Sunday, April 07, 2024
Last week we talked about Human Performance and how it can contribute to accidents and how understanding that we are all human and we can all make mistakes can help us all minimize those mistakes and lessen their impact. We all need to help each other remember to be safe, wear our PPE, challenge, fill out our pre-task cards, take the JHA seriously and actually develop one that specifically applies to what we are doing today and keep in mind that safety is not a routine or a process that we robotically do every day. It is something that we need to be focused on, every day, all day long. This week we are going to start looking at how the human brain processes information and hold attention and how that can affect incidents, safety and interaction. The brain processes information in a series of interactive stages:
(1) Attention — where and to what we intentionally or unintentionally direct our concentration.
(2) Sensing — sensory inputs (hearing, seeing, touching, smelling, etc.) receive and transfer information.
(3) Encoding, storage, thinking — incoming information is encoded and stored for later use in decision making (i.e., what to do with information). This stage of information processing involves interaction between the working memory and long-term memory (capabilities, knowledge, past experiences, opinions, and perspectives).
(4) Retrieval, acting — taking physical human action based on the synthesis of attention, sensation, encoded information, thinking, and decision-making. In a workplace environment this would include changing the state of a component using controls, tools, and computers, including verbal statements to inform or direct others. J Rasmussen, a leading engineer with IEEE who is working to develop models to help with human interaction with cybernetics and automation has developed a model for classifying human error into three different performance modes. These modes seem like an interesting way to break down our responses to certain items and a way to analyze how we can help prevent error through understanding. According to Rasmussen’s model used to classify human error, workers operate in one or more of three human performance modes: rule-based mode, skill-based mode, and knowledge-based mode.
[Citations: See Rasmussen, J. (1983); Skills, rules, and knowledge; signals, signs, and symbols, and other distinctions in human performance models. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, (3), 257–266]
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