I was invited to give a talk on this topic at National Tsing Hua University. Would like to share thoughts with everyone.

1. The role of emotion and
attention in ergonomics
Yang-Ming Huang
Department of Psychology
Fu Jen Catholic University

2. A bit of introduction
Education
Dept. of Psychology, University of
York, Ph.D
Work
Indiana University, PostDoc
Fu Jen Catholic University
Others
http://cogemonews.com
http://facebook.com/silverpsynews

3. Psychology & Ergonomics

4. What is psychology?
❖ From your own point of view

5. What does psychology has to do with ergonomics?
❖ The practice of designing products, systems or
processes to take proper account of the interaction
between them and the people who use them (adopted
from wiki)
❖ So it’s important to know how people who use them
think/feel

6. Attention

7. What is attention?
❖ According to William James
❖ “Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking
possession by the mind in clear and vivid form, of
one out of what seem several simultaneously possible
objects or trains of thought...It implies withdraw from
some things in order to deal effectively with others,
and is a condition which has a real opposite in the
confused, dazed, scatterbrained state."

8. Different types of attention
❖ Selective attention
❖ Divided attention
❖ Sustained attention

9. Attention & Ergonomics
❖ Does this scene looks familiar?

10. Attention & Ergonomics
❖ How do we fix this problem?
❖ Let’s use handsfree phone

11. Attention & Ergonomics
❖ In reality, handsfree phone didn’t really solve the
problem.
❖ We need to cure a distracted mind
❖ But how?

12. Attention & Ergonomics
❖ Let people from the other end see the traffic

13. Attention & Ergonomics
❖ Minimize cognitive load
❖ Restrict calls
❖ Simplified messages/alerts

14. Attention & Ergonomics
❖ Expand attentional resources
❖ Meditation
❖ Distraction

15. Attention & Ergonomics
❖ How to prevent people from making mistakes

16. Attention & Ergonomics
❖ How do we prevent pilots from making mistakes
❖ Automatization is the key
❖ Use alerts that truly captures attention

17. Attention & Ergonomics
❖ Task switching problem
❖ Nowadays, dual tasking is pretty common

18. Attention & Ergonomics
❖ How do we solve a problem like this?
❖ Split frame?

19. Attention & Ergonomics
❖ A Bottleneck is the bottleneck!
Reduce the need for dual-tasking

20. Emotion

21. What is emotion
❖ William James
❖ Our natural way of thinking about these standard
emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites
the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter
state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My thesis
on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly
the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact, and that our feeling
of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion.

22. Despite theoretical debate
❖ Emotion does contain
❖ body change
❖ cognitive aspect
❖ affective aspect

23. Emotion & Ergonomics
❖ Since emotion is very
complicated, it is probably
not suitable to
❖ Use single aspect to
decode one’s emotion

24. Emotion & Ergonomics
❖ Since emotion is very complicated, it is probably not
suitable to
❖ Just prompt stuff that induce positive emotion
Sad people prefer sad
music more

25. Emotion & Ergonomics
❖ Body posture differs

26. Emotion & Ergonomics
❖ Body Temperature

27. Emotion & Ergonomics
❖ Action tendency
❖ Behavior tendency
❖ Puppy Says

28. Emotion & Ergonomics
❖ Emotion & information processing style
❖ Global/Local processing
❖ Analytic vs. Heuristic thinking style

29. Emotion & Ergonomics
❖ Let’s see an example

30. To conclude

31. Humans are stupid
robots with a heart
It’s important to make
them feel touched