Sébastien Tremblay

Université Laval | ULAVAL · School of Psychology

Mental workload is a key factor influencing the occurrence of human error; specifically in remotely-operated vehicle operations. Both low and high mental workload has been found to disrupt performance in a nonlinear fashion at a given task; however, research that has attempted to predict individual mental workload has met with little success. The o...

This study examined whether teaming up mitigates individual vulnerability to task interruptions in complex dynamic situations. Omnipresent in everyday multitasking environments, task interruptions are usually detrimental to individual performance. This is particularly crucial in dynamic command and control (C2) safety-critical contexts because of t...

The aim of this study was to empirically assess the efficacy of cognitive countermeasures based on the technique of information removal to enhance human operator attentional disengagement abilities when facing attentional tunneling. Lessons learned from human factors studies suggest that conflict with automation leads to the degradation of operator...

Video surveillance can be cognitively very demanding as it imposes operators to stay focus for a long time and to provide the right response for relevant stimuli among a lot of information. In this challenging activity, it is relevant to consider the use of decision-aid techniques to improve operators’ alertness. The purpose of this study was to ex...

We investigate the suitability of a microworld simulation of complex problem-solving (CPS), a type of game-based assessment that mimics the dynamics of decision-making in the real world through complex situations, as a tool for personnel selection. After completing either Democracy (D3; i.e., a political game) or Ecopolicy (i.e., a simulation of so...

Plusieurs chercheurs et professionnels de la santé soulignent l’importance d’améliorer la validité écologique des outils de détection des commotions cérébrales (CC), notamment en pratique sportive afin de susciter davantage l’engagement des athlètes envers le processus d’évaluation. Le développement d’une nouvelle approche de détection de CC a perm...

Objective To examine the reliability and learning effect of an assessment tool based on serious gaming (SENIC) for sport-related concussions. A secondary objective was to collect preliminary data on responsiveness following a concussion. Researchers hypothesized that no learning effect would be observed and that performance would be impaired follow...

p>The concept of 21st century skills has become omnipresent in education, training, and personnel selection policies; however, there is little consistency regarding the terms, definitions, or measurement instruments used. A proliferation of terms makes it difficult to identify, operationalize, and teach these non-technical skills, and also goes aga...

The concept of 21st century skills has become omnipresent in education, training, and personnel selection policies; however, there is little consistency regarding the terms, definitions, or measurement instruments used. A proliferation of terms makes it difficult to identify, operationalize, and teach these non-technical skills, and also goes again...

Security surveillance is frequently used to increase public safety. Characteristics of the surveillance rooms, however, pose many cognitive challenges pertaining to distraction and interruptions, which may affect surveillance performance. Affective computing could represent a potential solution. It involves the recognition and the interpretation of...

Background and aims: Virtual reality has been shown to be an effective non-pharmacological intervention for reducing anxiety of pediatric patients. A newer immersive technology, that of augmented reality, offers some practical advantages over virtual reality, and also seems to show beneficial effects on anxiety. The main objective of this study wa...

BACKGROUND Before the pandemic, it was already recognized that internet-based misinformation and disinformation could influence individuals to refuse or delay vaccination for themselves, their families, or their children. Reinformation (i.e., hyperpartisan information, often ideologically-biased) – although not inherently disinformative – may add t...

Background Before the COVID-19 pandemic, it was already recognized that internet-based misinformation and disinformation could influence individuals to refuse or delay vaccination for themselves, their families, or their children. Reinformation, which refers to hyperpartisan and ideologically biased content, can propagate polarizing messages on vac...

Introduction: The lack of consensus regarding the nature or composition of executive functioning (EF) has led to a proliferation of executive tasks to assess the concept. Many do agree however that the theoretical concept of EF is a holistic one, leading us to consider whether it would be beneficial to assess EF in a more holistic manner. We explo...

The Cognitive Shadow is a decision-support system that uses policy capturing to model human operators’ judgment policies and provide online predictions of their decisions. The system can provide support in reaction to a decision mismatch (shadowing mode) or proactively (recommendation mode). The goal of this study was to compare these two modes of...

UNSTRUCTURED The COVID-19 pandemic generated an explosion in the amount of information shared online, including false and misleading information on the virus, and recommended protective behaviours. Prior to the pandemic, online mis- and disinformation were already identified as having an impact on people’s decision to refuse or delay recommended va...

