Space Station Human Factors Research Review. Volume 4: Inhouse Advanced Development and Research

A variety of human factors studies related to space station design are presented. Subjects include proximity operations and window design, spatial perceptual issues regarding displays, image management, workload research, spatial cognition, virtual interface, fault diagnosis in orbital refueling, and error tolerance and procedure aids

Preliminary human safety assessment (PHSA) for the improvement of the behavioral aspects of safety climate in the construction industry

Occupational safety in the construction industry still represents a relevant problem at a global level. In fact, the complexity of working activities in this sector requires a comprehensive approach that goes beyond normative compliance to guarantee safer working conditions. In particular, empirical research on the factors influencing the unsafe behavior of workers needs to be augmented. Thus, the relationship between human factors and safety management issues following a bottom-up approach was investigated. In particular, an easy-to-use procedure that can be used to better address workers' safety needs augmenting the company's safety climate and supporting safety management issues was developed. Such an approach, based on the assessment of human reliability factors, was verified in a real case study concerning the users of concrete mixer trucks. The results showed that the majority of human failures were action and retrieval errors, underlining the importance of theoretical and practical training programs as a means to improve safety behavior. In such a context, information and communication activities also resulted beneficially to augment the company's safety climate. The proposed approach, despite its qualitative nature, allows a clearer understanding of workers' perceptions of hazards and their risk-taking behavior, providing practical cues to monitor and improve the behavioral aspects of safety climate. Hence, these first results can contribute to augmenting safety knowledge in the construction industry, providing a basis for further investigations on the causalities related to human performances, which are considered a key element in the prevention of accidents

Design Methodology for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Team Coordination

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) systems, despite having no onboard human pilots, currently require extensive human involvement to accomplish successful mission operations. Further, successful operations also require extensive colalboration between mission stakeholders, including operators, mission commanders, and information consumers (e.g. ground troops relying on intelligence reports in their area). Existing UAV system interfaces provide little to no support for collaboration between remote operators or for operators to collaborate with information consumers. As reliance on UAVs continues to increase in military and civilian operations, this lack of support for collaboration will likely become a substantial limitation of existing UAV systems. In order to introduce effective collaboration support to UAV system interfaces, it is essential to understand, and be able to derive system design requirements that address, the necessary group interactions that occur in UAV task enviroments. However, few collaborative requirements analysis methods exist, and to our knowledge, no method exists that captures design requirements for collaborative decision making in complex, time-critical environments. This report describes the development of a new design requirements analysis method for deriving information and functional requirements that address the collaboration needs of UAV (and other complex task) operators, and the needs of stakeholders interacting with these operators. More specifically, theis method extends a recently developed requirements analysis method, called the Hybrid Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) method, which enables the generation of information and functional requirements for futuristic UAV system interfaces. The original Hybrid CTA method focused on deriving single user system interface requirements. This work extends this method by introducing analytic steps to identify task and decision-making dependencies between different UAV operations collaborators. This collaborative extension to the Hybrid CTA utilizes the notion of boundary objects, an analytic construct commonly used in the study of group work. Boundary objects are physical or information artifacts that cross the task boundaries between members of distinct groups. Identifying boundary objects in complex task operations help the analyst to identify task and decision-making dependencies between local and remote collaborators. Understanding these dependencies helps to identify information sharing requirements that the UAV system should support. This report describes the analytic steps of the collaborative extension, and provides background information on the original Hybrid CTA method and the boundary object construct. The report also describes a project in which the new design requirements method was used to revise a proposed set of UAV operator displays.Prepared For Boeing Phantom Work

Human Visual Navigation: Effects of Visual Context, Navigation Mode, and Gender

Abstract This thesis extends research on human visual path integration using optic flow cues. In three experiments, a large-scale path-completion task was contextualised within highly-textured authentic virtual environments. Real-world navigational experience was further simulated, through the inclusion of a large roundabout on the route. Three semi-surrounding screens provided a wide field of view. Participants were able to perform the task, but directional estimates showed characteristic errors, which can be explained with a model of distance misperception on the outbound roads of the route. Display and route layout parameters had very strong effects on performance. Gender and navigation mode were also influential. Participants consistently underestimated the final turn angle when simulated self-motion was viewed passively, on large projection screens in a driving simulator. Error increased with increasing size of the internal angle, on route layouts based on equilateral or isosceles triangles. A compressed range of responses was found. Higher overall accuracy was observed when a display with smaller desktop computer monitors was used; especially when simulated self-motion was actively controlled with a steering wheel and foot pedals, rather than viewed passively. Patterns and levels of error depended on route layout, which included triangles with non-equivalent lengths of the two outbound roads. A powerful effect on performance was exerted by the length of the "approach segment" on the route: that is, the distance travelled on the first outbound road, combined with the distance travelled between the two outbound roads on the roundabout curve. The final turn angle was generally overestimated on routes with a long approach segment (those with a long first road and a 60° or 90° internal angle), and underestimated on routes with a short approach segment (those with a short first road or the 120° internal angle). Accuracy was higher for active participants on routes with longer approach segments and on 90° angle trials, and for passive participants on routes with shorter approach segments and on 120° angle trials. Active participants treated all internal angles as 90° angles. Participants performed with lower overall accuracy when optic flow information was disrupted, through the intermittent presentation of self-motion on the small-screen display, in a sequence of static snapshots of the route. Performance was particularly impaired on routes with a long approach segment, but quite accurate on those with a short approach segment. Consistent overestimation of the final angle was observed, and error decreased with increasing size of the internal angle. Participants treated all internal angles as 120° angles. The level of available visual information did not greatly affect estimates, in general. The degree of curvature on the roundabout mainly influenced estimates by female participants in the Passive condition. Compared with males, females performed less accurately in the driving simulator, and with reduced optic flow cues; but more accurately with the small-screen display on layouts with a short approach segment, and when they had active control of the self-motion. The virtual environments evoked a sense of presence, but this had no effect on task performance, in general. The environments could be used for training navigational skills where high precision is not required

