Towards an Index of Opportunity: Understanding Changes in Mental Workload during Task Execution

Iqbal, Shamsi T.; Adamczyk, Piotr D.; Zheng, Xianjun S.; Bailey, Brian P.

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/10809 Copy

Description

Title

Towards an Index of Opportunity: Understanding Changes in Mental Workload during Task Execution

Author(s)

• Iqbal, Shamsi T.
• Adamczyk, Piotr D.
• Zheng, Xianjun S.
• Bailey, Brian P.

Issue Date

2004-04

Keyword(s)

Human-computer interaction

Abstract

To contribute to systems that reason about human attention, our work empirically demonstrates how a user's mental workload changes during task execution. We conducted a study where users performed an interactive hierarchical task and measured mental workload through the use of pupil size. Results show that (i) different types of subtasks impose different mental workload, (ii) workload decreases at subtask boundaries, (iii) workload decreases more at higher level boundaries and less at lower level boundaries, (iv) workload changes among subtask boundaries within the same level of a task model, and (v) effective understanding of why changes in workload occur requires that the measure be tightly coupled to a validated task model. We offer an Index of Opportunity that maps a user's mental workload to the disruptive impact of an interruption. This mechanism can help systems better compute the cost of interruption.

Type of Resource

text

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/10809

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