ABSTRACT
What is now known as “the human factors approach” was once characterized by a focus on individual people and their functioning. In the 1970s, human factors mostly focused on models of mental information processing. These models assumed that the interesting activities for understanding functioning in complex worlds were internal to the human. Meaning and perceptual order are the end result of an internal trade in representations. These representations would get increasingly ‹lled out and meaningful as a result of processing in the mind, with the help of structures like short-term memory, long-term memory, decision making, action execution, and others. Information processing ‹t a larger, dominant meta-theoretical perspective that takes the individual as its central focus. This view was a heritage of the scienti‹c revolution, which increasingly popularized the humanistic idea of a “self-contained individual.” For most of human factors, this meant that all processes worth studying took place within the boundaries of the body (or mind), something epitomized by the mentalist focus of information processing.
