ABSTRACT
CONTENTS Introduction .........................................................................................................403 13.1 Measuring Performance ...........................................................................404 13.2 Speed-Accuracy Trade-Off in Performance ..........................................406 13.3 Mechanisms and a Model of Posture and Performance.....................408 13.4 Studies of Posture and Performance ...................................................... 411
13.4.1 Field Studies...................................................................................412 13.4.2 Reaction Time and Tracking Tasks.............................................413 13.4.3 Visual Inspection Tasks ................................................................414 13.4.4 Keyboarding Tasks........................................................................416
13.5 Conclusions.................................................................................................419 Summary ..............................................................................................................419 References.............................................................................................................420
In the human factors community, performance is seen as one of the key objectives: human factors/ergonomics aims to improve human performance and well-being (Wilson 1995). Although much of the research on posture has focused on well-being, for example, the role of posture in causation of musculo-skeletal injuries, there exists a body of literature that has investigated postural effects on performance. A series of laboratory studies investigated the effect of gross body posture (lying, sitting, standing) on reaction time and found that standing reduced reaction times under certain conditions (Vercruyssen and Simonton 1994). A field study (Kim et al. 2001) found that postural and time-pressure measures together accounted for more than 50% of the variance in quality at different workstations on a production line.
