Effect of Individual Cognitive Styles on Control-Display Device Ability: An Experimental Study

The purpose of this study is to explore the feasibility of applying the Cognitive Styles Analysis (CSA) scale to measure the individual operation ability of operators to use a control-display device. Because competent operators may be able to reduce the possibility of serious accidents from the control room, it is important to effectively measure the individual differences among the operators. For this reason, we adopted a 2 (cognitive styles) × 2 (control-display pairing patterns) split-plot design for our experiment. This paper examined the differences between the performances of participants with field-dependent (FD) cognitive styles and field-independent (FI) cognitive styles in control-display pairing tasks and the correlation between CSA scores and performances. Sixty control room operators (30 participants per cognitive style) from five control rooms in Taiwan were recruited to participate in the experiment. The results of the experiment suggest that the CSA scale is capable of distinguishing between employees in their capacity to operate control-display devices effectively. Therefore, it is suggested that the CSA scale serve as a measurement criterion for screening control room operators. 1. Introduction In this paper a control-display device refers to the control panel used in nuclear power plants, air traffic control tower, and the like. It is the communication channel between various machinery and operators in the control room and is often made up of a large number of control and display units (Sanders and McCormick,1992). Often, the unsafe and inefficient operation of complex control-display device is closely related to a disastrous event in the control room. It is, therefore, essential to explore how to maintain a safe and efficient operation when using a control-display device. The topic of redesigning control-display devices is often explored in the literature. However, because of various reasons, such as for example the individual ability of an operator to control some equipment by means of a control-display device. The operator may not be able to safely and effectively operate the control-display device. Selecting the correct operators for the control-display device is an important issue for maintaining a safe and efficient control room operation (Lhoir, 1984). The control room operator referred to in this study are usually people with a bachelor's degree in engineering or the physical sciences in a nuclear power plant and qualified air traffic controllers in the air traffic control tower. Because the dexterity of the operators determines the possibility of disastrous events in the control room (Gray and Haas, 1984; Grosdeva and Montmollin, 1994; Seminara, 1980), any criteria that can be used to distinguish the difference between operators in the control room should be explored and listed for possible use in the evaluation of their abilities to operate a control-display device. Establishing the appropriate criteria will help select suitable operators and reduce the possibility of a serious incident occurring as a result from improper operation of the control-display device. In this study, the Cognitive Styles Analysis (CSA) is used to assess the individual spatial operation ability in terms of operating die control-display device. Proposed by Riding and Cheema (1991), the CSA scale is an effective evaluative tool for measuring individual spatial cognitive ability in field-dependent-independent (FDI) cognitive styles, which is the human characteristic of separating the target from its contextual surroundings in a spatial misleading condition where the target is hidden in its contextual environment and is hard to be separated (Witkin et al, 1962). When based upon a computerized administering system, the CSA is easier to use and is more valid (Redmond et al, 2007) tiian the traditional test of FDI cognitive styles. For this reason, the CSA has been widely used to measure a person's operating abilities to process spatial information, as well as examine the relationship between learning styles and the learning environment (Lee, 2007; Papanikolaou et al, 2006). …