Dear HFES PPTG Members,
We hope that, like us, you look back with satisfaction on the recent HFES conference, with well-attended and engaging sessions. The PPTG had two highly informative and well-received sessions during the conference, contributing to the knowledge and expertise exchange within our technical group. Additionally, our social get-together on Tuesday evening provided an informal setting for PPTG members to connect, network, and share insights in a relaxed and convivial atmosphere. We would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to all the PPTG members who participated and contributed to the success of these events. We would especially like to thank the reviewers and program chairs, their efforts are essential to make this possible.
With the conference, our annual highlight, behind us, it is time to briefly look back at what we achieved last year. Last year we supported some of our students with a PPTG Student Research Grant. We provided two $500 grants for HFES student members to conduct independent research related to perception and performance. It was a pleasure to read and hear about the research the students carried out during the last annual meeting. We will therefore make a PPTG Student Research Grant available again this year. More information about this will follow soon.
Last year we organized a webinar about reproducible research. An important topic with which we hope to contribute to knowledge sharing within our community. See https://learn.hfes.org/products/hfes-pptg-webinar-reproducible-workflows-make-your-life-easier-and-increase-the-value-of-your-research. Do you have a proposal for a webinar that suits the PPTG? Then we are happy to help you to actually organize this. Contact us for more information.
During our meeting, we presented the 2023 PPTG student paper award. Out of ten excellent papers, our reviewers selected Cody Poole’s article ” Information Access Costs with a Wide-Angle Desktop Display” as the winning paper. Please take the time to read a description of the work at the end of this newsletter. On behalf of our TG I would like to congratulate Cody Poole again on this achievement. We invite students to prepare a paper for next year’s student paper award again. We will review the paper on (i) scientific substance/impact of the work, (ii) quality of writing, and (iii) the student’s contribution to work.
Last year we concluded that we would like to further exchange knowledge on (i) perception research technologies, such as eye-tracking, (ii) perception support technologies, such as haptic feedback, (iii) human perception characteristics, such as visual impairment and auditory aspects of perception, and (iv) types of information presentation to improve understandability of information and/or to improve task performance. At HFES 2023 this list of topics of interested was extended with an interest with perception and performance research related to remote control in a broad range of domains, such as remote vessel / train / unmanned aerial systems, remote process control such as in nuclear / offshore environments, and remote control in healthcare and space mission control environments. We would like to invite you all to prepare research papers on these topics for our annual meeting next year. If there is sufficient interest in the topic of remote control, we will try to organize a special session around this topic in cooperation with other TG’s. More information about the submission and review process will follow once we receive more guidance from the HFES / ASPIRE 2024 organization.
This summer we sent out a call for nominations for next year’s PPTG officers. We are happy to announce that we have received one nomination for each position. We will soon inform you about the elections, where you can vote to ratify the nominations.
Stay tuned for upcoming PPTG news, activities and initiatives as we continue to promote excellence in the field of human factors and ergonomics within the technical group. Coming year we aim to continue to support our student members. Make sure you inform yourself about the criteria we have for those who want to apply for next year’s best student paper award, a student research grant, or financial support to travel to the annual meeting. We’re also open to suggestions from your side on how we could even better support our students.
Best regards,
Ellemieke van Doorn
PPTG 2023 Student Paper Award – abstract:
Title: Information Access Costs with a Wide-Angle Desktop Display.
In choosing where to present information on large displays, multiple monitors, and head-mounted displays, the potential arises to create access costs associated with placing information outside of the immediate field of view. The current experiment examined performance tradeoffs associated with increasing information access effort ranging from 16 to 128 degrees of lateral separation on a wide-angle desktop display. During a spatial integration task, participants indicated whether grid coordinate numbers shown in one location on the screen were within a designated zone on a map displayed in another location. Results showed a significant non-linear trend of head movements, a linear trend of response time, and no effect on error, when the two pieces of information were displayed at greater separation distances. These results have implications for designing visual displays, suggesting where information access effort needs to be considered when scanning for information outside of the immediate field of view.