Human Cognitive Overload: Physiological and Methodological Techniques for Measuring Cognitive Overload.

Abstract

The running state of visual cognition cannot be told from the running state of eye motion. Even the simplest and most commonly accepted beliefs fall apart when carefully studied. Visual attention is not confined to the center of gaze but can wander about over the visual field and become narrow or wide depending on the visual task to be performed. We showed this on seven subjects who were tested tachistoscopically for form resolution and identification simultaneously at the center of gaze and at the near peripheral field of vision. Binocular eye motion as if tracking along the boundary of an object can occur without any visual cognition that there is such an object in the visual field. We showed this on eight subjects who were exposed to random dot stereograms and monitored with a state-of-the-art binocular eye tracker. Our data led us to believe that measures of eye position and motion are fallible indices of visual cognition. Nevertheless, as in medicine, signs of disorder may be inexplicable yet reliable. Our study leads us to believe that tests can be designed for cognitive fatigue and overload using transient and well-defined visual tasks imposed on the visual field.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Aug 14, 1998
Accession Number
ADA351622

Entities

People

  • Jerome L. Krasner

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Application-Specific Integrated Circuits
  • Binoculars
  • Boundaries
  • Cognition
  • Cognitive Workload
  • Data Processing
  • Detection
  • Eye Movements
  • High Resolution
  • Human-Machine Interaction
  • Identification
  • Measurement
  • Psychology
  • Recognition
  • Task Performance And Analysis
  • Two Dimensional
  • Visual Perception

Readers

  • Educational Psychology
  • Vision Science/Vision Psychology/Cognitive Neuroscience.