The Cognitive Engineering Research Institute (CERI) is an independent, not-for-profit, research institute founded by partners from private industry, academia, and government laboratories.

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Cognitive Engineering
Research Institute
5810 South Sossaman Rd.
Ste. 106
Mesa, AZ 85212 -5826

P: 480-988-7306
F: 480-988-3162

FAQ's

What exactly does CERI study?
CERI conducts research on individual and team performance and processes (e.g., coordination, situation awareness). In general, CERI aims to understand how people interact with technology and each other in cognitively demanding work domains. Once the factors that impact performance and processes are identified, this knowledge can be applied to training methodologies and system designs to improve human capabilities.

What is cognitive engineering?
Cognitive Engineering is critically important in today’s society due to the fact that tasks are becoming increasingly complex. The goal of cognitive engineering is to better design these system with the human in mind. Cognitive engineering is also striving to develop better tools for real–time human performance assessment, monitoring, and intervention. A properly designed complex system benefits society in many ways: optimal systems mean higher system effectiveness, the safety and reliability of these systems is improved, and training costs are reduced.

Why is this research necessary?
Teams are often highly distributed with individual team members spanning the globe. In addition to dealing with the coordination constraints inherent of distributed teams, members also have to work with ever-changing technology. Humans and machines constantly interact, and while this network-centric, socio-technical, environments provides tremendous improvements in society, there are lurking problems. Systems are becoming so complex and distributed that oversight and monitoring is falling behind and effective design and implementation is becoming difficult. Critical infrastructure systems such as nuclear energy, power distribution, air traffic control, and homeland security are becoming more susceptible to hidden flaws in system design, operation, and training. Additionally, training is becoming more and more expensive as complex systems are rarely designed with training in mind. In the military, the training costs associated with the life cycle of a weapons system is often an order of magnitude higher than the hardware costs of the entire system.

How does this research benefit society?
Teams are a ubiquitous part of society (i.e. sports teams, military teams, emergency response teams, medical teams, etc.). Research involving teams can lead to better team training procedures, better teams, and more satisfactory teamwork outcomes. It can also lead to a more efficient and safer working environment.

What domains does your research apply to?
Our research applies to all types of teams and collaborative team efforts. Some examples of where our research is beneficial are:
· UAV command & control and data exploitation
· Planning (Military, emergency response)
· Extreme Environments
· Medical/hospitals
· Emergency management
· Homeland Security

What is team cognition?
The collaborative cognitive processes such as coordination and communication, planning, decision making, and situation assessment that teams exhibit when accomplishing a task.

I see you have many psychologists as researchers. I thought psychologists did counseling – is there more to psychology than I thought?
There are many different aspects of behavior that psychologists study. These topics go well beyond clinical psychology. Some examples of other areas of psychology are:
· Consumer Psychology
· Education Psychology
· Human Factors Psychology
· Industrial/Organizational Psychology
· Social Psychology
· Sports Psychology
· Training Psychology

I’m a student; what opportunities are there for me at CERI?
For information regarding research opportunities, please click here.