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Situation awareness
Published in Rhona Flin, George G. Youngson, Steven Yule, Enhancing Surgical Performance, 2015
Rhona Flin, Simon Paterson-Brown
It is surprisingly easy to demonstrate the fallibility of human perceptual and memory systems. One type of attentional failure, particularly relevant to dynamic environments, is ‘change blindness’, where observers fail to notice that key elements have been altered between presentations of the same image. Psychologist Daniel Simons has demonstrated this in a range of intriguing studies.21 In one of his experiments,22 a pedestrian was stopped in the street by a stranger who asked for directions. While the directions were being given, some workmen walked between the two people with a huge board so that the stranger could not be seen for a brief period. Astonishingly, half of those giving directions failed to notice that the stranger had been switched for a different person, after the board had been removed. The same effect applies to auditory stimuli, which is called inattentional deafness.23 For those surgeons who like some low-level background music in their operating theatre, it often comes as quite a surprise when they relax from some task that has required intense concentration to find that they never heard any of the music despite the fact that it was clearly audible to everyone else in the theatre. This is the task shedding mentioned in Section 4.2.2, but sometimes it can be critical information that is missed or de-prioritized.
Sleep loss and change detection in simulated driving
Published in Chronobiology International, 2020
A. J. Filtness, V Beanland, K.A. Miller, G. S. Larue, A Hawkins
Driving is a complex task that requires successful maintenance of attention. Failures in driver attention are a significant road safety problem, and can take many forms (Beanland et al. 2013). Within sleepiness research, it has been well established that sleep loss impairs reaction time during sustained vigilance tasks (e.g., Belenky et al. 2003; Dinges et al. 1997; Van Dongen et al. 2003) as well as reaction time to emerging hazards (Smith et al. 2009). Furthermore, sleep loss compromises visual attention, resulting in impaired visual performance (De Gennaro et al. 2001). It also increases distractibility (Anderson and Horne 2013), which diminishes the ability to maintain attention. These findings demonstrate a range of ways in which sleepy individuals are unable to adequately focus their attention. One aspect of attention that has received limited investigation in relation to potential sleepiness-related impairment is the ability to detect changes. The ability to detect visual changes in driving environments is crucial for safe driving (Caird et al. 2005). However, observers often fail to detect changes in visual scenes, which is a phenomenon known as change blindness (Rensink et al. 1997). Failures to detect changes can account for up to 10% of all serious road accidents (Beanland et al. 2013). Known influences on change blindness include the relevance of the changing object to the observer, and visual clutter within the environment (e.g., Rensink et al. 1997; (Murphy and Murphy 2018). Within a driving context, these may be contextualized as the safety relevance of the change and the complexity of the driving environment (e.g., urban vs rural; Beanland et al. 2017).