Mental Workload and the Display of Abstraction Hierarchy Information

Author(s):  
Catherine M. Burns ◽  
Laura K. Thompson ◽  
Antonio Rodriguez

In designing large ecological displays, designers are faced with the question of how to display multiple levels of abstract information. Previous research has shown that people may perform better, in terms of diagnosis speed and accuracy, if multiple levels of information are presented in an integrated format (Burns, 2000). We repeated the study of Burns (2000) which looks at providing abstract information in three formats - one level at a time, windowed and integrated. We collected eye tracking data at intervals throughout the experiment. Our eye-tracker was able to collect pupil diameter measures and changes. Results showed no notable difference in pupil diameter measures between the integrated condition and the one level at a time condition, but notably higher increases in pupil diameter when abstract information was in separate windows. Furthermore, pupil diameters increased over time in the windowed condition, suggesting that workload with this display may have been increasing. These preliminary data suggest that separating levels of abstract information may increase the mental workload of operators.

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerhard Marquart ◽  
Joost de Winter

Pupillometry is a promising method for assessing mental workload and could be helpful in the optimization of systems that involve human-computer interaction. The present study focuses on replicating the studies by Ahern (1978) and Klingner (2010), which found that for three levels of difficulty of mental multiplications, the more difficult multiplications yielded larger dilations of the pupil. Using a remote eye tracker, our research expands upon these two previous studies by statistically testing for each 1.5 s interval of the calculation period (1) the mean absolute pupil diameter (MPD), (2) the mean pupil diameter change (MPDC) with respect to the pupil diameter during the pre-stimulus accommodation period, and (3) the mean pupil diameter change rate (MPDCR). An additional novelty of our research is that we compared the pupil diameter measure with a self-report measure of workload, the NASA Task Load Index (NASA-TLX), and with the mean blink rate (MBR). The results showed that the findings of Ahern and Klingner were replicated, and that the MPD and MPDC discriminated just as well between the lowest and highest difficulty levels as did the NASA-TLX. The MBR, on the other hand, did not interpretably differentiate between the difficulty levels. Moderate to strong correlations were found between the MPDC and the proportion of incorrect responses, indicating that the MPDC was higher for participants with a poorer performance. For practical applications, validity could be improved by combining pupillometry with other physiological techniques.


2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 319-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Wedel

AbstractVariationist/evolutionary models of phonology assume a causal chain that links biases at the utterance level to the development and consolidation of abstract phonological patterns over time. Some of the properties of linguistic cognition that have been proposed to underlie this chain are (i) storage of experienced detail at multiple levels of description, (ii) feedback between perception and production, (iii) a similarity bias in the production and perception of variation, and (iv) enhancement of cues to potentially ambiguous lexical items in usage. I review evidence for these properties and argue that they interact to provide a pathway for individual usage events to influence the evolution of contrastive sublexcal category systems, i.e phoneme inventories. Specifically, the proposed Network-Feedback model predicts that the organization of sublexical category systems is shaped by a conflict between a general drive toward greater similarity among sublexical categories on the one hand, and a bias toward maintaining contrast between tokens of competing lexical categories on the other. The model provides testable hypotheses about the conditions favoring phoneme merger, chain-shifts, and phonemic splits, and more generally about the influence of lexical contrast on the packing of sublexical categories along gestural/perceptual dimensions. Finally, this pathway of change is consistent with proposals that sublexical categories such as features and segments are not primitives of language, but emerge through more general properties of performance, perception, categorization and learning.


