How does manipulation of secondary task scheduling affect human performance?

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrice D. Tremoulet ◽  
Kathleen M. Stibler ◽  
Patrick Craven ◽  
Joyce Barton ◽  
Adam Gifford ◽  
...  
Author(s):  
Patrice D. Tremoulet ◽  
Kathleen M. Stibler ◽  
Patrick Craven ◽  
Joyce Barton ◽  
Adam Gifford ◽  
...  

1975 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 494-497
Author(s):  
C. Christian Stiehl

The use of secondary task to measure degradations in the performance of a primary task is well documented in the human performance literature. This paper describes research in the design, construction, and development of the Visual Alertness Stressor Test (VAST) as a means of measuring the effects of stressors on a boat operator's performance. The VAST task required the subject to respond to particular patterns of lights displayed in a semi-circle around the cockpit of the boat while he maintained a specified course with the boat. The basic measures taken were the response times and the number of missed signals. A 2 − 2 factorial design was used where the factors were the type and amount of fatigue that the subject experienced. The results confirmed that the overall effect of “typical” exposure to the environmental stressors of boating was a significant degradation in performance. The main effect of type of fatigue was insignificant, as was the interaction of type of fatigue and amount of fatigue. Implications for boating safety as well as future research efforts and applications of VAST are discussed.


Author(s):  
Bradley Chase ◽  
Holly M. Irwin-Chase ◽  
Jaclyn T. Sonico

Individual differences in human performance is an issue that confounds many studies and has not been properly controlled in the ergonomics/human factors literature. This paper examines the concept of individual differences in performance primarily from the perspective of cognitive performance. A study was designed to test the effect of a secondary visual task on a primary visual task. In one condition, participants performed the dual task, while assigning no weight to the secondary task. In the second condition, the primary task was performed simultaneously with the secondary task. The effect of the added workload was measured via the effect on primary task performance. In the baseline portion of the task participants had their baseline (80–90% accuracy) of performance collected by adjusting the stimulus duration. The individual participant stimulus duration was then used as the experimental stimulus duration and the effect of secondary task performance on primary task performance was measured.


2008 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 11-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph Beneke ◽  
Dieter Böning

Human performance, defined by mechanical resistance and distance per time, includes human, task and environmental factors, all interrelated. It requires metabolic energy provided by anaerobic and aerobic metabolic energy sources. These sources have specific limitations in the capacity and rate to provide re-phosphorylation energy, which determines individual ratios of aerobic and anaerobic metabolic power and their sustainability. In healthy athletes, limits to provide and utilize metabolic energy are multifactorial, carefully matched and include a safety margin imposed in order to protect the integrity of the human organism under maximal effort. Perception of afferent input associated with effort leads to conscious or unconscious decisions to modulate or terminate performance; however, the underlying mechanisms of cerebral control are not fully understood. The idea to move borders of performance with the help of biochemicals is two millennia old. Biochemical findings resulted in highly effective substances widely used to increase performance in daily life, during preparation for sport events and during competition, but many of them must be considered as doping and therefore illegal. Supplements and food have ergogenic potential; however, numerous concepts are controversially discussed with respect to legality and particularly evidence in terms of usefulness and risks. The effect of evidence-based nutritional strategies on adaptations in terms of gene and protein expression that occur in skeletal muscle during and after exercise training sessions is widely unknown. Biochemical research is essential for better understanding of the basic mechanisms causing fatigue and the regulation of the dynamic adaptation to physical and mental training.


Author(s):  
Margreet Vogelzang ◽  
Christiane M. Thiel ◽  
Stephanie Rosemann ◽  
Jochem W. Rieger ◽  
Esther Ruigendijk

Purpose Adults with mild-to-moderate age-related hearing loss typically exhibit issues with speech understanding, but their processing of syntactically complex sentences is not well understood. We test the hypothesis that listeners with hearing loss' difficulties with comprehension and processing of syntactically complex sentences are due to the processing of degraded input interfering with the successful processing of complex sentences. Method We performed a neuroimaging study with a sentence comprehension task, varying sentence complexity (through subject–object order and verb–arguments order) and cognitive demands (presence or absence of a secondary task) within subjects. Groups of older subjects with hearing loss ( n = 20) and age-matched normal-hearing controls ( n = 20) were tested. Results The comprehension data show effects of syntactic complexity and hearing ability, with normal-hearing controls outperforming listeners with hearing loss, seemingly more so on syntactically complex sentences. The secondary task did not influence off-line comprehension. The imaging data show effects of group, sentence complexity, and task, with listeners with hearing loss showing decreased activation in typical speech processing areas, such as the inferior frontal gyrus and superior temporal gyrus. No interactions between group, sentence complexity, and task were found in the neuroimaging data. Conclusions The results suggest that listeners with hearing loss process speech differently from their normal-hearing peers, possibly due to the increased demands of processing degraded auditory input. Increased cognitive demands by means of a secondary visual shape processing task influence neural sentence processing, but no evidence was found that it does so in a different way for listeners with hearing loss and normal-hearing listeners.


2004 ◽  
Vol 171 (4S) ◽  
pp. 496-497
Author(s):  
Edward D. Matsumoto ◽  
George V. Kondraske ◽  
Lucas Jacomides ◽  
Kenneth Ogan ◽  
Margaret S. Pearle ◽  
...  

2015 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
William S. Helton ◽  
Katharina Näswall

Conscious appraisals of stress, or stress states, are an important aspect of human performance. This article presents evidence supporting the validity and measurement characteristics of a short multidimensional self-report measure of stress state, the Short Stress State Questionnaire (SSSQ; Helton, 2004 ). The SSSQ measures task engagement, distress, and worry. A confirmatory factor analysis of the SSSQ using data pooled from multiple samples suggests the SSSQ does have a three factor structure and post-task changes are not due to changes in factor structure, but to mean level changes (state changes). In addition, the SSSQ demonstrates sensitivity to task stressors in line with hypotheses. Different task conditions elicited unique patterns of stress state on the three factors of the SSSQ in line with prior predictions. The 24-item SSSQ is a valid measure of stress state which may be useful to researchers interested in conscious appraisals of task-related stress.


Author(s):  
Bastien Trémolière ◽  
Marie-Ève Gagnon ◽  
Isabelle Blanchette

Abstract. Although the detrimental effect of emotion on reasoning has been evidenced many times, the cognitive mechanism underlying this effect remains unclear. In the present paper, we explore the cognitive load hypothesis as a potential explanation. In an experiment, participants solved syllogistic reasoning problems with either neutral or emotional contents. Participants were also presented with a secondary task, for which the difficult version requires the mobilization of cognitive resources to be correctly solved. Participants performed overall worse and took longer on emotional problems than on neutral problems. Performance on the secondary task, in the difficult version, was poorer when participants were reasoning about emotional, compared to neutral contents, consistent with the idea that processing emotion requires more cognitive resources. Taken together, the findings afford evidence that the deleterious effect of emotion on reasoning is mediated by cognitive load.


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