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Research Needs for Human Factors (1983)

Chapter: Introduction and Overview

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Suggested Citation:"Introduction and Overview." National Research Council. 1983. Research Needs for Human Factors. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/759.
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1
INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW

In the last several years the public has become sensitized to the importance of equipment designed to accommodate its human users. In the course of events at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant many residents of Harrisburg were evacuated because of the accident precipitated by operators misinterpreting their instruments. Coal miners cover equipment lamps intended to illuminate the mine wall, because they object to the glare in their faces. The M-1, the most technologically sophisticated battle tank ever produced, is limited by the operating difficulties experienced by its crew. With computer terminals now pervasive in the workplace, more users are voicing their complaints about requirements to converse in arcane dialects of computer languages.

Each of these examples reflects a failure to consider the design of a system from the point of view of its potential users; thus it is not surprising that the public is demanding that more attention be paid to such considerations. These demands may be expressed in the decisions of jurors in court cases involving product liability, in the renewed emphasis on human factors in military and aeronautics laboratories, and in the increase in job opportunities for human factors professionals in the computer industry. In March 1982, over 1,000 people participated in a conference devoted to discussing how to make computers more user-oriented.

The historical roots of the human factors profession are in industrial engineering and in psychology. In the early 1900s Frederick W.Taylor coined the term scientific management, by which he meant the application of

The principal author of this chapter is Richard W.Pew.

Suggested Citation:"Introduction and Overview." National Research Council. 1983. Research Needs for Human Factors. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/759.
×

scientific principles in the design of the industrial workplace. Although overzealous “Taylorism” resulted in some early mismanagement, his work formed one of the building blocks for modern industrial engineering and operations research.

During the latter stages of World War II, psychologists, who had been involved in the selection and training of aircraft pilots, were called on to take a novel perspective. Instead of selecting pilots to meet the severe demands of the cockpit, they were asked to select the cockpit design best suited to the characteristics of pilots. This approach reduced accidents and allowed a larger population of potential pilots to be certified. Because flying pushes the human body to its physiological limits, the effects of physiological stress on performance became a further consideration. After the war a small group of universities began training human factors specialists for research and development in the military services and the aerospace industry.

In 1957 the Human Factors Society was formed with 90 founding members; by 1977 the membership had grown to 1,956; and in the last five years the organization has expanded by an additional 50 percent. In addition, various engineering societies have formed groups related to human factors. The formation of this committee within the National Research Council in 1980 is the latest explicit recognition of the importance of human factors in today’s technological society.

Human factors engineering can be defined as the application of scientific principles, methods, and data drawn from a variety of disciplines to the development of engineering systems in which people play a significant role. Successful application is measured by improved productivity, efficiency, safety, and acceptance of the resultant system design. The disciplines that may be applied to a particular problem include psychology, cognitive science, physiology, biomechanics, applied physical anthropology, and industrial and systems engineering. The systems range from the use of a simple tool by a consumer to multiperson sociotechnical systems. They typically include both technological and human components.

Human factors specialists from these and other disciplines are united by a singular perspective on the system design process: that design begins with an understanding of the user’s role in overall system performance and that systems exist to serve their users, whether they

Suggested Citation:"Introduction and Overview." National Research Council. 1983. Research Needs for Human Factors. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/759.
×

are consumers, system operators, production workers, or maintenance crews. This user-oriented design philosophy acknowledges human variability as a design parameter. The resultant designs incorporate features that take advantage of unique human capabilities as well as build in safeguards to avoid or reduce the impact of unpredictable human error.

On the international scene this collection of activities has been called ergonomics, meaning the study of work. Its practitioners have placed somewhat more emphasis on biomechanics and the physiological costs of doing work than have human factors practitioners in the United States. Aside from this distinction, the two terms refer to the same collection of specialties.

While its foundations rest ultimately in the parent disciplines, human factors research focuses on the solution of system design problems involving more than one of these disciplines. Since World War II the major sources of funding for basic research underlying human factors work have been the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the military services. Since the passage of the Mansfield Amendment (Public Law 91–441, 1970) to the U.S. defense budget, which mandated a shift toward system development and away from basic research, the real dollar volume of research has not increased very much. What research there is has focused increasingly on short-term goals. As a result the basic knowledge needed to provide the underpinnings for human factors applications to new technology has not been generated. The need to reverse this trend is at least part of the reason that the military services and NASA have taken the initiative in sponsoring the work of this committee. This report reflects the committee’s recommendations for needed research in terms of both long-term and short-term objectives.

