[psysec] Looking for a technical term

[Sarah Gordon]

Hi Brian,
Hello again,

I sent this to Brian, not the list. Reposting (in response to Brians post
about x and y relationship etc.):


Here is what I am thinking.

x didn't cause y.

x caused some event (not y) which in turn triggered (y) (action required -
lots of things to do).

so there can be (but is not necessarily) causality - i mean, if the system
was malfunctioning, anything could trigger the event that in turn triggers
the 'this is what you need to do now' message. but i dont think the term
would necessarily need to reflect the causality or lack thereof.  I'm not
even sure it could, because the real 'cause' is once removed.

I think he's really talking about real simple thing. You focus so much on
one thing that there is nothing left for the real thing. Not that you could
do anything about the real thing *anyway*. Maybe its planned to distract
with the 'do many things'. He didnt say anything about why, etc.

And, I am not sure the term he wants is actually a technical term in the
technical sense, but rather  a psychological term - if its just a technical
term per se, on/off would probably do nicely. :)

On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 4:28 AM, Peter Gutmann <pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz>wrote:

> Let's say you have some sort of warning mechanism that warns you about
> potential danger (usually false positives) and requires that you manually
> override a dozen different things in order to continue as normal, perhaps
> in
> an attempt to counter habituation when disabling false alarms.  The
> warning-
> override however is so laborious that you have to spend all of your energy
> focusing on the complex override process and never really get a chance to
> think about what you're being warned about.
>
> There is probably some specific term for this, but I can't think of it at
> the
> moment.  It's not quite hazard matching or situational awareness, it's
> somewhat related to weapon focus (in which people facing an armed offender
> fixate on the weapon and little else), I could homebrew "task-directed
> perceptual narrowing" but I'm sure someone's given this problem a name
> before.
> Does anyone know of an existing name for this?
>
> Peter.
>
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-- 
-sg
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