Customer Reviews

Human Performance, Workload, and Situational Awareness Measures Handbook, Second Edition

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The last several years have seen a confluence between the fields of Human Factors Engineering, Engineering Psychology and Human Computer Interaction (HCI), this has co-occurred with the development of Systems Engineering techniques for the measurement and planning of human performance in closed loop man-machine systems (see Alphonse Chapanis's handbook on Human Factors in Systems Engineering). But the specific measurement of human performance factors in a variety of stressful environments is becoming increasingly important in a variety of domains (transportation, military, automated systems, and in the office worker/knowledge management environment). Without specific measures of what we mean, or need to experimentally evaluate in determining the performance, workload, awareness and stress of workers in these automated systems we are left without specific guidance in the design of safer, more effective and user-suitable work environments.

Dr. Gawron combines her academic and defense/aerospace expertise to provide a tightly organized summary of measures appropriate to human performance, workload, and situation awareness in a variety of environments. This handbook is developed in four well-researched and bibliographically documented chapters. The first offers a review of experimental methods and controls as they apply to human factors research and closed-loop complex systems. This is especially necessary for engineering users who may be less familiar with the tools and methods of experimental psychology. The second chapter begins with formal definition and domain-appropriate classification of human performance then proceeds to describe and document a taxonomy of experimental techniques and measures ranging from reaction time and error rate to highly specific cognitive performance tests and measures of air combat performance. The third defines measures for workload in both the physical and cognitive domains as they may be applied to a variety of stressful work environments. The final chapter describes and provides testable measures for the more recently defined field of situation awareness and describes how this otherwise ephemeral descriptor can be quantitatively and qualitatively be measured in various work situations.
Extensive bibliographies are provided which will permit formal verification of each category and measure and lead the reader to domain-specific tools and instruments appropriate to any environment which must be engineered for human performance.

Dr. Gawron extends these performance measures beyond their traditional role in target acquisition/equipment operator/pilot/command & control environments to a variety of work situations and systems; e,g, pp. 66-67 on White Collar performance measures. I believe that this variety of non-defense/transportation cognitive and physical performance measures will become increasingly important in our knowledge-based society.

This handbook provides the knowledge and tools to understand and specifically measure human performance, workload and situation awareness in the full range of environments and human-machine systems and it will become increasingly valuable in our highly automated and knowledge/computer-based working environments.

--Ira Laefsky, MS Engineering/MBA
Information Technology, HCI Consultant and Researcher
Formerly Senior Consultant at Arthur D. Little and DIGITAL Equipment Corporation

This book is a refreshing exception to the norm in a field filled with theoretical works which do not translate well to practical guidelines one can follow immediately in the laboratory. This much-needed book attempts to answer the deceptively simple question "Which performance test will be best for my experiment?" It does a good job of answering that question, and in so doing, provides a valuable service to psychology and human factors researchers everywhere. Congratulations to Dr. Gawron for making a real contribution to the field!