Ben D Sawyer

University of Central Florida | UCF · Department of Industrial Engineering & Management Systems

Individuated font selection, which can increase text reading speed, may be able to increase mathematical expression reading speed and influence reasoning accuracy. To investigate whether the same font that increases a participant’s reading speed enhances mathematical reading, we compared their speed in evaluating mathematical expressions as true or...

As social robots increase in capabilities and become ubiquitous parts of the environment, there will be more conflicts between humans and technological agents. Conflict is not necessarily bad: it can provide opportunities for sharing information, calibrating trust, and establishing common situation awareness—provided the conflict plays out in a rea...

Effective battlespace visualization tools are a key component of tactical decision making, especially in support of a multi-domain operation (MDO). The findings for comparisons between the more traditional tools such as sand tables and tablets and the newer mixed-reality options do not show clear findings for the superiority of the newer technology...

Generative AI (GenAI), specifically the Large Language Model (LLM), focuses on creating content like text, images, audio, or other data types similar to that created by humans. Advancements in various LLMs have accelerated AI development, potentially impacting various fields, including education. Can LLMs produce educational content with similar re...

Background: Format readability, including font and spacing, impacts reading metrics in adults, but will the research generalize to children? We examined how eight fonts (four serif and four sans serif) and three-character spacing variations influenced children’s reading comprehension and reading speed. Methods: Fifty-one students in third–fifth gra...

Within the past 60-90 days, the ChatGPT and GPT-4 large language models (LLMs) have taken the world by storm. Last year, a Google engineer became so convinced that a model was sentient that he violated his NDA. Two years ago, few were taking the prospect of the emergence of arti cial general intelligence (AGI) seriously. Today, even conservative ex...

Task fMRI provides an opportunity to analyze the working mechanisms of the human brain during specific experimental paradigms. Deep learning models have increasingly been applied for decoding and encoding purposes study to representations in task fMRI data. More recently, graph neural networks, or neural networks models designed to leverage the pro...

Reading short pieces of text under time pressure, such as reading navigation cues while driving or running, can be enhanced through optimal font selection. In this study, a laboratory experiment is replicated by crowd workers using their own computers at home to investigate the effect of the font on single-word reading speed. The finding shows simi...

New advancements in vehicle automation, electrification, data connectivity, and digital methods of sharing—known collectively as New Mobility—are poised to revolutionize transportation as it is known today. Exactly what results this disruption will lead to, however, remains unknown, as indeed the technologies and their uses are still taking shape a...

This panel discussion is third in a series examining the educational challenges facing future human factors and ergonomics professionals. The past two panels have focused on training of technical skills in data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to human factors students. This panel discussion expands on these topics and argues f...

In developing the highly useful technologies, knowledge from human factors and ergonomics (HF/E) can be of great use, especially to designers charged with the difficult task of dovetailing humans and machines in complex systems built to navigate sometimes chaotic environments. The role of HF/E in A ³ design remains centered around the goal that A ³...

Readability is on the cusp of a revolution. Fixed text is becoming fluid as a proliferation of digital reading devices rewrite what a document can do. As past constraints make way for more flexible opportunities, there is great need to understand how reading formats can be tuned to the situation and the individual. We aim to provide a firm foundati...

Medical professionals engage in an enormous and ever-increasing amount of reading in Electronic Health Records (EHRs), which may have adverse impacts on patient care. Personalized readability formats (PRFs) may help to accelerate reading these records, without training, and without adversely affecting comprehension in this critical task. Using Hist...

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed our lifestyles, habits, and daily routine. Some of the impacts of COVID-19 have been widely reported already. However, many effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are still to be discovered. The main objective of this study was to assess the changes in the frequency of reported physical back pain complaints reported duri...

Although online businesses are investing significant capital into technology, many still struggle to be successful and most of them fail. To help with that, we have created a methodology to evaluate the quality of electronic services and its relationship with consumer satisfaction.

In our age of ubiquitous digital displays, adults often read in short, opportunistic interludes. In this context of Interlude Reading, we consider if manipulating font choice can improve adult readers' reading outcomes. Our studies normalize font size by human perception and use hundreds of crowdsourced participants to provide a foundation for unde...

The continued advances in artificial intelligence and automation through machine learning applications, under the heading of data science, gives reason for pause within the educator community as we consider how to position future human factors engineers to contribute meaningfully in these projects. Do the lessons we learned and now teach regarding...

Objective The aim of this study is to describe information acquisition theory, explaining how drivers acquire and represent the information they need. Background While questions of what drivers are aware of underlie many questions in driver behavior, existing theories do not directly address how drivers in particular and observers in general acqui...

Modern digital interfaces display typeface in ways new to the 500 year old art of typography, driving a shift in reading from primarily long-form to increasingly short-form. In safety-critical settings, such at-a-glance reading competes with the need to understand the environment. To keep both type and the environment legible, a variety of ‘middle...