This report does not attempt to cover the full scope of human factors engineering, even in relation to military and NASA needs. As the committee began discussing research needs, a wide range of possible topics was considered. Two of our meetings included tours and discussions of ongoing research in military laboratories. Committee members were encouraged to develop brief position papers on highlighted topics that were germane to their interests. The human factors community was surveyed through an article in the Bulletin of the Human Factors Society, and 116 responses were received; the survey results confirmed the importance of many of the

Suggested Citation:"Introduction and Overview." National Research Council. 1983. Research Needs for Human Factors. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/759.
×

topics already identified by the committee. Some topics were dropped, and some new papers were generated. Others were combined into coherent units; still others were deferred for further study or initiative.

The material in this report is the result of that process. Each chapter is designed to be a self-contained report of an important area in which research is needed. All the topics discussed here meet the following criteria: (1) each topic is germane to our military and NASA sponsors; (2) the topics are within the expertise of the committee; (3) each topic has been, in the opinion of the committee, incompletely addressed by previous or current military and civilian research efforts; and (4) the potential results of the recommended research will be important contributions to the scientific basis and practice of human factors. And the work of the committee is ongoing. In addition to the research areas presented in this report, work on a number of topics is in various stages of development: (1) organizational context in relation to design; (2) team performance; (3) simulation; (4) human performance modeling; (5) multicolor displays; (6) human factors education, and (7) accident reporting systems. We expect to address many of these as well as other topics in subsequent reports.

In the paragraphs that follow, the areas of research suggested by the committee are summarized together with some of our major recommendations. The chapters themselves provide a detailed elaboration of these topics.

HUMAN DECISION MAKING

A central issue in the understanding of human performance is human decision making. It has become even more important with the increased role of automation in complex modern systems ranging from military command, control, and communication systems to aircraft and process control systems. There has been much support for research on decision making over the last 15 years, particularly by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Office for Naval Research. This research has tended to focus on formal decision theoretic constructions, which, while analytically powerful, have proved to be insufficiently robust to reflect the strengths and weaknesses of human decision-making capabilities. The committee recommends further research, with an emphasis on moving into uncharted areas.

Suggested Citation:"Introduction and Overview." National Research Council. 1983. Research Needs for Human Factors. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/759.
×

Surprisingly, despite the effort devoted to decision-making research in general, there is still a need for research on how to structure practical decision problems and on improving the realism of models that claim to relate to decision-making performance. We do not know how to represent decision situations that evolve dynamically, nor do we have a systematic framework from which to consider decision aiding.

Furthermore, we are coming to realize that many planning activities actually involve decision making that cannot be modeled by enumerating the possible states of the world and courses of action in a unitary decision matrix. They often evolve over time in bits and pieces with limited central direction. We need a deeper understanding of such diffuse decision processes in order to provide effective computer aids for this kind of decision.

While previous work has led to many decision-making aids and models, no criteria or methodologies have been suggested for evaluating their relative merits. Until such comparisons are made, practitioners will continue to advocate their own products without a basis for choice among them. Finally, there is a persistent need for development of innovative ways of soliciting preference and relative value judgments from people, a problem that leads us directly to the second topic.

ELICITING EXPERT JUDGMENT

The application of expert judgment covers everything from medical evaluations to accident investigations. Although the subject matter ranges widely, it is our belief that there are generic, substantive research issues that should be addressed in a coherent program. These problems recur in diverse contexts for which elicitation methods either do not exist or are inadequately standardized across applications to yield consistent results. The research issues include (1) creating a common frame of reference from which to assess judgments among a group of experts; (2) formulating questions for experts in a way that is compatible with their mental structures or cognitive representations of a problem; (3) eliciting judgments about the quality of information; (4) detecting and identifying reporting bias in judgments; and (5) minimizing the effects of memory loss and distortion on the reporting of past events.

Suggested Citation:"Introduction and Overview." National Research Council. 1983. Research Needs for Human Factors. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/759.
×

SUPERVISORY CONTROL SYSTEMS

Supervisory control is a relatively new conceptualization of system function that is playing an increasingly important role in automated systems. In such systems, operators supervise the semiautomatic control of a dynamic process, such as a chemical plant or railway system. Typically the operators work in teams and control computers, which in turn mediate information flow among various automatic components. Other examples of supervisory control systems are modern aircraft, medical intensive care units, power plants, and distributed command and control systems such as may be found in military operations or in manufacturing by robots. Such systems deemphasize the importance of human sensory and motor capabilities and emphasize complex perceptual and cognitive skills. This perspective is relatively new to practicing system designers; work is beginning to be sponsored in these areas, but much further development is needed.

