Trial lecture presenting my neurocognitive research

In late February 2015 I was invited to give a presentation of my research to the Department of biological and medical psychology at the University of Bergen. I emphasized my neurocognitive research, clinical studies and the use of psychophysiological measures in my applied research. The presentation was structured around the published papers, highlighting the findings in the abstracts. Among the topics covered were implicit learning, selective attention, working memory, situation awareness, team-work, consciousness and clinical work.

Lecture on cognitive factors in operative environments

Below is the presentation from the third lecture in the Operational psychology master's course (in Norwegian). The lecture covers dynamic decision environments, mental models, decision-making, naturalistic decision-making, situation awareness, team decision-making, shared mental models, team cognition, team situation awareness, and finally gave examples from my own research.

Introductory lecture to operational psychology master course

In the spring semester of 2014, we started offering a master's course in Operational psychology. I was responsible for the course, but used extensive guest lecturers, where experts in each respective field was asked to cover a topic. The course topics were:

1. Introduction to the field of Human Factors (me)
2. Operative cooperation, leadership and communication (Roar Espevik)
3. Cognitive processes in operative settings (me)
4. Individual differences in operative situations (Paul Bartone)
5. Care of personnel after critical incidents (Jarle Eid)
6. Human error and accident causes (Kathryn Mearns)

Below is my introductory lecture (in Norwegian). The lecture localized the field of Human Factors within the rest of psychology, and discussed it's history, topics, methods, and gave samples from research and application (including an overview of our research group).

Paper introducing the methodology of the similarity index in field studies

Early in my post-doc project, our research group was contacted by an emergency control centre in a major oil company. The centre handles incidents on offshore oil and gas rigs, events like fires or gas leaks, heavy weather or ships on collision course. The centre's task is to construct a coherent image of the emergency based on the incoming information, and to advise and organize the different resources involved in handling the emergency. The centre wanted our help to identify areas for further improving their emergency handling.

My initial approach to the request was to develop measures for individual and team mental representation. That is, does each team member have a good idea of what's going on at the oil rig, and does the team as a whole have a good idea of this? However, it quickly became apparent that since both actual events and training exercises in this setting are non-transparent, dynamic and interactive, it would be challenging to establish a ground truth for what the different team members should be expected to know at different times through an exercise.

We arranged a series of unstructured and semistructured training exercises for all the emergency teams in the organization. At planned intervals we "froze" the exercise, and had all team members answer questions about the situation and the team's work. But the challenge remained of how to assess the responses of these questions. The experts were reluctant to say that a given team member should hold a given bit of information about the situation at a given point in time.

The solution I chose was to compare the answers between the team members. I developed two algorithms that were applicable to all the questions. The first of these returned a value from 0 to 1, indicating how similar your answer was to the rest of the team. The second returned a value from 0 to 1, indicating how similar your answer was to the team leader. I argued that the first calculation should approach a measure of shared mental models, that is, the extent to which the team member had the same representation of the incident as the rest of the team. The second calculation should approach a measure of situation awareness, as a higher score should be associated with more accurate knowledge, given the assumption that the team leader was the best informed member of the team.

As this was a fairly (though not completely) novel methodological approach, before going any further we published a paper that went into some detail on describing the measures and the calculation of the scores. This was published in Journal of Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making: The similarity index as an indicator of SMM and SA in field studies. This paper did not test any research hypotheses, as this was reserved for future papers.

Book chapter on situation awareness applied in maritime settings

In 2013, our research group "Operational psychology research group" and associated members collaborated on an edited book called "Motivating for safety". The book was intended for practitioners in the industry, in particular captains and safety officers in the maritime field. The book covered topics such as safety climate, sleep deprivation, shared mental models, situation awareness, leadership, psychological capital and hardiness. Each topic is illustrated with cases, exercises and training questions. My chapter on situation awareness is linked below.

Motivating for safety - Chapter 6 - Seeing, understanding, anticipating - Situation awareness as a requirement for safe voyages

Trial lecture on the psychology of risk

In the process of applying for a associate professor position in cognitive psychology, I was asked to deliver a lecture on my own research. Rather than talking about my previous research on the neurocognition of selective attention, I chose to focus the presentation around different research projects I've had on the topic of "risk".

I started out with an example I sometimes use in my lectures to demonstrate the various risks that are relevant to their age group in Norway. I then introduced some classic studies on risk, and some fundamental perspectives. I presented my recent series of Go/NoGo lab experiments intended to model risk perception. I then introduced "situation awareness" as an application of risk in real-word settings, and the related research projects I've run to attempt to approach it in surveys, lab and field experiments. Finally, I discussed some of the consequences of risk, showing how people's behaviour are sometimes changed after considering dangerous situations. Relevant to this, I presented three experiments done in collaboration with Hallgeir Sjåstad, where presenting a threat influenced how security policy was evaluated by a post-Utøya sample.

Trial lecture on "Human factors"

After applying for a position in work and organizational psychology, I was asked to give a trial lecture to the relevant faculty members. The prescribed topic was "Current perspectives in work and organizational psychology". Some of my research interests were in the field of "human factors", and as this topic was not well represented in the present teaching load of the department, my aim was to demonstrate what "human factors" is, and how it relates to other fields of psychology and should be considered a part of work and organizational psychology. I covered the field's history, some general themes, research approaches and applications.

Presentation of field study for applied network (HFC forum)

I was invited to hold a presentation on my research at one of the meeting for Human Factors in Control, a national network for researchers, industry and consultants that are working with human factors. The presentation is fairly similar to the one I held at HFES in 2012, but somewhat updated and with some added details.

Suggesting a context-general survey for situation awareness

One of the aims of my post-doc was to develop a measurement approach for situation awareness (SA) that could be applied across different settings, and can be used in large data collections. Endsley's theoretical model suggests that SA consists of three levels - perception, understanding and prediction, and should be measured with instruments adapted to the setting in question.

Based on a theoretical review, I developed and piloted an inventory of 13 items, which were then tested on a larger sample of 166 sailors. To test whether the inventory supported the theoretical model for SA, two different confirmatory factor analyses were run, one where all items were associated with a single factor, and one where the items were associated with three factors.  The three factor model showed a good fit with the response patterns.

Thus the approach appears psychometrically valid, although it remains to see whether it has any predictive value. Further, some researchers may be reluctant to measure SA in the same way across contexts. The article was published in a special issue of International Maritime Health.

Link to paper: Sætrevik, B. (2013). Developing a context-general self-report approach to measuring three-level situation awareness. 

Poster on emergency preparedness center teams for stakeholder seminar

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:

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:

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:

1. Cognitive lab experiments modelling mechanisms of risk behaviour and situation awareness
2. Analysing larger data sets to examine how different individual and organizational variables are connected, and developing an inventory for measuring situation awareness
3. 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 

The third project turned out to become the main focus of my post doc years. After one and a half year on the project, I gave a short presentation of the theoretical model and preliminary results to my faculty colleagues at our annual research seminar: