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Fatigue is a recognized problem in many facets of the human
enterprise. It is not confined to any one area of activity but
enters all situations in which humans have to perform for extended
intervals of time. Most problematic are the circumstances in which
obligatory action is continuous and the results of failure are
evidently serious or even catastrophic. Therefore, the modern media
especially highlights fatigue-related failures in industries such
as transportation, materials processing and healthcare. It can be,
and indeed is, no coincidence that most of the spectacular failures
in process control that have resulted in the world's largest
industrial accidents have occurred in the small hours of the
morning when the circadian rhythm is lowest and operator fatigue
itself peaks. While there have been legislative efforts made at
state, federal and international levels to regulate working hours
of employees, the appropriate implementation of such legislation is
still a long way off. The Handbook of Operator Fatigue provides a
comprehensive account of the subject to serve as the definitive
reference work for researchers, students and practitioners alike.
The volume features 30 chapters written by experts from around the
world to address each important facet of fatigue, including: the
scale of the fatigue problem (Section I), the nature of fatigue
(Section II), how to assess fatigue (Section III), the impact of
fatigue on health (Section IV), fatigue in the workplace (Section
V), the neurological basis of fatigue (VI), sleep disorders (VII),
and the design of countermeasures to fatigue (VIII).
In recent years there has been steadily increasing interest in
motor behavior and a growing awareness that a person not only has
to know what to do in a particular situation, but also how to do
it. The question of how actions are performed is of central concern
in the area of motor control. This volume provides an
advanced-level treatment of some of the main issues. Experiments
concerned with basic processes of motor control typ ically examine
very simple movements. At first glance these tasks appear to be far
removed from real-world tasks, but it should be kept in mind that
they are not studied for their own sake. One of the main reasons
for using them is the well-recognized, but sometimes questioned,
scientific principle that basic laws may be discovered more easily
in simple situations than iIi complex situations. Another reason is
that the simple tasks studied constitute building blocks of more
complex tasks. For example, some complex skills can be consid ered
as consisting of sequences of aimed movements, although, as no one
would doubt, knowing everything about these individual movements
does not mean knowing everything about, for example, typing. The
first two chapters of the present volume focus on behavioral and
physiological studies of programming and preparation of move ments.
In the first chapter D. Rosenbaum introduces the concept of a motor
program that is set up in advance of the overt movement."
Fatigue is a recognized problem in many facets of the human
enterprise. It is not confined to any one area of activity but
enters all situations in which humans have to perform for extended
intervals of time. Most problematic are the circumstances in which
obligatory action is continuous and the results of failure are
evidently serious or even catastrophic. Therefore, the modern media
especially highlights fatigue-related failures in industries such
as transportation, materials processing and healthcare. It can be,
and indeed is, no coincidence that most of the spectacular failures
in process control that have resulted in the world's largest
industrial accidents have occurred in the small hours of the
morning when the circadian rhythm is lowest and operator fatigue
itself peaks. While there have been legislative efforts made at
state, federal and international levels to regulate working hours
of employees, the appropriate implementation of such legislation is
still a long way off. The Handbook of Operator Fatigue provides a
comprehensive account of the subject to serve as the definitive
reference work for researchers, students and practitioners alike.
The volume features 30 chapters written by experts from around the
world to address each important facet of fatigue, including: the
scale of the fatigue problem (Section I), the nature of fatigue
(Section II), how to assess fatigue (Section III), the impact of
fatigue on health (Section IV), fatigue in the workplace (Section
V), the neurological basis of fatigue (VI), sleep disorders (VII),
and the design of countermeasures to fatigue (VIII).
Rapid advances in IT that allow complex information to be presented
in high volume and density are challenging human ability to absorb
and analyze data as never before. Designing technologies and
systems to provide optimal sensory information to human users will
be increasingly important. But to do this, quantitative
relationships between brain behavior at a molecular level and
observable human behavior must be better identified. This was
previously considered to be a futuristic, and somewhat unrealistic,
goal, however, recent advances in cognitive neuroscience have
provided new opportunities for researchers. Refinements in imaging
technology and simulation tools, and the learning yielded from
them, provided the Quantifying Human Information Processing (QHIP)
research teams strong starting points from which to further assess
the ability to quantify human information processing. Led by
experts in psychology, cognitive science, and information
processing, among other fields, researchers sought to quantify the
information flow in the nervous system, the limits of that flow,
and how it is affected by emotions. The QHIP effort looked at
specific aspects of the brain's information processing ability
including measuring task-related and unrelated thought, assessing
mental workload, and finding optimal information processing. The
researchers found important indicators of both the capacity and
limits of the human brain, and offer new ways to think about the
brain. This work is a valuable contribution to the fields of
psychology, neuroscience, and cognition, and will serve as a
resource for human factors engineers designing the next generation
of information, safety, analysis, and control systems because it
starts to answer how to maximize information processing without
overloading the central nervous system.
This book is a collection of contemporary applications of
psychological insights into practical human factors issues. The
topics are arranged largely according to an information
processing/energetic approach to human behavior. Consideration is
also given to human-computer interaction and organizational design.
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