ABSTRACT
Human cognitive attributes are important because they prescribe the capabilities and limitations of the human as a system component and the conditions for the successful matching of the human with other system components. Human capabilities and limitations are part of its subject-matter. Many human factors concepts that originate from practical contexts such as air traffic control systems have no exact equivalent in psychological parlance or psychological theories. The human can never monitor independently of perceptual processes but only through those processes, and therefore cannot recognize errors and omissions which are intrinsic to the perceptual processes themselves, for such recognition would require an independent mechanism. Humans have great difficulty in processing and weighing correctly information from several disparate sources, and any attempts to do so take a long time. A common characteristic of the human as a component of such systems is that the limitations imposed by attention are more severe than perceptual limitations.
