Emerging Needs and Opportunities for Human Factors Research (1995) / Chapter Skim
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10 Cognitive Performance Under Stress
10 Cognitive Performance Under Stress
Pages 262-290
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The program speculated that job stress, including the stress associated with the Postal Service's efforts to improve its highly automated sorting systems, was a significant contributor to the violence. The current focus on stress extends beyond the popular press.
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performed a human factors study of the incident. He concluded that time pressure and other stressors quite likely induced the pilots to make faulty -- and ultimately fatal -- decisions about deicing and departure.
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A good case also can be made that stress and the significance of its consequences will increase over the coming years: • Global economic competition has increased dramatically over the past couple of decades, and it shows little sign of slackening in the near future. Thus, both public organizations, such as the U.S.
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The concept of stress has evolved over the years. Stress researchers are far from unanimous in their use of the term (see, e.g., Everly and Sobelman, 1987:Chapter 1)
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Finally, the other factors part of Figure 10.1 is a recognition that, in virtually any situation, the cognitive activities in question will be affected by other things besides stress. And the effects of these factors may or may not be independent of stress effects.
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Via a block of subject-controlled trials with feedback, each subject first learned to predict the criterion to a satisfactory level of accuracy. Half of the subjects then performed test trials under time pressure.
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Therefore, in terms of threat, the stressfulness of Rothstein's time pressure was probably minimal. Rothstein did not explicitly apply the term stress to his time pressure conditions.
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, human factors and basic cognition researchers have experimentally examined the contemporaneous effects of acute stressors on, for instance, task performance in the presence of noise or extreme temperatures (see Hancock, 1986b)
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inquiry into the Air Ontario crash at Dryden is a good illustration of incident analysis. The investigator sifted through the available records of a significant, catastrophic event, trying to reconstruct conditions that may have led or contributed to it.
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The rarity of relevant reports highlights both an opportunity and a need for methodological developments to which human factors stress researchers could be major contributors. In collaboration with practicing incident analysts from diverse backgrounds, human factors specialists should aggressively seek to extend the public literature on incident analysis techniques.
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The present research recommendation is that the same approach be attempted in the domain of stress and cognition. That is, an effort should be made to develop stress simulators as research tools that would induce realistic stress reactions but would not actually expose subjects to the threat of serious harm that is an essential element of stress.
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From page 273... ...
There is currently considerable activity in the development of virtual reality technology. Much of that work is proceeding at a breakneck pace in the private entertainment industry, to the point that several virtual reality games and "rides" are currently available to consumers in special arcades and amusement parks (Corliss, 1993)
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However, the overarching theme of our recommendations for substantive research is that human factors investigators should develop practical means for counteracting or handling adverse stress-cognition interactions. Five approaches to solving human factors stress problems can be distinguished: Approach 1: Eliminate or weaken the stressor.
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To the lay observer, the responsibilities and the pace of air traffic control seem crushingly stressful. Airplanes appear to converge on airports unceasingly, and a single mistake could be fatal for hundreds of people.
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indicates that stress vulnerability is correlated with simple questionnaire reports of everyday "cognitive failures." We previously recommended the development of various forms of stress simulators, such as competitive games and virtual reality experiences. If that effort succeeds, then it seems only natural that performance in the simulations be examined for their ability to predict individuals' performance in the work situations of ultimate interest: if trainee Smith thinks clearly in tight game situations, is it reasonable to expect him or her to do the same when a catastrophe strikes the workroom?
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Finally, subjects in a no-stress condition received no shocks during training. Figure 10.2 shows the mean numbers of correct target identifications, by condition, during the three criterion trials and the last three training trials.
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A plausibly effective hybrid training strategy would train in basic skills under relaxed conditions and then allow trainees to "overlearn" those skills under stressful conditions. Yet another potentially effective strategy would be to concede that skill acquisition is slower under stress, but insist that it simply needs to be extended for a longer period of time.
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In a strategic response, the individual executes a deliberate plan for coping with stressful conditions. For instance, faced with a stringent time limit for making a choice, a decision maker might rationally elect to alter the decision process, giving temporal priority to those aspects of the options that are deemed most important (e.g., Ben Zur and Breznitz, 1981)
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An ambient stressor (e.g., heat, noise, close confinement) is one whose presence is independent of the person's task performance, whereas the opposite is true of a task stressor (e.g., time pressure or high performance stakes)
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stress reduces attention according to the inverse of the probabilities of information being taken into account under nonstressful conditions (see Zajonc, 1968)
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. Thus, researchers who take up the challenge posed by this final proposal will need to make contributions to fundamental understanding of the problem as well as to practical innovations.
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One of them relies on analyses of naturally occurring incidents involving stressful conditions, such as accidents. The other uses various forms of simulation, including competitive games and virtual reality technologies.
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The critical assumption underlying this approach is that people differ reliably in their tendencies to perform cognitive tasks well or poorly under stressful conditions. The aim of the research recommended in this area is identifying easy-to-assess predictors of such individual differences.
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Crump, J.H. 1979 Review of stress in air traffic control: its measurement and effects.
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Kirschner 1980 An information-processing interpretation of air traffic control stress. Human Fac tors 22:561-567.
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1990 Human factors aspects of the Air Ontario crash at Dryden, Ontario: analysis and recommendations to the Commission of Inquiry.
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Crandall, and T.O. Jacobs 1993 Training decision makers for the real world.
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1986 The effects of time pressure on judgment in multiple cue probability learning. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 37:83-92.
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Zakay, D., and S Wooler 1984 Time pressure, training and decision effectiveness.
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