The eye as a window to working memory: how toimprove multitasking decisions using eye data

Abstract

Modern life is characterized by multiple activities and goals that we pursue in parallel, insequence, or by intertwined combinations of the two. During a workday we typically have a mainproject we carry out, but this activity is interleaved with responding to emails and phone calls,and interactions on social media. This means that we have to take hundreds of small decisionsevery day on what to do next. Our earlier research has shown that people are not very good inmaking multitasking decisions: people combine tasks in a suboptimal manner and cannot estimatewhen it pays off to switch between tasks. As a consequence, many people feel there are too manydays of work in which they are continuously busy, but do not get anything done. The core idea ofthe proposed research is that there are many situations in which it is better to offload multitaskingdecisions to an interruption manager, a system that schedules interruptions at moments thatminimize disruption. In this project we will develop such an interruption-management system,based on eye measurements.

Document Details

Document Type
DoD Grant Award
Publication Date
Sep 11, 2017
Source ID
FA95501710309

Entities

People

  • Niels Taatgen

Organizations

  • Air Force Office of Scientific Research
  • United States Air Force
  • University of Groningen

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Agent-Based Social Robotics and Mobile-Assisted Learning in Virtual Environments.
  • Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery.
  • Parallel and Distributed Computing.