This is the fourth volume of contributions from a group of researchers participating in the Second International Conference on Engineering Psychology and Cognitive Ergonomics, organized by the Human Factors Group of the College of Aeronautics, Cranfield University, at Oxford in 1998. The book is split into 56 chapters arranged in four parts. Part one of the book, Job Design and Analysis, is mainly concerned with the behavior of human beings when undertaking a job. It starts with the modeling and simulation of human operator in process control prepared by Pietro Carlo Cassiabue. One other interesting chapter in this section is written by John R. Wilson et al. who studied the work of schedulers in six collaborating companies in the manufacturing industry. Other than these two chapters, the other eight covered different work design topics like structuring of working behavior by Rob van Ouwerkerk et al. and effects of mental fatigue, as induced by time-on-task, on task performance by Monicque Lorist and Theo Meijman.
The second part of the book is extensive and specifically compiled to include chapters addressing the issues of human-computer interaction. It commences with the keynote speech of Gavriel Salvendy illustrating the use of cognitive ergonomics knowledge in the design and evaluation of web and other computer systems and gives the web designers some cues and hints of redesigning the web text for increasing search efficiency. The other noteworthy chapter written by Jonathon Smalley describes the Athena HCI assessment suite, which is a small wargaming prototyping facility addressing HCI integration at five levels. The other 13 chapters are centered mostly on other HCI issues like icon design by Sine McDougall et al. and user perception of multimedia video by George Ghinea and Johnson Thomas.
The third part of the book, Applied Psychology, is highlighted by the important chapter on the psychodynamics of human-computer interaction by Neville Moray. The readers should be satisfied with the vast amount of information provided in this section of 15 chapters on the psychology of the individual, mental workload and model, and methods data capture and analysis. Speech is the human's highest capacity output communication channel. It is noted that some chapters in this section coincidentally share the common interest of experimenting on human speech. They are the study of user interactions with speech systems by Kate Hone and David Golightly, effects of auditory warning signals on