Publications by authors named "Christopher Wickens"

Overlaying images from multiple geospatial databases increases clutter and imposes attentional costs by disrupting focusing attention on each database and dividing attention when comparing databases. Costs of overlay clutter may offset the benefits of reduced scanning between two images displayed separately. In two experiments, we examine these attention issues using computational metrics to quantify clutter.

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The concepts of automation trust and dependence have often been viewed as closely related and on occasion, have been conflated in the research community. Yet, trust is a cognitive attitude and dependence is a behavioural measure, so it is unsurprising that different factors can affect the two. Here, we review the literature on the correlation between trust and dependence.

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Despite knowing exactly what an object looks like, searching for it in a person's visual field is a time-consuming and error-prone experience. In Augmented Reality systems, new algorithms are proposed to speed up search time and reduce human errors. However, these algorithms might not always provide 100% accurate visual cues, which might affect users' perceived reliability of the algorithm and, thus, search performance.

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In a dynamic decision-making task simulating basic ship movements, participants attempted, through a series of actions, to elicit and identify which one of six other ships was exhibiting either of two hostile behaviors. A high-performing, although imperfect, automated attention aid was introduced. It visually highlighted the ship categorized by an algorithm as the most likely to be hostile.

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Objective: This experiment examined performance costs when processing two sources of information positioned at increasing distances using a flat panel display and an augmented reality head-mounted display (AR-HMD).

Background: The AR-HMD enables positioning virtual information at various distances in space. However, the proximity compatibility principle suggests that closer separation when two sources of information require mental integration assists performance, whereas increased separation between two sources hurts integration performance more than when a single source requires focused attention.

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Previous research suggests people struggle to detect a series of movements that might imply hostile intentions of a vessel, yet this ability is crucial in many real world Naval scenarios. To investigate possible mechanisms for improving performance, participants engaged in a simple, simulated ship movement task. One of two hostile behaviors were present in one of the vessels: Shadowing-mirroring the participant's vessel's movements; and Hunting-closing in on the participant's vessel.

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Objective: Three experiments sought to understand performance limitations in controlling a ship attempting to meet another moving ship that approached from various trajectories. The influence of uncertainty, resulting from occasional unpredictable delays in one's own movement, was examined.

Background: Cognitive elements of rendezvous have been little studied.

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Objective: Evaluate and model the advantage of a situation awareness (SA) supported by an augmented reality (AR) display for the ground-based joint terminal attack Controller (JTAC), in judging and describing the spatial relations between objects in a hostile zone.

Background: The accurate world-referenced description of relative locations of surface objects, when viewed from an oblique slant angle (aircraft, observation post) is hindered by (1) the compression of the visual scene, amplified at a lower slang angle, (2) the need for mental rotation, when viewed from a non-northerly orientation.

Approach: Participants viewed a virtual reality (VR)-simulated four-object scene from either of two slant angles, at each of four compass orientations, either unaided, or aided by an AR head-mounted display (AR-HMD), depicting the scene from a top-down (avoiding compression) and north-up (avoiding mental rotation) perspective.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study examined how effectively people can identify hostile intentions from the movements of computer-controlled ships in three different variability conditions.
  • The experiment showed that even without variability, participants could only accurately identify the hostile ship about 60% of the time, and introducing random movements further decreased detection rates.
  • The findings suggest that recognizing threats based solely on movement patterns is difficult, especially when adversaries introduce uncertainty, highlighting a need for tools to improve human decision-making in these scenarios.
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Complex and dynamic environments including military operations, healthcare, aviation, and driving require operators to transition seamlessly between levels of mental workload. However, little is known about how the rate of an increase in workload impacts multitasking performance, especially in the context of real-world tasks. We evaluated both gradual and sudden workload increases in the dynamic multitasking environment of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) command and control testbed and compared them to constant workload.

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Objective: The aim was to evaluate the relevance of the critique offered by Jamieson and Skraaning (2019) regarding the applicability of the lumberjack effect of human-automation interaction to complex real-world settings.

Background: The lumberjack effect, based upon a meta-analysis, identifies the consequences of a higher degree of automation-to improve performance and reduce workload-when automation functions as intended, but to degrade performance more, as mediated by a loss of situation awareness (SA) when automation fails. Jamieson and Skraaning provide data from a process control scenario that they assert contradicts the effect.

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Article Synopsis
  • This study compared how emergency physicians of different experience levels make task-scheduling decisions in emergency departments.
  • The research evaluated the influence of task attributes like priority and difficulty on these decisions, highlighting that more experienced physicians often rely on simpler decision-making models compared to their less experienced counterparts.
  • Results indicated that a model focusing solely on task priority was more accurate for experienced physicians, suggesting implications for training and evaluating decision-making strategies in complex environments.
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Objective: Experimentally investigate maneuver decision preferences in navigating ships to avoid a collision. How is safety (collision avoidance) balanced against efficiency (deviation from path and delay) and rules of the road under conditions of both trajectory certainty and uncertainty.

