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Introduction: The objective of this study is to investigate the extent to which sighted persons understand thought processes of persons who are visually impaired (i.e., those who are blind or have low vision). The investigation focused on a street-crossing task. Method: Participants were 15 visually impaired persons and 21 sighted persons. The sighted group included 6 orientation and mobility (O&M) specialists and 15 individuals who represent the sighted public and have infrequent interactions with people with visual impairments. Participants provided verbal reports of their thought processes associated with a street-crossing scenario twice, once as a “non-pretender” and once as a “pretender.” In the non-pretender role, participants verbalized their thinking in line with their actual state of sightedness. In the pretender role, participants with visual impairments pretended that they did not have any visual impairments, whereas sighted participants pretended that they were blind. Transcribed data were analyzed using thematic analysis, resulting in three themes with 14 subthemes. The genuine responses of visually impaired participants and the imitated responses of the sighted participants were compared using proportions of the subthemes. Results: Fisher’s exact z tests demonstrated that out of the 14 subthemes, the visually impaired participants’ proportions were (a) similar to those of sighted O&M specialists in 10 subthemes and (b) different from those of the other sighted participants in seven subthemes. Participants verbalized fewer thoughts when describing sighted navigation than when describing navigation as a person with visual impairment. Discussion: Sighted persons with infrequent social interaction with people who are visually impaired seem to be less successful at “pretending to be blind,” indicating that they may have difficulties in adopting the perspective of people with visual impairments. Implications for Practitioners: Sighted O&M specialists develop an understanding of the cognitive processes of people who are visually impaired through training and contact. Other professionals that support these individuals (e.g., technology designers) could benefit from developing such an understanding and immersing themselves in the social life of people with visual impairments.

The recognition-primed decision (RPD) model and Take the First (TTF) heuristic assert that successful and experienced decision makers typically generate relatively few options, and generate a satisficing, or the best, option first. Moreover, the TTF heuristic suggests that as more options are generated the likelihood that the best option will be selected is reduced. An alternative proposal suggests that the ability to anticipate the outcome of a situation is actually positively related to the number of options generated. To test these opposing claims we compared high and low performing critical-care nurses on three simulated critical care scenarios and measured their option generation behaviors and the courses of action pursued. Consistent with RPD and TTF, the data suggest that high performers generate fewer options than low performers during situational assessment. However, counter to RPD and TTF, the current data suggest that the selection of options generated later in the process may actually facilitate better outcomes. Implications for the design of instruction and training materials are discussed.

In line with the proposed themes of this conference and cognizant that gains in understanding are often enhanced notably by a consideration of findings from outside of a particular field (Dunbar, 1995), we demonstrate here how the burgeoning field of sport psychology might inform views of the future of the human factors and ergonomics profession. Four areas of sport psychology are discussed is this regard. The first concerns research on the self-regulatory strategies of athletes operating in stressful competitive environments; the second recent developments in risk taking research; the third research on perceptual-cognitive skills training for performance in dynamic, open sports; and the final area the link between emotion and motor behavior. We appeal to human factors and ergonomics professionals to consider how the two fields could be mutually informative in solving problems common to both fields.

Whereas knowledge management relies on processes of knowledge elicitation, there is also a process in which knowledge is “recovered,” typically from archived documents. We conducted a knowledge recovery (KR) effort, going from documents to a structured set of propositions concerning expert knowledge about terrain analysis, discussing landforms, soils, rock types, etc. Assertions and feature associations were recast as over 3,000 propositions. When contrasted with results from previous evaluations of methods of knowledge elicitation, KR was costly in terms of time and effort, suggesting that knowledge-based organizations should make knowledge capture an on-going aspect of work, rather than finding themselves in the “catch-up mode” to recover lost expertise. For both knowledge elicitation and recovery, the knowledge has to be represented in a form that is usable and useful (e.g., instantiation in knowledge bases). We created from the propositions a navigable knowledge model based on over 150 Concept Maps, which were hyperlinked together and to dozens of resources (aerial photos, maps, diagrams, etc.). Such knowledge models are intended to make the “expertise of the past” more useful and usable in training and in performance support.