ABSTRACT

When accident or breakdown afflicts large technical installations, it is often important, for both legal and ameliorative design reasons, to extract the best possible memory record of salient events from diverse groups of involved principals and patch it together in the most accurate and useful manner. Because there exists a considerable body of empirical knowledge concerning memory completeness and accuracy under different evoking conditions, a good opportunity exists for some ergonomists to specialize in the provision of

memory patching services, based upon the development of useful recall and memory patching protocols from this knowledge. The problem in developing such protocols is to avoid being drowned in the detail of thousands of empirical findings. To avoid drowning, it is probably better first, that those who engage in such protocol development be arm’s length from those engaged in actual experiments in the field and second, that relatively few key memory results be incorporated in early protocols. In order to initiate this development process, there is here presented ten candidate findings about which to develop such a protocol.