The effect of information integration on team communication in a simulated submarine control room task.

Submarine control rooms are characterised by dedicated individual roles for information types (e.g. Sonar operator processes sound energy), with individuals verbally reporting the information that they receive to other team members to help resolve uncertainty in the operational environment (low information integration). We compared this work design with one that ensured critical information was more readily available to all team members (high information integration). We used the Event Analysis of Systemic Teamwork (EAST) method to analyse task, information, and social networks for novice teams operating within a simulated submarine control room under low versus high information integration. Integration impacted team member centrality (importance relative to other operators) and the nature of information shared. Team members with greater centrality reported higher workload. Higher integration across consoles altered how team members interacted and their relative status, the information shared, and how workload was distributed. However, overall network structures remained intact.

Wider integration (distribution) of information within teams in a simulated submarine control room altered the content of the information shared between team members and the centrality and workload of team members. Practitioners must consider how to integrate information in sociotechnical systems such that information traditionally held by specialist positions can be distributed within teams to benefit team performance and other outcomes.

The Impact of Information Integration in a Simulation of Future Submarine Command and Control.

OBJECTIVE: Examine the extent to which increasing information integration across displays in a simulated submarine command and control room can reduce operator workload, improve operator situation awareness, and improve team performance. BACKGROUND: In control rooms, the volume and number of sources of information are increasing, with the potential to overwhelm operator cognitive capacity. It is proposed that by distributing information to maximize relevance to each operator role (increasing information integration), it is possible to not only reduce operator workload but also improve situation awareness and team performance. METHOD: Sixteen teams of six novice participants were trained to work together to combine data from multiple sensor displays to build a tactical picture of surrounding contacts at sea. The extent that data from one display were available to operators at other displays was manipulated (information integration) between teams. Team performance was assessed as the accuracy of the generated tactical picture. RESULTS: Teams built a more accurate tactical picture, and individual team members had better situation awareness and lower workload, when provided with high compared with low information integration. CONCLUSION: A human-centered design approach to integrating information in command and control settings can result in lower workload, and enhanced situation awareness and team performance. APPLICATION: The design of modern command and control rooms, in which operators must fuse increasing volumes of complex data from displays, may benefit from higher information integration based on a human-centered design philosophy, and a fundamental understanding of the cognitive work that is carried out by operators.

Perceptual experience shapes our ability to categorize faces by national origin: A new other-race effect.

People are better at recognizing own-race than other-race faces. This other-race effect has been argued to be the result of perceptual expertise, whereby face-specific perceptual mechanisms are tuned through experience. We designed new tasks to determine whether other-race effects extend to categorizing faces by national origin. We began by selecting sets of face stimuli for these tasks that are typical in appearance for each of six nations (three Caucasian, three Asian) according to people from those nations (Study 1). Caucasian and Asian participants then categorized these faces by national origin (Study 2). Own-race faces were categorized more accurately than other-race faces. In contrast, Asian American participants, with more extensive other-race experience than the first Asian group, categorized other-race faces better than own-race faces, demonstrating a reversal of the other-race effect. Therefore, other-race effects extend to the ability to categorize faces by national origin, but only if participants have greater perceptual experience with own-race, than other-race faces. Study 3 ruled out non-perceptual accounts by showing that Caucasian and Asian faces were sorted more accurately by own-race than other-race participants, even in a sorting task without any explicit labelling required. Together, our results demonstrate a new other-race effect in sensitivity to national origin of faces that is linked to perceptual expertise.

Beyond opponent coding of facial identity: Evidence for an additional channel tuned to the average face.

Face identity can be represented in a multidimensional space centered on the average. It has been argued that the average acts as a perceptual norm, with the norm coded implicitly by balanced activation in pairs of channels that respond to opposite extremes of face dimensions (two-channel model). In Experiment 1 we used face identity aftereffects to distinguish this model from a narrow-band multichannel model with no norm. We show that as adaptors become more extreme, aftereffects initially increase sharply and then plateau. Crucially there is no decrease, ruling out narrow-band multichannel coding, but consistent with a two-channel norm-based model. However, these results leave open the possibility that there may be a third channel, tuned explicitly to the norm (three-channel model). In Experiment 2 we show that alternating adaptation widens the range identified as the average whereas adaptation to the average narrows the range, consistent with the three-channel model. Explicit modeling confirmed the three-channel model as the best fit for the combined data from both experiments. However, a two-channel model with decision criteria allowed to vary between adapting conditions, also provided a very good fit. These results support opponent, norm-based coding of face identity with additional explicit coding of the norm. (PsycINFO Database Record

Aftereffects support opponent coding of expression.

