The Human Operator Simulator. Volume VIII. Applications to Assessment of Operator Loading

摘要

The study was designed to show that Human Operator Simulator (HOS), a general-purpose model of human performance, can accurately simulate the kinds of complex interactions between competing task demands experienced by a human operator performing a complex mission. HOS, on the other hand, requires that the user supply only fairly objective information about hardware system configuration and dynamics, operator size and general performance characteristics, and sequences of task operations. In this study, an operator performing both a primary pursuit tracking task and a 'neutral' secondary task was simulated. The tracking task was adopted as the primary task because of the following: (1) It is commonly encountered by operators of modern control systems; (2) Its continuous nature ensures that it will be sensitive to interruptions by a secondary task; and (3) It permits definitions of continuously variable performance measures. The secondary task is neutral in the sense that the operator 'does nothing,' thereby avoiding the task interactions that occur when two tasks compete for processing channels. The secondary task was an externally scheduled interruption of the tracking task. Experimentally, this could be achieved by, for example, blanking out the display so that an operator engaged in visually monitored pursuit tracking could not see the display for a specified length of time.