Focus on Behavior the Science of Psychology: Of Men and Machines

[Music] from the moment of his birth man is involved with machines machines can prolong his life and they can end it abruptly the study of men and machines the systematic effort to make their relationship as safe and efficient as possible in a world that grows ever more complex is one of the newest branches of psychology it also seems destined to be one of the most important this field of psychology is known as human engineering and its Pioneers are the engineering psychologists [Music] I'm John Darley I'm in the control tower at the Idle Wild airport about 250,000 years ago man picked up a stone and made an axe like this one for the next quarter of a million years not very much happened at least not from the standpoint of engineering psychology because man continued to work with very simple tools but since the Industrial Revolution things have picked up quite a bit here for example at this busy Airfield we can see how far and how fast we've come when machines get this complicated how does man cope with it has become the job of the engineering psychologist to find out the study of man's behavior is the province of psychology and in today's World our behavior is very much linked to the machines in the home on the roads at work we are almost never without a machine of some kind therefore it has become the responsibility of engineering psychologists to study man's behavior with his friend and enemy The Machine during it after World War II many psychologists tackle this increasingly complex relationship Kennedy Taylor Morgan chapanis cap in England barlet and Broadband among others one of the Pioneers is Dr Paul M Fitz of the University of Michigan engineering psychology thinks of man's relation to machine as a kind of dialogue in which the man and machine exchange information but this information exchange sometimes breaks down for example the housewife in setting the control on her oven uh sometimes sets it too high so that the roast Burns or the driver reaching to turn off the windshield sh wiper uh turns off the headlights instead engineering psychologists attempt to eliminate such confusion not by changing man's habits but by changing the machine they attempt to discover how machines can be designed so that the machine will speak a language which man understands this means I believe that we should study man's habits determine his natural reactions to uh stimul do experiments such as this simple stimulus response compatibility study can you hear me all right yes this time we're going to test your speed and accuracy of response to signals in this case just the center light will come on and when you see that light you were to respond just as quickly as you can all right are you ready your reaction time was .17 your movement time was .11 you reset the CL this time we're going to make it a bit more complicated instead of just the center light coming on any one of the nine lights may appear your task again is to put your finger on the button as quickly as you see the light all right are you ready your reaction time was 33 your movement time was .18 as you can see man does best when there are no Alternatives when we increase the number of alternatives atives in this experiment man's reactions increased by about 50% but the task is still a highly compatible one that is man's reactions are very natural ones and he practically never makes an error let's see now what happens when we separate the stimulus and the response and man must control from a distance as is often the case in the man machine dialogue all right this time we have a more complicated task the signal will appear on this panel up here and you were to respond as before when these buttons down here again touch the light as touch the appropriate Button as soon as the light comes on are you ready okay your reaction time was 63 your movement time was. 17 the biggest source of confusion in man machine communication arises when the brain has to translate and interpret information the next step in our experiment is of this sort the experimenter rotates the display so that it appears to be seen upside down and in a mirror reaction time now may be longer than a second and you will notice that the subject's movements are uncertain and sometimes made to the wrong target uh he can no longer use natural reactions in responding to the stimulus lights each step in which we have reduced the compatibility between man and machine has resulted in a fractional increase in the subject's reaction time at first this uh increase of fractions of a second may seem trivial until one considers that a machine such as an airplane flies hundreds of feet uh in a second here a lack of compatibility is a matter of life and death lack of compatibility means that the pilot makes errors his reaction time slows down this is exactly what was happening to some of our pilots in World War II when engineering psychology first got started in this country as a matter of fact it started right here in the cockpits of our PLS we had the cream of American Youth preparing for air combat and yet about one in every hundred was being killed in a training accident [Music] why it was our job to find out Pilots Arrow most of these accidents were called on the reports but we engineering psychologists thought differently we talked to the pilots and they called it engineering design era Pilots era hell that's an engineering era he had half a second to flip over to his reserve tank and it takes three try it once and see I can see how it happened the two levers are exactly alike in an emergency you don't don't have time to look you just grab everybody that flies at aircraft has trouble they feel for one knob and grab another they never flown the plane before the whole instrument panel is different you look around for the air speed indicator and it's someplace else obviously it was not the pilots then what was it we started with the instrument panel every indicator on it is important to a pilot but six of them are vital these are the six they tell the pilot his position and his rates of movement in three-dimensional space but there was no standard Arrangement and so each time a pilot flew a different type of aircraft he had to learn a new arrangement of the instruments in order to find out what arrangement would shorten eye movements reduce decision time and save lives we photographed measured and timed actual eye movement patterns of pilots in Flight as a next step we converted all the data to schematic drawings compared them and found that one arrangement required the least amount of eye movements and was clearly Superior to all the rest today this Arrangement is standard in all military and most civilian aircraft and the pilots like it they call it the sacred sex but one of the six was not