John Senders

• Professor Emeritus at University of Toronto

Objective To share results of an experiment that used visual occlusion for a new purpose: inducing a waiting time. Background Senders was a leading figure in human factors. In his research on the visual demands of driving, he used occlusion techniques. Methods In a simulator experiment, we examined how drivers brake for different levels of urgenc...

https://doi.org/10.1177%2F00187208221101301 Objective. To share and discuss results from an occlusion experiment in which Senders was involved. Background. Senders was a leading figure in human factors science. This includes studies on visual occlusion in driving. Methods. In a simulator experiment, we examined how drivers brake for different leve...

The use of mobile devices while cycling is common, but the risks caused by their use are still poorly understood. The growing number of cyclists means that the societal and economical impact of bicycle accidents will grow. In order to better understand cyclist distraction, we took the first steps to study the visual demand of cycling. Fourteen volu...

It is commonly accepted that vision plays an important role in car braking, but it is unknown how people brake in the absence of visual information. In this simulator study, we measured drivers’ braking behaviour while they had to stop their car at designated positions on the road. The access to visual information was manipulated by occluding the s...

Driving in the real world is a collection of visual-motor tasks involving a vehicle and everything else. The tasks vary as a function of time and place and speed. They are a population of "customers" demanding to be served with uncertain levels of urgency. Each task competes with all the others for attention and frequently must wait to be observed....

Clinicians and patients often confuse drug names that sound alike. We conducted auditory perception experiments in the United States to assess the impact of similarity, familiarity, background noise and other factors on clinicians' (physicians, family pharmacists, nurses) and laypersons' ability to identify spoken drug names. We found that accuracy...

Illegible prescriptions require pharmacists to clarify more than 150 million prescriptions annually and are a continuing source of potential error.[1][1] Computerized prescriber order entry (CPOE) holds promise in eliminating illegible prescriptions. However, only 21–32% of U.S. office practices

To implement a prescribing-error reporting system in primary care offices and analyze the reports. Descriptive analysis of a voluntary prescribing-error-reporting system Seven primary care offices in Vermont, USA. One hundred and three prescribers, managers, nurses and office staff. Nurses and office staff were asked to report all communications wi...

How does one design something that is complex? Or something that is simple? Why should one try to reduce or increase complexity? What is complexity? There are a large number of different uses of the word, including many in mathematics and physics. Most of these are not useful in attempting to fit the word to the problems of the design of systems an...

Drug name confusions occur when drugs whose names look or sound alike (e.g., Celebrex/Cerebyx) are confused by clinicians and patients. Our project examines effects of frequency and similarity on auditory perception of drug names. Luce's Neighborhood Activation Model is the theoretical framework. Frequency information was taken from national prescr...

John Senders is Professor Emeritus of Engineering at the University of Toronto and Lecturer in Law at York University in Toronto. He has spoken and written on the nature and source of human error since 1976. He is Principal Scientific Consultant to the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) and a member of the board of its Canadian offsprin...

Previous research has shown that objective measures of orthographic (i.e., spelling) similarity can predict the probability of drug-name confusion, but it is not clear how these objective measures relate to subjective judgments of similarity. This study examined the association between one objective measure of orthographic similarity, the Dice coef...

In these two companion papers, methods developed in a series of studies in the 1940's and 1950's are applied to the analysis of 6 DOF control devices used in modern human machine systems such as teleoperation and virtual environments. Contrary to the early studies, the current work showed that the simultaneous time-on-target in multidegree of freed...

In these two companion papers, methods developed in a series of studies in the 1940's and 1950's are applied to the analysis of 6 DOF control devices used in modern human machine systems such as teleoperation and virtual environments. Contrary to the early studies, the current work showed that the simultaneous time on target in multidegree of freed...

The point of regard is usually considered to be the place where visual attention is directed although there are some exceptions. The identification of the point of regard is easy. A variety of commercial devices are available. The movement of the eye from one place to another stems from two quite different mechanisms. One is driven by events in the...

It is time that hospitals realize that human error is inevitable and must be anticipated. A technique developed in the aerospace industry and known as "failure mode and effects analysis" involves identifying mistakes that will happen before they happen, and determining whether the consequences of those mistakes would be tolerable or intolerable. Th...

Our major goal is to account for some simple digit-recall data with a theory that integrates two models from two scientific traditions. The random-sampling model, founded in the memory and attention literature, holds that (1) stimulus features are randomly sampled throughout the course of stimulus presence and (2) proportion correct recall is equal...

Medical error is not a medical but rather a behavioral matter. In this article, the differences between errors and accidents are discussed in a theoretical manner. A discussion of some useful taxonomies is followed by suggestions on how to talk about an error. In brief, one must distinguish between the "mode" of a particular error (whether, for exa...

Our major goal is to account for some simple digit-recall data with a theory that integrates two models from two scientific traditions. Therandom-sampling model, founded in the memory and attention literature, holds that (1) stimulus features are randomly sampled throughout the course of stimulus presence and (2) proportion correct recall is equal...

For the purposes of describing human behaviour in any situation or task there is a very large number of both independent or dependent variables that could be taken into account. If we disregard the task an individual is trying to complete, there will rarely be any special reason, except scientific fashion, for choosing one set of dependent variable...

The ability to correlate the autonomically mediated responses of various physiological effectors with the presentation of environmental stimuli may some day prove useful in studying the limits of man's ability to tolerate stress or in diagnosing psychosomatic disorders. A working definition of autonomic ″driving″ is presented, and its existence is...

Pilots and flight simulator used in study of human visual sampling study

Carbonell [1] recently proposed an economic model of a pilot's visual sampling behavior based on queueing theory. The results of a validation study of this model have been completed. This validation was based on instrument data and eye-movement data taken during mission flights using a Link trainer. The results of the simulation using the queueing...

A rational model is described about visual sampling behavior in inspecting a large number of visual displays, where significant deviations are to be detected. The interval between two successive observations of the same display is supposed to be dependent on the value of the time function at the first observation. A next observation can be deffered...

One of the major themes underlying the Human Factors Symposium in Boston this May was the crucial relationship between men and computers. In general, it was said, our computers are rapidly becoming so economical that now we are obliged to find ways of making better use of the people who use the computers. The problem of man — computer interaction,...

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Four Ss each read dials of four pointer designs at lateral displacements of 10° from 10° to 80°. Results were analyzed in terms of time and error scores. No significant differences were found among the pointer designs. "If reversal errors are ignored, the ability to discriminate pointer position when the dial is displaced as much as 40° from the fi...

Four groups of subjects performed a series of tracking tasks on 2 different target courses and under 2 conditions of surround illumination. The tasks were varied from pure compensatory (maintaining an indicator on a reference point by compensating for outside influences) to pure pursuit (controlling the follower indicator to keep it superimposed on...

A comparison has been made between compensatory and pursuit tracking for a one dimensional visual tracking task, and the functional relationship between tracking accuracy and the nature of the tracking task has been determined for various combinations of pursuit and compensatory tracking. The results indicate that important, as well as statisticall...