environmental topic 4- human factors

Question 1

drews and doig aim

Answer 1

to see if they could help nurses gather information as quickly and accurately as possible to reduce their cognitive load

Question 2

drews and doig sample

Answer 2

42 experienced nurses from a hospital in Utah as participants to assess a new display system on computers to monitor patients

Question 3

drews and doig procedure

Answer 3

new CVS compared to standard display unit and improved by changing how data was displayed to add more graphical representations, geometric shapes, trends and colour
nurses randomly assigned the CVS or control group
4 realistic but fake scenarios used to help measure effectiveness of new system in a lab psychology department
-20 min training
-asked to give verbal evaluation of patients physiological status, interpret data and recommend interventions
- given a patient scenario and 5 mins to complete each of the 4
-response times and accuracy were assessed
after trials nurses were given self reports to complete on workload and a 7 point likert scale about the desirability of the display and realism of the study

Question 4

drews and doig results

Answer 4

faster response time in CVS group- 30% improvement
in 2/4 patient scenarios the CVS group were significantly better with accuracy
the nurses related the scenarios as being realistic and the use of CVS as being desirable
in the control condition in each scenario only one nurse accessed the trend info

Question 5

drews and doig conclusion

Answer 5

the new display system (CVS) can help improve nurses assessments of patients in terms of accuracy and speed of response/interpretation
the use of CVS may help nurses to detect earlier more subtle changes and so potentially avoid patient harm

Question 6

brown and poulton - secondary task performance

Answer 6

participants drove a car in:
-an area with a relatively small number of important inputs or (e.g residental area)
-an area with a relatively large number of important inputs (e.g car park of crowded area)
whilst doing this they listened to a tape containing a series of pre-recorded numbers and had to identify those numbers that changed from one sequence to the next
participants made more errors when driving in the shopping car park
explained in terms of cognitive overload theory as suggests more attention needs to be given to stimuli associated with primary tasks of driving in this environment so had less mental capacity left for stimuli associated with less important numbers task

Question 7

miller- STM and chunking

Answer 7

proposed that most people can hold 7 pieces of info (+/-2) in their short term memory
if we chunk info together into units that mean something to us then the 7 chunks of remembered material can actually be quite large

Question 8

the hawthorne studies - measuring productivity

Answer 8

6 women studied intensly at the Hawthorne plant of the western electric company
invested the impact of light levels by systematically varying light levels for the group assembling electric relay switching whilst keeping light constant for a control group
found that any change led to increased productivity
suggests that if workers know they are being observed than this alone is enough to improve performance- hawthorne effect

Question 9

higuera-Trujillo- colour

Answer 9

VR study on 80 spanish uni students whilst wearing headsets that stimulated their classroom at the uni and changed the walls colour and carried out 2 cognitive tasks:
1. memory task- see how many words participants could memorise and recall
2. attention task- seeing how quickly participants could react to specific auditory stimuli whilst avoiding distractors
results suggested participants performed better on both tasks if the VR room was coloured purple or blue purple
colour blindness/vision problems were controlled for