Joint Cognitive Systems

Anomaly R esponse 89

The above are short s amples of problems with alarm systems (Norros &

Nuutinen, 2005), each of which points to families of story lines about affordance

and clumsiness given the demands on JCSs. This set illustrates many of the patterns

on how alarms c an be designed that fail to support skill at control of attention in a

JCS (Woods, 1995b). Most straightforwardly, alarms are m is-designed in terms of

percep tual func tions: Are the percep tual signals that mark abnormal conditions in a

monitored process discriminable from the background and each other (e.g.,

Patterson 1990)? Another perceptual function of alarms is the cap acity of the

signal itself to attract people’s attention (exogenous control of attention or aler ting).

Thi ...