PSY3080 Human Factors

Requisites

Pre-requisite: PSY1010 and PSY1020 and (STA2300 or PSY2100)

Synopsis

The course begins with an historical overview of the interface between psychology and work and the consequent growth of human factors/engineering psychology. Research methodology plays a big part in human factors, indeed it is a theme that runs through the whole course, so there is some early coverage of statistics and methods, but no more than has already been covered in PSY2100 and PSY3111. Sections on human sensory systems, cognition, and human physiology emphasise the importance of understanding the limitation of these systems from a human-machine interface perspective. The approach taken involves reviewing a topic (e.g., perception), describing the limitations in human systems for machine and software design, followed by coverage of the design process itself. The final section of the course applies the principles of human factors to fields such as automation, transportation, medicine, and training with a view to explaining much of the problem behaviour we observe in these fields and using human factors principles to bring about improvements.

Course offers