Control Room Operators' Cue Utilization Predicts Cognitive Resource Consumption During Regular Operational Tasks

Physiological measures of operators' mental state in supervisory process control tasks: a scoping review

Physiological measures are often used to assess the mental state of human operators in supervisory process control tasks. However, the diversity of research approaches creates a heterogeneous landscape of empirical evidence. To map existing evidence and provide guidance to researchers and practitioners, this paper systematically reviews 109 empirical studies that report relationships between peripheral nervous system measures and mental state dimensions (e.g. mental workload, mental fatigue, stress, and vigilance) of interest. Ocular and electrocardiac measures were the most prominent measures across application fields. Most studies sought to validate such measures for reliable assessments of cognitive task demands and time on task, with measures of pupil size receiving the most empirical support. In comparison, less research examined the utility of physiological measures in predicting human task performance. This approach is discussed as an opportunity to focus on operators' individual response to cognitive task demands and to advance the state of research.

Cue utilization and pool lifeguarding

INTRODUCTION

Amongst pool lifeguards, the capacity to identify drowning swimmers quickly and accurately depends on the interpretation of critical cues. However, assessing the capacity for cue utilization amongst lifeguards at present is costly, time-consuming, and largely subjective. The aim of this study was to test the relationship between cue utilization and the detection of drowning swimmers in a series of virtual public swimming pool scenarios.

METHOD

Eighty-seven participants with or without lifeguarding experience engaged in three virtual scenarios, two of which were target scenarios where drowning events occurred within a 13 minute or 23 minute period of watch. Cue utilization was assessed using the pool lifeguarding edition of the EXPERTise 2.0 software following which 23 participants were classified with higher cue utilization, while the remaining participants were classified with lower cue utilization.

RESULTS

The results revealed that participants with higher cue utilization were more likely to have acquired experience as a lifeguard, were more likely to detect the drowning swimmer within a three minute period, and, in the case of the 13 minute scenario, recorded a greater dwell time on the drowning victim prior to the drowning event.

CONCLUSION

The results suggest that cue utilization is associated with drowning detection performance in a simulated environment and could be employed as a basis for assessments of performance amongst lifeguards in the future.

PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS

Measures of cue utilization are associated with the timely detection of drowning victims in virtual pool lifeguarding scenarios. Employers and trainers of lifeguards can potentially augment existing lifeguarding assessment programs to quickly and cost-effectively identify the capabilities of lifeguards. This is especially useful for new lifeguards or where pool lifeguarding is a seasonal activity that might be associated with skill decay.

Explaining emergency physicians' capacity to recover from interruptions

OBJECTIVE

To assess whether the capacity to utilize cues amongst emergency physicians is associated with differences in the capacity to recover performance following an interruption.

BACKGROUND

Interruptions are implicated in errors in emergency medicine due to the cognitive load that they impose on working memory, resulting in a loss of performance on the primary task. The utilization of cues is associated with a reduction in cognitive load during the performance of a task, thereby enabling the allocation of residual resources that mitigates the loss of performance following interruptions.

METHOD

Thirty-nine emergency physicians, recruited at a medical conference, completed an assessment of cue utilization (EXPERTise 2.0) and an online simulation (Septris) that involved the management of patients presenting with sepsis. During the simulation, physicians were interrupted and asked to check a medication order. Task performance was assessed using scores on Septris, with points awarded for the accurate management of patients.

RESULTS

Emergency physicians with higher cue utilization recorded significantly higher scores on the simulation task following the interruption, compared to physicians with lower cue utilization (p = .028).

CONCLUSION

The results confirm a relationship between cue utilization and the recovery of performance following an interruption. This is likely due to the advantages afforded by associated reductions in cognitive load.

APPLICATION

Assessments of cue utilization may assist in the development of interventions to support clinicians in interruptive environments.

Investigating Cognitive Load in Energy Network Control Rooms: Recommendations for Future Designs

This study analyzed and explored the cognitive load of Australian energy market operators managing one of the longest inter-connected electrical networks in the world. Each operator uses a workstation with seven screens in an active control room environment, with a large coordination screen to show information and enable collaboration between different control centers. Cognitive load was assessed during both training scenarios and regular control room operations via the integration of subjective and physiological measures. Eye-tracking glasses were also used to analyze the operators gaze behavior. Our results indicate that different events (normal or unexpected), different participants for the same session, and different periods of one session all have varying degrees of cognitive load. The system design was observed to be inefficient in some situations and to have an adverse affect on cognitive load. In critical situations for instance, operator collaboration was high and the coordination screen was used heavily when collaborating between two control centers, yet integration with the system could be improved. Eye tracking data analysis showed that the layout of applications across the seven screens was not optimal for many tasks. Improved layout strategies, potential combination of applications, redesigning of certain applications, and linked views are all recommended for further exploration in addition to improved integration of procedures and linking alarms to visual cues.

