May 24, 2000
Here are your class presentations put
online.
May 22, 2000
Presentations will be Wednesday starting at 10:30. Be prepared to
discuss the projects as well. Papers will be done individually and will be
due Thursday at 3:00 pm.
May 2, 2000
I have updated the class schedule. Please check below for the correct
days for each topic.
May 1, 2000
Welcome to Human Factors. I hope we have a lot of fun exploring ways to
apply psychology to engineering problems of all types.
Three-Mile Island! Many people do not know where this place is but they know very well what happened there - the largest nuclear accident in U.S. history. Something went wrong. Nearly very wrong. Why? Obviously some mechanical system failed, but the failure that occurred had been anticipated by the engineers that built the nuclear power plant and should not have been much of a concern. Sophisticated pieces of equipment are designed with the expectation that some time some part of the system will fail. The reason Three-Mile Island became serious was that the information the operators had about the failure was poor and they responded inappropriately. The United States was within about 2 minutes of a disaster of the scale of Chernobyl and yet it was completely unnecessary. Had the computer control room been adequately designed, taking into account human abilities and limitations, the disaster at Three-Mile Island would not even have rated a front page note in the local paper of the area. In this disaster we have one of the defining examples of the need for and importance of human factors.
A good, yet simple, definition of human factors is the design of equipment that people use intentionally taking into account how people operate. Since human beings have characteristic ways of perceiving, thinking, and feeling which cannot be easily modified, it makes sense to change machines to fit us rather than the other way around. Human factors is the scientific/engineering field that collects the relevant data for understanding how humans interact with machines, and uses that information towards the design and implementation of human-machine systems.
The objectives of this course are two-fold: 1) to introduce the field of human factors and the fundamental concepts of the discipline, 2) to introduce the way in which human factors specialists think. To best accomplish these objectives the course is broken down into two parts. The first part of the class will provide the basics of human perceptual, cognitive, and motor abilities relevant to human factors. The second part of the course will consist the class working on projects to gain experience using human factors knowledge in actual applied settings. Thus, this course will move from the classroom to application of that knowledge in order to give you a taste of the work done by human factors professionals.
| Topic/Assignment | Reading |
Week #1 |
|
| M: Introduction to Human Factors and Overview of the Course | Ch. 1 |
| T: Reliability and Error (Human and Machine) | Ch. 3\Kantowitz Ch. 12 |
| W: Human Hearing/Signal Detection | 81-83; 96-103; 122-127; 152-157; 66-70 Fourier Analysis Tutorial Missing Fundamental Signal Detection Theory |
| R: No Class - I will be at the Midwestern Psychological Association | |
| F: Human Visual Capabilities | 83-96; 108-122; 132-152; 161-178 Receptive Fields Tutorial |
Week #2 |
|
| M 9: 00AM: Human Motor Capabilities/The studies need to be finalized by this date. | Ch. 13, 14, 15 Stretch Reflex Visual Reaction Time Auditory Reaction Time |
| M 1:00 PM: Human Information Processing I | Ch. 4, 9 Memory Span Data Memory Span Experiment Brown-Peterson Data Brown-Peterson Experiment Serial Position Data Serial Position Experiment |
| T: Human Information Processing II | Ch. 10, 11 Spatial Cuing Visual Search |
| W: Displays and Controls/Task Analysis and Workspace Design | Ch. 8,16,17 |
| R: Test I (I will be out of town) | Ch. 17/Sanders Ch. 14, 15 |
| F: Project Begin (I will be out of town) | readings TBD |
Week #3 |
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| M: Meetings and Presentations TBD | |
| T: | |
| W: | |
| R: | |
| F: | |
Week #4 |
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| M: | |
| T: | |
| W: | |
| R: | |
| F: Project 2 Report Due/Class Wrap-up |
The class is broken down into two sections each of which will have separate sets of assignments.
The first section of the class will consist primarily of lecture/discussion on the background information of Human Factors. In addition, we will work several problems, usually in class, that require quantitative solutions. You guessed it, we will do math. This section will conclude with an examination. The examination will be worth 100 points and will be composed of items of many different types. The types of items will be multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, short answer, problems and essays, etc.
Human factors professions play two types of roles relating to the design of equipment: 1) as actual members of a design team developing a new device or evaluating and existing device and 2) as a researcher collecting and analyzing data necessary to do (1) more effectively. Most years we do something akin to (1) above, but this year we are going to do (2). I propose that we conduct a human factor study. At this point in time I do not have any specific studies in mind. Below is a list of some sketched out ideas that we, as a class, can use as a starting board for our work.
- Time to find material in a web vs. print syllabus
- Time to find a psychological abstract on web, vs. CD-ROM vs. Print
- Effects of Background on Reading time and Accuracy
- An examination of the reading effects of PowerPoint Backgrounds
- The effect of glare on reading different types of reading screens
- The effect of noise on attention
You will have both a presentation and a paper due for this project. The presentation is to be done on PowerPoint. The presentation will be done by your group while the papers will be done individually.
The exam, each presentation and each paper will be worth 100 points each. The in class problems and homework are another 100 points. As can be seen, active class participation is vital to the success of this course. Therefore, participation will be worth 100 points, or 20% of your grade. Grades will be assigned on a 10% scale.