Learning From Our Mistakes – Identifying Opportunities for Technology Intervention to Address Everyday Cognitive Failure

There is growing opportunity for technologies to augment human memory and other cognitive processes – widespread ervasive sensing enables fine-grained traces of human activity, and advances in display technologies enable systems to provide input to user cognition in a wide array of settings. However, systems to date typically either address known cognitive impairment (e.g. autism and Alzheimer’s disease), or look to enhance ones’ general capacity for a specific task. In contrast to these approaches, we argue that a focus on recognition and quantification of human error is key to the design of future systems for augmenting the human mind. By focusing on the errors made in cognition, we can first identify frequent, persistent or severe failures as targets for future pervasive computing systems, and then go on to measure the success of any interventions developed, i.e. by asking have the augmentation
systems delivered actually reduced the prevalence, persistence or impact of a specific cognitive error? In this article, we make the general case for the study of human error in order to support the design and evaluation of technology
interventions to extend cognitive capabilities, before focusing on a case study in the augmentation of human memory.