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic generated an explosion in the amount of information shared online, including false and misleading information on the virus, and recommended protective behaviours. Prior to the pandemic, online mis- and disinformation were already identified as having an impact on people's decision to refuse or delay recommended va...

Background Wearable devices collect physiological and behavioral data that have the potential to identify individuals at risk of declining mental health and well-being. Past research has mainly focused on assessing the accuracy and the agreement of heart rate (HR) measurement of wearables under different physical exercise conditions. However, the c...

BACKGROUND Wearable devices collect physiological and behavioral data that have the potential to identify individuals at risk of declining mental health and well-being. Past research has mainly focused on assessing the accuracy and the agreement of heart rate (HR) measurement of wearables under different physical exercise conditions. However, the c...

Operators monitoring closed-circuit television systems face many error-prone situations given the cognitive challenges they experience. The Scantracker is a prototype tool developed to support surveillance, relying on live oculometric data to trigger notifications that mitigate camera negligence, attention tunneling and vigilance decrement. To be r...

While non-player opponents in commercial video games often rely on simple artificial intelligence techniques, machine learning techniques that capture human strategies could make them more engaging. Cognitive Shadow is a prototype tool that combines several artificial intelligence techniques to continuously model human decision-making patterns duri...

The Cognitive Shadow is a prototype decision support tool that can notify users when they deviate from their usual judgment pattern. Expert decision policies are learned automatically online while performing one’s task using a combination of machine learning algorithms. This study investigated whether combining this system with the use of a process...

Security surveillance represents a cognitively challenging task. To support surveillance operators, Thales Research and Technology Canada developed the Scantracker, which relies on real-time oculometric data to trigger notifications that mitigate camera negligence, attentional tunneling and vigilance decrement. Recently, this tool was adapted to au...

Closed‐circuit television (CCTV) surveillance units largely rely on the support of surveillance operators. Although this job is cognitively challenging, few studies have investigated the main human factors improving the ability to detect critical incidents in this context. This study aimed to explore the contribution of individual characteristics a...

Recently, due to the emergence of mobile electroencephalography (EEG) devices, assessment of mental workload in highly ecological settings has gained popularity. In such settings, however, motion and other common artifacts have been shown to severely hamper signal quality and to degrade mental workload assessment performance. Here, we show that cla...

Utilisation de l'intelligence artificielle dans les jeux vidéos

With the burgeoning of wearable devices and passive body/brain-computer interfaces (B/BCIs), automated stress monitoring in everyday settings has gained significant attention recently, with applications ranging from serious games to clinical monitoring. With mobile users, however, challenges arise due to other overlapping (and potentially confoundi...

Security surveillance entails many cognitive challenges (e.g., task interruption, vigilance decrements, cognitive overload). To help surveillance operators overcome these difficulties and perform more efficient visual search, gaze-based intelligent systems can be developed. The present study aimed at testing the impact of the Scantracker system—whi...

Assessment of mental workload is crucial for applications that require sustained attention and where conditions such as mental fatigue and drowsiness must be avoided. Previous work that attempted to devise objective methods to model mental workload were mainly based on neurological or physiological data collected when the participants performed tas...

Despite extensive research, measurable benefits of predictive policing are scarce. We argue that powerful models might not always help the work of officers. Furthermore, developed models are often unexplainable, leading to trust issues between police intuition and machine-made prediction. We use a joint approach, mixing criminology and data science...

The Cognitive Shadow is a prototype tool intended to support decision making by autonomously modeling human operators’ response pattern and providing online notifications to the operators about the decision they are expected to make in new situations. Since the system can be configured either in a reactive “shadowing” or a proactive “recommendation...

Heart rate variability (HRV) has been studied in the context of human behavior analysis and many features have been extracted from the inter-beat interval (RR) time series and tested as correlates of constructs such as mental workload, stress and anxiety. Such constructs are crucial in assessing quality-of-life of individuals, as well as their over...

The validity of two commercial-off-the-shelf eye trackers, including a fixed system and a mobile device, was compared in the context of a gaze-based assistant tool implemented to aid security surveillance. Participants performed a security surveillance simulation that required them to detect incidents across multiple video feeds. Aid from the Scant...

