ERGONOMICS

WMSU IE 136
WESTERN MINDANAO STATE UNIVERSITY
 COGNITIVE
ERGONOMICS
BIRI | HADJULA | PAGADUAN
TOPIC OUTLINE:
1. Cognitive Limitations Exist in the Workplace

2. Human Capabilities and Limitations

3. The Sense

4. Human Cognitive Practices

SENSORY
STIMULI
COGNITIVE LIMITATIONS IN THE WORKPLACE
Cognitive Limitations in the Workplace:
1. Thefact that the human is a thinking, learning, processing being that is
constantly
changing, also poses some consistency problems for performance.
Example: The partial nuclear meltdown of the Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania,
USA, in 1979. (United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 2013).

2.In more production-related cases, the same assembly line and operators may be used to
produce multiple variants of a product, where the fundamental elements are the same but subtle
differences exist. This can often cause confusion or errors, leading operators to assemble parts
incorrectly.
HUMAN CAPABILITIES AND
LIMITATIONS
1. Our mental capacity changes with age.
2. Our cognitive abilities are a
combination of skills, experience,
pattern recognition, attention, memory,
ability to focus, expectations,
associations, generalization and the
ability to sort information into
Image reproduced with permission from: Alex Mit/ Shutterstock.com.
categories.
Figure 1: The human brain
3. Ourphysical well-being can have interprets information from the
a significant impact on these abilities. external environment.
THE SENSES
VISION
The most dominant sense that humans
use. Our field of vision in total extends about 170
degrees horizontally; the outer rim (peripheral)
of that field is good at detecting movement but
not detailed information.

LIGHT
Light is a form of electromagnetic radiation,
whose different wavelengths are interpreted by human
eyes as different colors. The visual photoreceptors in
the eyes are called the rods and cones.
TABLE 1: Parameters that influence vision
Contrast sensitivity is our ability to distinguish between light and dark, allowing us to see lines, text, shapes and
contours of objects. High contrast means that there is a large difference between black and white in the field of
CONTRAST view, while low contrast means more subtle differences on a grey scale. Our contrast sensitivity decreases as we
age, meaning that it becomes more important that readable information should have enough differentiation
between black and white.

Color is the result of how our brains interpret and distinguish different wavelengths of light. The receptors that
COLOR dominate color vision are the cones, which are centrally located in the eye’s retina. Different people have
different abilities to distinguish and interpret different colors, depending on age, education, culture and genetic
preconditions (such as color blindness).

DARK-ADAPTED Depending on the number of rods (the more numerous and sensitive receptors) in the eyes, our ability to see in
VISION the dark varies, with some people experiencing a brief period of inability to see. Also, in dark environments, our
ability to see different colors decreases.

DEPTH PERCEPTION This is the ability to distinguish how far away different objects are relative to each other. Our ability to perceive
depth is dependent on binocular (two-eyed) stereo vision and on previous experience and is decreased in the
dark.
MOVEMENT The human eye is very good at detecting movement (a remnant of our descent from stone-age hunter-gatherers),
which can sometimes be used as a deliberate way to attract attention to details or changes of status in a process.
DETECTION This is extensively used in software, for example progress bars and flashing advertisements on web pages.

