Analyzing Behavioral Data for Refining Cognitive Models of Operator

We present a methodology and a loo1 for analyzing the activity of an operator interacting with a complex technical device. The goal is of reJning cognitive models of the operator by relating them to patterns of behavior in real situations. The activity is observed to be modeled as a trace having a graph structure The trace is transJbrmed according to metadata in order to become meaningfkl in the context of modeling theories. Our "Trace Based System" thus gathers both a representation of the activity and a representation of the analyst's expertise, for facilitating the discovery of knowledge in the jeld of cognitive psychology. The approach is illustrated by its application for car driver cognitive modeling.