Book Description

In the era which followed the second world-war, human-machine interaction was dominated by the questions of movement control and movement accuracy as luminaries such as Craik, Crossman, McRuer, Baron and their respective colleagues fought to generate analog solutions to problems fundamentally framed as questions about analog machines. As pointed out in his admirable keynote paper (Moray, this volume), the challenge was often understood as a complex of demands but even within such multi-tasking environments, the continuous control problem was the one that thrust itself predominantly to the fore. Significant and successful efforts to address such challenges were indeed forthcoming just as the necessity of this aspect of human-machine interaction began to wane. Not merely because of the digital revolution, but also the very fact that these continuous control problems themselves were open to successful resolution left them vulnerable to the engineering community who rightfully sought to solve soluble problems. done. SA and automation-based interaction fall naturally together and the present Conference is the second incarnation of this most fruitful union. The efforts evident in the present conference are captured by a number of themes. Moray in his keynote implores us not to forget the hard won knowledge of the past, protesting that the success of quantitative modeling of skill-based behavior can well form a template for successful quantitative modeling of both rule-based and knowledge-based behavior. The technical papers in this Volume address the following broad research topics: Situational Awareness; Air Traffic Control; Stress, Workload, and Fatigue; Decision Making; and Driver Performance and Distraction.