We used aftereffects to investigate the coding mechanisms underlying perception of facial expression. Recent evidence that some dimensions are common to the coding of both expression and identity suggests that the same type of coding system could be used for both attributes. Identity is adaptively opponent coded by pairs of neural populations tuned to opposite extremes of relevant dimensions. Therefore, the authors hypothesized that expression would also be opponent coded. An important line of support for opponent coding is that aftereffects increase with adaptor extremity (distance from an average test face) over the full natural range of possible faces. Previous studies have reported that expression aftereffects increase with adaptor extremity. Critically, however, they did not establish the extent of the natural range and so have not ruled out a decrease within that range that could indicate narrowband, multichannel coding. Here the authors show that expression aftereffects, like identity aftereffects, increase linearly over the full natural range of possible faces and remain high even for impossibly distorted adaptors. These results suggest that facial expression, like face identity, is opponent coded. (PsycINFO Database Record

How Well Do Computer-Generated Faces Tap Face Expertise?

The use of computer-generated (CG) stimuli in face processing research is proliferating due to the ease with which faces can be generated, standardised and manipulated. However there has been surprisingly little research into whether CG faces are processed in the same way as photographs of real faces. The present study assessed how well CG faces tap face identity expertise by investigating whether two indicators of face expertise are reduced for CG faces when compared to face photographs. These indicators were accuracy for identification of own-race faces and the other-race effect (ORE)-the well-established finding that own-race faces are recognised more accurately than other-race faces. In Experiment 1 Caucasian and Asian participants completed a recognition memory task for own- and other-race real and CG faces. Overall accuracy for own-race faces was dramatically reduced for CG compared to real faces and the ORE was significantly and substantially attenuated for CG faces. Experiment 2 investigated perceptual discrimination for own- and other-race real and CG faces with Caucasian and Asian participants. Here again, accuracy for own-race faces was significantly reduced for CG compared to real faces. However the ORE was not affected by format. Together these results signal that CG faces of the type tested here do not fully tap face expertise. Technological advancement may, in the future, produce CG faces that are equivalent to real photographs. Until then caution is advised when interpreting results obtained using CG faces.

How distinct is the coding of face identity and expression? Evidence for some common dimensions in face space.

Traditional models of face perception emphasize distinct routes for processing face identity and expression. These models have been highly influential in guiding neural and behavioural research on the mechanisms of face perception. However, it is becoming clear that specialised brain areas for coding identity and expression may respond to both attributes and that identity and expression perception can interact. Here we use perceptual aftereffects to demonstrate the existence of dimensions in perceptual face space that code both identity and expression, further challenging the traditional view. Specifically, we find a significant positive association between face identity aftereffects and expression aftereffects, which dissociates from other face (gaze) and non-face (tilt) aftereffects. Importantly, individual variation in the adaptive calibration of these common dimensions significantly predicts ability to recognize both identity and expression. These results highlight the role of common dimensions in our ability to recognize identity and expression, and show why the high-level visual processing of these attributes is not entirely distinct.

Aftereffects support opponent coding of face gender.

Many aspects of faces derived from structural information appear to be neurally represented using norm-based opponent coding. Recently, however, Zhao, Seriès, Hancock, and Bednar (2011) have argued that another aspect with a strong structural component, namely face gender, is instead multichannel coded. Their conclusion was based on finding that face gender aftereffects initially increased but then decreased for adaptors with increasing levels of gender caricaturing. Critically, this interpretation rests on the untested assumption that caricaturing the differences between male and female composite faces increases perceived sexual dimorphism (masculinity/femininity) of faces. We tested this assumption in Study 1 and found that it held for male, but not female faces. A multichannel account cannot, therefore, be ruled out, although a decrease in realism of adaptors was observed that could have contributed to the decrease in aftereffects. However, their aftereffects likely reflect low-level retinotopic adaptation, which was not minimized for most of their participants. In Study 2 we minimized low-level adaptation and found that face gender aftereffects were strongly positively related to the perceived sexual dimorphism of adaptors. We found no decrease for extreme adaptors, despite testing adaptors with higher perceived sexual dimorphism levels than those used by Zhao et al. These results are consistent with opponent coding of higher-level dimensions related to the perception of face gender.