Questions tagged [human-factors]
Human factors and Ergonomics is a multidisciplinary field incorporating contributions from psychology, engineering, industrial design, graphic design, statistics, operations research and anthropometry. In essence it is the study of designing equipment and devices that fit the human body and its cognitive abilities.
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How long does it take to read a sentence with X number of characters?
How does the time needed to read a sentence scale with the number of characters? Or does this time scaling depend on something more than just character count?
For example, let $X$ be the number of ...
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Omitting word(s) when typing
[Reraising a recently asked question that was closed here, but in more cogsci fashion, I hope.]
Some people are more inclined than others to omit a word when typing, but still be unaware of its ...
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Is reading from the screen more difficult than reading from paper and how can screen reading be made easier?
I've noticed that as a student when reading material, there is a choice between reading from the screen or reading from paper.
When reading from paper I find that I concentrate more and that ...
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Why don't people read instructions?
Some people are very careless when reading instruction on a work task they've been given or in reading any other kind of text. They would skip some of the sentences, not get deep into other and ...
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Why do people press elevator call buttons repeatedly?
Many people, particularly those in a rush, keep on pressing the elevator call button despite the light clearly indicating that it was previously pressed, and the knowledge that such action will have ...
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What are the psychological differences in camelCase and underscore_case programming conventions?
In computer programming, spaces are often forbidden in the declaration of variable names, so programmers have created alternate methods of identifying word boundaries in variable names: camel case and ...
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Is ignoring messages a learned behavior?
As someone that works troubleshooting stuff, I've seen a surprising amount of people that, when confronted with messages, warnings and errors, tend to seek help fast (or early in the process) in the ...
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Are there any open task sets available to assess workload using secondary task measures?
Performance on secondary tasks next to a primary task is sometimes used to assess mental workload (Ogden, Levine and Eisner, 1979). For example, the Stroop test as a secondary task has been evaluated ...
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Are there any models of the human visual field of view taking into account head, neck and eye movements and calculating likelihood of fixation?
I would like to know if there are studies that (1) model the field of view taking into account all degrees of freedom of the head, neck and eyes and (2) if there is any probabilistic model assigned to ...
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Are younger people less capable of driving?
I've seen articles saying that teen drivers have the most accidents out of every age group. Those articles also claim that teen drivers are less capable of driving as their brains are less developed ...
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Why is the occipital lobe behind instead of in front?
These are regions of our brain:
Our eyes are in front below our forehead, however, the visual area Occipital Lobe is behind. Are there any biological reasons for this? why shouldn't Occipital Lobe be ...
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Is there a term in psychology for when a tool is perceived as an extension of your body?
Is there a specific term that describes the phenomenon where you perceive a tool as an extension of your own body?
An example of this would be when a skilled artist or tradesman has so mastered their ...
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How to design ballot papers with a large number of candidates in a preferential system?
Background: In the 2013 Australian Federal election, several parties were elected to the senate seemingly because of usability issues related to the ballot paper (see here for discussion). For example:...
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Are imprinting and computer literacy connected?
I've recently became aware of the phenomenon of imprinting, in which baby animals start to associate with the first moving object with eyes that they see during a critical period of their infancy.
...
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What is the scientific term for information overload?
I'm a computer science major. Currently I'm working on a project for which I want to expose users to different levels of information depending on their distance from displays.
Anyone who ever saw a ...
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How do people respond to auditory warning signals?
I am working on a literature review of total reaction time to an auditory alert, in a transport context. All of the literature I can find about perception-response times are in the context of visual ...
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Sensory dissonance: Will the visual or auditory channel win?
Is there any research showing that our visual channel takes precedence over the auditory channel (or vice versa) if there is some dissonance between them?
Examples:
Say a person driving a car ...
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Need a definition of Cognitive Simplicity (or Complexity) that would appeal to a wide audience
Everyone in my organization wants to make our products & website as simple as possible for our customers. My concern is that "simple" means different things to different people.
I'm looking for a ...
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Is EEG brain-computer interface reliable?
I am a computer science student [assume I have very little knowledge of the biological part of EEG]. I recently came across the topic EEG and was pretty interested in it. As far as I know, we get an ...
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Does a more ergonomic and user friendly interface/device make the human brain work less?
There was an interesting discussion on UX.StackExchange related to washing machines and their front windows. I was very surprised that it took me like 2 minutes or so to figure out why the washing ...
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Are there cognitive benefits to two hand typing versus one finger?
