Towards the Shape of Mental Workload

Abstract

Mental workload is a measure of how much mental effort a person devotes to one or more tasks. In two experiments, we investigated the effect of multiple identical tasks on human performance in terms of both accuracy and response time for a visuo-spatial task set and an auditory task set. The findings showed that participants performed linearly worse on some measures of performance when the number of tasks increased, while other measures showed two distinctive variations on this linear decrease in performance. We discuss these results in terms of their effect on the traditional linear representation of workload in IMPRINT (IMproved Performance Research INtegration Tool, Archer & Adkins, 1999), a task-based human performance modeling system.

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