Exploring The Effect Of Pre-Operational Priming Intervention On Number Entry Errors

Managing and reducing error in number entry tasks is important, especially in safety critical contexts. Understanding factors that can affect number entry accuracy could help the design of more dependable systems. We present three interventions for number entry tasks, inspired by known priming effects (where exposure to prior stimuli can impact task performance). The interventions were questions for the operator to answer before entering each number. Questions related to the value/size of the number, its structure, and the context of the number entry task respectively. Results of a within-subject study show that although there was no significant difference amongst performance across interventions, all three interventions helped to improve the accuracy of number entry by reducing entry errors (by up to 40.8%) and unnoticed errors (by up to 60.7%). These are impressive gains and suggest the importance of more work in this area.