This book includes all of the papers presented at the NATO Symposium on
Human Detection and Diagnosis of System Failures held at Roskilde,
Denmark on August 4-8, 1980. The Symposium was sponsored by the
Scientific Affairs Division of NATO and the Rise National Laboratory of
Denmark. The goal of the Symposium was to continue the tradition
initiated by the NATO Symposium on Monitoring Behavior and Supervisory
Control held in Berchtesgaden, F .R. Germany in 1976 and the NATO
Symposium on Theory and Measurement of Mental Workload held in Mati,
Greece in 1977. To this end, a group of 85 psychologists and engineers
coming from industry, government, and academia convened to discuss, and
to generate a "state-of-the-art" consensus of the problems and solutions
associated with the human IS ability to cope with the increasing scale
of consequences of failures within complex technical systems. The
Introduction of this volume reviews their findings. The Symposium was
organized to include brief formal presentations of papers sent to
participants about two months in advance of the meeting, and
considerable discussion both during plenary sessions and within more
specialized workshops. Summaries of the discussions and workshop reports
appear in this volume.