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The Society ForHuman Performance In Extreme Environments |
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Founder's Message |
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Dear Colleagues,The Society for Human Performance in Extreme Environments unites professionals and operational personnel who are dedicated to optimizing the health, safety and performance of individuals operating within stressed, extreme, and high-risk/high-technology environments and systems. The professionals in our forum, many of whom are pilots, astronauts, aquanauts, polar explorers, mountaineers, behavioral scientists, medical doctors, and engineers, represent those individuals who have had the courage and conviction to use science and technology to push beyond the boundaries of human limitations. In doing so, they have allowed humanity one step closer to achieving its greatest potential. HPEE was created to support these individuals in their pursuit of academic and operational knowledge to be applied towards enhancing human performance and behavior in all challenging environments and systems. Working in this field, it is vital to gain access to information involving factors influencing performance in stressed and high-risk/high-technology environments, whether they concern the human-technology interface (human factors and engineering), human interaction and team-performance, or psychological and physiological stressors these environments afford. All play a vital and interdependent role in mediating the performance of those operating within them. The importance of viewing human performance as a culmination of multiple factors, and not merely as a function of any single aspect (e.g., cognition or interpersonal interaction, or human-technology interface) has become apparent through our difficulty in comprehensively understanding and predicting human performance in highly complex and stressed environments and systems. The relatively new work in this area has demonstrated human performance to be mediated by a multitude of factors related to the human, system, and environment, as well as the interfaces between them. Traditional research efforts have focused predominately on individualized areas (e.g., cognition, or psychosocial, or physiology, or human-technology interface) an approach which will obviously never lose its importance or validity. Yet we are beginning to see that these individualized and disparate efforts are not enough to account for human performance in these specialized systems and environments. With the advancement of aviation cockpit technology, for example, and the corresponding rise in system complexity induced by automation, advances in avionics, satellite communication systems, and display technologies, the need for a more interdisciplinary approach has become apparent. Human performance in relation to this and other technological environments, can only be optimized by identifying issues that not only include, but integrate the human-technology, human-human (behavioral, team coordination and communication), and human-environmental interface aspects (fatigue, stress, hypoxia, decompression sickness, acceleration forces, and other physiological and physical conditions afforded by the flight environment). The day of engineers designing systems for use by humans, without knowledge or consideration of human behavior and performance is rapidly disappearing. Countless experiences with high-complexity, high-risk environments have revealed all too visibly what can, and will, happen when the design of technology fails to consider the human users within the system and combines with high-risk consequences to produce tragic consequences. The path does not stop there, however, as performance in technological environments is mediated by more than human-technology interface aspects alone. Human-human interaction, known also as psychosocial or team performance issues, have been demonstrated to cause an uncountable number of fatalities in most extreme and complex environments in which humans have endeavored including spaceflight, mountaineering, undersea diving, polar exploration, firefighting, military combat, and high performance and general aviation. These environments share many factors in common. All demand human performance abilities bordering on the limits of human capabilities, and accordingly, impose technological, psychological, psychosocial, and physiological stressors on those operating within them. All afford human-technology, human-human, and human-environmental interfaces through which lives critically depend and failure in any link of the chain will result in error, and ultimately, the loss of lives. It is vital for those working to understand and enhance human performance and behavior with all its complexities to venture beyond their own area of expertise into other complimentary domains and disciplines in order to gain a comprehensive understanding of all properties that mediate it. It also remains important to recognize elements that remain stable across domains, and to isolate those elements that are independent of them. While the elements that induce panic behavior vary from domain to domain (e.g. airplane emergency, underwater accident, war, natural disaster, etc.), research across domains often reveals a constancy of behavioral and performance manifestations. HPEE aims to assist in making these constancies across domains more visible. Scientists' abilities to understand and enhance human performance in any domain depends on their ability to not only apply their own area of expertise to that environment or system, but also to understand how that specialized aspect interplays with all other factors mediating performance in that environment. HPEE's members believe in the importance of employing findings from a variety of domains and disciplines to enhance their comprehensive understanding of human performance in challenging environments. Our forum facilitates the development of such knowledge to its members. For individual professionals, it is often impractical to keep abreast of efforts extending beyond one's own area of specialty and into those emanating from a variety of other disciplines and domains. Our Journal is devoted primarily towards displaying empirical and operational findings emanating from a variety of areas including the behavioral, engineering, and life sciences. M. Ephimia Morphew |
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