A functional model of the human orienting activity

Activity theory (AT) offers a unique perspective for understanding how people comprehend reality. Of particular importance here is an orientation, i.e. familiarization with the environment or, in a narrow sense, with a specific situation. Such an orienting activity precedes executive activity, and is to some extent similar in purpose to the concept of situation awareness (SA). However, the human orienting activity cannot be reduced to SA, because it includes both the conscious and unconscious components, and is responsible for developing a static as well as a dynamic model of reality. The present study explores an orienting activity from the perspective of functional analysis. The basic units of this analysis are not the human actions and operations as in the morphological analyses, but rather the functional blocks. The proposed model, which includes both the cognitive and motivational components, is not an homeostatic, but a goal-directed and self-regulating system.

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