In September 2012, the research group I was part of arranged a stakeholder conference for our industry partners and other stakeholders in the maritime and offshore business. Formal organizer of the conference was the marine insurance company Norwegian Hull Group, and the overall theme for the conference was "safety climate".
Our research collaborators Jarle Eid, Rhona Flin and Fred Luthans had oral presentations at the conference. I presented a poster on the shared situation awareness in teams field study described in previous posts. The poster is available here: Emergency preparedness center poster
To zoom around the different sections of the poster, use the Prezi below:
Monday 2 December 2013
Thursday 28 November 2013
HFES conference paper and presentation on shared beliefs in emergency center teams
Towards the end of my post-doc period, I presented my field study work at the 56th annual conference of the Human factors and ergonomics society (HFES) in Boston in 2012. The presentation consisted of a 20 minute presentation and a five page conference paper, both posted below.
The work argues that efficient handling of critical situations relies not only on the availability of information, but also how the information is transferred and distributed within the team. In the presentation I lay out some of the challenges to measuring "situation awareness" for team members in realistic settings. I suggest that it may be fruitful to compare the beliefs of the various team members working together and estimate to which extent they match up. I present a rough description of one of my field experiments, where I worked with the emergency preparedness center of an offshore oil company. Five teams ran a realistic training scenario for 2-3 hours, and the scenario was frozen at nine time points where the team members had to answer how confident they were about their information handling and what they knew about the situation. Heart rate variability was measured for all team members throughout the scenario.
The results show that team members were quite confident, their confidence rose early in the scenario and remained stable throughout the scenario. However, the confidence was not related to what they actually knew about the scenario, which was lower and varied more across time. High frequency variability in heart rate can be taken as an indicator for cognitive adaptability. Results showed this to covary with less complex phases of the scenario. As this work was ongoing at the time of presentation, the oral presentation results are more complete than the results in the paper. Also note that the calculation of both shared knowledge and HRV have changed since this point in the analysis.
Conference paper: A controlled field study of SA in emergency handling teams
Conference presentation:
The work argues that efficient handling of critical situations relies not only on the availability of information, but also how the information is transferred and distributed within the team. In the presentation I lay out some of the challenges to measuring "situation awareness" for team members in realistic settings. I suggest that it may be fruitful to compare the beliefs of the various team members working together and estimate to which extent they match up. I present a rough description of one of my field experiments, where I worked with the emergency preparedness center of an offshore oil company. Five teams ran a realistic training scenario for 2-3 hours, and the scenario was frozen at nine time points where the team members had to answer how confident they were about their information handling and what they knew about the situation. Heart rate variability was measured for all team members throughout the scenario.
The results show that team members were quite confident, their confidence rose early in the scenario and remained stable throughout the scenario. However, the confidence was not related to what they actually knew about the scenario, which was lower and varied more across time. High frequency variability in heart rate can be taken as an indicator for cognitive adaptability. Results showed this to covary with less complex phases of the scenario. As this work was ongoing at the time of presentation, the oral presentation results are more complete than the results in the paper. Also note that the calculation of both shared knowledge and HRV have changed since this point in the analysis.
Conference paper: A controlled field study of SA in emergency handling teams
Conference presentation:
Tuesday 9 July 2013
Presentation of post doc program
After defending my PhD thesis, I worked in a consulting agency, where I advised on the design of critical work environments to reduce the risk of human error, typical in maritime and offshore settings. After some time there, I was offered a post doc research position at the University of Bergen, although in a different department than where I did my PhD. The post doc was funded by the Research Council of Norway, and was intended to provide actionable input to the Norwegian hydrocarbon industry. Thus I had to turn to a more applied research focus than in my previous basic research on neurocognitive mechanisms, but I was able to relate some of my experience as a consultant in the field.
