Mitigating cognitive bottlenecks via an augmented cognition adaptive system

A conceptual framework for designing human-computer cognitive systems is proposed. The Cognitive Bottleneck Framework (CBF) identifies four significant "cognitive bottlenecks" that negatively impact the quality and tempo of decision making: (1) Information overload; humans cannot manage the vast amounts of information delivered by their computing environment, (2) Sequential cognitive processing; while information arrives in parallel, humans are essentially serial processors that can only address a single thread or task at a time, (3) Narrow user input capabilities: the system has more sophisticated means of communicating to the human than the human has of communicating to the system, and (4) Function mis-allocation; tasks are allocated to humans by default rather than by design, leaving them with tasks for which they are cognitively ill-suited. The overall purpose of CBF is to "right-size" these bottlenecks, remove constraints that restrict information flow, and better fit information channels to the abilities of either the human or computer.