Planned Seeing

Résumé du livre

"Many wartime problems in the Services called for careful selection of personnel, but as this monograph shows, psychological investigations of human behavior need not necessarily be restricted to problems in the allocation of manpower. Where a high proportion of the candidates would have to be rejected were the required standard of working efficiency to be achieved solely by personnel selection, it may be possible to ensure that the work is well done by adjusting the balance between the requirements of the task and the capabilities of the worker by applying either the technique of work design or that of synthetic training. Accurate measures of human performance taken from men on the work itself, or from some simulation of the actual situation, can often detect features in the task which are causing difficulty. In some cases it is practicable to remove such difficulties by altering the design of the working conditions, as in the case of the Operations Rooms of Fighter Command, where human efficiency was greatly affected by apparently minor changes in the features of the Control Room equipment. A slight increase in the size of some critical detail often meant that everyone looking at the plotting table was able to see the display clearly and accurately. In other cases, however, visual difficulties occurred but were quite unavoidable, as in bomb-aiming, where air bombers had to estimate by eye the average position of a number of target indicators. For military reasons the physical characteristics of the display could not be altered in any way; again controlled human experiments were required to discover the main causes of the difficulties experienced, to determine which features of the real-life situation had to be incorporated in the synthetic training situation. As a result of these experiments, a training apparatus was devised which was officially adopted for synthetic training in Bomber Command. Whether the difficulties are removed by re-designing working conditions, or are overcome by intensive synthetic training, any improvements practicable will allow of a higher proportion of average or below average men to be employed. By applying these principles the Service is able to make the best use of the manpower available by up-grading personnel so that they can work efficiently at tasks which had previously presented some difficulty. These experiments were carried out by Dr. N.H. Mackworth between 1943 and 1945 under the general guidance of Sir Frederic Bartlett, Head of the Psychology Laboratory, Cambridge University, in close association with the Flying Personnel Research Committee and with the Operational Research Sections of Fighter Command and Bomber Command of the Royal Air Force."--Foreword