12 waiters and waitresses from a small Midwestern town and 16 waiters and waitresses from a large urban area participated in an experiment to assess whether larger tips were given when they stood erect or squatted when taking orders. Using an A-B-A-B research design, waiters and waitresses alternately stood and squatted for a 4-wk. period while taking orders at lunch and dinner. The research was conducted in moderately priced, family-style restaurants. Analysis indicated that significantly higher tips were given (a) at dinner than lunch, (b) in the urban area, (c) to female servers, and (d) when the server squatted.
A new partnership is forming between humans and uninhabited aircraft. To augment the abilities of military forces on the ground and in the air, the US Armed Forces have developed several Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to work in conjunction with human pilots and enhance surveillance and combat capabilities. Even with no onboard pilot, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and combat-tailored versions (UCAVs) rely on proficient human operators on the ground for proper guidance and munitions deployment. For this reason, system designers must consider several key human factors issues in the development of functional UAV/UCAV systems. This work addresses three of these issues: workload, situation awareness, and teaming concerns. Recommendations to maximize operator efficacy, based on findings from human factors and ergonomics research, are presented as well as implications for training.
Monitoring digital displays for changes will be an increasing part of a soldier's duties as the U.S. Army transforms to a networked system of systems; however, it is well established that humans often fail to detect such changes in contexts with competing demands on attention. Interventions that enhance visual attention might also enhance change detection, because focused attention has been identified as a requirement for change detection. Given current claims that habitual experience with action video games can increase attentional resources, we investigated whether such experience would lessen the incidence of change blindness in two change detection tasks. Although we replicated a previously demonstrated difference between players and nonplayers on the flanker-compatibility test (Green & Bavelier, 2003), we failed to find evidence that habitual action video game players were superior to nonplayers when it came to change detection.As the U.S. military develops more complex networked digital systems for battlefield management, troop deployment, and other operational needs, the monitoring of digital displays will become an increasingly important aspect of many soldiers' responsibilities. Some have argued that if new soldiers are already familiar with
The United States Armed Forces are turning to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), and their combat-modified counterparts (UCAVs), to support human pilots and improve electronic surveillance and weapons deployment capabilities, particularly for risky suppression of enemy air-defense (SEAD) operations. Successful implementation and integration of UAVs/UCAVs into today's military requires focused attention toward human factors issues to ensure mission success and efficiency. In addition to considerations for satellite links, positive target verification, and assurance of collateral safety prior to weapon(s) launch, a primary concern is how operators interact with the UAV/UCAV system. This paper describes a portion of these concerns by presenting human factors considerations for UAV/UCAV-operator data links, vehicle control, and operator display issues. Relevant empirical findings are reviewed and implications for training and systems design are outlined.
The potential for change detection failure during the monitoring of a military digital situation awareness map was investigated. Participants were asked to monitor the map for icon appearance or disappearance. A change accompanied by two other changes was detected 69.3% of the time, while the same change occurring alone was detected 79.6% of the time. When three changes occurred simultaneously, all three were detected only 37% of the time. Detection of icon appearance was superior to detection of icon disappearance, as might be expected from the literature on visual attention. The discussion addresses the need to represent change explicitly in such systems and suggests properties that a change detection aid should possess.Military command and control is undergoing major transformation. The use of networked information processing tools is increasing, along with the employment of unmanned sensors. As these systems proliferate, direct observation will no longer MILITARY PSYCHOLOGY, 20:81-94, 2008
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