116,828 research outputs found

    Understanding safety-critical interactions with a home medical device through Distributed Cognition

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    As healthcare shifts from the hospital to the home, it is becoming increasingly important to understand how patients interact with home medical devices, to inform the safe and patient-friendly design of these devices. Distributed Cognition (DCog) has been a useful theoretical framework for understanding situated interactions in the healthcare domain. However, it has not previously been applied to study interactions with home medical devices. In this study, DCog was applied to understand renal patients’ interactions with Home Hemodialysis Technology (HHT), as an example of a home medical device. Data was gathered through ethnographic observations and interviews with 19 renal patients and interviews with seven professionals. Data was analyzed through the principles summarized in the Distributed Cognition for Teamwork methodology. In this paper we focus on the analysis of system activities, information flows, social structures, physical layouts, and artefacts. By explicitly considering different ways in which cognitive processes are distributed, the DCog approach helped to understand patients’ interaction strategies, and pointed to design opportunities that could improve patients’ experiences of using HHT. The findings highlight the need to design HHT taking into consideration likely scenarios of use in the home and of the broader home context. A setting such as home hemodialysis has the characteristics of a complex and safety-critical socio-technical system, and a DCog approach effectively helps to understand how safety is achieved or compromised in such a system

    Investigation of potential cognition factors correlated to fire evacuation

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    The design of a navigation system to support indoor fire evacuation depends not only on speed but also a relatively thorough consideration of the cognition factors. This study has investigated potential cognition factors which can affect the human behaviours and decision making during fire evacuation by taking a survey among indoor occupants in age of 20s under designed virtual scenarios. It mainly focuses on two aspects of Fire Responses Performances (FRP), i.e. indoor familiarity (spatial cognition) and psychological stress (situ-ated cognition). The collected results have shown that these cognition factors can be affected by gender and user height and they are correlated with each other in certain ways. It has also investigated users‟ attitudes to the navigation services under risky and non-risky conditions. The collected answers are also found to be correlated with the selected FRP factors. These findings may help to further design of personalized indoor navigation support for fire evacuation

    Codifying distributed cognition: a case study of emergency medical dispatch

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    The theory of distributed cognition is recognised as being relevant to system analysis and design but it has lacked visibility for practice. In this paper I develop a codified method of analysis based on distributed cognition which provides both structure and guidance in the use of the theory. The method developed comprises a systematic exploration and description of three functional levels of a system, namely, the information flow model, physical model, and artefact model. These levels are analytically separate but integrate in modelling the propagation and transformation of information within a system. The approach to developing this method has been exploratory and iterative: developing the understanding of distributed cognition and contextual study literature, with practical application to the London Ambulance Service Central Ambulance Control room context. The application of the method to this context reveals a number of design issues and concerns lending support to its use in these situations. Furthermore, this paper introduces a conception of how distributed cognition can be used to deliberate about potential design scenarios, which is a use of distributed cognition that has been alluded to but has not been explained elsewhere. This paper makes progress in narrowing the gap between distributed cognition theory and practice by adding guidance through a structured codified methodology. The method provides an accessible, practical approach to analysing team based systems using distributed cognition

    The brain’s conversation with itself: neural substrates of dialogic inner speech

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    Inner speech has been implicated in important aspects of normal and atypical cognition, including the development of auditory hallucinations. Studies to date have focused on covert speech elicited by simple word or sentence repetition, while ignoring richer and arguably more psychologically significant varieties of inner speech. This study compared neural activation for inner speech involving conversations (‘dialogic inner speech’) with single-speaker scenarios (‘monologic inner speech’). Inner speech-related activation differences were then compared with activations relating to Theory-of-Mind (ToM) reasoning and visual perspective-taking in a conjunction design. Generation of dialogic (compared with monologic) scenarios was associated with a widespread bilateral network including left and right superior temporal gyri, precuneus, posterior cingulate and left inferior and medial frontal gyri. Activation associated with dialogic scenarios and ToM reasoning overlapped in areas of right posterior temporal cortex previously linked to mental state representation. Implications for understanding verbal cognition in typical and atypical populations are discussed

    Breakfast for You task (B4Y): Preliminary evidence from the development of an interactive and ecological task for the assessment of social cognition

