Engineering Commons^™

Human Behavior During Spaceflight: Evidence From An Analog Environment, Kenny Mikael Arnaldi

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Spaceflight offers a multitude of stressors to humans living and working in space, originating from the external space environment and the life-support system. Future space participants may be ordinary people with different medical and psychosocial backgrounds who may not receive the intense spaceflight preparation of astronauts. Consequently, during a mission, a space participant’s mood and behavior could differ from a trained astronaut. This study was an exploratory research project that used an artificial habitat to replicate an orbital environment and the activities performed by humans in space. The study evaluated whether the type of environment affects mood and temperament. Two …

Reliability Of Eyewitness Reports To A Major Aviation Accident, Dave English, Michael Kuzel

International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace

There is a paucity of studies on the reliability of eyewitness reports to aviation crashes. We examine witness statements to a widely observed major airline accident to determine if reported accident investigator distrust of details in eyewitness reports is supported by empirical evidence. The extensive archival witness record (N > 300) of a wide-body airliner crash in clear daylight conditions is subjected to statistical analysis to test eyewitness reliability. Even with over 200 witnesses within a three square kilometre (1.6 square mile) area answering a binary observation question, the variance is sometimes high enough to preclude forming statistically significant conclusions …

Differential Effects Of Refractive Blur On Day And Nighttime Driving Performance, Joanne M. Wood, Michael J. Collins, Alex Chaparro, Ralph Marszalek, Trent Carberry, Philippe Lacherez, Byoung Sun Chu

Publications

PURPOSE. To investigate the effect of different levels of refractive blur on real-world driving performance measured under day and nighttime conditions.

METHODS. Participants included 12 visually normal, young adults (mean age = 25.+- 5.2 years) who drove an instrumented research vehicle around a 4 km closed road circuit with three different levels of binocular spherical refractive blur (+0.50 diopter sphere [DS], +1.00 DS, +2.00 DS) compared with a baseline condition. The subjects wore optimal spherocylinder correction and the additional blur lenses were mounted in modified fullfield goggles; the order of testing of the blur conditions was randomized. Driving …

Examining The Relationship Between Familiarity And Reliability Of Automation In The Cockpit, Rian Mehta, Steven Rice, Scott Winter

Publications

This study sought to determine the correlation between familiarity and perceptions of reliability, as associated to specific aviation-related automated devices. Participants’ experience levels ranged from non-pilots to novice pilots to certified flight instructors. It was hypothesized that familiarity has a direct correlation with ratings of reliability for various aviation-related automated devices and that the correlation across devices for each participant would be positive. The researchers expected to find a difference in the familiarity-reliability relationship as a function of experience. Findings showed that there was a significant positive correlation between familiarity and reliability for every single automated device. A positive correlation …