BRUARY 9,1962 THE MICHIGAN DAILY ENGINEERING PSYCHOLOGY: Scientists Probe Man, Machine Role By DONNA ROBINSON stitute of Science and Techology. During World War II, when The research head is Prof. Arthur nearly every day saw the addition Melton of the psychology depart- of some new and more complicated ment. gadget to the equipment used for Two Major Programs the business of war, a new prob- The laboratory is at the present lem also began to emerge: the time involved in two major pro- more complicated machines be- I came, the more efficient they grams, Prof. Edwards said. The should have been. first is part of Project Michigan, All too often, they weren't; it a exensiesuy of echnques- fn $ rirn r~i7nfor v I took men to operate the machines, and men were still just as "simple as ever." The weapons engineer's call for help was answered by the experimental psychologist, and a new science arose: the science of engineering psychology, P r o f. Ward Edwards, research psychol- ogist at the Engineering Psychol- ogy Laboratory said recently. Psychology Specialty' Engineering psychology, a spe- ciality within experimental psy- chology, is concerned with the man-machine system: how the two parts may be mated-the machine by design and the man by train- ing-so that the capabilities of both can be efficiently explointed. The work of the engineering psychologist is thus useful to in- dustry as well as to the armed service. The scope of this new specialty was for a time limited largely to "knobs and dials problems"-the problems in making instruments such as airplane altimeters easier to read, of placing and shaping controls so they could be recog- nized and used without having actually to look 'at them. Pure Experiment But the work now being con- ducted at the Engineering Psy- chology Laboratory is of a more fundamental nature and is often pure experimental psychology, Prof. Edwards said. In order to exploit the capabili- ties 'of men, scientists must first know what those capabilities are. Consequently much of present-day work in engineering psychology is basic research in perception, memory, decision - making and thinking. The Engineering, Psychology Laboratory was established in 1958 as an independent group within the Willow Run Laboratories, which later merged with the In- joil ~acquiringl, organizing an ~IU ax ploiting information on the battle field. The project is sponsored by an army contract, the largest IST has, and concerns many depart- ments within the Institute. The Engineering Psychology Laboratory is responsible for the, part of the program concerning image interpretation. The images in question here are those pro- duced by radar, infrared and aerial photography, and similar informa- tion-gathering devices. Extract Information The aim of the team working on the problem is to find how much information can be extract- ed from these images, and how IT the information can be displayed so as to be most easily readable. Different phases of this problem which are being studied include the effects of confusion elements in the image, of information given the viewer about the image, and of distortion of the image by transmitting and display instru- ments, such as a radar screen. The second large-scale program the Laboratory is engaged in now is sponsored partly by Project Michigan and partly by several Air Force agencies. It concerns the way men make risky decisions and how they acquire and organize the information for these deci- sions, Prof. Edwards said. He is primarily responsible for the work on this problem, and here again the research is mostly at an abstract level. 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