Finding a Needle in a Haystack When You've Never Seen a Needle: A Human Factors Analysis of Seti 1

Abstract

An analysis of some key human factors aspects of NASA's SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program is presented. The results of some preliminary studies in human discrimination and recognition of patterns embedded in gaussian noise fields where the nature of the signal is unknown are discussed. A strategy for employing human pattern recognition capabilities in the SETI context, or in similar applications where signal attributes cannot be determined apriori, is offered.