Human Factors 

About: Human Factors is an academic journal published by SAGE Publishing. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Poison control & Task (project management). It has an ISSN identifier of 0018-7208. Over the lifetime, 4178 publications have been published receiving 213204 citations. The journal is also known as: HFES.

Toward a Theory of Situation Awareness in Dynamic Systems

Abstract: This paper presents a theoretical model of situation awareness based on its role in dynamic human decision making in a variety of domains. Situation awareness is presented as a predominant concern in system operation, based on a descriptive view of decision making. The relationship between situation awareness and numerous individual and environmental factors is explored. Among these factors, attention and working memory are presented as critical factors limiting operators from acquiring and interpreting information from the environment to form situation awareness, and mental models and goal-directed behavior are hypothesized as important mechanisms for overcoming these limits. The impact of design features, workload, stress, system complexity, and automation on operator situation awareness is addressed, and a taxonomy of errors in situation awareness is introduced, based on the model presented. The model is used to generate design implications for enhancing operator situation awareness and future directio...

Trust in Automation: Designing for Appropriate Reliance

Abstract: Automation is often problematic because people fail to rely upon it appropriately. Because people respond to technology socially, trust influences reliance on automation. In particular, trust guides reliance when complexity and unanticipated situations make a complete understanding of the automation impractical. This review considers trust from the organizational, sociological, interpersonal, psychological, and neurological perspectives. It considers how the context, automation characteristics, and cognitive processes affect the appropriateness of trust. The context in which the automation is used influences automation performance and provides a goal-oriented perspective to assess automation characteristics along a dimension of attributional abstraction. These characteristics can influence trust through analytic, analogical, and affective processes. The challenges of extrapolating the concept of trust in people to trust in automation are discussed. A conceptual model integrates research regarding trust in automation and describes the dynamics of trust, the role of context, and the influence of display characteristics. Actual or potential applications of this research include improved designs of systems that require people to manage imperfect automation.

Humans and Automation: Use, Misuse, Disuse, Abuse

Abstract: This paper addresses theoretical, empirical, and analytical studies pertaining to human use, misuse, disuse, and abuse of automation technology. Use refers to the voluntary activation or disengagement of automation by human operators. Trust, mental workload, and risk can influence automation use, but interactions between factors and large individual differences make prediction of automation use difficult. Misuse refers to over reliance on automation, which can result in failures of monitoring or decision biases. Factors affecting the monitoring of automation include workload, automation reliability and consistency, and the saliency of automation state indicators. Disuse, or the neglect or underutilization of automation, is commonly caused by alarms that activate falsely. This often occurs because the base rate of the condition to be detected is not considered in setting the trade-off between false alarms and omissions. Automation abuse, or the automation of functions by designers and implementation by man...

Naturalistic Decision Making

Abstract: Objective: This article describes the origins and contributions of the naturalistic decision making (NDM) research approach. Background: NDM research emerged in the 1980s to study how people make decisions in real-world settings. Method: The findings and methods used by NDM researchers are presented along with their implications. Results: The NDM framework emphasizes the role of experience in enabling people to rapidly categorize situations to make effective decisions. Conclusion: The NDM focus on field settings and its interest in complex conditions provide insights for human factors practitioners about ways to improve performance. Application: The NDM approach has been used to improve performance through revisions of military doctrine, training that is focused on decision requirements, and the development of information technologies to support decision making and related cognitive functions.

Measurement of Situation Awareness in Dynamic Systems

Abstract: Methodologies for the empirical measurement of situation awareness are reviewed, including a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of each method and the potential limitations of the measures from a theoretical and practical viewpoint. Two studies are presented that investigate questions of validity and intrusiveness regarding a query-based technique. This technique requires that a simulation of the operational tasks be momentarily interrupted in order to query operators on their situation awareness. The results of the two studies indicate that the query technique is not intrusive on normal subject behavior during the trial and does not suffer from limitations of human memory, which provides an indication of empirical validity. The results of other validity studies regarding the technique are discussed along with recommendations for its use in measuring situation awareness in varied settings.