The present work introduces a prototype intelligent cognitive assistant that continuously learns the decision pattern of the user online, instantly recognizes deviations from that pattern as potential errors and then alerts the user accordingly. We investigated the potential of this prototype system using a human-in-the-loop experiment designed to...

For the last five years or so, predictive policing algorithms have been implemented in large cities. However, these algorithms are not always suited for small-to-medium cities. Furthermore, predictive policing solutions are seldom developed taking into account ergonomics, UX design and the implementation impact on the work environment. Combining de...

Affective computing, with its potential to enhance human-computer interaction, is experiencing an expansion of its use in many areas such as health care and the gaming industry. One obstacle to its widespread adoption can be the high cost requirement for biofeedback. Indeed, typical laboratory setups are often expensive which makes them out of reac...

Research on adaptive systems based on human psychophysiological assessments has been growing rapidly over the last decade. One fundamental component of such a system is human state assessment, on which the adaptation depends, at least partly. This is critical as the confidence of operators in such system will be determined to some extent by the acc...

Mental workload assessment is crucial in many real life applications which require constant attention and where imbalance of mental workload resources may cause safety hazards. As such, mental workload and its relationship with heart rate variability (HRV) have been well studied in the literature. However, the majority of the developed models have...

This paper investigates the use of physio-behavioural detection of fun to model players’ preferences in real-time in the context of an adaptive game. To do so, a Physiological and Behavioural Model of Fun (PBMF), previously trained on 218 players, was used to model players’ preferences based n gameplay events. As a proof-of-concept, we leverged the...

In complex dynamic work environments, the consequences of task interruptions on performance can put public safety at risk. If not designed carefully, current tools aiming to facilitate interruption recovery can instead hamper performance because of information overload. Although a simpler solution—the forewarning of an imminent interruption—has pro...

Everyday complex and stressful real-life situations can overwhelm the human brain to an extent that the person is no longer able to accurately evaluate the situation and persists in irrational actions or strategies. Safety analyses reveal that such perseverative behavior is exhibited by operators in many critical domains, which can lead to potentia...

Notre cerveau est une merveille de l’évolution qui nous permet notamment de communiquer, d’apprendre, de percevoir notre environnement, de nous concentrer, de nous souvenir d’un événement et de nous adapter à des situations nouvelles. Malgré toutes ces qualités, il arrive fréquemment que notre cerveau nous joue des tours qui se traduisent par des m...

Finding a physiological signature of a player's fun is a goal yet to be achieved in the field of adaptive gaming. The research presented in this paper tackles this issue by gathering physiological, behavioural and self-report data from over 200 participants who played off-the-shelf video games from the Assassin's Creed series within a minimally inv...

Auditory alarms are widely used in aviation to provide information and/or elicit attention (re)orienting toward emergency situations. However, several incidents result from an absence of reaction to such alarms. In this context, the fast and timely detection of the pilot’s failure to notice an auditory alarm could help preventing accidents through...

Finding a physiological signature of a player’s fun is a goal yet to be achieved in the field of adaptive gaming. The research presented in this paper tackles this issue by gathering physiological, behavioural and self-report data from over 200 participants who played off-the-shelf video games from the Assassin’s Creed series within a minimally inv...

Emergency resuscitation in intensive care units (ICUs) requires effective team communication to orchestrate the joint performance of several individuals. Although team simulation training has proven an effective means to improve communication skills in high‐risk environments, the influence of debriefing content on simulation‐based learning is less...

Closed-circuit television (CCTV) is increasingly used as a means to ensure the safety and security of critical infrastructure and public spaces. Operators in control rooms are responsible for monitoring multiple camera feeds that generally exceed the number of screens available. Using a realistic video surveillance simulation, the current study inv...

The present work investigates a cumulative part-task training method that builds up task complexity adaptively based on individual learner states. A research-oriented game entitled “Space Fortress” was used to evaluate two training conditions in a between-group design prior to a third condition involving an adaptive cumulative part task training me...

The failure to notice critical changes in both visual and auditory scenes may have important consequences for performance in complex dynamic environments, especially those related to security such as aviation, surveillance during major events, and command and control of emergency response. Previous work has shown that a significant number of situat...

In a single large-scale study, we demonstrate that verbal sequence learning as studied using the classic Hebb repetition effect (Hebb, 1961)—the improvement in the serial recall of a repeating sequence compared to non-repeated sequences—is resilient to both wide and irregular spacing between sequence repetitions. Learning of a repeated sequence of...

