WORKING MEMORY CAPACITY

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ADVANCED APPLIED EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY PSYC
451 / APSY 610 Dean Owen Introduction contd
22 July 2005
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APPLICATION - THEORY CYCLE
EXPOSE
APPLIED PROBLEMS
THEORIES
PROPOSE
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THREE CATEGORIES OF RESEARCH
THEORY DRIVEN
PRINCIPLE DRIVEN
PROBLEM DRIVEN
BASIC RESEARCH
APPLICABLE RESEARCH
APPLIED RESEARCH
LABORATORY EXPERIMENTS
SIMULATION EXPERIMENTS
REAL-WORLD EXPERIMENTS
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Vicente, 1994
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MAJOR PROBLEMS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
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TAKE THE BUS AND LEAVETHE DRIVING TO US

• A bus carrying families home to north-eastern
  Brazil plunged off a cliff, killing 22 people and
  injuring 43.
• The bus failed to negotiate a sharp curve, went
  off the highway and fell 40m.
• Seven children were among the dead.

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TAKE THE BUS contd

• Fifteen Iraqi pilgrims were killed and 25 injured
  when a bus taking them on a tour of Shite Muslim
  sites in Iran slid off the road and hit an
  electricity pylon.
• The crash occurred in the mountainous west of the
  country.
• Ten of those killed died from electrocution.

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TAKE THE BUS contd

• A speeding bus in Bangladesh lost control and
  crashed into a tree killing at least 11 people
  and injuring 25.
• About 5000 people are killed in road accidents in
  Bangladesh every year due to faulty vehicles, lax
  traffic rules, unskilled drivers, and poor road
  conditions. The Press 18
  December 2003

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A CRITICS OPINION

• Sadly, psychologists are notoriously gullible.
• Psychology is not a science.
• It has no agreed theoretical foundation and after
  a century of floundering around has failed to
  come up with any general theory of human
  behaviour.
• The differences between schools of psychology are
  not about detail, they are about
  fundamentals. contd

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A CRITICS OPINION contd

• Nor does psychology grow.
• While physical sciences constantly refine and
  expand their understanding of the world,
  psychology is swept by new ideas which wipe out
  everything that went before.
• Nor is psychology of much practical value.
  Bernard Robertson
  Editor of The New Zealand Law Journal

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PSYCHOLOGYS STRENGTHS

• Psychologists bring important strengths to an
  interdisciplinary science of human-environment
  interactions.
• Substantively, psychology is the pre-eminent
  science for understanding behavior at the
  individual level. contd

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PSYCHOLOGYS STRENGTHS contd

• It is uniquely positioned for replacing
  unexamined beliefs about human behavior with
  findings based on solid empirical analysis.
• Methodologically, it is the strongest of the
  human sciences in the use of experimentation and
  thus is in the best position to clarify issues of
  cause and effect. Stern, 2000

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HOW TO SAVE THE WORLD

• The notion of affordance is the crucial key to
  ergonomic designs for the coming century.
• The reason is the need to coerce desired
  behaviour whether or not people intend it.
• Systems with strong affordances coerce people
  without their realizing It.
• Moray,1995

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TRANSPORTABILITY

• There is a persistent rumour that the new
  armoured vehicle will not fit into a C130
  aircraft without removing its turret.
• All that is necessary to load the vehicle onto
  the aircraft are a few simple tasks including
  folding back mirrors, removing storage racks and
  antennae and lowering the suspension
  approximately 10 minutes of work in all.
• Their air transportability by our C130 Hercules
  was a condition of contract. Mark
  Burton Minister of Defence

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MULTI-FUNCTION TECHNOLOGY

• A British-based firm is selling the AK-MP3
  music player, built into the ammunition clip of a
  Kalashnikov.
• It can be swapped with the magazine carrying
  bullets and inserted into the weapon.
• It has enough storage space to hold 3,000 audio
  books or 9,000 songs.
• Cost of MP3 accessory NZ544
• With hundreds of books NZ1,088
• Cost of a Kalashnikov NZ1,007

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COGNITIVE ERGONOMICS

• IT TAKES 13.4 LONGER TO READ TEXT PASSAGES IN
  ALL UPPER CASE THAN IN ALL LOWER CASE.
• It takes 13.4 longer to read text passages in
  all upper case than in all lower case.
• Tinker Paterson, 1932

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COGNITIVE ERGONOMICS

• Gregory, M., Poulson, E. C. (1970). Even
  versus uneven right-hand margins and the rate of
  comprehension in reading. Ergonomics, 13, 427-434.

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• The promise of cognitive psychology lies in the
  progress of cognitive technology.
• The International Journal
• of Cognitive Technology
• And cognition supported by technology may be
  different from unaided cognition.

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WAY-FINDING AIDS

• Silver ferns turned over on path to find ones
  way back by the reflected moonlight.
• A ball of string unrolled during exploration of
  a cave, to be followed back out.

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WAY-FINDING AID
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SIGNAGE AMBIGUITY

• Psychologist Aidan Moran, of Dublins University
  College, discovered that many signs on Irish
  roads were not conveying the intended
  information.
• Road users were questioned about a sign showing a
  skidding car and a running figure, aimed at
  warning of the dangers of speeding through
  residential areas.
• Of those questioned, 6 interpreted the sign as
  urging drivers to watch out for joggers.

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SIGNAGE SPECIFICITY
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RECIPROCITY OF HUMAN TECHNOLOGY

• The relationship between the human and technology
  is reciprocal
• The human has always been influenced by
  technology, and
• the human influences that technology by imposing
  certain requirements and constraints on how the
  technology is created.
  contd

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RECIPROCITY contd

• The physical form of the human dictates some
  aspects of the technology (e.g., the shape of the
  arm and the hand had to be taken into account
  when designing the rifle), and
• the humans cognitive (e.g., creative)
  capabilities determine what new computerized
  technology will be developed.
• We have postulated that the human-technology
  relationship is the essence of human
  factors. Meister Enderwick, 2002

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RECIPROCITY OF UNCERTAINTY INFORMATION

• Information indexes a relation between a
  psychological state of an individual and an event
  in the environment.
• Uncertainty is a property of an individual
  taken with reference to the information required
  to support the performance of the task.
• Information is a property of the environment
  taken with reference to the uncertainty generated
  in the performance of a task.

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WORKING MEMORY CAPACITY

• Many failures to develop a solution plan are
  caused by limitations of working memory.
• That is, often a long sequence of action
  packets must be composed into a plan.
• Then a cognitive simulation must be carried out
  to evaluate the plan.
• This process frequently involves too many bits
  of information to be handled in working
  memory. Wickens, Gordon, Liu, 1998

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CONSTRAINTS

• The lift memory can only hold 3 floors at one
  time.
• A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.

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INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

• With the cannabis-growing season well under way,
  police have asked bush users who stumble across
  any plots to log them on their GPS (global
  positioning system) devices and send the
  co-ordinates to police.
• Detective Sergeant Dave Beattie, of Taupo police,
  said cannabis plots were sometimes booby-trapped.
• Do not enter the plot, simply log your position
  on the GPS and move on.

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DEVICES THAT REMIND

• Memory can be aided by devices
• String tied on finger
• Post-it
• Checklist
• Diary
• Personal data assistant

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DEVICES THAT REMIND

• Memory can be aided by devices
• String tied on finger
• Post-it
• Checklist
• Diary
• Personal data assistant

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DEVICES THAT REMIND

• Memory can be aided by devices
• String tied on finger
• Post-it
• Checklist
• Diary
• Personal data assistant
• Speed bugs

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A device that remindsSpeed bugs indicate
critical air speeds for takeoff landing.
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Violating the clockwise standard
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FATAL ROAD RAGE

• A man who held up traffic when he was dropped off
  at an intersection in Melbourne has been stabbed
  to death in a road rage attack.
• The victim suffered a single, fatal knife wound
  when he leant in the car window of an irate
  driver with whom he remonstrated when the driver
  sounded his horn.
• Given the society we live in, its a thing that
  people do, arm themselves. Its a fact of life,
  said homicide detective Senior Sergeant Charlie
  Bezzina.

