Cognitive Task Analysis: Methods for Capturing and Leveraging Expertise in the Workplace

Whether the issue is capturing the expertise held in individuals exiting the workplace, designing training programs to develop more experts at a faster pace, or building technologies that support expert performance in attempts to raise the ceiling of performance, there is an increasingly salient need for robust and reliable methods for capturing cognition in the workplace. Cognitive task analysis (CTA) is a broad set of tools, techniques and approaches for eliciting, analyzing, and representing the knowledge and cognitive processes involved in task performance. is chapter outlines the purpose and utility of CTA, reviews what a general CTA process comprises, reviews the general categories of CTA methods and highlights their relative strengths and weaknesses, and discusses some critical needs for the further development of CTA.