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    openIn the field of social cognition, the lack of ecological validity for the assessment procedures used in clinical practice is a recurrent obstacle. The classical static materials commonly used do not seem to accurately reflect the dynamic behavioural interchange occurring between people in the real-world, complex contexts that characterize social cognition. Consequently, researchers are now acknowledging the need for stimuli that are more dynamic, multimodal, context-embedded, and socially interactive. On this basis, the present study aimed to design a novel assessment tool that incorporates real-life scenarios and dynamic interactions between the subject and the researcher: The Breakfast for You (B4U) Task. We particularly sought to obtain preliminary evidence from a group of healthy young participants to initiate the validation process of the task, which framed social cognition in the context of daily life activities. By incorporating innovative variables tapping into components of social cognition (emotional recognition, ToM, and perspective taking), the study successfully demonstrated the convergent validity of B4U when compared to more traditional measures of social cognition. Furthermore, we achieved divergent validity by obtaining a genuine measure of pure social cognition disentangled from broader cognitive functions. Finally, we obtained evidence for ecological validity for a specific subcomponent of the ones assessed. Even if we lacked the appropriate statistical power to generalize our findings, the B4U task holds promise as a valid and ecologically sound assessment tool for social cognition if further implemented and refined with larger samples and extended to diverse clinical populations.In the field of social cognition, the lack of ecological validity for the assessment procedures used in clinical practice is a recurrent obstacle. The classical static materials commonly used do not seem to accurately reflect the dynamic behavioural interchange occurring between people in the real-world, complex contexts that characterize social cognition. Consequently, researchers are now acknowledging the need for stimuli that are more dynamic, multimodal, context-embedded, and socially interactive. On this basis, the present study aimed to design a novel assessment tool that incorporates real-life scenarios and dynamic interactions between the subject and the researcher: The Breakfast for You (B4U) Task. We particularly sought to obtain preliminary evidence from a group of healthy young participants to initiate the validation process of the task, which framed social cognition in the context of daily life activities. By incorporating innovative variables tapping into components of social cognition (emotional recognition, ToM, and perspective taking), the study successfully demonstrated the convergent validity of B4U when compared to more traditional measures of social cognition. Furthermore, we achieved divergent validity by obtaining a genuine measure of pure social cognition disentangled from broader cognitive functions. Finally, we obtained evidence for ecological validity for a specific subcomponent of the ones assessed. Even if we lacked the appropriate statistical power to generalize our findings, the B4U task holds promise as a valid and ecologically sound assessment tool for social cognition if further implemented and refined with larger samples and extended to diverse clinical populations

    Resilience markers for safer systems and organisations

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    If computer systems are to be designed to foster resilient performance it is important to be able to identify contributors to resilience. The emerging practice of Resilience Engineering has identified that people are still a primary source of resilience, and that the design of distributed systems should provide ways of helping people and organisations to cope with complexity. Although resilience has been identified as a desired property, researchers and practitioners do not have a clear understanding of what manifestations of resilience look like. This paper discusses some examples of strategies that people can adopt that improve the resilience of a system. Critically, analysis reveals that the generation of these strategies is only possible if the system facilitates them. As an example, this paper discusses practices, such as reflection, that are known to encourage resilient behavior in people. Reflection allows systems to better prepare for oncoming demands. We show that contributors to the practice of reflection manifest themselves at different levels of abstraction: from individual strategies to practices in, for example, control room environments. The analysis of interaction at these levels enables resilient properties of a system to be ‘seen’, so that systems can be designed to explicitly support them. We then present an analysis of resilience at an organisational level within the nuclear domain. This highlights some of the challenges facing the Resilience Engineering approach and the need for using a collective language to articulate knowledge of resilient practices across domains

    Moral Structure Falls Out of General Event Structure

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    The notion of agency has been explored within research in moral psychology and, quite separately, within research in linguistics. Moral psychologists have suggested that agency attributions play a role in moral judgments, while linguists have argued that agency attributions play a role in syntactic intuitions. To explore the connection between these two lines of research, we report the results of an experiment in which we manipulate syntactic cues for agency and show a corresponding impact on moral judgments. This result suggests that the two effects observed previously — in morality and in syntax — might each be a reflection of a more general capacity to understand event structure
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