Augmented Cognition Overview: Improving Information Intake under Stress

Abstract

Military operators are often put into complex human-machine interactive environments shown to fail when stressful situations are encountered. To enhance warfighter readiness and operational capability, DARPA's efforts in Augmented Cognition are developing a new generation of technologies to enable computational systems to adapt to the human's cognitive state in real-time. These augmented systems will be endowed with non-invasive sensors that provide objective measures of the warfighter's neurophysiological responses to ongoing events. Based on these measures, as well as cognitive and contextual models of the user's intentions and objectives, these systems will invoke validated mitigation strategies to enable maximal performance from the user, and to help return them to an optimally functional state. This panel provided an overview of the key components of an Augmented Cognition system, how its development and validation will be carried out, and where these technologies could be implemented both in military settings and beyond.