The Dissociation of Subjective Measures of Mental Workload and Performance
Yeh, Yei-Yu
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/69672
Description
Title
The Dissociation of Subjective Measures of Mental Workload and Performance
Author(s)
Yeh, Yei-Yu
Issue Date
1986
Department of Study
Psychology
Discipline
Psychology
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Psychology, Experimental
Abstract
Dissociation between performance and subjective measures of workload occurs when two task configurations are compared and the configuration that shows better performance is subjectively perceived as the more difficult task. According to a theory (Wickens & Yeh, 1983), dissociation occurs because subjective measures of mental workload do not reflect the processing characteristics that underlie the efficiency of the performance. Subjective workload was proposed to be sensitive to the amount of aggregate resource investment and be dominated by the demands on the perceptual/central resources.
The proposed theory was tested in three experiments, employing different combinations of a tracking task and a Sternberg memory search task. The demand of perceptual/central resources was found to be the most salient component of subjective workload from both the multidimensional analysis of the hidden structure and the regression analysis of the underlying components. Dissociation was found in the following manipulations: (1) when the amount of resource investment was induced to improve performance, (2) when the amount of resource competition was manipulated in different dual-task conditions, and when the demand on perceptual/central resources was increased by the number of concurrent tasks or by the number of display elements. However, in contrast to the prediction, the resource dimension of the processing stage was found not to be a source of dissociation.
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