ABSTRACT
About the chapter This chapter introduces several approaches used to model and evaluate cognitive tasks performed by people in a wide variety of industrial and consumer settings. These approaches provide several new measures of human performance, not considered in the earlier chapters of this book, such as the amount of transmitted information, receiver sensitivity, and biases or deviations from optimality. The approaches also provide helpful guidance into how knowledge and goals influence behavior and some of the underlying reasons for human error. The chapter begins by introducing the topic of communication theory. An important contribution of this theory is that it provides a quantitative measure of the information transmitted that is equivalent to the reduction of uncertainty. Applications of communication theory are discussed, before introducing several models of human processing. The latter discussion focuses on how human performance and decision making are influenced by selective attention, working memory limitations, the mode of processing, and other factors related to how people process information. Several models of human decision making are then introduced that can be used to evaluate how people make choices and make inferences. Such models can be used to make quantitative predictions in many different applications. Examples include models of customer preference and choice, models of fault detection and troubleshooting tasks performed by expert operators, and medical applications, such as diagnoses of illnesses by physicians.
