Informed by Knowledge

Expert Performance in Complex Situations

Kathleen L. Mosier,Ute M. Fischer

• Éditeur: Psychology Press
• Année: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136945106
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Psychologie
• Sous-sujet: Psychologie cognitive et cognition

The focus of this book is on how experts adapt to complexity, synthesize and interpret information in context, and transform or "fuse" disparate items of information into coherent knowledge. The chapters examine these processes across experts (e.g. global leaders, individuals in extreme environments, managers, police officers, pilots, commanders, doctors, inventors), across contexts (e.g. space and space analogs, corporate organizations, command and control, crisis and crowd management, air traffic control, the operating room, product development), and for both individual and team performance. Successful information integration is a key factor in the success of diverse endeavors, including team attempts to climb Mt. Everest, crowd control in the Middle East, and remote drilling operations.

This volume is divided into four sections, each with a specific focus on an area of expert performance, resulting in a text that covers a wide range of useful information. These sections present well-researched discussions, such as: the management of complex situations in various fields and decision contexts; technological and training approaches to facilitate knowledge management by individual experts and expert teams; new or neglected perspectives in expert decision making; and the importance of 'modeling' expert performance through techniques and frameworks such as Cognitive Task Analysis, computational architectures based on the notion of causal belief mapping such as 'Convince Me, ' or the data/frame model of sensemaking.

The volume provides essential reading for researchers and practitioners of Naturalistic Decision Making and those who study Expertise; Organizational and Cognitive Psychologists; and researchers and students in Business and Engineering.

Part I
Managing Complexity

Discussions from Various Fields and Decision Contexts

1
NDM Issues in Extreme Environments

Judith Orasanu

NASA Ames Research Center

Phil Lieberman

Brown University

Summiting Mt. Everest. A three-year mission to Mars. Fighting the World Trade Center inferno. Coast Guard rescue at sea. Urban warfare. Overwintering in Antarctica. What do these activities have in common? They all are cases of human performance in extreme environments. Decision making in these environments is critical to both the survival of the participants and the completion of the mission.

Why should we care about these environments? We care because we know that stressors of many types associated with extreme environments can significantly influence cognitive processes in general and decision making in particular. While these environments may appear exotic, in fact they are ubiquitous in our modern society. People routinely choose to work or play in these environments for a variety of reasons. Humans push the frontiers in search of knowledge, personal achievement, and maintenance of peace and security. As noted by the Society for Human Performance in Extreme Environments (HPEE), “Endeavors under the earth and sea, at the Earth’s poles, and in space have afforded numerous benefits to humankind and illustrate some of our greatest achievements” (HPEE, Web site).

Extreme environments are the next frontier of naturalistic decision making. These environments add new dimensions to expert decision making and performance in terms of physical and psychological stressors, interpersonal issues, and threats to cognitive functioning and general mental health. Understanding the impact of features of these environments on human functioning will also enhance our knowledge of naturalistic decision making.

In this chapter we define extreme environments (EEs) and discuss their effect on individual and team cognitive processes and decision making. We summarize the existing research on EEs, including studies from past space missions, simulations, and analog environments. Our focus then turns to the issues of what principles can be learned and generalized across different extreme environments, and what current knowledge and principles from NDM can inform future research in extreme environments. In addressing these issues, we will use human functioning during longduration space missions as our primary focus.

Extreme Environments

Manzey and Lorenz (1998) define extreme environments as “settings that possess extraordinary physical, psychological, and interpersonal demands that require significant human adaptation for survival and performance.” While many dimensions have been used to characterize various extreme environments (Sells, 1973), we find the following three to be most useful: the ambient environment, the social environment, and the nature of the task. Sauer, Wastell, and Hockey (1997) also include the technological environment. Several categories can be identified on the basis of these three factors, as shown in Figure 1.1.

