Central and Peripheral Cues to Difficulty in a Dynamic Task

摘要

Subjective workload assessments (e.g., NASA-TLX,SWAT, WP) rely upon judgments of difficulty (JODs) andworkload to determine how challenging it is for an operator tocomplete a task. While it is likely that subjective workloadassessments are an aggregate product of many cues todifficulty, including internal feelings of effort, that becomeavailable during task completion (Cordes, 1993; Kahneman,2000), moment-to-moment judgments may evolve asadditional external cues become available. That is, JODs arelikely based to some degree upon internal (privileged) cuesand integral task characteristics (central cues), but are alsoinfluenced by peripheral cues that serve as a proxy for taskdifficulty. These dynamic and multifaceted cues affect thechoice to initiate tasks (e.g., Mitchell, 2017), comply withsafety procedures (e.g., Sigurdsson, Taylor, & Wirth, 2013),and allocate resources (e.g, Kurzban, Duckworth, Kable, &Meyers, 2013), among other things. Identifying common cuesthat inform JODs contributes to workload theory and definesavenues for workload intervention.