My post doc project included three different venues of research:
My post doc project included three different venues of research:
- Cognitive lab experiments modelling mechanisms of risk behaviour and situation awareness
- Analysing larger data sets to examine how different individual and organizational variables are connected, and developing an inventory for measuring situation awareness
- A field study of teamwork in emergency response teams, where the team's training exercises were examined to see to which extent the team members had the same situation awareness
Saturday 29 June 2013
Distinguishing the "updating" component of working memory
A memory system must be able to serve at least two functions, to hold information over time, and to change the information that is being held. While several studies have identified a vast cortical network to be involved in working memory, little work has tried to distinguish the two different functions.
In 2008 I came into contact with Patrick Sörqvist, then a PhD student from an applied psychology lab in Gävle, Sweden, who was interested in practical implications of memory systems. He wanted to run an fMRI study of the number updating task, which can distinguish the points in time when working memory content is being updated, as opposed to when the content being held constant while ignoring new information. I helped out with experiment design, programming, fMRI analysis and write-up. We found some cortical regions to be more activated for memory updating than when not updating, and other regions to be activated in the inverse condition.
Sörqvist & Sætrevik (2010) The neural basis of updating: Distinguishing substitution processes from other concurrent processes - Scandinavian Journal of Psychology
We probably used the wrong heatmap shading for the fMRI activations shown in Figure 1 and 2, as they did not come out well in the black and white print. They were supposed to look more like this:
Figure 1: Areas more activated when updating.
Figure 2: Areas more activated when not updating.
Here are the same activations shown in an animated glass brain. Areas more activated when updating are shown in "hot", areas more activated when not activated are shown in "cold" (t-values 6-16 are shown).
In 2008 I came into contact with Patrick Sörqvist, then a PhD student from an applied psychology lab in Gävle, Sweden, who was interested in practical implications of memory systems. He wanted to run an fMRI study of the number updating task, which can distinguish the points in time when working memory content is being updated, as opposed to when the content being held constant while ignoring new information. I helped out with experiment design, programming, fMRI analysis and write-up. We found some cortical regions to be more activated for memory updating than when not updating, and other regions to be activated in the inverse condition.
Sörqvist & Sætrevik (2010) The neural basis of updating: Distinguishing substitution processes from other concurrent processes - Scandinavian Journal of Psychology
We probably used the wrong heatmap shading for the fMRI activations shown in Figure 1 and 2, as they did not come out well in the black and white print. They were supposed to look more like this:
Figure 1: Areas more activated when updating.
Figure 2: Areas more activated when not updating.
Here are the same activations shown in an animated glass brain. Areas more activated when updating are shown in "hot", areas more activated when not activated are shown in "cold" (t-values 6-16 are shown).
The study had quite few participants, but we later supported the main finding in another study with more participants (currently under review).
Introductory lecture on language and thought
The second introductory lecture was on language and thought. I tried to hold the two concepts up against each other, to contrast them and discuss whether they had any overlap.
The final 20 minutes of the two-hour lecture I briefly talked about the concept of intelligence and how it can be measured: http://prezi.com/pznxc5ihzxd3/psyk100-intelligens/
The final 20 minutes of the two-hour lecture I briefly talked about the concept of intelligence and how it can be measured: http://prezi.com/pznxc5ihzxd3/psyk100-intelligens/
Introductory lecture on "memory"
When I began working at the Department for psychosocial science, I was persuaded to give two lectures in cognitive psychology to the first year students. There were between 200 and 300 students at each lecture, and this was their first introduction to the topic.
The first of these lectures was on the topic of memory. I planned the lecture around the Atkinson and Shiffrin model of three memory stores, so I used this as a visual structure for the presentation, and placed all theories and findings in relation to this model.
The presentation (Norwegian only) is included below. Note that the lecture is supposed to run over 2x45 minutes, so if you click through it in 3 minutes it may induce motion sickness.
The first of these lectures was on the topic of memory. I planned the lecture around the Atkinson and Shiffrin model of three memory stores, so I used this as a visual structure for the presentation, and placed all theories and findings in relation to this model.
The presentation (Norwegian only) is included below. Note that the lecture is supposed to run over 2x45 minutes, so if you click through it in 3 minutes it may induce motion sickness.