Ambient Extremes

When we think of extreme environments, we typically imagine those that are inhospitable to life in the absence of life-sustaining technologies. These include outer space, underwater, deserts, polar regions, and high altitudes, as well as transient extreme environments, such as wildfires or urban fires and infectious disease areas (see Figure 1.1d). By requiring life-sustaining or protective habitats and equipment, these environments impose a number of constraints on human well-being and performance, and can be further subcategorized by several features that will be described in the next section. People sometimes place themselves in these extreme environments for reasons other than work, namely, for sport or the experience of being there, such as climbing Mt. Everest or scuba diving (Figure 1.1c).

Social Extremes

Other ambient environments are not inherently inhospitable to life, but the social environment is hazardous, such as working in a prison, hostage negotiations, human intelligence work, crisis management, mob control, peacekeeping operations, and all aspects of war (Figure 1.1b).

Task Extremes

The final category includes those in which the human activity itself is extreme, even though the ambient and social environments might not be inherently dangerous were participants not engaged in the extreme activity. Examples include rock climbing, bungee jumping, auto racing, Olympic athletics, and other extreme sports (Figure 1.1a).

FIGURE 1.1 Categories of extreme environments from least (a) to most (d) extreme.

In this chapter we are most concerned with environments and activities in Figure 1.1c and d because of their relevance to space missions.

Space as an Extreme Environment

Space missions epitomize extreme work environments. Outer space is completely inhospitable to human life and requires a technologically sophisticated habitat and life support system. Kanas and Manzey (2003) note four primary classes of stressors in space—physical, habitability, psychological, and interpersonal.

Physical stressors are those associated with traveling in or being in the space environment: acceleration changes, microgravity, ionizing radiation, impacts from meteoroids or space debris, and the nature of light-dark cycles.

Habitability stressors arise from the space vehicle and habitat: constant noise generated by onboard equipment, vibration, temperature, lighting (typically low), and air quality.

Psychological stressors include isolation from family and friends, confinement in a limited space, ever-present dangers of working in a hostile environment and the potential for life-threatening system failures, restricted sensory cues, monotony of routine, crowding, and limited privacy and personal space.

Interpersonal stressors may be associated with enforced social contact with other crewmembers, gender or culture of crewmembers, personality conflicts, crew size and leadership.

Space-specific stressors are in addition to those transient stressors that may be found in many high-risk environments on earth: high workload, time pressure and imminent danger in the face of critical system failures, inadequate or ambiguous information, or novel events with uncertain outcomes. One of the most pervasive and significant physiological issues in space missions is sleep and circadian disruption: Sleep tends to be limited and of poor quality, in part due to the constant ambient noise and limited privacy in the habitat, but also due to “slam shifting,” or shifting to the time schedule that matches earth time when a shuttle crew arrives at the station. Astronauts average about six hours of sleep per night, a level considered chronic deprivation for most people on earth and associated with decrements in cognitive performance (Mollicone, Van Dongen, Rogers, & Dinges, 2008).

During missions to the moon and ultimately to Mars, crews are likely to encounter problems that do not have scripted solutions. Problems may arise with the habitat, equipment, automated systems, science procedures, EVA gear, or health of the crew. Coping with unforeseen problems most likely will require team effort. Mission Control has significant resources to assist with problem resolution, but communication lags during Mars missions of up to 20 minutes (each way) or even total disruption mean that, on occasion, crews will need to function on their own. Another stressor unique to Mars missions is the fact that the crew will be the first space travelers who will not be able to see the earth or distinguish it from other dots of light in the vastness of space.

NASA’s challenge is how to prepare crews for long-duration space missions, that is, how to select, compose, and train teams for effective performance, teamwork, and good psychosocial adjustment. In addition to premission preparation, technologies will be needed to monitor the crew’s functional capability during missions and to provide countermeasures that support performance and well-being.

Findings that form the basis for expectations about how individuals and crews might perform in long-duration missions come from three primary sources—prior space missions, ground-based space simulations, and space analogs.

