How Perceptions of Caller Honesty Vary During Vishing Attacks That Include Highly Sensitive or Seemingly Innocuous Requests.

OBJECTIVE: To understand how aspects of vishing calls (phishing phone calls) influence perceived visher honesty. BACKGROUND: Little is understood about how targeted individuals behave during vishing attacks. According to truth-default theory, people assume others are being honest until something triggers their suspicion. We investigated whether that was true during vishing attacks. METHODS: Twenty-four participants read written descriptions of eight real-world vishing calls. Half included highly sensitive requests; the remainder included seemingly innocuous requests. Participants rated visher honesty at multiple points during conversations. RESULTS: Participants initially perceived vishers to be honest. Honesty ratings decreased before requests occurred. Honesty ratings decreased further in response to highly sensitive requests, but not seemingly innocuous requests. Honesty ratings recovered somewhat, but only after highly sensitive requests. CONCLUSIONS: The present results revealed five important insights: (1) people begin vishing conversations in the truth-default state, (2) certain aspects of vishing conversations serve as triggers, (3) other aspects of vishing conversations do not serve as triggers, (4) in certain situations, people's perceptions of visher honesty improve, and, more generally, (5) truth-default theory may be a useful tool for understanding how targeted individuals behave during vishing attacks. APPLICATION: Those developing systems that help users deal with suspected vishing attacks or penetration testing plans should consider (1) targeted individuals' truth-bias, (2) the influence of visher demeanor on the likelihood of deception detection, (3) the influence of fabricated situations surrounding vishing requests on the likelihood of deception detection, and (4) targeted individuals' lack of concern about seemingly innocuous requests.

Do Tele-Operators Learn to Better Judge Whether a Robot Can Pass Through an Aperture?

OBJECTIVE: This experiment examined whether tele-operators learn to better judge a robot's ability to pass through an aperture, hereafter referred to as pass-ability judgments, and detailed the nature of such learning. BACKGROUND: Jones, Johnson, and Schmidlin reported that tele-operators' pass-ability judgments did not improve over the course of their experiment, which was surprising. METHOD: In each of seven blocks, tele-operators made pass-ability judgments about 10 apertures whose width varied. During each trial, participants drove the robot toward the aperture, answered yes or no to whether it could pass through that aperture, and then attempted to drive the robot through the aperture. Pass-ability judgments were analyzed in terms of percentage correct and absolute thresholds; the latter mimicked how Jones et al. analyzed their data. RESULTS: Learning was revealed when judgments were analyzed in terms of percentage correct and not when analyzed in terms of absolute thresholds. Further analyses revealed that tele-operators only improved their pass-ability judgments for impassable apertures, and tele-operators' perceptual sensitivity and response bias changed over the course of the experiment. CONCLUSION: The percentage correct-based analyses revealed that tele-operators learned to make better pass-ability judgments. Jones et al.'s decision to analyze their data in terms of absolute thresholds obscured learning. APPLICATION: The present results suggested that researchers should employ percentage correct when studying learning in this domain, training protocols should focus on improving tele-operators' abilities to judge the pass-ability of impassable apertures, and tele-operators truly learned to better discriminate passable and impassable apertures.

Do exploratory arm movements contribute to maximum reach distance judgements?

Exploratory movements provide information about agents' action capabilities in a given environment. However, little is known about the specifics of these exploratory movements, such as which movements are necessary to perceive a given action capability. This experiment tested whether arm movements contributed to judgements of maximum reach distance. Participants made judgements about their maximum reach distance by walking to the point farthest from an object from which they still perceived the object to be reachable. Over the course of two sets of nine judgements, participants' arms either swung naturally by their sides (Unrestricted Condition) or were held together behind their backs (Restricted Condition). Arm movement restriction increased maximum reach distance judgement error when compared with unrestricted judgements. In addition, judgement error improved over trials only when exploratory arm movements were unrestricted, and the improvements did not carry over to subsequent judgements made when exploratory arm movements were restricted. Arm movement restriction did not increase the variability of judgement error when compared with unrestricted judgements. The results indicate that exploration is necessary to generate affordance information, show that restricted exploration degrades affordance perception, and suggest that maximum reach distance exists at the global array level. In addition, they have practical implications for operational situations in which actors' arm movements are restricted, such as when military personnel wear body armour.

