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World War II marked the advent of highly sophisticated machines and weaponry, creating previously unseen cognitive demands on operators in terms of decision-making, attention, situational awareness and hand-eye coordination.
It was observed that perfectly working aircraft, flown by the best-trained pilots, still crashed. In 1943, Alphonse Chapanis, a lieutenant in the U.S. Army, showed that "pilot error" could be greatly reduced when more logical and differentiable controls replaced confusing designs in airplane cockpits.
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