Automation And Adaptive Behavior

In his well-researched and thought-provoking article, David Kaber identifies what he believes to be a number of gaps in the research literature on human-automation interaction (HAI), spanning the spectrum from analysis to modeling and design. One of the central themes in his article is the observation that we have failed to give the phenomenon of satisficing the attention it deserves to usefully design and predict the performance of HAI systems. My purpose in this commentary is to second Kaber's position on this point, although I suggest that it will be fruitful to view satisficing as just one of many manifestations of the more general phenomenon of adaptive cognition and behavior.