Why the Fitts list has persisted throughout the history of function allocation

Function allocation is a core activity of the human–machine systems discipline. Sixty years ago, Paul Fitts marked the outset of function allocation research with an 11-statements list. Since then numerous function allocation methods have been proposed, but strikingly the seminal Fitts list spans the entire history of this domain and continues...

Hands-on experience of manual control in a human-machine systems engineering course

This paper presents the results of integrating hands-on experience in an engineering MSc course on human-machine systems. Students could voluntarily complete a homework assignment in which they performed manual control tasks using dedicated software. The tasks were accompanied by questions that students had to answer using the theory taught in...

Left turn gap acceptance in a simulator: Driving skill or driving style?

This paper describes two driving simulator experiments on left turn gap acceptance at intersections. In the first experiment, participants (N = 24) had to turn left at 25 intersections and cross an approaching traffic stream of 25 equally-spaced vehicles, with a different combination of intervehicle gap time and approach speed at each...

An analysis of braking measures

Braking to a full stop at a prescribed target position is a driving manoeuvre regularly used in experiments to investigate driving behaviour or to test vehicle acceleration feedback systems in simulators. Many different performance measures have been reported in the literature for analysing braking. These may or may not be useful to analyse the...

Five-point Likert items: t test versus Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon

Likert questionnaires are widely used in survey research, but it is unclear whether the item data should be investigated by means of parametric or nonparametric procedures. This study compared the Type I and II error rates of the t test versus the Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon (MWW) for five-point Likert items. Fourteen population distributions were...

Objective classification of residents based on their psychomotor laparoscopic skills

Background - From the clinical point of view, it is important to recognize residents’ level of expertise with regard to basic psychomotor skills. For that reason, surgeons and surgical organizations (e.g., Acreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, ACGME) are calling for assessment tools that credential residents as technically...

Advancing simulation-based driver training

A Two-Dimensional Weighting Function for a Driver Assistance System

Driver assistance systems that supply force feedback (FF) on the accelerator commonly use relative distance and velocity with respect to the closest lead vehicle in front of the own vehicle. This 1-D feedback might not accurately represent the situation and can cause unwanted step-shaped changes in the FFs during lateral maneuvers. To address...