On the role of working memory in trading-off skills and situation awareness in Sudoku

TL;DR

This paper investigates how working memory limitations affect the balance between skill execution and situation awareness during Sudoku gameplay, providing insights relevant to safety-critical cognitive tasks.

Contribution

It introduces a novel agent-based model to analyze the trade-off between skills and situation awareness in Sudoku, linking cognitive theory with practical safety-critical applications.

Findings

Trade-off impacts player proficiency

Agent-based simulations reveal cognitive constraints

Insights applicable to safety-critical domains

Abstract

Working memory accounts for the ability of humans to perform cognitive processing, by handling both the representation of information (the mental picture forming the situation awareness) and the space required for processing these information (skill processing). The more complex the skills are, the more processing space they require, the less space becomes available for storage of information. This interplay between situation awareness and skills is critical in many applications. Theoretically, it is less understood in cognition and neuroscience. In the meantime, and practically, it is vital when analysing the mental processes involved in safety-critical domains. In this paper, we use the Sudoku game as a vehicle to study this trade-off. This game combines two features that are present during a user interaction with a software in many safety critical domains: scanning for information and processing of information. We use a society of agents for investigating how this trade-off influences player's proficiency.