Where do misleading schemes of operators in industry come from?: an exploratory study in a microworld simulating a real aeronautical factory

The study presented here follows a former study, lead in a real aeronautical factory where operators control a semi-automated process of metallic frames stretching. The observations and interviews from this first study conducted to the identification of a misleading scheme. This misleading scheme consists in programming a stretching machine according to the results obtained on a precedent frame instead of using the inner frame characteristics. However, since studying this misleading scheme turned out to be complicated in the real factory, a micro-world, reproducing the factory activity was developed. This new article present the results obtained on this micro-world. First, the activity of twelve participants, who had never worked in the factory, was similar to the operator activity as they used the misleading scheme. Moreover, the micro-world showed that the misleading scheme brings a decrease in the performance of participants who were given more time on the micro-world. On the contrary, participant with little training always performed badly, whenever they used the misleading scheme or not. The results showed that the micro-world granted the access to a specific cognitive criterion, the misleading scheme, which was not easily accessible in the real factory. This results lead to two main recommendations: the first one states the importance to give the operator inhibition training against the misleading scheme; the second is with regard to the features an interface helping with the fabrication process should have.