INFORMATIONAL LOAD AS A DESIGN PARAMETER FOR TASKS INVOLVING MANUAL MOTIONS AND DECISIONS Available to Purchase

Increased acceptance of automation by management has changed the role of a typical industrial worker. These days workers are required more and more to use their manual and decision making capabilities. The designers of man‐machine systems, who are required to predict the performance of such systems, do not have available to them well‐tested techniques suitable for making such predictions. Some methodologies are available which assume the additivity of manual and decision times. Current experimental work has indicated that a certain informational load does not affect equally the performance time for various sub‐sections of a given task when discrete type motions are made. Various types of motions, i.e., move, position, etc., having different magnitudes have been investigated to study the effect of informational load on performance time. Informational loads were varied by changing the set size and the statistical structure of the same set. In addition to the description of Type II Tasks, findings of four studies are discussed. Based on the findings a set of guidelines is presented which may be used by the designers of tasks involving human decision making and manual motions.