Theory of science lectures

During my post-doc years, I lectured in the topic of Theory of science (Norwegian: vitenskapsteori) for the first semester of psychology (spring and fall). This took the form of three two-hour lectures based on the textbook "How to think straight about psychology" by Keith E. Stanovich. In the presentation materials for the lectures, I proposed a mind map that the students were invited to structure their understanding around. Branches specific for the science of psychology were structured to the left, while less topic specific branches were on the right. the students appeared to respond well to the presentation materials.

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:

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).

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/