Typography plays an increasingly important role in today’s dynamic digital interfaces. Graphic designers and interface engineers have more typographic options than ever before. Sorting through this maze of design choices can be a daunting task. Here we present the results of an experiment comparing differences in glance-based legibility between eig...

Objective The objective of this meta-analysis is to explore the presently available, empirical findings on transfer of training from virtual (VR), augmented (AR), and mixed reality (MR) and determine whether such extended reality (XR)-based training is as effective as traditional training methods. Background MR, VR, and AR have already been used a...

Applied neuroscience presently allows not only the scientific discovery-oriented probing of the inner workings of the mind, but increasingly the probing of individual minds toward gathering intelligence. Significant advances in neuroimaging, leveraging both active and passive electro-optical energy, can reveal specifics of information held in the m...

In the age of information, in-vehicle multitasking is inevitable. The popularity of the automobile, in combination with the present information age, create a growing demand to do more in-vehicle than simply focus on the road. Unconstrained Design, a philosophy which supports rather than constrains multitasking, is proposed as a path toward enhancin...

The explosion of data science (DS) in all areas of technology coupled with the rapid growth of machine learning (ML) techniques in the last decade create novel applications in automation. Many working with DS techniques rely on the concept of “black boxes” to explain how ML works, noting that algorithms find patterns in the data that humans might n...

This session looks to serve the purpose of recalling and recounting the life and contributions of Professor John Senders. The contributors to this session include his direct colleagues, his students, his co-authors, those whom he inspired, and even members of his family. These designations are not exclusive! Senders made so many contributions acros...

Understanding our visual world requires both looking and seeing. Dissociation of these processes can result in the phenomenon of inattentional blindness or ‘looking without seeing‘. Concomitant errors in applied settings can be serious, and even deadly. Current visual data analysis cannot differentiate between just ‘looking‘ and actual processing o...

Drivers rarely focus exclusively on driving, even with the best of intentions. They are distracted by passengers, navigation systems, smartphones, and driver assistance systems. Driving itself requires performing simultaneous tasks, including lane keeping, looking for signs, and avoiding pedestrians. The dangers of multitasking while driving, and e...

Understanding our visual world requires both looking and seeing. Dissociation of these processes can result in the phenomenon of inattentional blindness or ‘looking without seeing‘. Concomitant errors in applied settings can be serious, and even deadly. Current visual data analysis cannot differentiate between just ‘looking‘ and actual processing o...

The present study investigated the risk-taking behaviors of angry drivers, which were coincidentally measured via behavioral and electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings. We manipulated a driving scenario that concerned a Go/No-Go decision at an intersection when the controlling traffic light was in its yellow phase. This protocol was based upon th...

This paper describes a set of data made available that contains detailed subtask coding of interactions with several production vehicle human machine interfaces (HMIs) on open roadways, along with accompanying eyeglance data.

New advancements in vehicle automation, electrification, data connectivity, and digital methods of sharing—known collectively as New Mobility—are poised to revolutionize transportation as it is known today. Exactly what results this disruption will lead to, however, remains unknown, as indeed the technologies and their uses are still taking shape a...

The industry of sex aids for disabled people has been growing and becoming more nuanced, both with workers who facilitate manual sex aid and within the growing market of automated sex aids. Agency in sexual expression is often seen as an able-bodied activity and automated sex aids have yet to be considered with due rigor for general populations, in...

In the driving environment, competition exists between Driving Related Activities (DRAs) and Non-Driving Related Activities (NDRAs). This is a source of inattention and human error. Continual proliferation of in-vehicle information systems (IVIS) presents drivers with opportunities for distraction. Drivers simultaneously manage DRAs alongside unrel...

Objective: This work assesses the efficacy of the "prevalence effect" as a form of cyberattack in human-automation teaming, using an email task. Background: Under the prevalence effect, rare signals are more difficult to detect, even when taking into account their proportionally low occurrence. This decline represents diminished human capability...

When designers typographically tweak fonts to make an interface look ‘cool,’ they do so amid a rich design tradition, albeit one that is little-studied in regards to the rapid ‘at a glance’ reading afforded by many modern electronic displays. Such glanceable reading is routinely performed during human-machine interactions where accessing text compe...

Growing evidence supports the idea that patterns of gaze are important to human-machine trust, as they are to human-to-human trust (LaFrance & Mayo, 1976; Kendon, 1967), and indeed potentially all primate social dynamics (Emery, 2000). A growing literature explores trust and gaze toward anthropomorphic robots (Mutlu et al., 2009; Stanton & Stevens,...

This paper examines whether there is an association between pre-exposure trust in technology and subsequent glance behavior when interacting with a technology that was relatively novel for the majority of participants. After rating their level of trust in technology on a questionnaire, participants drove one of two vehicle models on a highway and e...

Failures in drivers’ attention allocation become evident when multi-tasking related demands leave vehicle operators unable to detect or respond appropriately to roadway threats or interfere adversely with their ability to appropriately control the vehicle. Robust methods for obtaining evidence and data about demands upon and decrements in the alloc...

Multitasking related demands can adversely affect drivers' allocation of attention to the roadway, resulting in delays or missed responses to roadway threats and to decrements in driving performance. Robust methods for obtaining evidence and data about demands on and decrements in the allocation of driver attention are needed as input for design, t...

Objective: We examine how transitions in task demand are manifested in mental workload and performance in a dual-task setting. Background: Hysteresis has been defined as the ongoing influence of demand levels prior to a demand transition. Authors of previous studies predominantly examined hysteretic effects in terms of performance. However, litt...

Cyber security is a high-ranking national priority that is only likely to grow as we become more dependent on cyber systems. From a research perspective, currently available work often focuses solely on technological aspects of cyber, acknowledging the human in passing, if at all. In recent years, the Human Factors community has begun to address hu...

Older drivers comprise an undue percentage of roadway crashes and fatalities, and existing data implicates decrements to situational awareness as one factor. Although forward attention in older drivers is well studied, rearward attention for this population is little explored. What evidence exists has suggested reduced mirror checks, especially und...

Effective cyber defense depends upon intrusion detection, i.e., the process of monitoring, detecting, and reacting appropriately to cyber activity threatening network security. Intrusion detection requires the execution of multiple unique, interdependent network analysis tasks. The current study aimed to expand understanding of cyber defense by sep...

Brain processes responsible for the error-related negativity (ERN) evoked response potential (ERP) have historically been studied in highly controlled laboratory experiments through presentation of simple visual stimuli. The present work describes the first time the ERN has been evoked and successfully detected in visual search of complex stimuli....

The laudable effort by Strayer and his colleagues to derive a systematic method to assess forms of cognitive distraction in the automobile is beset by the problem of nonstationary in driver response capacity. At the level of the overall goal of driving, this problem conflates actual on-road behavior; characterized by underspecified task satisficing...

Technology’s role in the fight against malicious cyber-attacks is critical to the increasingly networked world of today. Yet, technology does not exist in isolation: the human factor is an aspect of cyber-defense operations with increasingly recognized importance. Thus, the human factors community has a unique responsibility to help create and vali...

The IBM Academic Initiative Project is an online resource for educators to discover and download courserelated software. The present interface utilizes two systems for cataloging materials; the Repository acts as warehouse for thousands of pieces of available software, and indexes them via in-house IBM designation codes (i.e., B5143); while the Cou...

Email-delivered cyber-attacks which penetrate first-line algorithmic defenses must then face a human operator's decision: engage, or 'reject and report' the threat. Relatively little research exists into the factors that affect these outcomes, and what does is contentious to conduct; naturalistic studies into cyber-attack can easily invade individu...

In evaluating Google Glass, our team created a novel dependent variable collection strategy in which time-synchronized devices reported time-stamps for each user action, permitting precise temporal targeting of events in a simulated driving task. This device status reporting (DSR) trigger system was used to expose vehicle operators in the midst of...

As digital technologies proliferate and the points of direct and indirect influence between computer-mediated operations and the physical world increase, issues of cyber-security have burgeoned commensurably. Here, we argue that the critical criterion of interest proves to be each individual user’s state of mind, as mediated by the technologies wit...

We examined the systematic effects of display size on task performance as derived from a standard perceptual and cognitive test battery. Specifically, three experiments examined the influence of varying viewing conditions on response speed, response accuracy and subjective workload at four differing screen sizes under three different levels of time...

We assess the driving distraction potential of texting with Google Glass (Glass), a mobile wearable platform capable of receiving and sending short-message-service and other messaging formats. A known roadway danger, texting while driving has been targeted by legislation and widely banned. Supporters of Glass claim the head-mounted wearable compute...

The threat of drunk drivers on our nation’s highways has led to the proliferation of court-mandated ignition interlock devices (IIDs), which test the driver for alcohol consumption before ignition and during operation of the vehicle. Previous research has already demonstrated the distraction potential of IIDs. Litigation has suggested that this dif...

Cyber security operators in the military and civilian sector face a lengthy repetitive work assignment with few critical signal occurrences under conditions in which they have little control over what transpires. In this sense, their task is similar to vigilance tasks that have received considerable attention from human factors specialists in regar...

The negative impact of cognitive load, such as cell phone conversations, while driving is well established, but understanding the nature of this performance deficit is still being developed. To test the impact of load on awareness of different elements in a driving scene, memory for items within the environment was examined under load and no load c...

Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Infrastructure to Vehicle (I2V) technologies promise significant advances in roadway safety, but the prolonged timeline for migration to these technologies suggest turbulent decades of driving safety research to come. To answer the ongoing question of how ITS based evolution of the dr...