ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines a number of different ways that "modeling" and "performance" can be thought about and juxtaposed. The list is illustrative only, and is not meant to be a complete taxonomy in any sense. The object is to illustrate the futility of the general question, "Can performance be modeled?". The chapter offers some reasons why people are, or might be, interested in modeling performance. It briefly discusses a variety of specific areas in which performance, or things related to performance, are modeled in some fashion. The chapter speculates about some of the implications of these previous modeling activities for the conceptualization and measurement of complex job performance. Decision making and problem solving are important components of many jobs. Modeling by human-factors specialists usually involves the tranformation/transmitting process and the usual aim is to maximize the efficiency of the human operator in terms of the amount of information that can be transmitted per unit time.
