Comparative Analysis of Human and Subhuman Operator Performance in a Control Loop

Abstract

Using electric shock as a negative reinforcement, three Rhesus monkeys were trained on a custom-designed pre-programmable electronic visual tracking facility in an effort to compare their performance with those of human operators. Describing functions for these animals were estimated from input, output and error time records obtained under a compensatory tracking task. A Gaussian random noise generator was used to generate the forcing function over the frequency bandwidths of 0.05 and 0.15 Hz. A parameter optimization algorithm was used to compute a generally accepted five parameter performance model with the above describing function data. For comparison purposes, data for two human subjects were also collected and analyzed for the same tracking task. The describing function data and values of computed model parameters for these two species show no significant differences. Typically, the transportation lag ranged between 0.08 and 0.19 seconds. These similar functional relationships observed between human and subhuman operators lend support for monkey-man extrapolations in stressful tracking situations.