On Increasing the Sensitivity of Measures of Performance

This paper illustrates some of the methods which have been used to increase the sensitivity of measures of performance: adjusting the difficulty of the task; saturating the man's channel capacity by giving him an additional task to perform; using un unfamiliar task; measuring variability instead of mean performance: selecting specfic events on which to make measurements; examining component rather than overall measures: and channelling two dimensions of variability into one. Finally it raises a methodological difficulty in comparing the results of performance tests which may differ in sensitivity.