Directions: Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow by choosing the correct/most appropriate options: 

A train pulls up to a station in Japan. A train conductor points at the platform and then points at signs that specify the train number and its destination. Within the train cab, the driver points at his controls as he engages with them, as well as at key indicators and signs outside the train. On the platform, the attendant points at the train and then at the doors before they open. With each theatrical gesture, staff members intone the name, purpose, or state of the thing they are pointing towards. To the uninitiated, this might appear mysterious, but a deeper exploration reveals that this ritual is a health and safety behavior known as “Pointing and Calling” (or Shisa Kanko). It has a very old pedigree and a positive effect on safety and performance. It seems a ritualistic confirmation of the self-obvious but the reality is far more interesting and uncovers a truth about how just how deeply we are embedded in the world. It reveals how we can rely on our entire bodies, and not just our disembodied minds, to complete tasks safely.

The origin of this behavior is difficult to trace. The oft-repeated story is that a train engineer in the 1900s, Yasoichi Hori, was struggling with failing eyesight. To ward against making a mistake, he began to call out signals that would then be confirmed by his attendant fireman. Eventually, the behavior made it into an early railway manual in 1913. I couldn’t validate the origin story beyond the Japan Times article which mentioned it, but it has been employed in the Japanese rail network for nearly a hundred years. In the modern pointing and calling protocol, the worker begins by looking at their target, which can be anything crucial to the task at hand - controls, readouts, indicators, or positions. The worker then stretches out an index finger and calls the name or state of the control, before carrying out the related control action. Pointing and calling are firmly entrenched in the world of human performance training. In an era where we focus more on the design of technology to suit human needs and limitations, it seems a throwback. In reality, both approaches are needed. Even with hypothetically perfect technologies, people live in a complicated world. They constantly need to maintain attention and deal with a flood of sometimes contradictory information to make good decisions.

Laboratory research described by Ayanori Sato at the Ergonomics Laboratory, Japanese Railway Technical Research Institute (and reported by a Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs video on Japan) indicates that “Pointing and Calling” reduces human error by nearly 85% when used to complete simple and repetitive decision tasks. This is the difference of 2.38 errors per 100 actions in normal conditions and 0.38 errors per 100 actions, when pointing and calling are added to the chain of behavior. In 2011, Shinohara, Naito, Matsui, and Hikono conducted further research to explore just how pointing and calling activate attention and the selection of the right action. Over a series of trials, participants completed simple ‘single-rule’ or ‘multiple-rule’ laboratory tasks, with and without pointing and calling. This created four distinct trials, with experimenters assessing correct responses, reaction times, self-assessed workload, and other key performance criteria. The outcomes showed that pointing and calling improved performance when the task rules changed. Even consistent task rules seemed to benefit from the visual and auditory rehearsal. Self-assessed measures of workload suggested that adding pointing and calling did not increase workload. It’s important to note that the practice is not a panacea for all error management. It still requires an additional set of actions on top of any task demands. High-speed tasks or those that require the use of the hands may not allow a full pointing and calling protocol. 

For a practice that appears to improve safety and accuracy, it’s curious that it isn’t more commonly adopted across the world. In an article by the New York Metropolitan Transport Authority (MTA), pointing and calling was introduced as a job requirement in the New York subway, solely for conductors, who are required to gesture towards white striped boards (‘zebra boards’) when a stopped train is correctly aligned and can safely open its doors. Videos of MTA conductors carrying out this action show that it is a small, subtle, and non-verbal behavior, contrasting the more obvious and noisy approach taken by Japanese train officials. Shigeru Haga, Professor of Transportation and Industrial Psychology at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, suggests it is hard to get people outside Japan to carry out such a bold, repetitive action. Even workers in Japan go through extensive training to get over any embarrassment they might have in carrying out the pointing and calling the action. Understanding the concept and its effects on performance help make sense of the standard psychological explanations behind pointing and calling. Typical explanations focus on the attention and activation aspects of our mind’s task-control systems. Simultaneous pointing and calling seem to both reorient and activate our attention toward a target for future action. Even when carrying out a familiar task, the visual and auditory activation makes it easier for us to both remember to act and to choose the right course of action. This helps us avoid slips; where we know what to do, and have acted correctly in the past, but make a mistake all the same. It’s here that we turn to the deeper implications behind our normal psychological explanations of pointing and calling. We need to go beyond an explanation that physical gestures are required to ‘wake our minds up’ and to ‘focus on the job at hand.’ This is like saying we are a mind stuck inside a body. It implies that all the interesting actions (or failures) occur inside the mind, and the body is merely the tool of the mind. 

There is an alternate way to frame the situation and it can be demonstrated in a line of eye-tracking research into how we use our eyes to complete everyday tasks. In a series of experiments reviewed by Land and Hayhoe, researchers used head-mounted eye-tracking to observe how participants’ eyes moved when completing everyday tasks - in this case, preparing a cup of tea and making a sandwich. The point of both experiments was to try to understand how the eye gaze relates to decision-making and physical activity. The traditional view is that the eyes are just passive respondents to commands from the mind. That the mind builds up a deep picture of the world, processes its choices, and then directs the body to react. However, Land and Hayhoe were able to show that even in often-repeated and everyday tasks, large body motions (like the twisting of our torso) and eye movements come before the more refined motor actions. Body and eye movements are part of an _______ engagement with the world where we identify (and re-identify) task-relevant objects, monitor our own actions as they are carried out, and then check actions were completed correctly before moving on to the next task. In the case of making a cup of tea, eye movements include minutes of gaze upon the objects required to complete the task, and then rapid eye fixations on the first task-relevant objects. These rapid eye fixations intensify as objects approach each other to complete a step, like pouring hot water into the kettle. Finally, our gaze dwells on objects to confirm the right conditions have been met. This significant body and eye engagement suggest that we are not internalizing a deep model of the world and then acting from that. Rather, in accordance with a task, we are trying to complete, we are constantly and consistently reacquiring all the information we need throughout the task.