Does lacking information about your affordances impact your perception of others' affordances? A test of the embodied simulation hypothesis.

It has been argued that observers perceive actors' affordances via embodied simulation, that is, first perceiving their own affordance, which serves as a model for the actor's affordance, and then adjusting that model to account for differences between themselves and the actor. If so, then preventing observers from picking up information about their own affordances should cause several effects. Specifically, observers should make more errors about the actor's affordance compared to when the observer is free to pick up information about their own affordance. In addition, judgments about the actor's affordance should align better with the observer's affordance than with the actor's affordance, and increase in error as differences between the observer's and actor's affordances increase. The present study tested those predictions. To do so, observers (participants) made judgments about the farthest distance that an actor (a confederate) could reach. The observer's arms were either free to move or were immobilized by having the participant hold them behind their back. The present results did not support the predictions. The present research introduces a novel means for evaluating the Embodied Simulation Hypothesis, provides initial tests of related predictions, and corroborates prior research. In addition, it motivates important questions about embodied simulation and affordance perception.

Loudness adaptation: fact or artifact?

In the present study, the authors tested the hypothesis that contrast effects confound the Ipsilateral Comparison Paradigm (ICP). Bidirectional referents were used in which base tones of 50 or 70 dB alternated with referents of greater or lesser intensity in a 3.5-min listening period. The contrast hypothesis leads to the expectation that the bidirectional referents would produce opposing effects that should nullify time-based loudness changes in the common base tone. Contrary to that expectation, base-tone loudness declined significantly over time in the context of the bidirectional referents, and the loudness of the referents also declined significantly over time. Thus, the results of the study testified to the validity of the ICP as a contrast-free measure of broad-based loudness adaptation.

The effects of prism adaptation on egocentric metric distance estimation.

OBJECTIVE: The present experiment evaluated whether training involving throwing transferred to metric distance estimation (i.e., describing in feet and inches the distance between oneself and targets). BACKGROUND: In prior work, we found that metric estimation training negatively transferred to throwing. We explained our results in terms of cognitive intrusion. The present study tested that possibility by swapping our training and transfer tasks. METHOD: During pretesting, participants verbally estimated the metric distances between themselves and targets, or they threw a beanbag to targets. During training, participants donned goggles that distorted their vision. While wearing the goggles, they threw a beanbag to targets. Half received feedback. During posttesting, participants removed the distorting goggles and completed the same task that they performed during pretesting. RESULTS: The results indicated that the distorting goggles degraded throwing at the beginning of training, visual feedback improved throwing during training, the effects of training with feedback persisted into the throwing posttest, and the effects of training with feedback did not transfer to the verbal metric estimation posttest. CONCLUSION: Training involving throwing was effective, but did not transfer to verbal metric distance estimation. This supports our argument that the negative transfer observed in our previous study stemmed from cognitive intrusion. APPLICATION: The present experiment suggests that the creation of distance estimation training should begin with a careful analysis of the transfer task, and that distance estimation training programs should explicitly teach trainees that their training will not generalize to all distance estimation tasks.

An investigation of the prevalence of replication research in human factors.

OBJECTIVE: The present studies investigated the nature of replication research within the human factors literature. BACKGROUND: Many claim that researchers in certain fields do not replicate prior research. This is troubling because replications allow science to self-correct. A successful replication corroborates the original finding, whereas an unsuccessful replication falsifies it. To date, no one has assessed whether this issue affects the field of human factors. METHOD: In the first study, eight articles (parent articles) were selected from the 1991 issues of the journal Human Factors. Each article that had referenced one of the eight parent articles between 1991 and September 2006 (child articles) were also retrieved. Two investigators coded and compared each child article against its 1991 parent article to determine whether the child article replicated its parent article. The second study replicated these procedures. RESULTS: Half or more of the parent articles in Study I and Study 2 (75% and 50%, respectively) were replicated at least once. Furthermore, human factors researchers conducted replications of their own work as well as the work of others. However, many researchers did not state that they replicated previous research. CONCLUSION: Replications seem to be common in the human factors literature. However, readers may not realize that a study replicated prior research. Thus, they may incorrectly assess the evidence concerning a given finding. APPLICATION: Human factors professionals should be taught how to identify replications and to be cautious of research that has not been replicated.

