Human Performance and Limitations
The senses
Vision dominates. Acuity is highest at the fovea, while peripheral vision detects movement and dim light. Night vision uses the rods, needs roughly 30 minutes of dark adaptation, and is destroyed by a brief bright light. Colour coding fails in poor light and for colour-deficient people. Hearing spans about 20 Hz to 20 kHz and deteriorates with age and noise exposure, with high frequencies lost first.
Information processing and memory
Sensing, perception, decision, response. Attention is a limited resource: vigilance falls after about half an hour on a monotonous task, and interruptions cause omission errors. Short-term memory holds only a handful of items for a few seconds - which is why checklists, readbacks and sign-offs exist. Long-term memory needs cues for retrieval.
Arousal, stress and sleep
Yerkes–Dodson: performance peaks at moderate arousal, and both boredom (under-arousal) and panic (over-arousal) degrade it. Complex tasks are performed best at lower arousal than simple ones. Circadian rhythms dip in the early morning and mid-afternoon. Fatigue and accumulated sleep debt slow reactions, reduce vigilance and increase risk-taking.
Traps
Assuming that a well-practised skill cannot fail - highly automatic tasks produce capture and omission slips. Assuming that coffee, fresh air or willpower reverse fatigue; they mask it.
Rule of thumb: quote the numbers when offered - about 30 minutes for dark adaptation, about 7 items for short-term memory, and roughly 30 minutes before vigilance noticeably decays.