Two laboratory experiments were performed to study the human operator's adaptive behavior in manual control of slowly changing system dynamics. In the first experiment, the dynamics changed from rate to acceleration control. In the second experiment, the control stick sensitivity slowly increased or slowly decreased from a standard level. Tracking performance on a compensatory task demonstrated that the human operator lags in adapting to the changing system dynamics, but he does adapt when given sufficient time. As the rate of change increases, the human operator needs a larger change for detection of the change and less time to detect the changing system dynamics.
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