Workplace safety has been historically neglected by organizations in order to enhance profitability. Over the past 30 years, safety concerns and attention to safety have increased due to a series of disastrous events occurring across many different industries (e.g., Chernobyl, Upper Big-Branch Mine, Davis-Besse etc.). Many organizations have focused on promoting a healthy safety culture as a way to understand past incidents, and to prevent future disasters. There is an extensive academic literature devoted to safety culture, and the Department of Energy has also published a significant number of documents related to safety culture. The purpose of the current endeavor was to conduct a review of the safety culture literature in order to understand definitions, methodologies, models, and successful interventions for improving safety culture. After reviewing the literature, we observed four emerging themes. First, it was apparent that although safety culture is a valuable construct, it has some inherent weaknesses. For example, there is no common definition of safety culture and no standard way for assessing the construct. Second, it is apparent that researchers know how to measure particular components of safety culture, with specific focus on individual and organizational factors. Such existing methodologies can be leveraged for future assessments. Third, based on the published literature, the relationship between safety culture and performance is tenuous at best. There are few empirical studies that examine the relationship between safety culture and safety performance metrics. Further, most of these studies do not include a description of the implementation of interventions to improve safety culture, or do not measure the effect of these interventions on safety culture or performance. Fourth, safety culture is best viewed as a dynamic, multi-faceted overall system composed of individual, engineered and organizational models. By addressing all three components of safety culture, organizations have a better chance of understanding, evaluating, and making positive changes towards safety within their own organization.
Abstract. Vision is one of the dominant human senses and most human-computer interfaces rely heavily on the capabilities of the human visual system. An enormous amount of effort is devoted to finding ways to visualize information so that humans can understand and make sense of it. By studying how professionals engage in these visual search tasks, we can develop insights into their cognitive processes and the influence of experience on those processes. This can advance our understanding of visual cognition in addition to providing information that can be applied to designing improved data visualizations or training new analysts.In this study, we investigated the role of expertise on performance in a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) target detection task. SAR imagery differs substantially from optical imagery, making it a useful domain for investigating expert-novice differences. The participants in this study included professional SAR imagery analysts, radar engineers with experience working with SAR imagery, and novices who had little or no prior exposure to SAR imagery. Participants from all three groups completed a domain-specific visual search task in which they searched for targets within pairs of SAR images. They also completed a battery of domain-general visual search and cognitive tasks that measured factors such as mental rotation ability, spatial working memory, and useful field of view. The results revealed marked differences between the professional imagery analysts and the other groups, both for the domain-specific task and for some domain-general tasks. These results indicate that experience with visual search in non-optical imagery can influence performance on other domains.
Information visualization tools are being promoted to aid decision support. These tools assist in the analysis and comprehension of ambiguous and conflicting data sets. Formal evaluations are necessary to demonstrate the effectiveness of visualization tools, yet conducting these studies is difficult. Objective metrics that allow designers to compare the amount of work required for users to operate a particular interface are lacking. This in turn makes it difficult to compare workload across different interfaces, which is problematic for complicated information visualization and visual analytics packages. We believe that measures of working memory load can provide a more objective and consistent way of assessing visualizations and user interfaces across a range of applications. We present initial findings from a study using measures of working memory load to compare the usability of two graph representations.
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