Posts Tagged Human Factors Engineering
World View and the Worldview Assessment Instrument (WAI)
Posted by Tal Oron-Gilad in Military & Law Enforcement Applications, News on December 14, 2010
“New and improved technologies may enhance the 21st Century commander’s ability to communicate with coalition partners, but coalition efforts may still founder on the shoals of technical incompatibilities, language difficulties, cultural assymetrics, and ignorance of key historical and geopolitical issues.” R.H Scales, 2001
Can Worldviews predict differences in operators’ performance under stress (OPUS) derived from cultural differences?
If proven true, WAI might be very relevant to Command and Control (C2) environments which are often characterized as “teams of teams”.
What are worldviews?
Worldviews are sets of assumptions about life and the physical and social worlds. The ‘lens’ through which one perceives reality. The central insight of Worldview is that personal and cultural assumptions about reality have profound effects upon thought and behavior. The WAI (Koltko-Rivera, 2004) has 6 Core Dimensions, and is designed to assess crucial aspects of worldview.
Table 1. Pole Reflected by Score
| Metaphysics/ontology | over 40: Spiritualist | under 40: Materialist |
| Responsibility | over 56: External | under 56: Internal |
| Agency | over 32: Voluntarist | under 32: Determinist |
| Group | over 48: Collectivist | under 48: Individualist |
| Authority | over 24: Linear | under 24: Lateral |
| Mutability | over 16: Changeable | under 16: Permanent |
What have we done?
- Translation and validation of the Hebrew version of the WAI.
- Administration of the WAI to 305 Israeli participants (150 males and 155 females) mean age 25 SD(6), 22 SD(7) respectively.
- Comparison of the results across demographic characteristics (i.e., gender, age, strength of religious believe, military service background and domain, and workplace)
- Comparison of the results to the American sample reported by Koltko-Rivera
Summary of findings
The results reflect differences between American and Israeli samples, as well as differences among the Israeli participants. Some of these differences (e.g., relation to group) were related to the type of military service that participants had experienced. Thus, worldview or its components can possible contribute to the understanding of team performance in applied settings.
Differences within Israeli sample
- Ontology – Females were significantly more spiritual than males
- Relation to group – Those who served in combat roles in the IDF were more collectivists than those who served in field jobs or administrative ones
- Relation to authority – Females were significantly more lateral than males
Differences between American and Israeli samples
- There were items in the American WAI that did not load to any factor in the Israeli one. Therefore some changes were required to be made in order to generate the Israeli scoring.
Specific differences by dimensions:
- Ontology – Israeli sample more neutral, US sample more spiritual
- Responsibility – Both samples are internal but the Israeli sample is more skewed
- Agency – Both samples are voluntarists
- Relation to group – Both samples lean toward individualism
- Relation to authority – Israeli sample more neutral, US sample more lateral
- Mutability – Both samples are neutral
Act and Anticipate Hazard Perception Training – AAHPT
Posted by Tal Oron-Gilad in driving skills, Transportation & Safety on December 12, 2010
AAHPT is a research effort aimed toward developing innovative training strategies for Hazard perception among young-inexperienced drivers.
- AAHPT is still in its development stages. Nevertheless several experimental phases have already been completed
- Initial findings concerning AAHPT training methodologies are available, those are constantly embedded into future development directions.
AAHPT principles
- Intended for novice drivers who have already obtained the basic skills of driving (i.e., vehicle handling and maneuvering)
- Enriching driving experience in a short period of time (i.e., in a condensed way)
- Exposure to diverse real life driving situations (see below, residential, sparsely populated urban and inter-city areas)
- Training- Actual hazards vs. Testing- Potential hazards (i.e., less salient situations)
- Data driven events-not are defined a priori (i.e., there is no one single master solution)
- Goal standard of experienced drivers (performance of young-inexperienced is compared to a pool of data obtained
- Variety of HP measurements
AAHPT variations
- Active – Participants observe 63 HP video-based traffic scenes and are asked to press a response button each time they detect a hazardous situation.
Participants first observe a movie press a button each time they perceive a hazardous situation. Once, completed a text box appears and they have to specify the reason for their presses.
- Instructional – The ‘Instructional’ group underwent a theoretical tutorial, where written material concerning HP was followed by video-based examples. Participants were not asked to actively respond to situations, but rather to become familiar with concepts and examples.
Here are two sample slides taken from the Instructional-based training. The first leads to a discussion on different traffic environments and the second shows a specific example of pedestrians in an urban area including tips and information. This snapshot was taken from one of the 63 videos of traffic scenes used in the AAHPT training.
- Hybrid – The ‘Hybrid’ participants observed a concise theoretical component first (similar to the ‘Instructional’ mode) followed by a shortened active component (similar to the ‘Active’ mode). This mode enables the young-inexperienced drivers to receive both theoretical information as well as to act and respond.
HPT (Hazard Perception Test)
- Observe 58 HP movies and press a response button each time they detect a hazard similar way as in the Active training but different movies with less salient hazards (see following images left-training, the hazard (e.g., vehicle) is apparent whereas right-testing the hazard is not apparent ,i.e., potential danger).
- Classification task – similar to the one used in Borowsky, Oron-Gilad and Parmet, 2009(see also www.icttp.com/presentations/pdfs/O163.pdf).
To read more:
Borowsky, A., Oron-Gilad, T., Meir A. and Parmet Y. Human Factors and Ergonomics Society’s 54th Annual Meeting. California, September 27-October 1, 2010.