Surveillance operators must scan multiple camera feeds to ensure timely detection of incidents; however, variability in scanning behavior can lead to untimely/failed detection of critical information in feeds that were neglected for a long period. Using an eye tracker to monitor screen fixations we can calculate (in real-time) the time elapsed sinc...

Providing decision support to operators in command and control contexts requires careful assessment of its impacts on task performance. Here we describe a human-in-the-loop experiment using a naval air defense testbed to compare three conditions: 1) a baseline interface (DSS BASE ; 2) one that displays the temporal proximity of radar aircraft (DSS...

Providing decision support to operators in command and control contexts requires careful assessment of its impacts on task performance. Here we describe a human-in-the-loop experiment using a naval air defense testbed to compare three conditions: 1) a baseline interface (DSSBASE; 2) one that displays the temporal proximity of radar aircraft (DSSTEM...

Policy capturing is a judgment analysis method that typically uses linear statistical modeling to estimate expert judgments. A variant to this technique is to capture decision policies using data-mining algorithms designed to handle nonlinear decision rules, missing attributes, and noisy data. In the current study, we tested the effectiveness of a...

While the development of intelligent technologies in security surveillance can augment human capabilities, they do not replace the role of the operator entirely; as such, when developing surveillance support it is critical that limitations to the cognitive system are taken into account. The current article reviews the cognitive challenges associate...

Background: Visual deficits have been largely documented in people suffering from schizophrenia (SZ). These deficits may contribute to the low performance measured on visuospatial working memory (VSWM). It is important to establish whether the often-reported low working memory performance measured with neuropsychological tests is the by-product of...

While simple heuristics can be ecologically rational and effective in naturalistic decision making contexts, complex situations require analytical decision making strategies, hypothesis-testing and learning. Sub-optimal decision strategies – using simplified as opposed to analytic decision rules – have been reported in domains such as healthcare, m...

Detecting task-relevant changes in a visual scene is necessary for successfully monitoring and managing dynamic command and control situations. Change blindness—the failure to notice visual changes—is an important source of human error. Change History EXplicit (CHEX) is a tool developed to aid change detection and maintain situation awareness, and...

Crisis management teams face situations characterized by high risk, time pressure, and uncertainty and must adapt to a wide range of circumstances. Self-organizing teams have been proposed as an alternative to more traditional functional teams as they are described as adaptive and promptly reconfigurable. This study investigated whether self-organi...

Operators working in extreme environments are often confronted with task interruptions. These interruptions tend to impair performance, which can represent a threat to public safety. Most of the tools designed to aid task resumption in such dynamic contexts are post-interruption solutions consisting of providing information about missed events once...

The CSSS microworld simulates the task of a closed-circuit television (CCTV) operator responsible for monitoring multiple CCTV feeds in the context of security surveillance. Operators must manage the display of multiple CCTV feeds, monitor the feeds for critical incidents, and then report detected incidents. The microworld can be used for human fac...

Dynamic and complex command and control situations often require the timely recognition of changes in the environment in order to detect potentially malicious actions. Change detection can be challenging within a continually evolving scene, and particularly under multitasking conditions whereby attention is necessarily divided between several subta...

This paper addresses critical issues and reports key findings with regards to the development of participant-generic operator functional state (OFS) models in the context of cognitive work. Conceptually, this research is concerned with the nature of the relationship between the physiological state of individuals and human performance. Participants...

The current study examines the role of cognitive and perceptual loads in inattentional deafness (the failure to perceive an auditory stimulus) and the possibility to predict this phenomenon with ocular measurements. Twenty participants performed Air Traffic Control (ATC) scenarios—in the Laby ATC-like microworld—guiding one (low cognitive load) or...

The role of the compatibility between obligatory perceptual organization and the active assembly of a motor-plan in auditory-verbal serial recall was examined. The classic finding that serial recall is poorer with ear-alternating items was shown to be related to spatial-source localization, thereby confirming a basic tenet of the perceptual-motor a...

New technologies are available for emergency management experts to help them cope with challenges such as information overload, multitasking and fatigue. Among these technologies, a wide variety of physiological sensors can now be deployed to measure the Operator Functional State (OFS). To be truly useful, such measures should not only characterize...