Understanding changes in mental workload during execution of goal-directed tasks and its application for interruption management
Understanding changes in mental workload during execution of goal-directed tasks and its application for interruption management
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DOI：
10.1145/1314683.1314689
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发表时间：
2008-01-01
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
Iqbal, Shamsi T.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Bailey, Brian P.;Iqbal, Shamsi T.
如果在任务执行过程中精神负荷较低的时刻发送通知，则可以减少中断成本。认知理论家推测，这些时刻发生在子任务边界。在本文中，我们通过研究在执行目标导向任务期间工作负载的变化来对这一推测进行实证检验，重点关注任务中相邻块之间的区域，即子任务边界。在一项对照实验中，研究人员使用眼动追踪系统连续测量用户瞳孔扩张（一种衡量工作量的可靠指标）的同时，让他们执行若干交互式任务。从学生数据中提取工作量数据，精确地与相应的任务模型对齐，并进行分析。我们的主要发现包括：(i)在目标导向任务的执行过程中工作量的变化；相对于前一个子任务，工作量在子任务边界出现短暂的减少；（iii）在完成较大任务块的边界处，减少的量往往更大；（iv）不同类型的子任务导致不同的工作量。我们将这些发现置于注意力资源理论中，并讨论了中断管理系统的重要含义。
Notifications can have reduced interruption cost if delivered at moments of lower mental workload during task execution. Cognitive theorists have speculated that these moments occur at subtask boundaries. In this article, we empirically test this speculation by examining how workload changes during execution of goal-directed tasks, focusing on regions between adjacent chunks within the tasks, that is, the subtask boundaries. In a controlled experiment, users performed several interactive tasks while their pupil dilation, a reliable measure of workload, was continuously measured using an eye tracking system. The workload data was extracted from the pupil data, precisely aligned to the corresponding task models, and analyzed. Our principal findings include (i) workload changes throughout the execution of goal-directed tasks; (ii) workload exhibits transient decreases at subtask boundaries relative to the preceding subtasks; (iii) the amount of decrease tends to be greater at boundaries corresponding to the completion of larger chunks of the task; and (iv) different types of subtasks induce different amounts of workload. We situate these findings within resource theories of attention and discuss important implications for interruption management systems.