Cognitive Interaction Technology (CIT) is an interdisciplinary research area that aims to understand and support the interactions between a human user and other elements of a socio-technical system. Because this research addresses psychological, social, biological, and other task-related parameters of interactions between humans or between a human and a technical system in the context of research, education, rehabilitation and work, such disciplines like cognitive psychology, robotics, informatics, engineering, biomechanics and biology are incorporated.
Sport psychology can contribute to the field as well, especially because of its knowledge concerning skill acquisition, coaching and the development of psychological skills like routines, inner speech, or the regulation of stress, which are all useful in designing an optimal interaction scenario between humans and technical systems. An important reason for the new interest in the understanding of interaction technology in sport psychology is the impressive development of cognitive robotics and new technologies like virtual or augmented reality settings, cognitive glasses, or neuro-technology settings (see Schack, Bertollo, Koester, Maycock, & Essig, 2014b). Overall, athletes profit from advantages and developments in informatics, biomechanics, communication, and information technologies to optimize their performances in sport interactions. Experts from disciplines like informatics and computational neuroscience develop interaction technologies that are changing the way sport is practiced, played, observed, measured, and scored.
The main aim of CIT-research is to develop humanoriented technology that adapts to the physical and psychological needs of the human operator. Dimensions of such an optimal fit between human and technical systems are, for instance, task- and person-related equipment (e.g., body-oriented shape and flexibility of equipment), the presentation and change of information in accordance with human perceptual systems and an interaction and cooperation structure that considers the biological and psychological needs of human beeings.
Furthermore, the interaction design should be grounded in the measurement of, e.g., cognitive parameters of the human to lead interactions between humans and technical systems in a personalized, differential and human centered direction. In such a direction, researchers used, for instance, a multimodal approach and developed a multilevel architecture for a virtual sport coaching device, called Intelligent Coaching Space (ICSpace). Besides the capturing of motion data they use mainly biofeedback data and mental representation structures to inform the virtual coach about the recent learning stage of the subject (e.g., Hu¨lsmann, Frank, Schack, Kopp, & Botsch, 2016). A fundamental aspect of the growing field of CIT is to be able to identify user and contextspecific problems in the execution of sport-related action sequences. Based on information, like the actual visual focus (measured via eye-tracking) in golf or the detected objects like a golf ball (defined by a vision module), the cognitive interaction system is better able to provide individualized feedback, i.e., by displaying situation and user-specific help comments and hints for sport tasks like golf putting, e.g., within cognitive glasses (e.g., Schack, Bertollo, Koester, Maycock, & Essig, 2014a).
