Epic Human Failure on June 30, 2013

Nineteen Prescott Fire Department, Granite Mountain Hot Shot (GMHS) wildland firefighters and supervisors (WFF), perished on the June 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire (YHF) in Arizona. The firefighters left their Safety Zone during forecast, outflow winds, triggering explosive fire behavior in drought-stressed chaparral. Why would an experienced WFF Crew, leave ‘good black’ and travel downslope through a brush-filled chimney, contrary to their training and experience? An organized Serious Accident Investigation Team (SAIT) found, “… no indication of negligence, reckless actions, or violations of policy or protocol.” Despite this, many WFF professionals deemed the catastrophe, “… the final, fatal link, in a long chain of bad decisions with good outcomes.” This paper is a theoretical and realistic examination of plausible, faulty, human decisions with prior good outcomes; internal and external impacts, influencing the GMHS; and two explanations for this catastrophe: Individual Blame Logic and Organizational Function Logic, and proposed preventive mitigations

Intrusive effects of semantic information on visual selective attention

Every object contains semantic information in extension to its low-level properties. It is well documented that such information biases attention when it is necessary for an ongoing task. However, whether semantic relationships influence attentional selection when they are irrelevant to the ongoing task remains an open question. The ubiquitous nature of semantic information suggests that it could bias attention even when these properties are irrelevant. In the present study, three objects appeared on screen, two of which were semantically related. After a varying time interval, a target or distractor appeared on top of each object. The objects’ semantic relationships never predicted target location. Despite this, a semantic bias on attentional allocation was observed with an initial, transient bias to semantically related objects. Further experiments demonstrated that this effect was contingent on the objects being attended: if an object never contained the target, it no longer exerted a semantic influence. In a final set of experiments, we demonstrate that semantic bias is robust and appears even in the presence of more predictive cues (spatial probability). The results suggest that as long as an object is attended, its semantic properties bias attention, even if it is irrelevant to an ongoing task and there are more predictive factors available

ERPs and their brain sources in perceptual and conceptual prospective memory tasks: commonalities and differences between the two tasks

The present study examined whether Event-Related Potential (ERP) components and their neural generators are common to perceptual and conceptual prospective memory (PM) tasks or specific to the form of PM cue involved. We used Independent Component Analysis (ICA) to study the contributions of brain source activities to scalp ERPs across the different phases of two event-based PM-tasks: (1) holding intentions during a delay (monitoring) (2) detecting the correct context to perform the delayed intention (cue detection) and (3) carrying out the action (realisation of delayed intentions). Results showed that monitoring for both perceptual and conceptual PM-tasks was characterised by an enhanced early occipital negativity (N200). In addition the conceptual PM-task showed a long-lasting effect of monitoring significant around 700 ms. Perceptual PM-task cues elicited an N300 enhancement associated with cue detection, whereas a midline N400-like response was evoked by conceptual PM-task cues. The Prospective Positivity associated with realisation of delayed intentions was observed in both conceptual and perceptual tasks. A common frontal-midline brain source contributed to the Prospective Positivity in both tasks and a strong contribution from parieto-frontal brain sources was observed only for the perceptually cued PM-task. These findings support the idea that: (1) The enhanced N200 can be understood as a neural correlate of a ‘retrieval mode’ for perceptual and conceptual PM-tasks, and additional strategic monitoring is implemented according the nature of the PM task; (2) ERPs associated with cue detection are specific to the nature of the PM cues; (3) Prospective Positivity reflects a general PM process, but the specific brain sources contributing to it depend upon the nature of the PM task

Intrusive effects of task-irrelevant information on visual selective attention: semantics and size

Attentional selection is a mechanism by which incoming sensory information is prioritized for further, detailed and more effective, processing. Given that attended information is privileged by the sensory system, understanding and predicting what information is granted prioritization becomes an important endeavor. It has been argued that salient events as well as information that is related to the current goal of the organism (i.e., task-relevant) receive such priority. Here, we propose that attentional prioritization is not limited to task-relevance, and discuss evidence showing that task-irrelevant, non-salient, high-level properties of unattended objects, namely object meaning and size, influence attentional allocation. Such intrusion of non-salient task-irrelevant high-level information points to the need to re-conceptualize and formally modify current models of attentional guidance

Task-irrelevant semantic properties of objects impinge on sensory representations within the early visual cortex

Objects can be described in terms of low-level (e.g., boundaries) and high-level properties (e.g., object semantics). While recent behavioral findings suggest that the influence of semantic relatedness between objects on attentional allocation can be independent of task-relevance, the underlying neural substrate of semantic influences on attention remains ill-defined. Here, we employ behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measures to uncover the mechanism by which semantic information increases visual processing efficiency. We demonstrate that the strength of the semantic relatedness signal decoded from the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG): (i) influences attention, producing behavioral semantic benefits; (ii) biases spatial attention maps in the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), subsequently modulating early visual cortex (EVC) activity; (iii) directly predicts the magnitude of behavioral semantic benefit. Together, these results identify a specific mechanism driving task-independent semantic influences on attention

Structuring effect of tools conceptualized through initial goal fixedness for work activity

Analysis of work activities in nuclear industry has highlighted a new psycho-cognitive phenomenon: the structuring effect of tools (SET) sometimes leading to unexpected operating deviations; the subject is unable to perform a task concerning object A using or adapting a tool designed and presented to perform the same task concerning object B when object A is expected by the subject. Conditions to isolate and identify the SET were determined and reproduced in experiments for further analysis. Students and seven professional categories of adults (N = 77) were involved in three experimental conditions (control group, group with prior warning, group with final control) while individually performing a task with similar characteristics compared to real operating conditions and under moderate time-pressure. The results were: (1) highest performance with prior warning and (2) demonstration that academic and professional training favor the SET. After discussing different cognitive processes potentially related to the SET, we described (3) the psycho-cognitive process underlying the SET: Initial Goal Fixedness (IGF), a combination of the anchoring of the initial goal of the activity with a focus on the features of the initial goal favored by an Einstellung effect. This suggested coping with the negative effect of the SET by impeding the IGF rather than trying to increase the subjects’ awareness at the expense of their health. Extensions to other high-risk industries were discussed