Visit the Air Force Web Sight for more details

The military, being what it is, is very competitive. There are rivalries between the Army and Marines, for example, because they’re both ground forces. Another big rivalry is between the Navy and the Air Force to determine who has the better toys (nuclear submarines win over fighter jets, of course).

Nonetheless, after seeing a banner ad on the NBC website, I can say that at least the Navy knows how to spell, unlike the Air Force:

The only human factors lesson to be learned is to proofread your work to make a good impression on the one who is reading the advertisement. They are much more effective that way.

GPS devices, automation, and creepy men with chainsaws

I have been totally reliant on my GPS since I got to Rhode Island, and it has been mostly reliable. There have been a couple of errors, but nothing too drastic. Coming back from nearby Whole Foods last night, however, nearly gave me a panic attack. The route given to me by my GPS took me through a dark industrial park, past dimly lit residential areas, a giant warehouse with big loading docks, and a construction zone with a recently leveled building.

Did the GPS get me home? Yes. Did it take the shortest route? Yes. Did I have no choice but to fully trust the automation and hope that I wouldn’t encounter creepy men with chainsaws? Yes.

Automation is a wonderful thing, but it is distressing to be at the mercy of a machine. Yet, in many ideal futures, our cars drive for us so we don’t have to do any work. Except worry about creepy man with chainsaws.

Thankfully, there has been a lot of research on automation in the human factors literature. Much of the research examines how humans trust automation and how automation use changes after a failure. One of the better review articles is:

Parasuraman, R. & Riley, V. (1997). Humans and Automation: Use, Misuse, Disuse, Abuse. Human Factors, 39(2), 230-253. (link)

Map of Science

Tomorrow I leave for my 10-week summer internship in Newport, RI at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center. I’ll be working on Human-Systems Integration, which seems to be a military-specific term for human factors engineering. However, Human-Systems Integration is more than just human factors. It takes into account selection of personnel, training, and both physical and psychological factors of users of systems. It brings together a lot of research and reminds me of how interconnected science is.

A little over a year ago, the Information Esthetics group published what is effectively a map of science, of Relationships among Scientific Paradigms. It’s continually fascinating to see the links between all kinds of different fields. Click the image for a full-size version of the image.

A description from Seed Magazine:

This map was constructed by sorting roughly 800,000 published papers into 776 different scientific paradigms (shown as pale circular nodes) based on how often the papers were cited together by authors of other papers. Links (curved black lines) were made between the paradigms that shared papers, then treated as rubber bands, holding similar paradigms nearer one another when a physical simulation forced every paradigm to repel every other; thus the layout derives directly from the data. Larger paradigms have more papers; node proximity and darker links indicate how many papers are shared between two paradigms. Flowing labels list common words unique to each paradigm, large labels general areas of scientific inquiry.

Vision Science: Reaching across disciplines

I am back from Vision Sciences, and it was a great conference. There were lots of good talks and posters, and I found some research that is relevant to my dissertation. Thankfully, nothing actually scooped my dissertation, so I don’t have to start over. Whew.

What I’ve noticed in the past few years is how broad the research has gotten at VSS. It used to be primarily behavioral research. Participants performed a task that involved some aspect of visual cognition, and accuracy, reaction time, and sometimes eye movements were recorded and analyzed. There is still a lot of this kind of research today, and it is still valuable.

In the past few years, though, there has been an explosion of neuroscience and computational modeling. A huge portion of psychological research is veering towards neuroscience, and this is the next logical step in understanding the mind and brain. Also, it gives psychological research an air of legitimacy, since we can tell our friends and family we’re neuroscientists, not psychologists. But studying the brain in conjunction with the mind makes sense.

Additionally, developing computer models to mimic and understand how visual processing takes place makes sense towards developing artificial intelligence and being able to test various theories about different phenomena. Psychologists are often not computer scientists as well, so it is promising to see links being forged between these two disciplines.

As a whole, the field has broadened beyond psychology, so the term “Vision Science” is apt. This is analogous to some schools offering a Cognitive Science program, which looks at cognition from not only a psychological standpoint, but also from philosophical, computational, and biological ones as well. Before we know it, graduate training will expand from learning experimental design to programming in MATLAB and analyzing fMRI data.

If at first you don’t succeed, you fail.

I’m a couple of months behind on the phenomenon that is Portal, a short video game produced by Valve Studios. Portal is a first-person puzzle game with an ingenious twist: you have a “gun” that can shoot an entrance and exit portal pretty much anywhere, so you can cross a chasm by shooting portals next to you and on the wall across from you, allowing you to “cross” the chasm by avoiding it all together. The game is surprisingly hard to explain, actually. I’ll just embed a video:

The game is amazingly well done, and it makes me think about the video game and cognition research that is all the rage right now. Multitudes of studies (most famously Green & Bavelier, 2003) have shown that video game experts can process more information and have a larger functional field of view. This is just a side effect of these action video games, though - they weren’t designed to enhance cognition. A game like Portal, however, stretches the mind and requires an entirely new way to solve problems. Portal requires the player to completely re-conceptualize their concept of 3D space. Not many other tasks do that.This game provides a fascinating platform for learning this entirely new concept in a first-person environment. There are times (when learning how to maneuver a submarine, for example) when this type of spatial nonconformity is necessary to successfully complete a task. It would be interesting to examine what new cognitive skills develop as one becomes an expert with a game like this. The field of video game and cognition research is still fairly new, but I anticipate seeing it expand in many new directions, including leveraging innovative new games such as this to examine how we can train our minds and expand the way we think.