I've been reading an old popular psychology book by russian psychiatrist Vladimir Levi. One of the things that he has his depressed patients try is learn to juggle. He insists that such activity ...
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Talking about a problem helps (software developing)
I am 42 and doing software developer since 20 years.
Since several years I know that talking about a problem helps.
If I can't find a an easy solution myself I talk to a team mate or ask at a site ...
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What human factors play part in traffic congestion?
Traffic congestion is a daily phenomenon that costs people a lot of time, is bad for the environment and may even cost some money. There are many obvious causes for traffic congestion, such as the ...
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Why do drivers not slow down when they see signs indicating road work?
I found the following anecdote on Quora
Many years ago, I worked for a gas & electric power company, and had
been a member of a crew installing a road-side gas main. Despite the
signs, flashing ...
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Using Exploratory Factor Analysis for Items That Belong to Different Scales
I have a quick question about factor analysis from different scales. Is it advisable to use, conjunctly, items from various measures? For example, say that I want to evaluate factors that most ...
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Objectively defining the image parameters for facial detection, recognition, and identification in digital imagery
Axis communications have given guidelines on minimum operational requirements of a camera to allow a human observer to identify, recognise, and detect human subjects (https://www.axis.com/en-ca/...
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Why are core beliefs often phrased as opposites?
I was reading about core beliefs (here and here). While I get the definition, the examples seem very simple to me. For example "I'm ugly" vs "I'm beautiful". Don't most people accept that things exist ...
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Why does daylight-saving have such a big impact on us and weekends don't?
Last weekend, at least in Germany, the clock got switched from 2:00 AM to 3:00 AM.
Today I found a few articles, that suggest, that the daylight-saving has a big impact on people. Judges punish ...
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How to specify the quickest movement a human can do based on MTM standards?
I am looking for a benchmark as a reference regarding the human Kinesiology that specifies the quickest movement a human can do on basic everyday movements like computer mouse clicking. As far as I ...
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Factors affecting leniency of an evaluator (judge)
I am interested in psychology evidence on determinants of leniency of an evaluator. The evaluator will assess a service that is directly related to them (for example, customer satisfaction, or student'...
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Why are websites constantly updated even when the change seemingly reduces functionality?
Examples:
Imagine coming to SE tomorrow and instead of seeing "1 2 3 4 5 ... 77 next" at the bottom of the "questions" page, you see a giant circle with a triangle inside pointing to the right and ...
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What is the difference between two models of situation awareness?
The most famous definition of situation awareness (SA) is the three-level model proposed by Endsley (1995):
the perception of environmental elements with respect to time or space [(Level 1 SA)], ...
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What are shortcomings of query bases tools for measuring Situation Awareness?
A review compared many different ways for assessing Situation Awareness (SA), such as query based tools, external observers and self-report tools.
The paper argues that query based tools, such as the ...
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Theory about use of concept maps?
My background is Computing Science and I want to research how people use concept maps? By doing some google search I found the following link
https://www.msu.edu/~luckie/ctools/
What I want to ...
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Why do people bully other people?
What is the psychology behind bullying from the bullier's perspective?
What kind of people become bullies? Do bullies generally have anything common in their childhood histories?
N.B. This question ...
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What are ways to assess employability of workers?
Employability is typically defined as
the continuous fulfilling, acquiring or
creating of work through the optimal use of competences. (Van der Heijde & Van der Heijden, 2006)
One's ...
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What is the effect of Daylight Saving Time on attentiveness and productivity?
This weekend the clocks were set an our later (in some countries), such that the daylight lasts an hour longer in the evening. This has several reasons, among which a reduction in energy consumption ...
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Why do we dream? [duplicate]
Most of the people have their own imagination and most of them dream about many things and some time dream about those things which they have never seen, so how we will define the fact that why do we ...
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Organisation as a factor for safe behavior on the work-place
Many tools exists that allow the investigation of incidents and safe behavior on the workplace, such as the Human Factors Analysis and Classification System (HFACS) or the System Hardware Environment ...
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Psychology behind SE? [closed]
I'm not yet that SE experienced user but one thing I've observed is that If I give a good answer then I get upvotes on my other questions too.But as I give a comment that may seem to be bad to the OP ...
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Knowledge in what fields is necessary to develop an EEG brain-computer interface?
I am a computer science student, and as part of my project, I would like to develop a system that changes the TV channel, increases its volume, etc. by just the thought of it. My primary investigation ...