Evan M. Palmer

Review of Combat Identification Training: Technologies, Metrics, and Individual Differences

Combat identification (CID) has been studied throughout the 20th and into the 21st century, with a renewed interest in the topic in the past few decades. CID research has demonstrated that an emerging set of technologies could potentially mitigate some of the negative battlefield outcomes of failures in CID, including high rates of fratricide due to friendly fire. This paper discusses major CID research and provides an update on previous CID research by the authors. We review training technologies, effective measurement tools in this research, and important individual differences to consider for others researching training outcomes in relation to learning to differentiate between highly similar combat vehicles.

Recategorization of Video Game Genres

While the categories that are typically used to discriminate games have been useful in the past, more recently game mechanics have become utilized by a wider range of games, leading to earlier definitions becoming a less valuable categorization tool. This paper attempts to provide various ways games could be classified by focusing on the types of emotions they evoke, the skills they require or their relations with personality or cognitive variables. A description of those categories and the challenge in using them to define games is outlined as well as five alternate methods that may help make distinctions between games clearer.

The Effects of Color Vision Deficiencies on Medical Professionals and Proposed Countermeasures

Diagnosing various medical conditions and interpreting the results of colorimetric tests requires medical professionals to utilize color-based cues. However, those with a color vision deficiency (CVD) are at an increased risk of misdiagnosing patients and incorrectly interpreting the results of colorimetric tests. The most common CVDs afflicting medical professionals are deuteranomaly, deuteranopia, protanomaly, and protanopia, all of which reduce the ability to perceive a difference between green, yellow, orange, and red hues. For example, it has been found that medical professionals and students with a CVD have a decreased ability to detect blood in stool samples and are more likely to misread the results of colorimetric tests. In an effort to reduce these types of errors, potential countermeasures are explored, including screening for CVDs early on in medical school, implementing redundant coding principles for colorimetric medical tests, and designing efficient support systems for medical professionals with a CVD.

Gamification: Current Research and Applications

Gamification is the concept of applying game mechanics to non-game activities (Deterding, Dixon, Khaled, & Nacke, 2011). This concept has received a lot of recent interest from industry and many examples have emerged, especially within the fields of business and marketing, but has grown to encompass such varied examples as health care, training, prosocial behavior, and law enforcement. The purpose of this panel is to discuss some current research and applications of the gamification concept from a varied set of perspectives. The first panelist will describe lessons learned from research on gamification. The second panelist will describe gamification within an industrial context. The third panelist will discuss gamification concepts applied to education. A discussion among panelists and attendees of future trends and needs for gamification is expected.

Investigating Guiding Attributes in Visual Search for Medication Vials

Medical professionals must select from a vast array of medication vials to dispense the correct medication to a patient. The vials are often small and highly similar, potentially increasing the chance of committing a medical error. Over 400,000 people die every year due to medical errors according to recent studies; a third of which are thought to be medication related. We studied the visual characteristics of medication vial labels to identify properties leading to the fastest and most accurate search. In a visual search task, participants located a target vial among an array of similar looking vials whose labels varied along a set of specific attributes (color density, text size, and text orientation). Response time and accuracy data indicate that participants were faster and more accurate at finding vials with high color density and vertical text orientation, with the exception that when the text was large, there was no significant difference between these factors. Our research indicates that guiding attributes previously identified in basic visual search studies do in fact predict performance in search for medication vials.