Meir, Borowsky, Oron-Gilad, Parmet and Shinar. Act and Anticipate Hazard Perception Training for Young-Inexperienced Drivers, The 3rd International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (AHFE), July 17-20, 2010. see book chapter online http://www.crcnetbase.com/doi/abs/10.1201/EBK1439835074-c15
A Dome Projection Platform to study Pedestrian Behavior
Posted by Tal Oron-Gilad in News, Transportation & Safety on December 8, 2010
Did you know:
- Pedestrian road crashes are amongst the most substantial causes of death, injury and long-term disability among children, particularly among those in the age range of 5-to 9 years
- Negotiating traffic requires a variety of cognitive and perceptual skills. When those skills are not properly developed, pedestrians road-related decisions will probably be inadequate
- Young children are less competent in traffic than adults
- A large proportion of traffic injuries occur while children are walking to or from school
- Elementary-school children cross the road without adults’ accompaniment, especially when coming back from school
- Prohibiting children under the age of 9 from crossing the road alone is not sufficient for reducing their over-involvement in pedestrian crashes
Towards understanding child-pedestrian’s deficits in perceiving hazards when crossing the road
Together with my colleague David Shinar and two graduate students Anat Meir and Hagai Tapiro we are in the process of developing a platform to study how children at various ages perceive hazards and dangers in the traffic environment. We have developed an experimental platform that mimics a typical Israeli urban environment.
A Dome projection facility
- Integrates the natural visual and motor skills of a person into the environment
- Large enough to have participants immersed within its circumference
- Physical movement can be added to improve simulation fidelity
- Our dome is a 180 degrees projection facility (6.5 meters in diameter with 3-D perception projection system) it is temperature and noise controlled
- A verity of measurement (including eye tracking) and recording systems are available
Musts….
- for such a facility to be useful it must project a typical urban environment that resembles reality with the appropriate level of resolution and level of detail
- A 3-d model database of a typical Israeli urban area was developed (the database was generated by bdesign and is run on the MAK VR-Forces/VR-Vantage platform)
- Typical crossing scenarios are now being designed
So here I am proudly standing in the dome room and here’s Hagai in the control room.
Drivers’ perception of pedestrian in urban areas
Posted by Tal Oron-Gilad in Transportation & Safety on December 2, 2010
Statistical databases often distinguish between accidents with pedestrian-injuries in urban and inter-city areas. Obviously, conflicting situations involving pedestrians are more typical in urban areas and less common in intercity areas. Nevertheless, the urban environment itself is not unified. There are variations in its characteristics; some of its roads are located inside residential neighborhoods and are more populated with pedestrians while other urban roads are located beyond residential neighborhoods and are less populated with pedestrians. Specifically, it is not clear whether differences in pedestrian expectancies can be exemplified in within-neighborhood residential roads and between-neighborhood urban roads. In our new publications we used the results of a Hazard Perception Test (HPT) to examine differences in drivers’ response to pedestrian-related events in urban and residential areas.
This new publication will appear soon in a special issue dedicated to vulnerable road users (VRUs) in Accident analysis and prevention (David Shinar, guest editor). Look for: Borowsky, A., Oron-GIlad,T. , Meir, A. & Parmet, Y. (in press). Drivers perception of vulnerable road users: A hazard perception approach, Accident Analysis and Prevention. Accepted November 2010.
Abstract
The present study examined how experienced and young-inexperienced drivers (either trained in hazard perception or not) respond to and identify pedestrians when they appear in residential roads within populated neighborhoods and in urban roads located outside neighborhoods and usually less populated. As part of a hazard perception test, participants were connected to an eye tracking system and were asked to observe 58 traffic scene movies and press a response button each time they detected a hazardous situation. Analyzing all pedestrian-related events revealed that, regardless of driving experience or training, drivers detect pedestrians less often when they appear in urban areas and more often when they appear in residential areas. In addition, drivers had shorter fixations when fixating on pedestrians in residential areas. Moreover, experienced drivers processed information more efficiently than young-inexperienced drivers (both trained and untrained) when pedestrians were identified. Visual search patterns in urban and residential traffic environments are discussed.
Vibrotactile Guidance Cues for Target Acquisition
Posted by Tal Oron-Gilad in Military & Law Enforcement Applications, News, Tactile & Multimodal displays on December 1, 2010
This article won the Andrew P. Sage Best Transactions Paper Award for 2007
Oron-Gilad, T.; Downs, J.L.; Gilson, R.D.; Hancock, P.A.; , “Vibrotactile Guidance Cues for Target Acquisition,” Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C: Applications and Reviews, IEEE Transactions on , vol.37, no.5, pp.993-1004, Sept. 2007Abstract
Three experiments examined the use of vibrotactile cues to guide an operator toward a target. Vibrotactile stimulation on the hand can provide spatially stabilizing cues for feedback of subtle changes in position. When such feedback is present, a deviation from the point of origin results in tactile stimulation indicating the direction and magnitude of the positional error. Likewise, spatial deviation from a desired position displayed tactually can provide robust position guidance and stabilization sufficient to improve the acquisition time and accuracy of fine cursor control. A major advantage of this mode of information representation is that it can be present at the same time as visual cues with minimal cross-modal interference. Our findings suggest that performance is actually enhanced when both tactile and visual cues are present. Although previous studies have suggested that various forms of tactile feedback can provide position guidance and stabilization, to our knowledge, this work is the first that details the effect of tactile feedback on target acquisition directly.
Here are some more detail about the experiments and some images:
 Participant's position and target arena |
 Tactors placed inside hand |
 Tactors placed outside hand |
Vibrotactile cueing continuous gradient
Discrete tactile gradient
Human Factors Engineering 