Supervisory control may be thought of as a generalization from earlier work on monitoring and controlling complex systems; in that sense the foundations for modeling and theory are established. The theory must be greatly elaborated and extended, however, to meet the analysis requirements of current and future systems. As the human skills of thinking, reasoning, planning, and decision making become key, the models must be able to accommodate these human capacities and limitations. This is a choice opportunity to bring together work on control theory models and cognitive science representations.

Cognitive psychology is also advancing our understanding of the way in which resources are shared among various processes within the brain. This work has unexplored implications for understanding how to modify system design to change perceived workload, particularly in the complex tasks typical of supervisory control. Each of the military services has research programs focused on human workload analysis. In our opinion many of them are too application-oriented; they need a stronger focus on research to advance the knowledge base from which new application techniques will emerge.

Another key concern in supervisory control is prediction and the control of human error. Our understanding of this topic is in its infancy. We have no general theory of human error, although theories abound for human response time. Human reliability analysis has been in

Suggested Citation:"Introduction and Overview." National Research Council. 1983. Research Needs for Human Factors. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/759.
×

vogue for several years, but, as currently practiced, it simply uses the numerical aggregation of historical data on recorded human failure rates. It is weakest in just the situations in which it is most needed—when the activity involves complex diagnosis, situation assessment, and interaction with computers.

At the level of design, there are three major questions: how to design supervisory control tasks to accommodate human capabilities and limitations; how to organize and display the information needed to carry out these tasks; and how much control to delegate to the human versus the automatic parts of the system.

USER-COMPUTER INTERACTION

Since computers are already playing a major role in most new system developments, including supervisory control systems, issues of facilitating the learning and use by both computer professionals and novices has been accorded a chapter of its own.

At a March 1982 conference on user-computer interaction, more than 100 papers addressed a variety of topics related to hardware and software design. More than half of the 1,000 participants were system design specialists from industry and government. The committee believes that this level of interest foretells a heavy demand for scientific knowledge that has yet to be created. Although a number of industrial laboratories are supporting proprietary work, there is only one major funded collaborative effort between computer science and human factors specialists, that at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (funded by the Office for Naval Research).

Most human factors research has been done in the area of computer hardware. Information is available on which to base design decisions concerning information display hardware and keyboards. Many alternative input devices, such as joy sticks, track balls, and light pens, have been studied in the context of specific applications. There is a need for further work on input devices that focuses on comparison among the full range of devices across a broad set of uses, including instruction, text processing, and graphics.

Automatic speech recognition and production have attracted much interest as the technology improves. Speech as an alternative to manual and visual modes of

Suggested Citation:"Introduction and Overview." National Research Council. 1983. Research Needs for Human Factors. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/759.
×

input and output needs systematic investigation. Fundamental work is necessary on the design of interactive speech dialogs that involve inherently sequential communication and potentially heavy memory demands on the listener.

As computer terminals are becoming pervasive in the white-collar workplace, concern is growing about the adverse effects on people from long-term use of terminals with cathode ray tubes (CRTs). A recent study by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health found no radiation hazards from CRTs but did find a substantial increase in worker complaints of fatigue and other health problems from sustained daily use. This study was not able to distinguish CRT design-based complaints from those relating to the task or other features of the workplace—and this is an urgent research need. In Europe, governments are now mandating standards for workplace designs. It will not be long before similar actions are taken in the United States and the research must begin now to anticipate them.

In the area of software design, research needs are only beginning to be filled. Effective design of sophisticated software implies understanding of human knowledge sytems and the ability to represent not only what a user knows but also how a user makes inferences from that information. There is a need for models of users’ understanding of the system with which they are interacting, a problem that is important for supervisory control applications as well.

Perhaps the most neglected research area in computer system development is how to produce effective materials and reference information. While design principles developed for printed materials are useful for computer system documentation, there are documentation opportunities unique to interactive systems that we do not yet understand how to exploit effectively.

Finally, there is a need to understand in more detail the characteristics of the user population that make a difference in computer system design. We need research that suggests, in parametric terms, how changes in user characteristics should be reflected in system design changes.

The committee regards user-computer interaction as one of the most urgent topics on which to undertake research initiatives.

Suggested Citation:"Introduction and Overview." National Research Council. 1983. Research Needs for Human Factors. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/759.
×

POPULATION GROUP DIFFERENCES

Through public sentiment as well as government legislation, our society has mandated the elimination of discrimination among population groups in the design of jobs and workplaces. In addition to racial discrimination, there is growing concern about discrimination on the basis of sex, age, and disability. We lack the research necessary to describe the nature and extent of performance differences among the various population groups about which discrimination is a concern. The committee believes it is in the national interest to undertake the research necessary to accommodate this relationship between population group differences and design.