Environments of Intelligence

What is the role of the environment, and of the information it provides, in cognition? More specifically, may there be a role for certain artefacts to play in this context? These are questions that motivate "4E" theories of cognition (as being embodied, embedded, extended, enactive). In his take on that family of views, Hajo Greif first defends and refines a concept of information as primarily natural, environmentally embedded in character, which had been eclipsed by information-processing views of cognition. He continues with an inquiry into the cognitive bearing of some artefacts that are sometimes referred to as 'intelligent environments'. Without necessarily having much to do with Artificial Intelligence, such artefacts may ultimately modify our informational environments. With respect to human cognition, the most notable effect of digital computers is not that they might be able, or become able, to think but that they alter the way we perceive, think and act. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com/doi/view/10.4324/9781315401867, has been made available under a Creative Commons CC-BY licenc

Seeing Things As We Do: Ecological Psychology And The Normativity Of Visual Perception

In virtue of what is perception successful? In philosophy and psychology, we sometimes assume that visual accuracy amounts to a correspondence between percepts and subject-independent, physical properties. In this dissertation, I argue that we should reject this assumption in favor of norms grounded in the action-guiding nature of perception. Recent theories of perception purport to cast off the intellectualist baggage of twentieth-century thinking, and to address perception in its own distinctive terms. I show that these approaches are unified in aiming to reduce spatial aspects of the percept to subject-independent geometrical facts about the object-perceiver relation. In doing so, these views remain guilty of an unwarranted assimilation of perception to cognition. Perceptual constancy, the capacity to encounter a relatively stable world of object properties despite variation in sensory stimulation, is measured using a metric that has percept-physical property correspondence at one extreme, and retinal match at the other. Advocates of the correspondence norm freely redeploy this metric as gauging accuracy in perception, so that the closer a percept comes to invariantly matching the distal property, the closer it comes to veridically presenting the environment. Yet, correspondence views are committed to widespread misperception that cannot be accounted for in terms of evolutionary complexity. I distinguish between descriptive and normative enterprises in cognitive science, and suggest that we reinterpret the constancy metric as an empirically useful, descriptive quantificational tool—one that does not straightforwardly entail normative facts. With the correspondence norm undercut, I develop a more viable framework for understanding accuracy, one that draws on James Gibson’s ecological theory. Accordingly, accuracy is best understood pragmatically, in ecological terms such as usefulness. Partial constancy is often sufficient for an organism to act effectively in its environment, a result that suggests surprising consequences for what is seen in perception. In color ontology, there is some theoretical attention to descriptive facts about constancy. However, because of a worry about stipulating perceiver and context standards, theorists continue to reject ecological approaches to color. I resolve the worry by appealing to pluralism about scientific objects. The resulting framework is ecologically sensible, empirically useful, and deeply interdisciplinary

