Plane and Simple

Mason’s Psychology Department studies how even small cockpit disruptions can cause serious safety issues

By Colleen Kearney Rich, MFA ’95

Interruptions at work are annoying, but for some professionals—pilots, for example—they can be dangerous. That is why Professor Deborah Boehm-Davis, chair of Mason’s Psychology Department, and her research team in the department’s ARCH Lab are looking at the problem in a variety of ways.

Mason’s ARCH Lab forms a bridge between cognitive theory and its applications. Boehm-Davis’s area of expertise is cognitive psychology, and her focus is on human factors and applied cognition, also known as ergonomics.

“The physical [aspects of ergonomics are] easier for people to understand,” she says. Most people can see how ergonomics applies to work situations or cars, for example. But Boehm-Davis and her colleagues more often look at the unseen, the cognitive component of how users react to things and process information.

Funded by a grant from NASA, doctoral student Melanie Diez LeGoullon is investigating interruptions in the cockpit and sequential errors. For her part of the ARCH Lab projects, LeGoullon actually boarded planes for an observational study and developed a computational cognitive model of a pilot executing a checklist to help make predictions about task resumption after interruptions.

Boehm-Davis is quick to point out that the research isn’t just about pilots and aviation. It can apply to many situations, such as people using global positioning systems in cars.

“I’m more interested in the human–computer interaction,” says Boehm-Davis. Sometimes the research can involve breaking down a task, redesigning or improving a current product, or providing training to compensate for what the product isn’t able to help the user do.

Doctoral student David Cades is also looking at interruptions, but from a different point of view. He is trying to better understand how people in general deal with interruptions, working from theories on interruptions developed by Greg Trafton of the Naval Research Laboratory, who spends one day a week at Mason as part of an agreement between the labs.

“Here we are looking at routine behavior, and the time it takes to fundamentally get back on task,” Boehm-Davis says. “Timing is everything”—especially if that person is flying an airplane or operating a vehicle.

“Interruptions are inevitable in a work environment,” Cades says. “But if we can understand how people deal with interruptions and what it takes for them to resume a task, then we can look at how we can better train them to deal with those interruptions.” For his research, Cades has worked with human subjects from a research pool of undergraduate and graduate students maintained by the Psychology Department. The lab has a flight simulator and a driving simulator that arrived in the spring.

“It will be great to look at some of these things in an applied setting,” says Cades. “People still have a significant number of accidents a year because they are changing the channel on the radio or adjusting the heat.”

Boehm-Davis sees bad design everywhere she looks. Just get her talking about ergonomics and she will whip out her cell phone to give you a few examples. She can point to countless other instances in everyday life.

“The design should lead you to do the right thing,” she explains. “Designers need to understand people and their limitations, how the design helps or hinders performance.”

Boehm-Davis has been a principal investigator at the ARCH Lab for more than 20 years. Her current research falls into three categories: transportation, the influence of interruptions on performance, and cognitive workload. Before joining Mason in 1984, she worked in applied cognitive research at General Electric, NASA Ames, and Bell Laboratories. Over the years, she has worked on projects funded by the Office of Naval Research and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. A large portion of her research has also been supported by the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) and NASA, and has focused on pilots and their performance.

Boehm-Davis’s relationship with the FAA has been a long and happy one, encompassing all kinds of projects from evaluating the effectiveness of programs to developing training for the organization. “They love it when we are able to give them tools.”

“Yes, publishing papers is great, but when you redesign something and it is safer,” says Boehm-Davis, “well, that’s something you don’t often find in academia. That’s what really attracts me to this part of psychology.”