Lesson 1: Human Performance

Overview
Example
Quiz

Overview

Human performance research is conducted to improve our understanding of how humans interact, reason, adapt, and respond to different situations, technology, and environments. Through observation, monitoring, and analysis, we are better able to predict and enable human performance.

Many types of performance are studied such as eye-movement, fatigue, and cognitive skills such as memory. In this tutorial we will focus on memory.

Memory

In general, humans utilize two types of memory:

Short-term Memory:

To remember things you will only need for a short time, such as where you parked your car today.

Long-term Memory:

To remember things you will use over and over such as, how to operate you car.

Items in memory are encoded, stored, and retrieved until they are no longer needed. Memory may be affected by many things such as noise, distraction, fatigue or even information overload.

An airplane cockpit is a complex environment in which it is critical that a pilot be able to accurately perform many different tasks concurrently.

In a general aviation or private plane, a pilot will learn and remember all of the instruments and controls on an instrument panel such as this one.

Imagine trying to remember what all the instruments in this airplane cockpit do!

Go to the Research example to see how pilot memory is studied.

Research Example

Curator: Gaye Graves
Responsible NASA Official: Patricia M. Jones