The art of thinking · 1 · Foundations

Human information processing

Also known as: Information-processing approach, Information processing model

German: menschliche Informationsverarbeitung

In cognitive psychology and human factors, human information processing is the approach that describes perception, cognition and action as a sequence of stages — sensory input, perception, attention, working memory, long-term memory, response selection and response execution — through which information flows and is transformed.

Cognitive psychology
Foundations
Human factors

In one sentence

Human information processing models describe how information flows from the senses through attention and memory to a decision and an action.

Example

A human factors analysis of a missed alarm asks at which stage the information was lost: the tone was not heard over machine noise (sensing), heard but not attended to (attention), or recognized but answered with the wrong action (response selection).

What the research shows

The information-processing approach treats the mind as a system with limited capacity through which information passes in stages. Donald E. Broadbent (1958) drew one of the first flow diagrams, with a selective filter in front of a limited-capacity channel. Richard C. Atkinson and Richard M. Shiffrin (1968) described the modal model of memory with sensory registers, a short-term store and a long-term store. In human factors, Christopher D. Wickens and colleagues use a model in which sensory processing, perception, working memory and cognition, response selection and response execution are linked by feedback and supplied by limited attention resources; Wickens' multiple resource theory (2002) adds that tasks interfere more when they draw on the same resources (for example two visual tasks).

Evidence status

The approach is the standard frame of human factors textbooks and of many models of warning processing. Stage models are simplifications: processing is not strictly serial, stages overlap and run in parallel, expectations shape perception from the top down, and action feeds back into perception. Alternative frames — ecological psychology (James J. Gibson), situated and distributed cognition, activity theory — criticize the computer analogy. The models are useful for locating where information is lost, not as a literal description of the brain.

How it applies

The stage view helps to analyze where a reader or operator loses information: not seen, not noticed, not kept, not understood, or acted on wrongly. The glossary “Applied cognitive psychology for information use” builds on it, for example in the communication-human information processing model (C-HIP) for warnings. A stage analysis supports, but never replaces, the risk assessment and the required safety information; see also Human-machine interface (HMI).

External references

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