GLARE Glare is irrelevant high-intensity light that does not contribute to better illumination, but instead irritates and
overwhelms our sense of vision, leading to temporary inability to see.
TABLE 2: Key design factors for presenting visual information
INTENSITY Particularly for displays and signs, the amount of light entering the human eye must not
cause glare, nor must it be too dimly lit for the eye to perceive contrast and color.
It is wise to be restrictive with color-coding critical information, or to provide a redundant
CHOICE OF backup system for interpreting the colors correctly. For example, color-blind people who
COLOR cannot distinguish red and green colors close together can still interpret traffic lights
correctly because the colors are separated and follow a consistent rule of where they are
positioned.
STRENGTH OF Different tasks require different lighting strengths to be sufficient. For example, high-
LIGHTING precision detail work demands much higher light compared to general office work lighting.
Recommended lighting levels for different types of work are available.
Sufficient contrast – i.e., difference in object luminance – is important for humans to be
CONTRAST able to distinguish symbols from their background, especially regarding written
information and alarm signals.
ANGLE OF Consider where in the human’s field of vision information must be placed to be perceived,
VISION the appropriate distance away from the eyes, and the angle that the neck must adopt to see
well. This should be designed in parallel with illumination of the object being viewed.
HEARING
Human hearing, like vision, is tightly coupled to our cognitive pattern
recognition skills, which helps us distinguish many nuances of sound – most of us can
correctly identify the direction a sound comes from, the volume, the pitch and even when
certain signals concern us or not, such as when hearing our name spoken in a noisy
environment or being able to filter out sounds that carry no meaning for us (in some
cases known as selective hearing).
TABLE 3: Parameters that influence sound and hearing
LOUDNESS Sound travels in waves, which have different amplitudes corresponding to loudness. The
(AMPLITUDE) ear has limits for how much loudness it can tolerate before permanent hearing injuries
occur.
Pitch or frequency (the wavelength of the sound) defines the “tone” of the sound, and
PITCH differences in pitch delivered in a sequence can be distinguished by the human ear as
(FREQUENCY) melody or signals that can be associated with meaning. The human ear (and body) has
sensitivity to a wide range of frequencies but is unable to hear very high pitches well (such
as dog-whistles).
Thanks to stereo hearing (involving both of our ears), humans can determine which
direction a sound is coming from by interpreting the differences in loudness and pitch
LOCATION between the two ears. This ability is so exact that it is possible to create “sound illusions”
(DIRECTION) that convince a listener that a sound source is moving in space. This is done by recording
sound in a quiet room, using two separate microphones spaced apart by about the width of a
human head.
TOUCH
The tactile sense, also known as haptics, is what allows us to perceive
differences in pressure, temperature and frequency (as in vibrations) – most frequently
through nerve receptors in our skin that are sensitive to stimulation from bending of
hairs in the skin, and to pain.
HUMAN COGNITIVE PROCESSES
COGNITION
It is the overall process of handling information.

Two Categories of Mental Processing of Information

1. Bottom-Up
2. Top-Down
ATTENTIO
N
ATTENTION
Attention means devoting a human’s mental resources to a task or event at hand.
UNDIVIDED ATTENTION
Undivided attention focuses all our cognitive processing capability to one stimulus.

• Theability to keep focus on a process for duration of time is called

alertnessor
vigilance.
• A lack of this support is called a monotonous task or environment and leads to
boredom
and decreased motivation.
• Boredom is a mental state where our brain deactivates certain nervous centers and the
MEMOR
Y
MEMORY
It is the process that allows learning through storage of information, experiences and
rules in the brain.

Divisions of Memory
1. Long-Term Memory
2. Short-Term/Working Memory (STM)

• An established rule of thumb is “The rule of 7”, which states that 7 ± 2 is the maximum
number of unrelated items the STM can store at the same time.
• “Framing” which means actively identifying a pattern, category or sequence that groups or
contextualizes the items into coherent chunks.
PERCEPTION
PERCEPTION
Refers to our capacity to take in information from the environment, associate it
with meaning and mentally organize it.

ILLUSIONS
Illusions are when our interpretation of sensory signals are mismatched with reality.
Example: Optical illusions and when the brain automatically filters out information that it has
learned to sort as meaningless.

Images sourced from Wikimedia Commons (both credited to Fibonacci/Wikimedia Commons, 2014a and 2014b)

Figure 2: Examples of optical illusions: in some cases, we a) see things that aren’t necessarily there,
as in the Kanisza triangle, or b) interpret the size of identical shapes (the orange dots are the same
size) incorrectly due to confusing “clues” from surrounding information, as in the Ebbinghaus
illusion.
 Image by C. Berlin

Figure 3: Many people cannot see anything wrong with this book
title.
MENTAL
MODELS
The idea of “mental models” provides a language for speaking about
expectations that people have. What is important is that these expectations sometimes
lead a worker or user to look for specific cues in order to interpret their surroundings or
a machine interface and will then interpret them according to previous knowledge and
experiences.

Example: The word “tree” is a visual or auditory signal that carries a symbolic
meaning, but that symbol does not actually tell us what the tree looks like, how tall it
is, how wide, how leafy, etc.
THANK YOU
FOR
LISTENING!
BIRI | HADJULA |
PAGADUAN