Cue utilisation reduces the impact of response bias in histopathology

Histopathologists make diagnostic decisions that are thought to be based on pattern recognition, likely informed by cue-based associations formed in memory, a process known as cue utilisation. Typically, the cases presented to the histopathologist have already been classified as 'abnormal' by clinical examination and/or other diagnostic tests. This results in a high disease prevalence, the potential for 'abnormality priming', and a response bias leading to false positives on normal cases. This study investigated whether higher cue utilisation is associated with a reduction in positive response bias in the diagnostic decisions of histopathologists. Data were collected from eighty-two histopathologists who completed a series of demographic and experience-related questions and the histopathology edition of the Expert Intensive Skills Evaluation 2.0 (EXPERTise 2.0) to establish behavioural indicators of context-related cue utilisation. They also completed a separate, diagnostic task comprising breast histopathology images where the frequency of abnormality was manipulated to create a high disease prevalence context for diagnostic decisions relating to normal tissue. Participants were assigned to higher or lower cue utilisation groups based on their performance on EXPERTise 2.0. When the effects of experience were controlled, higher cue utilisation was specifically associated with a greater accuracy classifying normal images, recording a lower positive response bias. This study suggests that cue utilisation may play a protective role against response biases in histopathology settings.

Differentiating Experience From Cue Utilization in Radiological Assessments

OBJECTIVE

This research was designed to examine the contribution of self-reported experience and cue utilization to diagnostic accuracy in the context of radiology.

BACKGROUND

Within radiology, it is unclear how task-related experience contributes to the acquisition of associations between features with events in memory, or cues, and how they contribute to diagnostic performance.

METHOD

Data were collected from 18 trainees and 41 radiologists. The participants completed a radiology edition of the established cue utilization assessment tool EXPERTise 2.0, which provides a measure of cue utilization based on performance on a number of domain-specific tasks. The participants also completed a separate image interpretation task as an independent measure of diagnostic performance.

RESULTS

Consistent with previous research, a k-means cluster analysis using the data from EXPERTise 2.0 delineated two groups, the pattern of centroids of which reflected higher and lower cue utilization. Controlling for years of experience, participants with higher cue utilization were more accurate on the image interpretation task compared to participants who demonstrated relatively lower cue utilization (p = .01).

CONCLUSION

This study provides support for the role of cue utilization in assessments of radiology images among qualified radiologists. Importantly, it also demonstrates that cue utilization and self-reported years of experience as a radiologist make independent contributions to performance on the radiological diagnostic task.

APPLICATION

Task-related experience, including training, needs to be structured to ensure that learners have the opportunity to acquire feature-event relationships and internalize these associations in the form of cues in memory.

The effect of expertise, target usefulness and image structure on visual search

Experts outperform novices on many cognitive and perceptual tasks. Extensive training has tuned experts to the most relevant information in their specific domain, allowing them to make decisions quickly and accurately. We compared a group of fingerprint examiners to a group of novices on their ability to search for information in fingerprints across two experiments-one where participants searched for target features within a single fingerprint and another where they searched for points of difference between two fingerprints. In both experiments, we also varied how useful the target feature was and whether participants searched for these targets in a typical fingerprint or one that had been scrambled. Experts more efficiently located targets when searching for them in intact but not scrambled fingerprints. In Experiment 1, we also found that experts more efficiently located target features classified as more useful compared to novices, but this expert-novice difference was not present when the target feature was classified as less useful. The usefulness of the target may therefore have influenced the search strategies that participants used, and the visual search advantages that experts display appear to depend on their vast experience with visual regularity in fingerprints. These results align with a domain-specific account of expertise and suggest that perceptual training ought to involve learning to attend to task-critical features.

Assessment of Implicit and Explicit Measures of Mental Workload in Working Situations: Implications for Industry 4.0

Nowadays, in the context of Industry 4.0, advanced working environments aim at achieving a high degree of human–machine collaboration. This phenomenon occurs, on the one hand, through the correct interpretation of operators’ data by machines that can adapt their functioning to support workers, and on the other hand, by ensuring the transparency of the actions of the system itself. This study used an ad hoc system that allowed the co-registration of a set of participants’ implicit and explicit (I/E) data in two experimental conditions that varied in the level of mental workload (MWL). Findings showed that the majority of the considered I/E measures were able to discriminate the different task-related mental demands and some implicit measures were capable of predicting task performance in both tasks. Moreover, self-reported measures showed that participants were aware of such differences in MWL. Finally, the paradigm’s ecology highlights that task and environmental features may affect the reliability of the various I/E measures. Thus, these factors have to be considered in the design and development of advanced adaptive systems within the industrial context.

Cue utilisation predicts control room operators' performance in a sustained visual search task

This research was designed to determine whether qualified practitioners' cue utilisation is predictive of their performance during a sustained visual search task in an operational context. Australian Distribution Network Service Provider (DNSP) operators were recruited for two experiments, and were classified with either higher or lower cue utilisation based on an assessment of cue utilisation within the context of power distribution. Operators' performance was assessed using a domain-related sustained visual search task. In both experiments, power distribution operators with higher cue utilisation demonstrated shorter mean response latencies during the sustained visual search task, compared to operators with lower cue utilisation. Further, no differences in accuracy based on cue utilisation were observed during the sustained visual search task. The results are consistent with the proposition that power operators with higher cue utilisation have a greater capacity to sustain visual search during domain-related tasks, compared to operators with lower cue utilisation. Practitioner summary: Power distribution system operators' cue utilisation was used to predict performance during a domain-related sustained visual search task. Power distribution operators with higher cue utilisation demonstrated shorter mean response latencies during the sustained visual search task, but no differences in accuracy, compared to operators with lower cue utilisation. Abbreviations: DNSP: distribution network service provider; EXPERTise 2.0: EXPERT intensive skills evaluation; FAT: feature association task; FDT: feature discrimination task; FIT: feature identification task; fNIRS: functional near infrared spectroscopy; FPT: feature prioritisation task; FRT: feature recognition task; SCADA: supervisory control and data acquisition.