Richard B. Wagner’s research while affiliated with North Carolina State University and other places

Emotion is critical to human experience and is an integral part of perception, cognition, and behavior. While the mechanisms and precise measurement of emotion has been debated in the literature, researchers have theorized that emotion is related to activation across physiological, experiential, and behavioral response systems. This has important implications in human factors research and practice. Just as the cognitive task analysis was proposed to be used in tandem with hierarchical task analyses to account for cognitive components of a task, the current paper proposes a method to account for emotional components of a task. The emotion task analysis is proposed for the purpose of explicating emotion from an individual. Specifically, in order to account for emotional load and/or processes elicited during a task and to be used in tandem with previously established task analyses by usability/user experience researchers and human factors practitioners.

This study investigated two feedback types to see if there was a relationship between level of elaborative feedback and participant’s ability to learn a task while also looking at their use of automation. The task was a rule-based problem solving task where participants needed to learn the rules of selecting one pair (Ranger and Hiker) on a gridded map. Ten trials were randomly presented to participants who were asked to make pair selections based on rules (two stated and one unknown to the participant when starting) of correct matches. Results indicated that feedback type significantly influenced accuracy, while trial difficulty influenced use of automation. Results from this study can be applied in education and training of declarative knowledge tasks when rules must be inferred.

The society’s code of ethics was last updated in 2005 and thus needs to be reviewed and updated. To do so, the previous code of ethics was reviewed as well as other documentation particularly with respect to inclusion. The goal of the Code of Ethics Task Force at the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society is to not only review the society’s artefacts but also to recommend suggestions for their improvement with respect to best practices. Further, this Task Force will explore whether and if so how, operating rules should be established to support the Code of Ethics.

Emotion is critical to human experience and is an integral part of perception, cognition, and behavior. While the mechanisms and precise measurement of emotion has been debated in the literature, researchers have theorized that emotion is related to activation across physiological, experiential, and behavioral response systems. This has important implications in human factors research and practice. Just as the cognitive task analysis was proposed to be used in tandem with hierarchical task analyses to account for cognitive components of a task, the current paper proposes a method to account for emotional components of a task. The emotion task analysis is proposed for the purpose of explicating emotion from an individual. Specifically, in order to account for emotional load and/or processes elicited during a task and to be used in tandem with previously established task analyses by usability/user experience researchers and human factors practitioners.

Mind wandering is a common phenomenon in our daily lives, especially in routine tasks such as driving familiar routes. Some evidence suggests that there are detrimental effects of mind wandering on driving performance, but limited research has been conducted to examine the influence of mind wandering on a driver’s attentional processing of relevant or irrelevant information. More specifically, it is unclear as to whether the effects of mind wandering depend on the task relevancy of information presented in the visual field. The current study expands literature on mind wandering during driving using eye tracking to measure driver visual processing of relevant/irrelevant signage information in a simulated driving task while drivers reported their mental states. Preliminary results showed no significant differences in frequency and duration of glances to roadway information based on the mental state of the individual as well as the task relevancy of the information. Implications and future directions are discussed.

People are known to naturally segment meaningful units of activity into individual events. Though an influential body of work demonstrating the relationship between event perception and human performance in daily tasks does exist, less consideration has been given to ideas that event perception can shape driving performance. This paper offers an introduction to event perception for the transportation community with a study measuring drivers’ perceptions for events in simulated driving scenes. The results demonstrate consistency in drivers’ perceptions of events and that specific features of a driving scene can predict event boundaries. This study also provides some evidence for a relationship between event perception and driving skill as measured by driving frequency. Discussed are the study’s implications to predict and shape the cognitive performance of drivers, along with potential benefits for driver training programs.