Abstract
Supervision of multiple, concurrent tasks in real-time is a cognitively demanding activity. The “Task Manager” display assists supervision by depicting task priorities and deadlines in a dynamic, perceptual Gantt chart. In experiment 1, participants read alert messages from six concurrent tasks and evaluated the problems' effects on deadlines. The Task Manager promoted faster and more accurate problem evaluations than a static depiction of major task deadlines. In experiment 2, problem messages appeared in sets of 4 to 8, and participants ranked unread messages for priority, based on approaching deadlines and task priorities. The Task Manager promoted faster and more accurate message rankings. Additional automated ranking aids further improved performance. Two different methods of displaying the automated rankings yielded equal performance. When the automated rankings were removed, participants' manual performance was no worse than that of participants who had no prior automation experience or aiding.
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