Human performance modeling: Difference between revisions

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Complex motor tasks, such as those carried out by musicians and athletes, are not well modeled due to their complexity. Human target-tracking behavior, however, is one complex motor task that is an example of successful HPM.

The history of manual control theory is extensive, dating back to the 1800's1800s in regard to the control of water clocks. However, during the 1940's1940s with the innovation of servomechanisms in WWII, extensive research was put into the continuous control and stabilization of contemporary systems such as radar antennas, gun turrets, and ships/aircraft via feedback control signals.

Analysis methods were developed that predicted the required control systems needed to enable stable, efficient control of these systems (James, Nichols, & Phillips, 1947). Originally interested in temporal response - the relationship between sensed output and motor output as a function of time - James et al. (1947) discovered that the properties of such systems are best characterized by understanding temporal response after it had been transformed into a frequency response; a ratio of output to input amplitude and lag in response over the range of frequencies to which they are sensitive. For systems that respond linearly to these inputs, the frequency response function could be expressed in a mathematical expression called a ''transfer function''.<ref name=":1" /> This was applied first to machine systems, then human-machine systems for maximizing human performance. Tustin (1947), concerned with the design of gun turrets for human control, was first to demonstrate that nonlinear human response could be approximated by a type of transfer function. McRuer and Krenzel (1957) synthesized all the work since Tustin (1947), measuring and documenting the characteristics of the human transfer function, and ushered in the era of manual control models of human performance. As electromechanical and hydraulic flight control systems were implemented into aircraft, automation and electronic artificial stability systems began to allow human pilots to control highly sensitive systems These same [[transfer function]]s are still used today in [[control engineering]].