It is not enough to consider population group differences per se. In some cases the effect of a group characteristic such as age on performance may depend on the value of some other variables, such as amount of training or level of interpersonal skills. It may be misleading to discover simply that performance deteriorates with age, when in fact training or experience may reverse that trend. Such interactions remain largely unexplored.

There is also a need to understand the way in which these differences in performance should influence workplace design or training procedures. We know how to write equipment specifications designed to fit 95 percent of a particular user population insofar as body dimensions are concerned, but for most other human performance characteristics we lack this knowledge.

APPLIED METHODS

Much human factors work is performed under constraints of money, time, and opportunity that preclude the use of the kind of experimental methods used in laboratory research. From necessity, human factors practitioners have adopted or developed a variety of applied methods for acquiring or organizing information related to human characteristics that arise in the context of system design, development, and evaluation. Examples of these methods are task analysis, information flow analysis, collection and analysis of survey data, evaluation of physical mock-ups, and the structured walk through. In contrast to the methods of scientific research, which are maintained and disseminated in university curricula and textbooks, and by specialists who devote careers to improving and

Suggested Citation:"Introduction and Overview." National Research Council. 1983. Research Needs for Human Factors. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/759.
×

inventing experimental design procedures, applied methods in human factors work are described only briefly in technical project reports, which are difficult to access, and efforts to improve or invent methods occur largely in connection with a particular project.

There is a clear need to develop a compendium of standard descriptions of the most important applied methods. This compendium would be valuable for use in human factors curricula in colleges and universities and for continuing education tutorials for human factors practitioners. Currently most knowledge of applied methods is gained through on-the-job experience.

Documenting existing applied methods, however, will not fulfill the methodological needs for all current and future system design purposes. Advances in computer technology applied to automation and supervisory control systems and computer systems themselves all have profound methodological implications for the analysis and description of the roles people play in these sytems. Existing methods such as workload analysis, protocol analysis, and function allocation require research to modify and extend their use in new applications in which the emphasis is on cognitive functions of operators rather than on the perceptual-motor functions prominent in old systems.

Similarly, there is a need to develop new methods to provide information of the type and form necessary to resolve such issues as translating task requirements into personnel selection criteria, deriving training requirements from functional requirements, and describing or evaluating the effects of task or system functions on the affective responses of personnel.

All the basic research needs addressed in this report require experimental investigations to provide the theory, principles, and data to support human factors work in the design and evaluation of systems. The application of the knowledge derived from basic research, however, will occur largely through the use of applied methods. Documentation of existing methods and research to extend and initiate methods to meet future needs are as essential as the substantive research to improve both the scientific basis and the practical effectiveness of human factors work.

CONCLUSION

System design and the world of work are undergoing profound changes. In a period when automation is replacing

Suggested Citation:"Introduction and Overview." National Research Council. 1983. Research Needs for Human Factors. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/759.
×

the need for finely tuned perceptual-motor activities by skilled operators, human productivity is no longer easily assessed in terms of unit output. New systems place increased demands on the cognitive and decision-making aspects of human performance. The role of people in systems is shifting to those of monitoring and directing otherwise automatic processes in industrial production, transportation, military operations, and office work.

These changes in human-machine relations both offer new opportunities and present new problems for system design. It is therefore timely and appropriate that the committee’s first report of research needs in human factors emphasizes the importance of understanding fundamental cognitive processes and their role in interactive and supervisory control systems.

Suggested Citation:"Introduction and Overview." National Research Council. 1983. Research Needs for Human Factors. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/759.
×
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Suggested Citation:"Introduction and Overview." National Research Council. 1983. Research Needs for Human Factors. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/759.
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Suggested Citation:"Introduction and Overview." National Research Council. 1983. Research Needs for Human Factors. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/759.
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Suggested Citation:"Introduction and Overview." National Research Council. 1983. Research Needs for Human Factors. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/759.
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Suggested Citation:"Introduction and Overview." National Research Council. 1983. Research Needs for Human Factors. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/759.
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Suggested Citation:"Introduction and Overview." National Research Council. 1983. Research Needs for Human Factors. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/759.
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Suggested Citation:"Introduction and Overview." National Research Council. 1983. Research Needs for Human Factors. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/759.
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Suggested Citation:"Introduction and Overview." National Research Council. 1983. Research Needs for Human Factors. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/759.
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Suggested Citation:"Introduction and Overview." National Research Council. 1983. Research Needs for Human Factors. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/759.
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Suggested Citation:"Introduction and Overview." National Research Council. 1983. Research Needs for Human Factors. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/759.
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Suggested Citation:"Introduction and Overview." National Research Council. 1983. Research Needs for Human Factors. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/759.
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