2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerhard Marquart ◽  
Joost de Winter

Pupillometry is a promising method for assessing mental workload and could be helpful in the optimization of systems that involve human-computer interaction. The present study focuses on replicating the studies by Ahern (1978) and Klingner (2010), which found that for three levels of difficulty of mental multiplications, the more difficult multiplications yielded larger dilations of the pupil. Using a remote eye tracker, our research expands upon these two previous studies by statistically testing for each 1.5 s interval of the calculation period (1) the mean absolute pupil diameter (MPD), (2) the mean pupil diameter change (MPDC) with respect to the pupil diameter during the pre-stimulus accommodation period, and (3) the mean pupil diameter change rate (MPDCR). An additional novelty of our research is that we compared the pupil diameter measure with a self-report measure of workload, the NASA Task Load Index (NASA-TLX), and with the mean blink rate (MBR). The results showed that the findings of Ahern and Klingner were replicated, and that the MPD and MPDC discriminated just as well between the lowest and highest difficulty levels as did the NASA-TLX. The MBR, on the other hand, did not interpretably differentiate between the difficulty levels. Moderate to strong correlations were found between the MPDC and the proportion of incorrect responses, indicating that the MPDC was higher for participants with a poorer performance. For practical applications, validity could be improved by combining pupillometry with other physiological techniques.


Author(s):  
Satoru Tokuda ◽  
Evan Palmer ◽  
Edgar Merkle ◽  
Alex Chaparro

This study proposes a new method to quantify mental workload (MWL) automatically, without interfering with the operator's primary task performance. An unobtrusive Tobii eye tracker recorded eye movements while participants were engaged in a cognitively demanding N-back task. Original algorithms automatically analyzed the eye data, detected specific eye deviation movements called saccadic intrusions (SIs), and automatically quantified the eye deviation accounted for SIs. This SI measure was strongly correlated with the task difficulty levels in the N-back tasks and with pupil diameter. This indicates that the SI measure appeared to reflect MWL and may be used as a measure of MWL.


2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerhard Marquart ◽  
Joost de Winter

Pupillometry is a promising method for assessing mental workload and could be helpful in the optimization of systems that involve human-computer interaction. The present study focuses on replicating the pupil diameter study by Ahern (1978) for mental multiplications of varying difficulty, using an automatic remote eye tracker. Our results showed that the findings of Ahern were replicated and that the mean pupil diameter and mean pupil diameter change (MPDC) discriminated just as well between the three difficulty levels as did a self-report questionnaire of mental workload (NASA-TLX). A higher mean blink rate was observed during the multiplication period for the highest level of difficulty in comparison with the other two levels. Moderate to strong correlations were found between the MPDC and the proportion of incorrect responses, indicating that the MPDC was higher for participants with a lower performance. For practical applications, validity could be improved by combining pupillometry with other physiological techniques.


2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 401-422
Author(s):  
Estelle Variot
Keyword(s):  
The One ◽  

"Etymological, Lexical and Semantic Correspondences in the Process of Feminization of Professional Names, Trades and Activities in French and Romanian Societies. The feminization of thought represented by language and of its varieties in the Roman World has allowed to highlight some convergences that come from a common linguistic heritage, often from Greek and Latin and some hesitation about adapting society to its realities. The feminization of some words which comes from an ancient process illustrates on the one hand the potential of the language and on the other hand some constraints sometimes linked to the society itself, which creates transitional periods, between matching grammatical correction and the evolution of linguistic uses over time. The possibilities of lexical enrichment (internal creation or loan) show the means available in French and Romanian and some convergences in the area of derivation, of lexical units and their etymologies. The grammatical perspective and word constructing methods make it possible to give keys for the feminization of names of trades or professions. Likewise, recording entries in the lexicon, their evolution, their assimilation or sometimes their forgetfulness, for the benefit of new constructions highlight the existence of objective and subjective criteria which teach us a lot about society as a whole. Keywords: feminization of professions, internal and external enrichment, suffixal match, use of words, grammar, lexicon, French and Romanian."


