THE USE OF PROTOCOL ANALYSIS FOR DETERMINING ABILITY REQUIREMENTS FORPERSONNEL-SELECTION ON A COMPUTER-BASED TASK

The role of cognitively oriented tasks in the workplace continues to i ncrease as automation of physical task components advances. Difficulti es in automating the operator's cognitive processes have placed a rene wed emphasis on the human component in advanced manufacturing systems. While traditional task analysis techniques have made significant cont ributions to improving productivity when important task elements are v isually observable, their focus on manual task procedures make them le ss effective for cognitively oriented activities. This research has ma de a first attempt at integrating techniques from several disciplines to develop a cognitive task analysis methodology. The utility of this combined approach is examined for a new system being tested in the Uni ted States Postal Service. This task requires operators to encode, via a keyboard, addresses presented on a video display terminal. Results support the hypothesis that, for cognitively oriented tasks, a consens us based analysis technique (the Position Analysis Questionnaire) can be significantly improved by including data from task analysis provide d the methodology is suitable for identifying non-physical task compon ents.