ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the analysis of mental activities by jointly considering three complementary theoretical fields: Cybernetics and Human Information Processing theory, the Russian theories of the activity, and the ecological approach of the human perception. It attempts to an integrative approach of these three theoretical fields in a mixed-way, based on a Perception-Cognition-Action regulation loop. The chapter illustrates the functioning of this iterative regulation loop in the particular frame of the car-driving activity and discusses to the challenge of Cognitive Modeling. It describes the modeling step aims not only to provide a descriptive analysis of the mental activities based on empirical observations, but tries to propose formal models of human thinking that may be subject to scientific debates. A model of the human operator's mental activities should provide an in-depth description of the cognitive system at three levels, which are; it’s cognitive architecture, the cognitive processes implemented for the information processing and reasoning, and the data-structures used for knowledge.