so Sac the standard altimeter this is what the pilot formerly had to read to find out his altitude three pointers the long one for hundreds of feet the broad one for thousands of feet the small one for 10, thousands of feet at the moment this one reads 1,500 ft in a power dive this is what the pilot sees on his altimeter can he read it working under Dr Walter F graer engineering psychologist at Wright Patterson Air Force Base took the altimeter into the laboratory we'll start you off in level flight due south at 20,000 ft I'll call off course and altitude changes whenever the Bell Rings you read your altitude are you ready Roger okay Bank to the right to 225° and then climb to 30,000 ft Roger 23,500 error the psychologist knows the correct reading because he has arranged for the Bell to ring only at certain pre determine the altitudes 28,900 [Music] error 30,000 level out then put it into a dive 20 26 no 22,000 18 no no it's a uh okay level out pretty tough isn't it engineering psychologists found that the average pilot took 7 Seconds to read all three pointers of the conventional altimeter in the laboratory in the air of course where the pilot usually knows his approximate altitude his reading is considerably faster in the laboratory his readings also were frequently in Arrow by 1,000 ft or more and they were usually wrong in the dangerous direction that is the pilot thought he was higher than actually was it looked as if we had the answer to many Mountaintop crashes and crashes short of the field our problem was clear to find a better way of displaying altitude information and as we studied the altitude display we found out more about what the pilot needs to know this counter for instance was easy to read with speed and accuracy it told the pilot exactly where he was but it didn't tell him where he'd been where he was going to be or how fast his altitude was changing the search continued in all nine altimeter displays were tested we want to try out this new tape type altimeter I'll start you out a level flight at 30,000 ft as soon as you're ready put the nose down and then level out at 10,000 ft when the bell rings call out your altitude Roger 28,000 [Music] 265 20,900 15,000 10 Angels on the nose This Thing Really Works engineering psychologists found out which designs worked best for man design engine built it today the most modern Air Force planes are equipped with a tape altimeter it is also available for commercial planes and private Pilots these studies solved some of the problems for our Pilots but other problems remain it is not only essential that the machines speak clearly to the man the man must speak just as clearly to the machine in Flight the right response is a matter of life and death here's a scene that has been heed far too often when he touched the runway the pilot started to raise his flaps instead he raised his landing gear in certain types of aircraft this accident was tragically frequent who was to blame the man or the machine the answer again is the machine and here is the culprit identical control knobs placed side by side but controlling very different functions the pilot touching down at 100 m an hour doesn't have time to take his eyes off the Runway and yet with levers having the same shaped knob placed a few inches apart it's very easy for him to grasp the wrong one without visual cues what shapes can a man most easily distinguished by feel alone that was one of the next problems tackled by the engineering psychologist at Wright Patterson uh we want to find out whether you can tell the difference among these knobs if you can't see them uh you can put your blindfold down now and we'll position your hand out here when I say go I want you to put your hand down on the knob that is positioned directly under it all right and when I say stop I want you to take your hand up all right then after each pair I want you to tell me whether they were the same or different all right go stop go Stop Those Were the same go stop go stop those were the same go stop go stop those were different as a result of our experiments we recommended that each control have a different knob shape easily identified by touch and here are some of the shapes that we recommended easily identified by feel without the necessity of using Vision when these shapes were introduced into airplanes many of the landing accidents were reduced these experiments which we have been describing were some of the early experiments done by the engineering psychologist in the last 10 years machines have continued to grow more complicated and the work of the engineering psychologist more difficult helping man to stay ahead of the machine has become a big job let's suppose that a jet plane is coming in for a landing when the pilot makes a controlled movement there's a critical time lag before the aircraft responds resp if he waits for the response he'll be too late with his next control movement he has to be two or three movements ahead of the plane or else he's in trouble now how do we keep him out of trouble to give us the answer here is Dr Julian M Christensen of Wright Patterson Air Force Base first we have available a greatly expanded and improved engineering technology but but in addition to that we have learned considerably more about man and his ability to handle these very difficult situations as an example of the type of research that engineering psychologists are doing to support this effort we'd like to have you see some work that Dr war is doing when the pilot makes a control movement in his airplane there is always a lag between his control motion and the response to the aircraft this means that the pilot must really be a few steps ahead of the aircraft or else he's in trouble now what we've done here is attempt to simulate a bomber in a landing operation that is these computers have in them some of the dynamic characteristics of a bomber under a landing condition this little dot right here represents your present altitude this Square represents what your altitude should be if you're going to make a safe landing I see I move the dot into the square yes that's quite right but remember that little Dot's going to be moving up and down that's because your altitude naturally is changing during landing and furthermore of course you're going to be subjected to some turbulence so your task is to move that dot down to the square and keep it there ready okay fine well how' you find that pretty tough as you can see this is a very difficult task for our pilot to perform now if we let the computers take some of the burden from him and present only the information he needs in a slightly different form I think you can see that the job will be much easier and as a result the man machine combination will be much more effective it's important to note that we haven't changed man in