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OBJECTIVE: The present study examines the cognitive effects of placing icons in unexpected spatial locations within websites. BACKGROUND: Prior research has revealed evidence for cognitive conflict when web icons occur in unexpected locations (e.g., cart, top left), generally consistent with a dynamical systems models. Here, we compare the relative strength of evidence for both dual and dynamical systems models. METHODS: Participants clicked on icons located in either expected (e.g., cart, top right) or unexpected (e.g., cart, top left) locations while mouse trajectories were continuously recorded. Trajectories were classified according to prototypes associated with each cognitive model. The dynamical systems model predicts curved trajectories, while the dual-systems model predicts straight and change of mind trajectories. RESULTS: Trajectory classification revealed that curved trajectories increased (+11%), while straight and change of mind trajectories decreased (-12%) when target icons occurred in unexpected locations (p < .001). CONCLUSION: Rather than employing a single cognitive strategy, users shift from a primarily dual-systems to dynamical systems strategy when icons occur in unexpected locations. APPLICATION: Potential applications of this work include the assessment of cognitive impacts such as mental workload and cognitive conflict during real-time interaction with websites and other screen-based interfaces, personalization and adaptive interfaces based on an individual's cognitive strategy, and data-driven A/B testing of alternative interface designs.

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OBJECTIVE: Expand research on the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) to a more applied agricultural target detection/selection task and examine the utility of various performance metrics, including composite measures of speed and accuracy, in a High-Go/Low-No-Go stimuli task. BACKGROUND: Modified SARTs have been utilized to investigate mechanisms, such as failures of response inhibition, occurring in friendly fire and collateral damage incidents. Researchers have demonstrated that composite measures of speed and accuracy are useful for Low Go/High No-Go stimuli tasks, but this has not been demonstrated for High-Go/Low-No-Go tasks, such as the SART. METHOD: Participants performed a modified SART, where they selected ("sprayed") images of weeds (Go stimuli) that appeared on a computer screen, while withholding to rarer soybean plant images (No-Go stimuli). RESULTS: Response time was a function of distance from a central starting point. Participants committed commission errors (sprayed the soybeans) at a significantly higher rate when the stimuli appeared under the cursor centered on the screen for each trial. Participant's omission errors (failure to spray a weed) increased significantly as a function of distance. The composite measures examined were primarily influenced by response time and omission errors limiting their utility when commission errors are of particular interest. CONCLUSION: Participants are far more accurate in their decision making when required to execute a longer duration motor task in High-Go/Low-No-Go experiments. APPLICATION: Demonstrates a serious human factors liability of target detection and snap-to-target systems.

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OBJECTIVE: The goal of this study was to determine if using a standing desk would affect the productivity of workers, based on the type of work they perform. BACKGROUND: Standing desks are a promising new health intervention in the workplace, but users and employers often require more specific recommendations related to productivity, such as the type of work that is more suited for the standing desk. METHOD: Thirty-seven young and healthy adults performed eight cognitive tasks in a 2 × 2 × 2 within-subject design of the following independent variables: posture (sitting/standing), task difficulty (easy/hard), and input device (computer mouse/tactile screen) in a counterbalanced order. RESULTS: Our results revealed that using a standing desk had no negative effect on performance or perception, but it did lead to increased brain activity in the alpha band for the parietal region (ß = 0.186, p = .001). CONCLUSION: We conclude that users of standing desks can freely stand for any level of task difficulty for work that involves working memory. However, more research is needed to generalize these results to other types of cognitive abilities and prolonged use of standing desks. APPLICATION: Our results simplify recommendations for workers as they do not need to worry about the type of work they are performing when using a standing desk.

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OBJECTIVE: The objective is to provide a review of ecological interface design (EID), to illustrate its value to human factors/ergonomics, and to identify areas for future research and development. BACKGROUND: EID uses mature interface technologies to provide decision making and problem solving support. A variety of theoretical concepts and analytical tools have been developed to meet the associated challenges. EID provides support that is simultaneously grounded in the practical realities of a work domain and tailored to human capabilities and limitations. METHOD: EID's theoretical foundation is discussed briefly. Concrete examples of ecological and traditional interfaces are provided. Different categories of work domains are described, as well as the associated implications for interface design. A targeted literature review is conducted and the experimental outcomes are summarized. A representative evaluation is discussed, and interpretations of performance are provided. RESULTS: The evidence reveals that EID has been remarkably successful in significantly improving performance for work domains with constraints that are law driven (e.g., process control). In contrast, work domains that are intent-driven (e.g., information retrieval) have, by and large, been ignored. Also, few studies have addressed nonvisual displays. CONCLUSION: EID has not yet realized its potential to improve safety and efficiency across the entire continuum of work domains. APPLICATION: EID provides a single integrated framework that is (a) sufficiently comprehensive to deal with complicated work domains and (b) capable of producing innovative support that will generalize to actual work settings.

