Introduction

Engineering psychology is the application of psychological theory to real world activities. Engineering Psychology focuses on human factors from the neck up, in contrast to many applications of human factors to issues below the neck such as lower back injuries, fatigue, and work physiology. The goal is to improve human performance, increase speed and accuracy, while reducing attention demands, workload, and stress, where possible. This book provides a distinctive perspective integrating human information processing models and the latest psychological theories to derive principles and help readers understand how to improve human performance. While many specific real examples are utilized in the book to elucidate how psychological theory has been employed to actually improve performance, the primary objective of the book is to provide the reader with broad theoretical principles from an information processing perspective that will be useful in any human performance situation they encounter.