Friday, September 14, 2007

High Velocity Human Factors

I was personally introduced to the concept of High Velocity Human Factors on Wednesday by the designer who I believe coined the phrase - Moin Rahman of Motorola. It is a great concept and a rich area for human factors design.

Basically, the idea is that there are contexts/environments that operate at very high speeds. Police, military, firefighting, etc. In these situations, the way people sense, perceive, assess, and react may be fundamentally different. But no one has really delved into how. It is likely that emotional contributions to information processing increases. But again, we don't know quite how.
There is evidence that emotion and time pressure both narrow the scope of attention. Emotion may also affect color perception. Emotion could also cause priming of particular response schema.

I am really looking forward to getting involved in this research domain and finding out. If interested, let me know. We are always looking for more collaborators.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

More details on the wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_velocity_human_factors

Anonymous said...

High velocity human factors and the future of police technology and systems:
http://www.policeone.com/police-products/vehicle-equipment/articles/1646301/

Ryry the Adventurous said...

Hi Again,

What a coincidence! I just recently started researching this area of Human Factors myself... lo and behold, wikipedia redirected me back to your blog! I am absolutely enamored and facinated by the possibilities of research and into this area. I wanted to run to Amazon and buy up all the books I could find... but then realized that this field is so new, there isn't any material, except the writings of Mr. Rahman (which he very kindly sent me to read).

Are there many others out there who also have become suddenly introduced to and drawn to this new development?