Author(s):  
D. Hugh Whittaker ◽  
Timothy Sturgeon ◽  
Toshie Okita ◽  
Tianbiao Zhu

This book highlights the importance of time and timing in economic and social development. ‘Compressed development’ consists of two key features and their interaction: the tendency for development processes to unfold more rapidly (compression) and the institution-shaping influences of major periods of change and growth, especially when countries become integrated into the global economy (era). Using an interdisciplinary conceptual framework of state–market and organization–technology co-evolution, the authors contrast the experiences of ‘early’ and ‘late’ developers such as the United Kingdom and Japan, with countries–most notably China–which have become more deeply integrated with the global economy since the 1990s. Compressed developers experience ‘thin industrialization’, layered types of employment, and ‘double burdens’ or challenges in social development. National development strategies must accommodate global value chains and powerful international actors on the one hand, and decentralization on the other. To cope, and thrive, states must remain developmental, whilst being increasingly engaged and adaptive in multiple levels of governance. Compressed Development explores the historical and contemporary features of economic and social development at the intersection of development studies and studies of globalization. By bringing a new perspective on the ‘middle-income trap’, as well as the emerging digital economy, and the state–market and geopolitical tensions that are currently upending conventional wisdoms, the book offers timely insights that will be useful, not only for students of development, but for policymakers, business, and labour organization seeking to navigate the rushing currents of contemporary capitalism.


Author(s):  
Christopher Tuck

This chapter charts the key developments in European land warfare since 1900. On the one hand, it is possible to identify overarching explanatory ideas, metanarratives, that can be used to identify continuities in development over time across Europe’s armies. These include the concept of ‘modern system’ land warfare and the ‘transformation paradigm’. However, as this chapter also shows, these two points of continuity do not mean either that European armies are homogenous, or that their conceptual assumptions are uncontested. European land warfare remains a heterogeneous phenomenon, shaped by the variety in national contexts and by contending debates on how appropriate Europe’s armies are to the actual challenges of contemporary and future armed conflict.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (9) ◽  
pp. 4274
Author(s):  
Song Fang ◽  
Jianxiao Ma

Through an urban tunnel-driving experiment, this paper studies the changing trend of drivers’ visual characteristics in tunnels. A Tobii Pro Glasses 2 wearable eye tracker was used to measure pupil diameter, scanning time, and fixation point distribution of the driver during driving. A two-step clustering algorithm and the data-fitting method were used to analyze the experimental data. The results show that the univariate clustering analysis of the pupil diameter change rate of drivers has poor discrimination because the pupil diameter change rate of drivers in the process of “dark adaptation” is larger, while the pupil diameter change rate of drivers in the process of “bright adaptation” is relatively smooth. The univariate and bivariate clustering results of drivers’ pupil diameters were all placed into three categories, with reasonable distribution and suitable differentiation. The clustering results accurately corresponded to different locations of the tunnel. The clustering method proposed in this paper can identify similar behaviors of drivers at different locations in the transition section at the tunnel entrance, the inner section, and the outer area of the tunnel. Through data-fitting of drivers’ visual characteristic parameters in different tunnels, it was found that a short tunnel, with a length of less than 1 km, has little influence on visual characteristics when the maximum pupil diameter is small, and the percentage of saccades is relatively low. An urban tunnel with a length between 1 and 2 km has a significant influence on visual characteristics. In this range, with the increase in tunnel length, the maximum pupil diameter increases significantly, and the percentage of saccades increases rapidly. When the tunnel length exceeds 2 km, the maximum pupil diameter does not continue to increase. The longer the urban tunnel, the more discrete the distribution of drivers’ gaze points. The research results should provide a scientific basis for the design of urban tunnel traffic safety facilities and traffic organization.


2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jingxia Lin

AbstractTypological shift in lexicalizing motion events has hitherto been observed cross-linguistically. While over time, Chinese has shown a shift from a dominantly verb-framed language in Old Chinese to a strongly satellite-framed language in Modern Standard Mandarin, this study presents the Chinese dialect Wenzhou, which has taken a step further than Standard Mandarin and other Chinese dialects in becoming a thoroughly satellite-framed language. On the one hand, Wenzhou strongly disfavors the verb-framed pattern. Wenzhou not only has no prototypical path verbs, but also its path satellites are highly deverbalized. On the other hand, Wenzhou strongly prefers the satellite-framed pattern, to the extent that it very frequently adopts a neutral motion verb to head motion expressions so that path can be expressed via satellites and the satellite-framed pattern can be syntactically maintained. The findings of this study are of interest to intra-linguistic, diachronic and cross-linguistic studies of the variation in encoding motion events.


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