ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces some human performance issues that could guide people: cognitive fixation; plan continuation; fatigue; buggy or inert knowledge; new technology and computerization; and procedural adaptations. The new design changes the work associated with figuring out and remembering approach speeds and reduces the cognitive depth of crews' engagement with the task. Even more important than the cognitive processes involved in decision-making, are the contextual factors that surround people at the time. The Gulf War showed that there is a natural synergy between tactics, technology and human factors: effective leaders will exploit every new advance to the limit. Improvements in the form of new technology get stretched in some way, pushing operators back to the edge of the operational envelope from which the technological innovation was supposed to buffer them. Characteristic of cognitive fixation is that the immediate problem-solving context biases people in some direction.
