ABSTRACT
Many of the jobs carried out by human operators in the workplace have a “detection” component to them. Various kinds of watchkeeping tasks (e.g. radar monitoring, airport security, product quality control) are some of the more obvious examples. Other seemingly more complicated tasks, such as medical diagnosis and personnel evaluation, can also be reduced in many instances to a set of all-or-none decisions about the need for an intervention of some kind. In virtually all of these cases, the potential for human error exists, and a critical question for the human factors specialist is whether some or all of these errors can be attributed to operator training, system design, or other aspects of the job that could be retooled in some way.
