ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book argues that working memory is a very constraining limit in its own right, but also such limits drive other processing constraints, and principles, such as the costs of having material to be compared separated in space and time. While compatibility has long been a well-known principle in engineering psychology, the concept of similarity-based confusion does not enjoy such a rich history, yet is every bit as critical in characterizing human performance. Human performance theory is critical in helping to understand these strategic trade-offs, what drives people along the trade-off function, where they should operate versus where they do operate, and how to measure the quality of human performance across the function. The relative contributions of human perception and cognition to total system performance have grown accordingly.
