Draft:Nancy J. Cooke

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Nancy J. Cooke
Alma mater	George Mason University (B.A.) New Mexico State University (M.A., Ph.D.)
Known for	Team cognition Interactive Team Cognition Human–AI teaming
Scientific career
Fields	Cognitive psychology, human factors, Cognitive engineering, Human–AI interaction
Workplaces	Arizona State University New Mexico State University Rice University

Nancy J. Cooke is an American cognitive psychologist and human factors researcher known for her work on team cognition, cognitive engineering, and human–AI interaction. She is Professor Emerita of Human Systems Engineering at Arizona State University and Senior Scientific Advisor of the university's Center for Human, Artificial Intelligence, and Robot Teaming.

Cooke's research has focused on how knowledge and cognition can be measured in individuals and teams, and how communication and coordination contribute to team performance. This work led to the theory of Interactive Team Cognition, which conceptualizes team cognition as activity that emerges through interaction among team members. Her later research extended this work to teams involving artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and robots.

Cooke served as president of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society in 2016–2017 and as editor-in-chief of its journal, Human Factors, from 2005 to 2009. She was the first woman to serve as editor-in-chief of the journal. She was also the first woman to chair the National Research Council's Board on Human Systems Integration.

Education and career

Cooke received a B.A. in psychology from George Mason University in 1981. As an undergraduate, she was interested in both psychology and computer science and sought a field that combined the two, which led her toward engineering psychology and human factors for graduate study. She earned an M.A. in experimental psychology in 1983 and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology in 1987 from New Mexico State University. At New Mexico State, she studied under cognitive psychologist Roger W. Schvaneveldt. Her graduate research included work on expertise and methods for representing the organization of knowledge using Pathfinder network techniques.

After completing her doctorate, Cooke joined the Department of Psychology at Rice University in 1987. While at Rice, she worked on human factors research related to operation of the Space Shuttle robotic arm. She returned to New Mexico State University in 1992, where she became a full professor of psychology in 1999. Her research during this period increasingly shifted from individual expertise and knowledge representation toward cognition in teams.

Cooke joined Arizona State University in 2003. She later became a professor of Human Systems Engineering in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. From 2011 to 2020, she served as the founding chair of graduate studies in Human Systems Engineering and helped transition ASU's applied psychology master's program and applied cognitive science doctoral program into Human Systems Engineering programs within the engineering school. In 2017, Cooke became the founding director of ASU's Center for Human, Artificial Intelligence, and Robot Teaming, an interdisciplinary research center focused on teams composed of humans, artificial intelligence, and robotic systems. She later became the center's Senior Scientific Advisor. Cooke retired from the ASU faculty in 2026 and was named Professor Emerita.

Research

Knowledge elicitation and cognitive engineering

Cooke's early research focused on the representation, elicitation, and measurement of human knowledge. This work drew from cognitive psychology and knowledge engineering, including questions about how knowledge held by experts could be represented for use in computer-based systems. In 1994, she published a seminal survey of methods for eliciting knowledge across psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, education, and related fields. Questions about how knowledge could be represented and measured later became central to her research on cognition at the level of teams.

Team cognition

Cooke's shift toward team cognition was partly shaped by research on military decision making. Following the 1988 USS Vincennes incident, the U.S. Navy established the Tactical Decision Making Under Stress research program to study decision making by teams operating under demanding conditions. Cooke, whose research at the time focused on expertise and knowledge elicitation, became involved in this work from a cognitive psychology perspective. Her subsequent research examined how knowledge is distributed among team members and how team knowledge relates to communication, coordination, and performance. This included a seminal review with industrial and organizational psychologist Eduardo Salas of methods for studying cognition at the team level, which helped establish the measurement of team cognition as a distinct methodological problem.

Much of Cooke's team research used laboratory simulations of complex work, including aviation and military tasks. These environments allowed researchers to study communication, coordination, adaptation, and performance while maintaining experimental control. Over time, Cooke's work placed increasing emphasis on observing interactions among team members as evidence of cognition occurring at the team level. Cooke has also studied how teams adapt when established patterns of coordination are disrupted. This work employed dynamical systems theory approaches to examine whether training teams under changing or unexpected conditions could improve their ability to reorganize when they later encountered unfamiliar situations. For this work, Cooke and colleagues were awarded the Jerome H. Ely Human Factors Article Award. In 2013, Cooke's work culminated in the Theory of Interactive Team Cognition, introduced in an article in Cognitive Science. ITC theory describes team cognition as activity that emerges through interaction and argues that it should be studied at the level of the team and within the context in which teamwork occurs. Inspired by ecological psychology and complex adaptive systems science, the theory developed partly from limitations Cooke and her collaborators identified in approaches that characterized team cognition primarily through knowledge measured separately from individual team members.

