Doctors documenting: an ethnographic and informatics approach to understanding attending physician documentation in the pediatric emergency department.

Objective: The pediatric emergency department is a highly complex and evolving environment. Despite the fact that physicians spend a majority of their time on documentation, little research has examined the role of documentation in provider workflow. The aim of this study is to examine the task of attending physician documentation workflow using a mixed-methods approach including focused ethnography, informatics, and the Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety (SEIPS) model as a theoretical framework.

Exploring website gist through rapid serial visual presentation.

Background: Users can make judgments about web pages in a glance. Little research has explored what semantic information can be extracted from a web page within a single fixation or what mental representations users have of web pages, but the scene perception literature provides a framework for understanding how viewers can extract and represent diverse semantic information from scenes in a glance. The purpose of this research was (1) to explore whether semantic information about a web page could be extracted within a single fixation and (2) to explore the effects of size and resolution on extracting this information.

Measuring the time course of selection during visual search.

In visual search tasks, observers can guide their attention towards items in the visual field that share features with the target item. In this series of studies, we examined the time course of guidance toward a subset of items that have the same color as the target item. Landolt Cs were placed on 16 colored disks.

Meta-Analyses of the Effects of Standardized Handoff Protocols on Patient, Provider, and Organizational Outcomes.

Objective: The overall purpose was to understand the effects of handoff protocols using meta-analytic approaches.

Background: Standardized protocols have been required by the Joint Commission, but meta-analytic integration of handoff protocol research has not been conducted.

Method: The primary outcomes investigated were handoff information passed during transitions of care, patient outcomes, provider outcomes, and organizational outcomes.

Directly Comparing Handoff Protocols for Pediatric Hospitalists.

Background And Objectives: Handoff protocols are often developed by brainstorming and consensus, and few are directly compared. We hypothesized that a handoff protocol (Flex 11) developed using a rigorous methodology would be more favorable in terms of clinicians' attitudes, behaviors, cognitions, or time-on-task when performing handoffs compared with a prevalent protocol (Situation Background Assessment Recommendation [SBAR]).

Methods: Using a between-groups, randomized control trial design (Flex 11 versus SBAR) during a pilot study in a simulated environment, 20 clinicians (13 attending physicians and 7 residents) received 3 patient handoffs from a standardized physician, managed the patients, and handed off the patients to the same standardized physician.

Differentiating global and local contour completion using a dot localization paradigm.

Competing theories of partially occluded object perception (amodal completion) emphasize either relatively local contour relationships or global factors such as symmetry. These disparate theories may reflect 2 separate processes: a low-level contour interpolation process and a higher-order global recognition process. The 2 could be distinguished experimentally if only the former produces precise representations of occluded object boundaries.

The Aperture Capture Illusion: misperceived forms in dynamic occlusion displays.

Visual illusions can reveal unconscious representations and processes at work in perception. Here we report a robust illusion that involves the misperception of moving, partially occluded objects. When a dynamically occluded object is seen through 2 misaligned apertures, the object appears misaligned in the direction of the apertures, creating the Aperture Capture Illusion.

Intrinsic motivation and attentional capture from gamelike features in a visual search task.

In psychology research studies, the goals of the experimenter and the goals of the participants often do not align. Researchers are interested in having participants who take the experimental task seriously, whereas participants are interested in earning their incentive (e.g.

Estimation of mental workload using saccadic eye movements in a free-viewing task.

This study proposes a new method to automatically estimate a person's mental workload (MWL) using a specific type of eye movements called saccadic intrusions (SI). Previously, the most accurate existing method to estimate MWL was the pupil diameter measure [1]. However, pupil diameter is not practical in a vehicle driving environment because it is overly sensitive to brightness changes.

Signal detection evidence for limited capacity in visual search.

The nature of capacity limits (if any) in visual search has been a topic of controversy for decades. In 30 years of work, researchers have attempted to distinguish between two broad classes of visual search models. Attention-limited models have proposed two stages of perceptual processing: an unlimited-capacity preattentive stage, and a limited-capacity selective attention stage.

What are the shapes of response time distributions in visual search?

Many visual search experiments measure response time (RT) as their primary dependent variable. Analyses typically focus on mean (or median) RT. However, given enough data, the RT distribution can be a rich source of information.

Reaction time distributions constrain models of visual search.

Many experiments have investigated visual search for simple stimuli like colored bars or alphanumeric characters. When eye movements are not a limiting factor, these tasks tend to produce roughly linear functions relating reaction time (RT) to the number of items in the display (set size). The slopes of the RTxset size functions for different searches fall on a continuum from highly efficient (slopes near zero) to inefficient (slopes>25-30ms/item).

A theory of dynamic occluded and illusory object perception.

Humans see whole objects from input fragmented in space and time, yet spatiotemporal object perception is poorly understood. The authors propose the theory of spatiotemporal relatability (STR), which describes the visual information and processes that allow visible fragments revealed at different times and places, due to motion and occlusion, to be assembled into unitary perceived objects. They present a formalization of STR that specifies spatial and temporal relations for object formation.