Mental Workload
What is Mental Workload? Why measure it? Performance limits Predict top performance Tasks Cognitive/perceptual multiple
What kind of tasks have High mental workload? Air traffic control Pilot Military command & control Nuclear power plant operator anesthesiologist N/A Computer programmer College professor Mathematician Technical writer
Key Elements for High mental workload tasks Stimulus driven not self paced Large fluctuations in demand Multiple simultaneous tasks High stress/High consequence
Workload & Arousal Yerkes-Dobson law Low arousal Low performance Moderate arousal High performance Over arousal Low performance
Basic approaches to measuring mental workload Analytic Task difficulty Number of simultaneous tasks Task performance Primary task Secondary task Physiological (arousal/effort) Subjective assessment
Analytic Models Tracking models predict based on systems dynamics Queuing models predict on the basis of task co-occurrence SAINT / microSAINT best developed queuing models
Resources/Attention Some limited capacity Unitary: task always depletes common pool by a constant amount Multiple: task depletes pools of resources to varying degrees Mixed: cost of sharing even for highly dissimilar resources
Unconscious/Automatic Simplified HIP Model S E N O R Y T Attention Long Term Memory Working Memory Unconscious/Automatic Processes
Physiological Measures heart rate: sinus arrhythmia blood pressure respiratory rate variability tidal volume ventilation galvanic skin response evoked response amplitude evoked response latency evoked response latency electroencehpalogram, spectral components time domain, flicker fusion frequency pupil diameter electromyograms electrooculograms
Subjective Workload Measures Cooper-Harris Manual control characteristics SWAT Dimension based instrument NASA 6-D assessment scales