any respect we have only given him information that is more compatible this kind of work was started by Birmingham and Taylor at the naval research laboratory many years ago and what you are seeing here is based on their p ering efforts okay now we're going to let the computer do a little bit of the work you see this horizontal bar of light here on the display that bar of light represents your predicted altitude over at the left hand edge of the bar of light is your present altitude at the right hand edge of the bar of light is your predicted altitude 10 seconds from now so if you make a mistake on the controls the computer will tell you about it immediately got the picture right good oh okay we'll try this now ready right go that's much easier good we have seen the computer help one man solve one complex problem however in real life the situation is usually much more complicated there are many men and many machines dealing with complex inner relationships therefore the engineering psychologist has had to address himself to these types of situations as an example of work in this area we'd like to show you some research that's going on at the laboratory of Aviation psychology at the Ohio State University where they are dealing with problems related to the air traffic control situation I'm George Briggs and this is the radar control room of a simulated air traffic control system our skies the airspace above us are becoming more and more crowded every day and the man who attempts to control this traffic the air traffic controller has a difficult and at times nerve-wracking job to perform it's something like uh placing a policeman on the observation deck of the Empire State Building and asking him to direct automobile traffic down on Time Square in our laboratory we have students who instead of flying aircraft fly these consoles by inserting Corrections in the same way a pilot corrects his flight during an approach to the Airfield also as is the case in real life our laboratory air traffic controller can't see the planes he's talking to and what's worse the conventional radar display doesn't tell him which plane is which all he sees on the radar scope is a number of moving blips that is dashes of light and they are identical the radar display doesn't tell him the altitude of the planes either he has to remember that and he has to remember remember which flip stands for which plane when the traffic gets heavy he sometimes forgets first we studied the problems that arise in the use of conventional radar displays Alpha One radar of trying to locate you execute a 360° turn to the right over Alpha One radar turning right to 3 60° a sharp course change will show up on the radar scope and the controller will be able then to locate the plane but sometimes this leads to even worse trouble alpha 1 what is your altitude over alpha 1 to radar altitude 12,200 ft over Bravo four what is your altitude over Bravo four to control altitude 12,000 over Bravo four radar I have you in conflict with another aircraft descend to 10,000 ft descending to 10 Angels over alpha one I have you in conflict with another aircraft turn left 30 deges and hold your altitude over Alpha One to radar banking left over close call and sometimes collisions occur because the air traffic controller can handle only a certain amount of information without further assistance from the radar scope this happens not only in the laboratory but in real life as well and there it costs us a precious commodity human lives to get at the principles which operate in this kind of a man machine system we have placed our air traffic controller under extreme stress the two psychologists sitting on either side of the controller are going to measure his performance under an emergency condition which stretches his memory to the utmost we have overloaded the air traffic control system that is to say the skies are jammed with aircraft and now the radar scope is going dead attention all aircraft I have lost radar contact stand by till further advised Bravo 7 Bravo 7 Delta 8 I do not have you on radar standby until further advised orbit right until further advised under this kind of a stress we found that a trained controller could handle efficiently and safely approximately four aircraft simultaneously today in this kind of an emergency the controller at an airport would divert at least some of the aircraft to alternate Landing areas we set as our goal a technique which would shift the burden of memory from the man to the machine working under Dr Fitz the psychologist provided the engineers with several devices that would tell the controller which plane was which they were looking for some kind of a code or identifying Mark that would make each of the radar blips distinct and individual after several experiments they inserted a computer in the system as we have done now that would provide a code for each of the aircraft without the distinctive coding he sees this kind of radar display when the computer is added to the system he sees this every aircraft is identified by a code Mark which compares to the hands on a clock the shape is predetermined either by a computer or by information broadcast from the plane by radio now let us test the controller's emergency responses again mention all aircraft I have experienced radar failure stand by till further advised Bravo 7 Bravo 7 Delta 8 I have lost RAR contact orbit right until further advised coding has been tested under all sorts of circumstances and there is no doubt that it contributes to air traffic control safety and efficiency we found that by changing the machine in this way the capacity of the controller was increased 100% that is he could now handle simultaneously eight aircraft rather than four the Air Force is beginning to use coding in their radar approach control centers and it will become available in the future at civilian airports as well of course coding doesn't solve all the problems in air traffic control at this moment engineers and Engineering psychologists are seeking more more ingenious ways to adapt the mechanisms of air traffic control for an even more compatible relationship between man and machine a quarter of a million years separates this ax and this radar system and the history of engineering psychology spans only the last half century young as it is this science has already affected our lives and will do so in many more ways all the way from automobiles to aircraft left from kitchens to space capsules engineering psychology stands for man for the human scale in a world of complex man- machine relations and it's the hope of every engineering psychologist that his findings will contribute to the mainstream of psychology's efforts to help man understand himself and his world [Music] la oh [Applause] [Music] this is NE National educational television