Cognitive Security: An Architecture Informed Approach from Cognitive Science

Abstract

The study of cognitive warfare is an emerging multi-disciplinary area of research that aims to understand the individual, social, and technological dimensions of malicious efforts to influence and otherwise degrade the cognitive capacities of military and non-military targets for competitive advantage. By extension, research on cognitive security aims to understand how defence and civilian organizations can defend against threats in the cognitive domain. This paper aims to contribute to ongoing discussions on the human factors dimensions of cognitive warfare by outlining an approach that looks at cognitive vulnerabilities as a function of information processing features of architectural accounts of cognitive processes. Dual process theories/models of cognition are used as a representative example of the general approach. I argue that dual process theories (a) can provide a valuable model for how we ought to conceptualize cognitive vulnerabilities as features of well understood cognitive processes and (b) that viewing cognitive vulnerabilities this way enables answers to key practical questions in the cognitive security domain.