Knowing where and when to look in a time-critical multimodal dual task

Abstract

Human-computer systems intended for time-critical multitasking need to be designed with an understanding of how humans can coordinate and interleave perceptual, memory, and motor processes. This paper presents human performance data for a highly-practiced time-critical dual task. In the first of the two interleaved tasks, participants tracked a target with a joystick. In the second, participants keyed-in responses to objects moving across a radar display.Task manipulations include the peripheral visibility of the secondary display (visible or not) and the presence or absence of auditory cues to assist with the radar task. Eye movement analyses reveal extensive coordination and overlapping of human information processes and the extent to which task manipulations helped or hindered dual task performance. For example, auditory cues helped only a little when the secondary display was peripherally visible, but they helped a lot when it was not peripherally visible.

Mode-of-disparities error correction of eye-tracking data

“…These constraints would be hard to implement because they involve many experimental details-for example, when a blip changed color or how many active blips were on the radar display at a specific moment. Experimental analysis (Hornof et al, 2010) also demonstrated that when participants keyed-in a response, they were not even looking at the blips but, rather, were back on the tracking task, further illustrating the challenge in applying the RFL technique to the experiment. The MoD error correction method, however, needs to know only the locations and times of the fixations and the stimuli.…”

“…The MoD error correction method was used to correct the eye movement data collected in an experiment (Hornof, Zhang, & Halverson, 2010). The next section presents the experimental setup that was used to both illustrate and validate the technique.…”

Understanding multitasking through parallelized strategy exploration and individualized cognitive modeling

“…The work presented here models the data collected from our replication of the experiment [8], in which eye movement data were collected to inform detailed analysis and modeling. Figure 1 shows a screenshot of the display used in the dual task experiment.…”

“…The data presented here are from the third day, and from the ten participants who achieved good overall performance. More details of this experiment are discussed in [8]. Figure 2 shows the overall dual task performance by plotting the average classification time against the rootmean-square (RMS) tracking error, for each of the four conditions, with a different plot symbol for each of the two kinds of blips.…”

“…Paper-based cognitive modeling [3] has evolved into computational cognitive modeling [11] which permits increased complexity and predictive power in the models. Eye tracking has emerged as a powerful technique for revealing in greater detail how people are truly interacting with devices [6] and can also reveal nuanced interactions between parallelized task hierarchies [8].…”