A defeasible reasoning framework for human mental workload representation and assessment

Abstract

Human mental workload (MWL) has gained importance in the last few decades as an important design concept. It is a multifaceted complex construct mainly applied in cognitive sciences and has been defined in many different ways. Although measuring MWL has potential advantages in interaction and interface design, its formalisation as an operational and computational construct has not sufficiently been addressed. This research contributes to the body of knowledge by providing an extensible framework built upon defeasible reasoning, and implemented with argumentation theory (AT), in which MWL can be better defined, measured, analysed, explained and applied in different human-computer interactive contexts. User studies have demonstrated how a particular instance of this framework outperformed state-of-the-art subjective MWL assessment techniques in terms of sensitivity, diagnosticity and validity. This in turn encourages further application of defeasible AT for enhancing the representation of MWL and improving the quality of its assessment.

Experienced mental workload, perception of usability, their interaction and impact on task performance

“…Usability inspection should be accompanied by the assessment of one of all of these factors when possible. Beside Usability, another construct has a long research history in the field of Human Factors: the construct of human mental workload (MWL) [10, 11]. This is often referred to as cognitive load and I believe this can significantly contribute to the goal of informing interaction and web-design.…”

Dynamic changes in the use of online advice in response to task success or failure

“…At higher risk the processing of decisional support seemed delayed and advice was largely ignored, and this has implications for a range of interventions (Monaghan 2009;Palmer du Preez et al 2016). People do not think as well in crisis (Janis and Mann 1977) when overloaded (Longo 2015), and advice may actually be needed (Phillips, Ogeil, and Blaszczynski 2013).…”

Mental Workload in Medicine: Foundations, Applications, Open Problems, Challenges and Future Perspectives

“…Collecting relevant pieces of evidence related to mental worked should be performed in the centre of the clinician's natural operating environment and not only in experimental or simulating settings. Thirdly, a desirable mental workload assessment method should be developed and validated according to existing criteria [38,31]. It should have high sensitivity, better if in a high bandwidth, low intrusiveness on the primary task and high reliability, as well as showing concurrent and convergent validity.…”

“…An issue emerged from reviewed articles is the over-reliance on existing methods for mental workload assessment without a proper investigation of the validity of such methodologies. Several validation criteria have been proposed as guidelines [38,31], suggesting that a methodology should: …”