Human Systems Integration Division @ NASA Ames

One way to model human behavior easily and accurately is to decompose a complex task into a set of primitive operations to which performance parameters may be assigned. This allows reuse of models at the task level by means of behavioral templates. Performance predictions generated from reusable templates were tested against data from an experiment on space shuttle procedures. The experiment used different participant populations (novice pilots vs. expert astronauts) in different workload conditions (single vs. multiple malfunctions). A phrase-reading template was found to predict performance for the different groups in the different conditions, and a screen-touching template was found to predict performance for astronauts, but there was not enough data to evaluate cross-group and cross-condition predictions. Templates appear to be a useful tool for making predictions of human performance.