Prior Space Missions

The history of space missions to date indicates that crews may adapt quite well to these unusual circumstances (see Harrison, 2001; Suedfeld, 2005, for discussions of the salutogenic consequences of space travel). However, in some cases negative impacts have been found for cognitive, social, and emotional functioning.

Modern space missions can be separated into two major categories: (1) relatively brief shuttle missions that are about two weeks long and are used to transport replacement and visiting crewmembers to an orbiting vehicle, such as the Russian Mir or the International Space Station (ISS), and (2) long-duration missions. The longer-duration orbital missions typically last around six months, although actual durations have varied for both planned and unplanned reasons. Valeri Polyakov’s 14-month stay aboard Mir, beginning in January 1994, still holds the record for the longest continuous spaceflight by a single person. The initial crew size while the ISS was being built was three; following September 11, 2001, it was reduced to two, but in 2006 it increased again to three. When shuttles arrive the crew can grow to 10 or 11. Since expansion of the ISS living quarters in 2009, the crew size has grown to its full complement of six. Mir and the ISS were designed as research laboratories for long-term studies, including long-term biomedical research on the human crew.

Cognitive Effects

Research on short (six-day) shuttle and Mir missions found no significant impairment of cognitive functioning associated with being in space (Kanas & Manzey, 2003). However, these initial studies only tested simple cognitive processes. This situation was remedied by including complex cognitive tasks drawn from the Standardized Tests for Research with Environmental Stressors (STRES) (AGARD, 1989). The single-subject study conducted during an eight-day Mir mission compared in-flight performance with pre- and post-mission measures. Again, no impairments of speed or accuracy of basic cognitive functions were found, but decrements emerged on a complex psychomotor task (unstable tracking) and in a dual task that made greater demands on attentional control (unstable tracking plus memory search) (Manzey & Lorenz, 1998).

The same instrument battery was used in a long-duration Mir mission (in fact, the 438-day record-setting one). Measures were taken 41 times and compared with baseline and post-mission performance. Initial decrements were observed during the first month on the tracking task and the dual task while the cosmonaut went through an adaptation period, but then returned to baseline levels. Performance on some measures actually improved over time. The performance decrements were closely coupled with perceptions of workload and subjective mood ratings (Manzey & Lorenz, 1998). Similarly, Nechaev (2001) reported that crew “errors” were likely to occur when there were disturbances in the usual work-rest schedule, high workload, or psychosomatic distress. These studies suggest that cognitive functioning of well-adjusted and highly trained space travelers might be expected to be robust despite the stressors of space, at least over the periods studied.

Behavioral Health Effects

Short-duration space missions do not induce significant behavioral/mental health issues. Given that these missions are only two weeks in duration, the general wisdom is that crewmembers can basically “tough it out” for that brief period and deal with any problems after returning to terra firma.

In contrast, anecdotal reports indicate that adjustment problems and somatoform disorders (i.e., psychosomatic reactions) occurred in long-duration Mir missions (Kanas & Manzey, 2003). For instance, Valentine Lebedev (1988) reported that his “nerves were always on the edge, I get jumpy at any minor irritation.” After his experience on board the Russian orbiter Mir, U.S. astronaut John Blaha commented that he never anticipated the situation would be so stressful—or that it would interfere so much with his performance (Burrough, 1998).

The most systematic study on individual and crew functioning in space was conducted by Kanas and his colleagues (Kanas et al., 2001a). They collected weekly data from both U.S. and Russian crewmembers aboard the Mir and Mission Control personnel in both countries using several scales tapping individual mood and group climate. Compared to the normative sample, the space crews expressed less dysphoria and higher cohesion, leadership, and management control (Kanas et al., 2001b). When stress and mood disturbance were experienced, crewmembers tended to displace it to outside supervisors (Kanas et al., 2001c).

