Practical Implications
A knowledge of the Simon effect is useful in the design of man-machine interfaces. Aircraft cockpits, for example, require a person to react quickly to a situation. Imagine that you are flying a plane and there is a problem with the left engine. In an aircraft with a good man-machine interface design (which most have), the indicator light for the left engine should be positioned physically to the left of the indicator light for the right engine. This interface would display information in a way that matches the types of responses that people should make. If it were the other way around, you may respond incorrectly and adjust the wrong engine.
Read more about this topic: Simon Effect
Famous quotes containing the words practical and/or implications:
“War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view “realistically”; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent—war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it—this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)