Background: Human decision error is a prominent factor in nautical collisions, but the multiple factors of geometry of collisions and role of uncertainty have been little studied in empirical human factors literature.

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Objective: The aim of this study was to explore the impact of prior information on spatial prediction and understanding of variability.

Background: In uncertain spatial prediction tasks, such as hurricane forecasting or planning search-and-rescue operations, decision makers must consider the most likely case and the distribution of possible outcomes. Base performance on these tasks is varied (and in the case of understanding the distribution, often poor).

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Article Synopsis
  • The study aimed to understand how visualizations impact predictions of uncertain spatial trajectories and participant overconfidence in those predictions.
  • Previous research found that predicting these trajectories is tough and often leads to overconfidence, suggesting that visual aids during training may help.
  • Two experiments showed that while participants made more accurate predictions with visualizations, their advantage disappeared when the visuals were removed, indicating that visualizations can aid predictions but may also create dependency issues.
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We report the NMR of the molecular endofullerenes H@C, HO@C and HF@C dissolved in the nematic liquid crystal N-(4-methoxybenzylidene)-4-butylaniline (MBBA). The H NMR lines of H and HO display a doublet splitting due to residual dipole-dipole coupling. The dipolar splitting depends on temperature in the nematic phase and vanishes above the nematic-isotropic phase transition.

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Objective: The objectives were to (a) implement theoretical perspectives regarding human-automation interaction (HAI) into model-based tools to assist designers in developing systems that support effective performance and (b) conduct validations to assess the ability of the models to predict operator performance.

Background: Two key concepts in HAI, the lumberjack analogy and black swan events, have been studied extensively. The lumberjack analogy describes the effects of imperfect automation on operator performance.

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Objective: The aim of this study was to examine the human-automation interaction issues and the interacting factors in the context of conflict detection and resolution advisory (CRA) systems.

Background: The issues of imperfect automation in air traffic control (ATC) have been well documented in previous studies, particularly in conflict-alerting systems. The extent to which the prior findings can be applied to an integrated conflict detection and resolution system in future ATC remains unknown.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates how human overconfidence affects the prediction of uncertain spatial trajectories, like those of hurricanes or ships, highlighting challenges in accurately predicting variance.
  • Two experiments reveal that while participants can predict linear paths better than nonlinear ones, they consistently underestimate the uncertainty involved, showing overconfidence in their forecasts.
  • The findings suggest that effectively predicting uncertainties in trajectories requires different skills than forecasting average paths, indicating a need for improved training and tools to enhance understanding of variability.
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Objective: The aim of this study was to validate the strategic task overload management (STOM) model that predicts task switching when concurrence is impossible.

Background: The STOM model predicts that in overload, tasks will be switched to, to the extent that they are attractive on task attributes of high priority, interest, and salience and low difficulty. But more-difficult tasks are less likely to be switched away from once they are being performed.

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Objective: We aimed to examine the effects of information access cost and accountability on medical residents' information retrieval strategy and performance during prehandover preparation.

Background: Prior studies observing doctors' prehandover practices witnessed the use of memory-intensive strategies when retrieving patient information. These strategies impose potential threats to patient safety as human memory is prone to errors.

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Objective: We examine the effects of two different kinds of decision-aiding automation errors on human-automation interaction (HAI), occurring at the first failure following repeated exposure to correctly functioning automation. The two errors are incorrect advice, triggering the automation bias, and missing advice, reflecting complacency.

Background: Contrasts between analogous automation errors in alerting systems, rather than decision aiding, have revealed that alerting false alarms are more problematic to HAI than alerting misses are.

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Objective: We aimed to build upon the state of knowledge about the impacts of sleep disruption into the domain of complex cognitive task performance for three types of sleep disruption: total sleep deprivation, sleep restriction, and circadian cycle.

Background: Sleep disruption affects human performance by increasing the likelihood of errors or the time it takes to complete tasks, such as the Psychomotor Vigilance Task. It is not clear whether complex tasks are affected in the same way.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study developed a computational model to understand automation complacency effects in operators using a robotic arm under varying levels of automation support.
  • Unlike previous models that focused on simple monitoring failures, this research tests complacency within a complex task, allowing system designers to assess automation's benefits and drawbacks without human-in-the-loop experiments.
  • Results showed that while the model successfully predicted routine performance and responses to failures after complacency developed, it highlighted that visuals scanning alone does not capture all attention allocation aspects related to complacency.
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