Cortical Evoked Response and Eyeblink Measures in the Workload Evaluation of Alternative Landing System Displays,
Abstract
From an intuitive viewpoint, physiological measures would appear to provide an optimal set of techniques for assessing workload. They make minimal demands on the operator's time and attention, they lend themselves to ready quantification, and they tap functions which are easy to relate theoretically to the workload construct. For example, in one view a major determinant of workload is the amount of effort required of the operator. It would be expected rationally that the amount of effort expended should manifest itself in the degress of physiological arousal or activation in the individual. Therefore, indices of such arousal should bear a direct and consistent relationship to the amount of workload. Unfortunately, the history of attempts to derive relationships is less than impressive. While there have been notable successes, such as the work of Beatty on pupillary measures and the heart rate results reported by Roscoe in this volume, there were many instances in which physiological measures failed to show correlations either with imposed workload levels, or even with each other under identical conditions. Such results led some investigators to abandon physiological measurement entirely on the basis that it was inherently unreliable. Others, however, realized that such lack of correlation might just as well indicate that the measures were tapping different aspects of a complex construct and might, in fact, be revealing an unexpected and very desirable specificity or diagnosticity .
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jun 01, 1987
- Accession Number
- ADP005635
Entities
People
- Glenn Wilson
- R. D. O'donnell