An Experimental Approach to Measuring Resilience Potential: Interactions in a Breakfast Cooking Task

Abstract: Industrial systems that form the basis of our daily lives, such as railroads, medicine, and aviation, function as socio-technical systems with complex and large-scale characteristics. As a methodology for the safe operation of such systems, measures to enhance "resilience potential," the ability to flexibly respond to changes in circumstances, such as unexpected behavior or unknown events, are attracting attention. Through an experimental approach, this study aims to clarify what strategies and cognitive factors cause differences in performance among operators and how these differences relate to resilience potential. Furthermore, by defining the characteristics of resilient behaviors from the experimental results, we will examine interaction designs to promote these behaviors.MethodThis study focused on the relationship between non-technical skill (NTS), a general-purpose task performance skill, and resilience and formulated the following experimental hypotheses.(1) Participants with higher NTS will behave more resiliently, resulting in higher work performance.(2) When a sudden change occurs, the information and strategies used by the high NTS group will differ from those of the low NTS group.The participants in the experiment were 23 university students. They completed a questionnaire to measure NTS before the experimental tasks. In the experiment, participants were asked to play an application game that implements Craik & Bialystok's Breakfast cooking task: prepare a breakfast set (toast, fried eggs, and coffee) for the number of people ordered at any given time. Additional orders for coffee, fried eggs, and toast alone may be placed, and the task requires that all the ordered items be cooked as quickly as possible without making any mistakes. This task is characterized by the fact that only the goal to be achieved is given, and the procedures and strategies along the way are left to the participants' judgment. This is similar to the characteristics of air traffic control operations, a well-known task that requires resilience potential. The experiment consisted of five scenarios. Scenarios 1, 2, and 4 were steady-state scenarios, while scenarios 3 and 5 were emergency scenarios. In the steady-state scenario, participants were asked to operate one application, while in the emergency scenario, they were asked to perform two applications in parallel. We designed the emergency scenarios to observe the resilience potential, an adaptive response to changing circumstances where accustomed methods do not work. The measurement data were task performance, gaze data, and post-task interviews. Task performance was evaluated regarding the time required to complete the task and the number of errors.Result and DiscussionThe experimental results showed no correlation between NTS scores and work performance. Thus, hypothesis (1) was not supported. Next, we compared the gaze data of the groups with high and low NTS scores. We found several areas on the experimental screen where the gaze accumulation amount differed significantly. In particular, the group with high NTS scores looked at the work progress indicator more than those with low NTS scores. On the other hand, the group with low NTS scores saw more buttons that became active when work was completed than those with high NTS scores. Compared to the post-interview results, the high NTS score group was found to be actively managing their progress. On the other hand, the group with low NTS scores did not address their progress in detail but only checked whether the work was completed using button expressions. These results suggest that hypothesis (2) is likely to be supported.

Keywords: resilience potential, interaction design, non-technical skills, cognitive experiment

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1004864

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