Can metric feedback training hinder actions involving distance?

OBJECTIVE: The present studies tested whether distance estimation training with metric feedback can degrade the performance of untrained primarily perceptual-motor tasks. BACKGROUND: Training with metric feedback can improve distance estimations. However, previous research led to the conclusion that those improvements stemmed from changes in cognitive processing rather than in perception. If trainees applied their new cognitive strategies to primarily perceptual-motor tasks, then the performance of those tasks should degrade. The present studies tested that possibility. METHOD: Experiment 1 sought to replicate that training with metric feedback would improve metric distance estimations. Experiments 2 and 3 investigated whether such training would degrade the performance of a primarily perceptual-motor task. Experiment 4 investigated whether such training would affect a perceptual-motor task that required cognition. RESULTS: Metric feedback improved metric distance estimation (Experiments 1-4) and throwing to a specified distance (Experiment 4). Metric feedback degraded throwing to a target (Experiments 2 and 3), although that effect was not evident when pretesting was omitted (Experiment 3). CONCLUSION: If distance estimation trainees apply what they learned from metric feedback to untrained primarily perceptual-motor tasks, then the performance of those tasks will suffer. However, if trainees apply what they learned to untrained tasks that require metric estimation, then the performance of those tasks will improve. APPLICATION: Distance estimation training with metric feedback may not generalize to other tasks and may even degrade performance on certain tasks. Future research must specify the conditions under which distance estimation training with metric feedback leads to performance improvements and decrements.

Does content affect whether users remember that Web pages were hyperlinked?

OBJECTIVE: We determined whether memory for hyperlinks improved when they represented relations between the contents of the Web pages. BACKGROUND: J. S. Farris (2003) found that memory for hyperlinks improved when they represented relations between the contents of the Web pages. However, Farris's (2003) participants could have used their knowledge of site content to answer questions about relations that were instantiated via the site's content and its hyperlinks. METHOD: In Experiment 1, users navigated a Web site and then answered questions about relations that were instantiated only via content, only via hyperlinks, and via content and hyperlinks. Unlike Farris (2003), we split the latter into two sets. One asked whether certain content elements were related, and the other asked whether certain Web pages were hyperlinked. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 with one modification: The questions that were asked about relations instantiated via content and hyperlinks were changed so that each question's wrong answer was also related to the question's target. RESULTS: Memory for hyperlinks improved when they represented relations instantiated within the content of the Web pages. This was true when (a) questions about content and hyperlinks were separated (Experiment 1) and (b) each question's wrong answer was also related to the question's target (Experiment 2). CONCLUSION: The accuracy of users' mental representations of local architecture depended on whether hyperlinks were related to the site's content. APPLICATION: Designers who want users to remember hyperlinks should associate those hyperlinks with content that reflects the relation between the contents on the Web pages.

Factors affecting the usefulness of impenetrable interface element borders.

N. Walker and J. B. Smelcer (1990) found that selection times for menus could be reduced by placing the menus adjacent to the edge of the screen; this creates a border between the menu and the edge of the screen that the mouse cursor cannot penetrate. Based on this finding, they proposed that selection times for graphical user interface targets could be reduced by employing these impenetrable borders. Four studies tested this prediction with a Web browser's back button and scroll bar. Results demonstrated that targets employing impenetrable borders were always selected faster than were targets placed 1 pixel from the edge of the screen, which supports Walker and Smelcer's prediction. However, within the constraints of the current studies, this speed advantage asymptotes at approximately 283 ms for target heights of 2.00 cm and target distances of 3.50 cm. In addition, these findings generalized across most angles of approach. Actual or potential applications of this research include target placement decisions in the design or modification of graphical user interfaces.