Bridging human reliability analysis and psychology, Part 2: A cognitive framework to support HRA

This is the second of two papers that discuss the literature review conducted as part of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) effort to develop a hybrid human reliability analysis (HRA) method. This review was conducted with the goal of strengthening the technical basis within psychology, cognitive science and human factors for the hybrid HRA method being proposed. The first paper provides an overview of the literature review approach and high-level structure, whereas this paper presents the results of the review. The psychological literature review encompassed research spanning human cognition and performance, and consequently produced an extensive list of psychological processes, mechanisms, and factors that contribute to human performance. To synthesize this large amount of information for HRA, the authors organized the results of the literature review into a cognitive framework that consists of proximate causes of failure of human macrocognition (i.e., types of cognitive errors), and connects those causes to psychological mechanisms that underlie human cognition, and then to performance influencing factors (PIFs) that can lead to the failure. This cognitive framework can serve as a tool to inform HRA. Beyond this, however, the cognitive framework has the potential to also support addressing human performance issues identified in human factors applications.