654 Psychological Experimentation Addressing Practical Concerns
also in Cambridge, under Craik. The APRU went on to
become a leading establishment in Great Britain for the sci-
entific study of problems relating to the human use of tech-
nology. Bartlett (1943, 1948) studied the effects of fatigue on
human performance. Mackworth developed the first lab-
oratory tests designed to simulate the requirements for sus-
tained attention when monitoring a radar screen and spawned
the field of vigilance research (Mackworth, 1950). Craik
abstracted the requirements of antiaircraft gunnery into lab-
oratory tracking tasks and, through experiments using a sim-
ulated cockpit that he built, advanced understanding of
perceptual-motor performance generally. Not only did Craik
(1947, 1948) contribute as an experimentalist, but his theo-
retical ideas, some of which were published after his
untimely death in 1945, also were influential both in psy-
chology and in the emerging area of feedback systems or
cybernetics.
In the United States, S. S. Stevens collected at the Har-
vard Psychoacoustics Laboratory a cadre of psychologists
who soon would become well known, including James
Egan, Karl Kryter, J. C. R. Licklider, George Miller, and
Irwin Pollack. Among other achievements, this group im-
proved intelligibility-testing techniques and explored meth-
ods for improving the understanding of speech in aircraft
cockpits (Egan, 1944; Miller, 1947). Licklider (1946) exper-
imentally investigated peak clipping and discovered that he
could enhance the intelligibility of speech in a radio trans-
mission system by using signal power to increase the signal
amplitude even though the system amplitude-handling capa-
bility was limited and peak clipping would result.
Harvard University had a broader contract with the
National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) that in-
cluded funding for the Electro-Acoustics Laboratory and the
Radio Research Laboratory, as well as subcontracts with
other university laboratories that were working on human-
machine interaction. In early 1945, just before the end of the
war, the NDRC was asked to fund a new activity examining
behavioral issues in naval combat information centers. Im-
mediately after the war, this work was turned over to Johns
Hopkins University, where Clifford Morgan, Alphonse
Chapanis, Wendell Garner, John Gebhard, and Robert Sleight
became key contributors in a laboratory that identified with
most of the psychological issues associated with the design
of large-scale systems with which people had to interact
(Chapanis, 1999). The creation of this laboratory led to pub-
lication of “Lectures on Men and Machines: An Introduction
to Human Engineering,” by Chapanis, Garner, Morgan, and
Sanford in 1947, and then to the first text to use the title,
Applied Experimental Psychology,by Chapanis, Garner, and
Morgan in 1949.
Another distinguished team, which included Paul Fitts and
Arthur Melton, was assembled in Washington, DC, by J. R.
Flanagan to develop improved methods for selecting and
training Army Air Force pilots. At the time, all testing was
done with paper and pencil. This group developed the first re-
liable apparatus tests for evaluating the skills associated with
flying (Bray, 1948; Fitts, 1947a, 1947b). Psychological test-
ing was also used in connection with the selection of officers
and key military personnel in Germany at least during the
early days of the war; however, test results served primarily
to guide the clinical judgment of those responsible for per-
sonnel assignments. “Concepts of objectivity, standardiza-
tion, reliability and validity were almost entirely lacking”
(Fitts, 1946, p. 160). The psychological testing program was
inexplicably abandoned in Germany in 1942.Postwar DevelopmentsThe contributions of psychologists to the war effort in the
United States were widely recognized; as a result, each mili-
tary service set up a laboratory for the continued study of the
behavioral and psychological issues relevant to equipment
design. In 1945 Paul Fitts became the first director of the
Army Air Force Psychology Branch of the Aeromedical Lab-
oratory at Wright Patterson Field in Ohio, while Arthur
Melton became head of an Army Air Force program on
personnel selection and training in San Antonio, TX. In the
same year, Franklin V. Taylor, with the assistance of Henry
Birmingham, established the first Navy human engineering
program at the Naval Research Laboratory. The following
year, the Human Engineering Division of the Naval Electron-
ics Laboratory was established in San Diego under Arnold
Small. The army’s Human Engineering Laboratory was
formed by the Army Ordnance Corps at Aberdeen Proving
Ground near Baltimore in 1952, initially under the direction
of Ben Ami Blau. In each of these establishments, the focus
was on designing military equipment to make it easier for op-
erational personnel to use and on improving the availability
and readiness of the military forces through personnel selec-
tion and training. In the military sphere human performance
is pushed to its limits, and there is a need to understand what
those limits are and how to design to take account of them. It
is significant that all the military services recognized the im-
portance of human performance capacities and limitations in
the operation of their equipment and began in-depth experi-
mental investigations of them soon after World War II ended.
The desire among researchers with special interests in
applied problems to be affiliated with associations that repre-
sented specifically those interests found expression in the
establishment in Great Britain of the Ergonomics Research