Cooke's later research extended her work on team cognition to teams with increasingly varied structures, including systems in which humans work with artificial intelligence and robots. This work combined ACT-R cognitive architecture models and Wizard of Oz experimentation to examine communication, coordination, adaptation, and trust in mixed human-machine teams. In discussing this research, Cooke has emphasized interdependence and differentiated roles as defining features of human–AI teams, rather than requiring artificial agents to reproduce human capabilities. In one line of experiments, she described how limitations in a synthetic teammate's ability to anticipate other team members' information needs eventually affected the communication behavior of the human teammates as well. Her research eventually spanned human–AI and human–robot interaction, applying ideas from human teamwork to systems in which people work interdependently with autonomous technologies. The Center for Human, Artificial Intelligence, and Robot Teaming became an institutional focus for this research at ASU, bringing together work in human factors, psychology, engineering, artificial intelligence, and robotics.

In 2024, Cooke and colleagues introduced the concept of "teamness" as a way to describe variation in how groups function as teams. The concept was proposed in response to the growing range of systems studied as teams, including distributed and temporary teams and teams containing nonhuman members. It provides a way to describe differences in characteristics such as team composition, roles, authority, shared goals, and interdependence without treating whether a group constitutes a team as a simple categorical distinction.

Professional leadership and service

Cooke served as editor-in-chief of Human Factors, the flagship journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, from 2005 to 2009. She was the first woman to hold the position since the journal was founded in 1958. She later served as president of HFES in 2016–2017.

Cooke has also held leadership roles with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. She was a member of the National Research Council's Board on Human-Systems Integration from 2007 to 2016 and chaired the board from 2012 to 2016, becoming its first female chair.

Cooke also chaired the Committee on the Science of Team Science, which produced the 2015 consensus report Enhancing the Effectiveness of Team Science. The report reviewed research on factors that influence scientific collaboration and team effectiveness.

She served on the United States Air Force Scientific Advisory Board from 2008 to 2012. In 2016, she was designated a National Associate of the National Research Council in recognition of her service to the National Academies.

Awards and honors

Cooke was elected a Fellow of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society in 2000 and a Fellow of the American Psychological Association in 2009. She was later elected a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the International Ergonomics Association.

Her HFES honors include the O. Keith Hansen Outreach Award and the Arnold M. Small President's Distinguished Service Award. She received the latter in 2014 and was the second woman to receive the award. In 2022, Cooke was selected as one of the inaugural participants in the Titans of HFES symposium, which was established to recognize influential researchers and practitioners in human factors and ergonomics.

In 2023, Division 21 of the American Psychological Association awarded Cooke the Franklin V. Taylor Award for Outstanding Contributions in the Field of Applied Experimental/Engineering Psychology.

Selected works

• Cooke, N. J. (1994). "Varieties of Knowledge Elicitation Techniques." International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 41, 801–849.
• Cooke, N. J.; Salas, E.; Cannon-Bowers, J. A.; & Stout, R. J. (2000). "Measuring Team Knowledge." Human Factors, 42(1), 151–173. doi:10.1518/001872000779656561
• Salas, E.; Cooke, N. J.; & Rosen, M. A. (2008). "On Teams, Teamwork, and Team Performance: Discoveries and Developments." Human Factors, 50(3), 540–547. doi:10.1518/001872008X288457
• Cooke, N. J. & Gorman, J. C. (2009). "Interaction-Based Measures of Cognitive Systems." Journal of Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making, 3(1), 27–46. doi:10.1518/155534309X433302
• Gorman, J. C.; Cooke, N. J.; & Amazeen, P. G. (2010). "Training Adaptive Teams." Human Factors, 52(2), 295–307. doi:10.1177/0018720810371689
• Cooke, N. J.; Gorman, J. C.; Myers, C. W.; & Duran, J. L. (2013). "Interactive Team Cognition." Cognitive Science, 37(2), 255–285. doi:10.1111/cogs.12009
• Cooke, N. J. & Hilton, M. L., eds. (2015). Enhancing the Effectiveness of Team Science. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press. doi:10.17226/19007
• McNeese, N. J.; Demir, M.; Cooke, N. J.; & Myers, C. W. (2018). "Teaming With a Synthetic Teammate: Insights into Human-Autonomy Teaming." Human Factors, 60(2). doi:10.1177/0018720817743223
• Cooke, N. J.; Cohen, M. C.; Fazio, W. C.; Inderberg, L. H.; Johnson, C. J.; Lematta, G. J.; Peel, M.; & Teo, A. (2024). "From Teams to Teamness: Future Directions in the Science of Team Cognition." Human Factors, 66(6), 1669–1680. doi:10.1177/00187208231162449

See also

• Team
• Cognitive engineering
• Human–AI interaction
• Human–robot interaction

External links

• Nancy J. Cooke profile at Arizona State University
• Center for Human, Artificial Intelligence, and Robot Teaming