Interpersonal Issues and Crew Cohesion

Interpersonal tensions were rarely a problem on brief shuttle missions, but tended to emerge about six weeks into longer missions, after the crew had become adjusted to life in the space environment (Kanas & Manzey, 2003). Analysis of the critical incident logs in the shuttle/Mir study (Kanas et al., 2001a) revealed that U.S. crews reported more interpersonal problems than Russians (e.g., feeling unsupported by other crewmembers or conflicts with Mission Control personnel). The fact that the Americans were guests on Mir with two Russian cosmonauts and with Russian Mission Control being the lead control center may explain this finding. These relatively positive results led Kanas and Manzey to conclude that “negative interpersonal phenomena that occur during long-duration space missions are related more to psychosocial pressures from the stressful and confined conditions than to individual personality weaknesses” (Kanas & Manzey, 2003, p. 96).

Simulated Space Missions

Given the limited number of crewmembers from past space missions and the absence of systematic data from those crews, space agencies have turned to realistic simulations of space missions to study issues associated with crew functioning. These missions in hyperbaric chambers, which mimic the habitat and operations of the shuttle, Mir, or ISS, have run for durations from 4 days to 240 days.

One simulation of note that addressed crew decision making was a 60-day study run by the European Space Agency (ESA) in 1992, the Experimental Campaign for the European Manned Space Infrastructure (EXEMSI) (Hockey & Sauer, 1996). In addition to collecting biomedical and physiological data (as during a real space mission), the four crewmembers also performed a decision task every workday (40 trials each) using a simulated task that involved monitoring the cabin air quality to determine whether one of a set of possible contaminants exceeded safety criteria. This task required memory and strategic skills in order to maintain accuracy. The study found different strategies for adapting to the stress of continued isolation and confinement. Two of the four crewmembers were able to maintain low error rates throughout the two months of the study, but at a cost of increased cognitive effort and slowing of performance. The other two crewmembers’ performance accuracy decreased over time, with little evidence of increased cognitive effort. While this was a realistic decision task, it was more structured than those typically used in NDM studies. However, an important contribution of this methodology is its finding that cognitive stress effects are not always evident in the product, but must be sought in indirect measures, such as response time, information search, or subjective ratings of effort or fatigue (Hockey & Sauer, 1996). The EXEMSI study also provided observations related to crew psychosocial adjustment. Despite composing the crew based on a theoretical framework for crew compatibility, two dominant crewmembers exhibited conflict over leadership. However, overall the crew adjusted well to the two-month isolation.

A longer isolation study conducted by the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems (IBMP) in its ground simulator during 1999 resulted in much more interpersonal friction and behavioral health problems (Sandal, 2004). The Simulation of Flight of International Crew on Space Station (SFINCSS-99) included four Russian males who were onboard for 240 days; a second crew (one German and three Russian males) stayed in an adjoining chamber for 110 days, followed by a third multicultural gender-mixed crew for another 110 days. In addition, three shuttle crews visited for four or seven days. Several critical interpersonal incidents occurred during this mission, presumably resulting from lack of a common language as well as cultural differences concerning gender norms and conflict management strategies (Sandal, 2004).

Lessons learned from these and other simulation studies prepared IBMP and ESA to conduct the first Mars preparatory study, Mars-105 (ESA, 2009). A six-member male crew of four Russians, one French, and one German lived in the Russian simulator for 105 days, performing in scenarios as if they were actually traveling to Mars. Realistic crew tasks, including simulated emergencies and communication lags of up to 20 minutes, provided opportunities for researchers to observe how the crew performed under isolation and confinement for this duration. This is the first simulation study that included tasks to elicit naturalistic decision making. After analyzing data from this study (which was completed on July 14, 2009), a full Mars mission simulation will be conducted lasting 520 days, about half the duration of an actual round-trip to Mars.

To summarize, simulations of crews in the extreme environment of space have provided considerable information on interpersonal interactions, s...

Table des matières

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Preface
• Part I: Managing Complexity: Discussions from Various Fields and Decision Contexts
• Part II: Technological Support and Training for Knowledge Management
• Part III: Commentary: Overlooked Issues in Expert Decision Making
• Part IV: Outlook: New Methods and Approaches