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THE SYSTEMS APPROACH

• Aggressive driving is a syndrome of
  frustration-driven behaviours, enabled by the
  drivers environment.
• Exclusive focus on characteristics of the
  aggressive drivers and how to control them is
  short-sighted.
• Specific aggressive behaviours such as honking
  and running red lights are associated with
  actual delays in travel, and congestion.
• Ergonomics-oriented approaches that involve
  environmental modifications are needed.
  
  Shinar, 1998

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The system
Territoriality in motion!
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DIVIDE CONQUERAPPLIED TO DYSLEXIA

• Reading requires your brain to rejigger its
  visual and speech processors so that artificial
  markings become linked to the sounds they
  represent.
• When you see the written word cat, your brain
  must hear the constituent phonemes and associate
  the result with an animal that purrs.
  contd

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Dyslexic?Blame it on the brain.

• Dyslexia is a flaw of biology specifically of
  the brain a glitch in the neurological wiring
  that makes reading extremely difficult.
• Up to 1 in 5 kids may not be wired to
  read. TIME, 28 July 2003

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A systems approach
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LEARNING IS BRAIN CHANGE

• Focused instruction can help jump start the
  brains of dyslexic children.
• With appropriate intervention early on, much of
  the dyslexia can be eliminated.
• Specialised training exercises can activate
  circuits in the brains of children with dyslexia
  that match those used by normal readers.
• Virginia Berninger, educational psychologist
  Centre of Human Development and
  Disability University of Washington

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GRAPHEMES VS PHONEMES

• New Zealand anti-war protest
• One, two, three, four,
• We dont want your dirty war.
• New Zealand anti-apartheid protest
• One, two, three, four,
• We dont want your Springbok tour.

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WRESTLING WITH GRAPHEMES

• A sign of dyslexia in a preschooler is that they
  may have trouble learning the alphabet.
• Signs of dyslexia in kindergarten to the fourth
  year of primary school are reading and spelling
  errors such as
• letter reversals d for b in dog and bog,
  and
• letter inversions m for w, u for
  n. Earl Lane, The Press, 2 March 2004

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• b

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• p

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• b

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• p

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• ?

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• ?

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• ?

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• ?

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Dyslexic?Blame it on the written word.

• English is notoriously irregular.
• For example, if tongue is pronounced tung, why
  isnt argue pronounced arg?
• And if enough is enuff, why isnt bough
  pronounced buff? contd

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DYSLEXIA contd

• Scientists compared the reading ability of
  dyslexics from Britain, France and Italy and
  found that Italian dyslexics read far better than
  their French and English counterparts.
• The difference is not in the languages
  themselves, it is in their writing
  systems. contd

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DYSLEXIA contd

• English has 1,120 different ways of spelling its
  40 phonemes.
• Italian needs only 33 combinations of letters to
  spell out its 25 phonemes.
• Many Italian dyslexics are not even aware they
  have a problem and would notice it only if
  given a battery of psychological
  tests. TIME, 26 March 2001

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SUBJECTIVE MEASUREMENT

• On the basis of the 2002-2003 Health Survey, Id
  dump the entire health budget into psychological
  medicine.
• Why? Because despite over 90 of us saying
  were in good or excellent health, the survey
  also found that
• half of us are overweight (with 20 classified
  as obese),
• one in five of us are addicted to nicotine,
• one in seven of us are dopeheads,
  contd

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SUBJECTIVE MEASUREMENT contd

• one in six of us engage in hazardous drinking
  habits,
• one in five adults over 45 years has heart
  disease,
• the same proportion have asthma,
• one in three has a back problem, and
• one in twelve has diabetes.
• We are so removed from reality, we have utterly
  lost the ability to separate fact from
  fiction. Michael Laws

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• END
• 22-7-05