An Analysis of Presence and User Experiences Over Time

This manuscript presents the result of a series of studies intended to shed light on understanding how trends regarding user experiences in VR changes over time when engaging with VR games. In my first study, I explored how user experiences compared when playing Minecraft on the desktop against playing Minecraft within an immersive virtual reality port. Fourteen players completed six 45 minute sessions, three sessions were played on the desktop, and three in VR. The Gaming Experience Questionnaire, i-Group presence questionnaire, and Simulator Sickness Questionnaire were administered after each session, and players were interviewed at the end of the experiment. Survey data showed substantial increases in presence and positive emotions when playing Minecraft in VR while multiple themes emerged in participant interviews: participants\u27 heightened emotional experiences playing Minecraft in VR was closely linked to feelings of immersion and improved sense of scale; participants overall enjoyed using motion controls, though they felt indirect input was better for some actions; and players generally disliked traveling via teleportation, as they found it disorienting and immersion-breaking. In my second study, I identified temporal shifts in user perceptions that had taken place within the first two years that consumer VR devices had become available. To consider what could be learned about the long-term use of consumer VR devices, I analyzed online forums discussions devoted to specifically VR. I gathered posts made on the /r/Vive subreddit from the first two years after the HTC Vive\u27s release. Over time, users moved from passive to active as their attitudes and expectations towards presence and simulator sickness matured. The significant trends of interest found to influence this was game design implementation and locomotion techniques. In my third study, again, I examined the data taken from the /r/Vive subreddit forum posts to gain further insights into the scope of what ``lingering effects\u27\u27 users had reported experiencing after using VR and the progression of these effects over time. After identifying search terms designed to discover comments made about lingering effects, I found three significant categories of lingering effects (besides simulator sickness) during my qualitative analysis: perceptual effects, behavioral effects, and changes in dreams. The perceptual and behavioral categories were further divided into sub-themes; including disruption of body ownership and proprioception, loss of a sense of depth in the real world, visual after effects, the need to verify the reality of the natural world through touch, hesitation when moving in the real world, and attempts to apply VR interaction metaphors to real-life interactions. After identifying these categories of effects, I mapped out how these effects progressed concerning time. In particular, I coded data according to four temporal concepts: 1) how long must be spent in VR to trigger an effect, 2) how long before the onset of an effect upon exiting VR, 3) the duration of any specific effect, and 4) the total duration that all effects can continue to occur overall. In my fourth study, I examined how user experiences and trends regarding presence changed throughout a single gaming session. Participants were immersed in a virtual experience called \u27The Secret Shop\u27 and given instructions to explore their surroundings with no guided direction. After their experience ended, users performed an After Action Review (AAR) while watching a recording of their recent experience, followed by a semi-structured interview. I graphed each user\u27s feelings of presence over time from second to second using the results of the After Action Review. Presence was shown in these graphs to both rise and fall, gradually and rapidly, throughout the course of each user\u27s experience. The analysis of both the graphs and the interviews then showed that presence was significantly impacted by user expectations, affordance inconsistencies, and the intensity of engagement experienced throughout the session. In my final study, I loaned out VR headsets to local novice users to track their perceptions of presence across the span of four weeks. Users were given the freedom to explore any VR games and applications of interest to them off-site to simulate regular VR consumer experiences. In this study, I analyzed how over time, novice users gradually evolved in their understanding of presence and what became most important to them in order to maintain and create it in the form of visual appeal, interaction techniques, and locomotion. I also found that the levels of engagement experienced across games were shown to be linked to whether users experienced lingering effects, how their perceptions of time spent within VR had been altered, and whether or not they retained any interest in investing in future VR-related purchases

Wearable Computing for Health and Fitness: Exploring the Relationship between Data and Human Behaviour

Health and fitness wearable technology has recently advanced, making it easier for an individual to monitor their behaviours. Previously self generated data interacts with the user to motivate positive behaviour change, but issues arise when relating this to long term mention of wearable devices. Previous studies within this area are discussed. We also consider a new approach where data is used to support instead of motivate, through monitoring and logging to encourage reflection. Based on issues highlighted, we then make recommendations on the direction in which future work could be most beneficial

A case-matched study of neurophysiological correlates to attention /working memory in people with somatic hypervigilance

Accepted 14 June 2016Somatic hypervigilance describes a clinical presentation in which people report more, and more intense, bodily sensations than is usual. Most explanations of somatic hypervigilance implicate altered information processing, but strong empirical data are lacking. Attention and working memory are critical for information processing, and we aimed to evaluate brain activity during attention/working memory tasks in people with and without somatic hypervigilance. Method: Data from 173 people with somatic hypervigilance and 173 controls matched for age, gender, handedness, and years of education were analyzed. Event-related potential (ERP) data, extracted from the continuous electroencephalograph recordings obtained during performance of the Auditory Oddball task, and the Two In A Row (TIAR) task, for N1, P2, N2, and P3, were used in the analysis. Between-group differences for P3 amplitude and N2 amplitude and latency were assessed with two-tailed independent t tests. Between-group differences for N1 and P2 amplitude and latency were assessed using mixed, repeated measures analyses of variance (ANOVAs) with group and Group × Site factors. Linear regression analysis investigated the relationship between anxiety and depression and any outcomes of significance. Results: People with somatic hypervigilance showed smaller P3 amplitudes—Auditory Oddball task: t(285) = 2.32, 95% confidence interval, CI [3.48, 4.47], p = .026, d = 0.27; Two-In-A-Row (TIAR) task: t(334) = 2.23, 95% CI [2.20; 3.95], p = .021, d = 0.24—than case-matched controls. N2 amplitude was also smaller in people with somatic hypervigilance—TIAR task: t(318) = 2.58, 95% CI [0.33, 2.47], p = .010, d = 0.29—than in case-matched controls. Neither depression nor anxiety was significantly associated with any outcome. Conclusion: People with somatic hypervigilance demonstrated an event-related potential response to attention/working memory tasks that is consistent with altered information processing.Carolyn Berryman, Vikki Wise, Tasha R. Stanton, Alexander McFarlane and G. Lorimer Mosele