Sunday 23 June 2013
Transient activation of speech areas following language task
My fMRI study of primed dichotic listening from 2009 showed that stimulus conflict increased medial prefrontal activation, and response conflict increased left dorsolateral activation. That went some way in terms of figuring out which mechanisms are involved in the task, and we accounted for it in terms of the Desimone and Duncan's biased competition model and/or Botvinick's model of interaction between cognitive conflict and control.
After publishing this work, I started thinking whether the data could also be used to understand how the mechanisms interacted. Some recent studies have indicated that high cognitive conflict on one trial leads to increased cognitive control on the following trial. The increased control is typically seen as faster and more accurate performance, and increased activation in cortical areas assumed to hold the task set instructions. Could I do something similar with my task? Given that I had formally left the neurocognitive research group at this time, I was perhaps also motivated to get the most out of my already collected fMRI data.
The 2009 analysis had analysed according to what the current stimuli and the current response was. The new analysis restructured the data file according to whether the previous and the current trial was high (prime repeated in targets) or low conflict (no prime-target repetition). This yielded four different categories (previous trial - current trial):
Cognitive conflict in a syllable identification task causes transient activation of speech perception area of speech perception area - Brain and Cognition
After publishing this work, I started thinking whether the data could also be used to understand how the mechanisms interacted. Some recent studies have indicated that high cognitive conflict on one trial leads to increased cognitive control on the following trial. The increased control is typically seen as faster and more accurate performance, and increased activation in cortical areas assumed to hold the task set instructions. Could I do something similar with my task? Given that I had formally left the neurocognitive research group at this time, I was perhaps also motivated to get the most out of my already collected fMRI data.
The 2009 analysis had analysed according to what the current stimuli and the current response was. The new analysis restructured the data file according to whether the previous and the current trial was high (prime repeated in targets) or low conflict (no prime-target repetition). This yielded four different categories (previous trial - current trial):
- High - high
- Low - high
- High - low
- Low - low
From this we could run two different analyses: In the first contrast, we compared sequence 1+2 with sequence 3+4, i.e. examined what the effect of the current trial was, regardless of what happened on the previous trial. As expected, this yielded much the same result as the 2009 analysis, showing that task conflict activates medial and dorsolateral prefrontal areas. The second contrast compared sequence 1+3 with sequence 2+4, i.e. examined what the effect of the previous trial was, regardless of the current trial. This showed that following a stimulus conflict, activation increased in temporal areas, more on left than on right side. No behavioural after effect of conflict was seen, perhaps since there is no defined correct answer in the prime dichotic listening task (both syllables are correct, and error rates are low), and response times were not measured.
In line with current models for how cognitive conflict modulates cognitive control, we interpreted the effect as challenging task leading to more resources being dedicated to the type of processing involved in the task, in this case discriminating verbal stimuli. The fact that sequential effects showed temporal rather than e.g. dorsolateral activation, may indicate that conflict did not lead to increased task or instruction focus, as has been seen in e.g. sequential effects of Stroop tasks, perhaps as the task is rather simple.
My by then former college Karsten Specht helped me with the analyses and the manuscript, and we published this in "Brain and Cognition" in 2012. A lab meeting presentation of this study can be found here.
Cognitive conflict in a syllable identification task causes transient activation of speech perception area of speech perception area - Brain and Cognition
Wednesday 12 June 2013
Lab meeting: Transient activation of speech areas
In December 2012 I was asked to give a 20 minutes presentation of some of my research at our department's research seminar. I was relatively fresh in the field of work and organizational psychology at that time, so I presented a re-analysis of some previous fMRI work. Although I tried to simplify the work and focus on the gist of it, I'm afraid most of my audience had a hard time to following the unfamiliar topic and methodology. Looking back at it now, I think I may also have overused the prezi features somewhat...
The work I presented had just been accepted into Brain and Cognition the same day as my presentation was due, so I make a note of this at the end.
The work I presented had just been accepted into Brain and Cognition the same day as my presentation was due, so I make a note of this at the end.
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