Preview of Models of the Human Monitor/Supervisor

In past years many of us have been confronted by our nontechnical friends and asked, in effect, how we have the audacity to suggest that human behavior can be reduced to mathematical equations. Typically we have retreated to the argument that we are dealing with man-machine interactions which are quite utilitarian and mechanistic to begin with. Therefore, such mechanistic mathematic models have a face validity. Anyway, when the stimulus and response are well-defined and the decision criterion straightforward, the models are useful because they are good predictors of the aspects of human behavior which are important.