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OBJECTIVE: The objective of the study is to replicate and extend population stereotypes from a broad range of users for display-control relations of common interfaces using pictures/images of the objects. BACKGROUND: Population stereotypes for display-control configurations refer to people's tendencies to associate certain control actions with display properties. An interface will benefit by being designed in a manner that is consistent with the stereotypes. The stimuli used in the present study include conceptual replications of objects that have been examined previously and new ones. METHOD: An online survey was designed to collect data about participants' natural response tendencies or interpretations of the meaning associated with objects, representations, and colors. Participants were obtained through MTurk from the United States, India, and UK. RESULTS: We replicated 76% and partially replicated an additional 16% of the stereotypic responses found in prior studies. Considering the full data set, we found stereotypic responses for 62% of the stimuli that are consistent across the three countries in which the participants were located, although the strength of these stereotypes may differ by location. For the remaining 38% of the stimuli, population stereotypes still emerged for some locations. Few gender differences were found. CONCLUSION: Cross-cultural stereotypic responses exist for many objects, representations, and display-control configurations. However, because stereotypes can be limited to specific regions or change over time, we recommend that they be captured periodically to ensure design guidelines based on the stereotypes remain valid. APPLICATION: Designers can use the stereotypic responses to guide design decisions.

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The effect of spatial compatibility for various display-control configurations on human performance was studied with a dual-task paradigm using a tracking task and a discrete response task. Degradation of performance on both tasks within the visual modality was observed and was considered to be most likely due to resource competition resulting from simultaneous task operation. It was found that the more complicated the mapping for the discrete spatial compatibility response task, the more severe the interference with the tracking task. Although performance on both the tracking and spatial response tasks was impaired, the magnitude of impairment was not as great as expected, implying that focal and ambient vision required for the tracking task and spatial task, respectively, might be deployed, at least partly, from separate resources. Participants here seemed to successfully use focal vision for tracking and ambient vision for identifying signal lights concurrently, reducing the expected keen competition for visual resources.

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Previous research indicates that useful field of view (UFOV) decline affects older driver performance. In particular, elderly drivers have difficulty estimating oncoming vehicle time-to-contact (TTC). The objective of this study was to evaluate how UFOV impairments affect TTC estimates in elderly drivers deciding when to make a left turn across oncoming traffic. TTC estimates were obtained from 64 middle-aged (n=17, age=46±6years) and older (n=37, age=75±6years) licensed drivers with a range of UFOV abilities using interactive scenarios in a fixed-base driving simulator. Each driver was situated in an intersection to turn left across oncoming traffic approaching and disappearing at differing distances (1.5, 3, or 5s) and speeds (45, 55, or 65mph). Drivers judged when each oncoming vehicle would collide with them if they were to turn left. Findings showed that TTC estimates across all drivers, on average, were most accurate for oncoming vehicles travelling at the highest velocities and least accurate for those travelling at the slowest velocities. Drivers with the worst UFOV scores had the least accurate TTC estimates, especially for slower oncoming vehicles. Results suggest age-related UFOV decline impairs older driver judgment of TTC with oncoming vehicles in safety-critical left-turn situations. Our results are compatible with national statistics on older driver crash proclivity at intersections.

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Strayer et al.'s conclusion that their "cognitive distraction scale" for auditory-vocal tasks indicates "significant impairments to driving" is not supported by their data. Additional analysis demonstrates that slower brake reaction times during auditory-vocal tasks were fully compensated for by longer following distances to the lead car. Naturalistic driving data demonstrate that cellular conversation decreases crash risk, the opposite of the article's assumption. Hence, the scale's internal and external validities for indicating driving impairment are highly questionable.

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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, with our own understandable, scientifically inspired aspiration for measuring deterministic performance optimization. Measures of response conceived under this latter imperative are, at best, only shadowy reflections of the actual phenomenological experience involved in real-world vehicle control. Whether we, as a research community, can resolve this issue remains uncertain. However, we believe we can mount a positive attack on what is arguably another equally important dimension of the collision problem.

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The effect of spatial compatibility on dual-task performance for various display-control configurations was studied using a tracking task and a discrete four-choice response task. A total of 36 participants took part in this study, and they were asked to perform the primary tracking task while at the same time to respond to an occasional signal. Different levels of compatibility between the stimuli and responses of the discrete response task were found to lead to different degrees of influence on the tracking task. However, degradation of performance was observed for both tasks, which was probably due to resource competition for the visual and spatial resources required for simultaneous task operation and required for bimanual responses. No right-left prevalence effect for the spatial compatibility task was observed in this study, implying that the use of unimanual two-finger responses may not provide the right conditions for a significant effect in the horizontal right-left dimension. PRACTITIONER SUMMARY: The effect of spatial compatibility in multiple display-control configurations was examined in a dual-task paradigm. The analyses of keen competition for visual and spatial resources in processing the dual tasks under different degrees of stimulus-response compatibility provide useful ergonomics design implications and recommendations for visual interfaces requiring frequent visual scanning.

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