1 Visual Sensory

1. Illuminance & Luminance

Illuminance
Incident light; the energy reaching the surface of a to-be-seen object; declines
with the square of the distance from the source.
measured in units of foot candles or lux
Luminance
the amount of light reflected off objects, which declines with the square of the
distance from the to-be-seen-object.
intensity also dependent on texture of objects surface.
measured in foot lamberts (FL) or Candela/M2

2. Bottom-Up vs. Top-Down Processing:

3. Depth Perception: Bottom-up Contributors

Sources of 3-D depth cues:

Accommodation
focusing images through changes in shape of the lens; a proprioceptive cue.
Binocular convergence
Binocular convergence
Binocular disparity
stereopsis; hole-through-the-hand example.

1
2 Auditory
1. Criteria for Alarms

Must be heard above background ambient noise.

Should be a minimum of 15 db above the threshold of hearing above the noise
level. This typically requires about 30 db difference to guarantee detection.
Sound components should be distributed across several frequencies to avoid
masking of the alarm by the malfunctioning equipment/system noise.
Should not be above danger levels for hearing whenever possible. Danger level
begins at 85-90 db. Careful selection of frequencies can often be used to accomplish
this and the criteria for 15 db above noise alarm.
Should not be overly startling
Trade-off between too loud and too soft.
Can be addressed by tuning the rise time of the alarm pulse.
Should be informative
Signal the nature of the emergency
Signal the appropriate action to be taken (ideally)
Too many types of alarms can produce confusion.
Should not disrupt the processing of other signals or any background speech com-
munications that may be essential to deal with the alarm
Aircraft, Medical equipment, alarm systems

2. Importance of fidelity level (speech):

produce recognizable speech,

produce recognizable speech that can be heard in noise, and
support easy listening.

3. Sources of Noise-Induced Hearing Loss

3 Cognition
4 Decision Making
5 Displays
1. The 13 Principles of Display Design

Perceptual Principles
Make displays legible (or audible)
Contrast, visual angle, illumination, noise, masking.
Legibility is necessary, but not sufficient, to create usable displays.
Iterative testing is critical.

2
 Avoid absolute judgment limits
Do not require operators to judge levels of a represented variable on basis of
a single sensory dimensionespecially when there are more than five to seven
possible levels.
Top-down processing
People perceive and interpret information through the filter of experience
(their expectations).
If a signal presented is inconsistent with a persons prior expectations, then
more physical evidence of that signal must be presented to guarantee correct
interpretation (i.e., offsetting the confirmation bias).
Redundancy gain
Messages expressed more than once, or in a alternate physical form, are
more likely to be interpreted correctly.
Discriminability
(a) Similarly appearing signals will likely be confused.
i. Primary cause is the ratio of similar features to dissimilar ones (AJB648
- AJB658 vs. 48 - 58).
(b) Designers should remove unnecessary similar features and highlight dissim-
ilar ones.
Mental Model Principles
Attention Principles
Memory Principles