Modeling Performance Measures and Self-Ratings of Workload in a Visual Scanning Task

Abstract

Mental workload is the amount of demand on an individual’s limited mental resources and thus is an important consideration in human factors research. This research focuses on workload from two primary methods of measuring it – self-ratings of workload and performance. An experiment to test workload involved the manipulation of the number of tasks to be performed at once and the time available to respond to the task or tasks. The results show that performance changes by shifting between ceiling, linear decrease, and floor performance as workload increases. SWAT ratings of workload followed the same pattern. We conclude that the IMPRINT (Improved Performance Research Integration Tool; Archer & Adkins, 1999) modeling system should maintain its existing method of modeling self ratings of workload, but that they may make use of a new algorithm based on this data to model performance as workload changes.

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