Psychophysiology has contributed much to the development and understanding of the mental workload concept. Recent advances in theoretical models of autonomic nervous system functioning have the potential to increase the practical utility of psychophysiological measures in workload assessment. For example, “modes of autonomic control” can explain why psychophysiological measures sometimes dissociate from performance and subjective workload measures, and from each other when multiple measures are examined simultaneously. Further, these models may provide the neurophysiological structure to strengthen inferences about the relation between the psychophysiological measures and the underlying psychological processing of task demand manipulations.
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