MAIN PROBLEMS OF ENGINEERING PSYCHOLOGY
This B.F. Lomov’s article[24] is devoted to a detailed consideration of the main problems of engineering psychology. These include the problems of transferring information to a human operator, control actions of a human operator, operational thinking, the memory of a human operator, activities of a human operator in control and management systems, and reliability of a human operator. B.F. Lomov examines in detail the content of these problems and gives examples of engineering and psychological studies of Soviet and foreign psychologists in the 1950s-1960s. The problem of transmitting information to a human operator includes psychophysiological (correlation between a physical signal and sensory systems), information-theoretic (assessment of the maximum amount of information perceived and processed by a person per unit of time) and psychological (study of mental processes involved in information processing) aspects. The study of the control actions of a human operator includes the identification of the mechanisms of mental regulation of working movements. The aspects of operational thinking include the solution of practical problems and the subsequent construction of a model of the proposed set of actions that ensure the achievement of the goal. The problem of memory functioning in the activity of the operator is manifested in the study of the regularities of the operative memory itself, which ensures the execution of current tasks. The analysis of the activity of a human operator in control and management systems consists in its algorithmic description and identification of the characteristics of building information models of tasks and objects. The problem of reliability of operators involves the study of the causes of failures in work, factors of reliable work in adverse conditions, features of working capacity, the specifics of mental regulation of activity and individual typological properties of a person. All of the listed areas of engineering-psychological research constitute a complex of problems of the “man-machine” system. The abstract and keywords for the article were compiled by A.A. Kostrigin.