Cognitive Psychology: Workload, Attention, and Decision Making

131 flashcards

What is mental workload?: The demands of a task compared with the person's processing capacity available at that time.
How can workload be expressed?: Workload = Time needed to complete task / Time available for task.
Why is mental workload considered unobservable?: It cannot be directly seen or measured; it must be inferred from performance, physiology, or self-reports.
What are the main determinants of workload?: Number of tasks, nature of tasks, type of mental operations, and required effort or precision.
What are O'Donnell and Eggemeier's five criteria for workload measures?: Sensitivity, diagnosticity, nonintrusiveness, acceptability, and minimal equipment/performance impairment.
What is primary-task performance measurement?: Measuring the efficiency and effectiveness of the main task to estimate workload.
What is a secondary-task measure?: Measuring performance on an additional task to estimate how much spare processing capacity remains.
What is a formal workload measure?: Task analysis and mathematical assessment of task properties to estimate workload.
What are physiological workload measures?: Heart rate/variability, hormones, blood pressure, breathing rate, EEG/ERP, pupil diameter, and blinking.
What are subjective workload measures?: Self-reports using single-item or multidimensional rating scales.
What are the strengths of primary-task measures?: High face validity and usually nonintrusive.
What are the weaknesses of primary-task measures?: Performance can be influenced by other factors and workload changes may not change performance.
What are the strengths and weaknesses of formal measures?: Strength: no participants needed. Weaknesses: models can be difficult to build, incomplete, or limited.
What are the strengths and weaknesses of secondary-task measures?: Strength: sensitive to spare capacity. Weaknesses: can interfere with primary task and cause inconsistent strategies.
What are the strengths and weaknesses of physiological measures?: Strengths: objective and nonintrusive. Weaknesses: artifacts, validity concerns, and acceptability.
What are the strengths and weaknesses of subjective measures?: Strengths: easy to collect and face validity. Weaknesses: collected after task and may confuse effort with workload.
What are common problems in workload measurement?: Performance may not change with demand; tasks use different modalities; fatigue/stress and strategy variations.
What is the bottom line for workload measurement?: Choose appropriate measures and consider multiple measures because workload is multidimensional.
What is vigilance?: A state of readiness to detect and respond to small changes occurring at random intervals.
What was the Mackworth clock test?: A vigilance task requiring detection of occasional double skips on a clock-like display over time.
What is vigilance decrement?: A decline in the ability to detect signals as time on task increases.
What types of tasks commonly cause vigilance demands?: Long-duration, repetitive, low-engagement tasks requiring alertness for weak or infrequent signals.
What is fatigue?: A state between alertness and sleepiness resulting from high or low workload over long periods.
How quickly can vigilance decrement occur?: It may appear within the first half hour and, in demanding situations, within five minutes.
What are remedies for vigilance decrement?: Reduce time on task, make signals salient, change expectancy, increase arousal, and take breaks.
What is the Yerkes-Dodson Law?: Performance often follows an inverted-U relationship with arousal.
What happens when arousal is too low?: Underpreparedness, insufficient monitoring, and poor performance.
What happens when arousal is too high?: Attentional control can decline and performance can suffer.
Is the Yerkes-Dodson Law always accurate?: No. The relationship varies by task and situation.
What is an ongoing task (OT)?: The task a person was already performing before an interruption.
What is an interrupting task (IT)?: A task that interrupts the ongoing task.
How can interruption problems be reduced?: Finish subtasks first, use cues, reduce return delay, keep ongoing task visible, and make tasks distinct.
What is selective attention?: Focusing processing on relevant information while reducing attention to distractors.
What is the spotlight metaphor of attention?: Attention focuses on a limited region of the visual field; separating targets from distractors improves selection.
What is covert orienting?: Shifting attention to a location without moving the eyes to fixate on it.
What is overt orienting?: Directing the eyes toward a location through visual fixation.
What is endogenous orienting?: Voluntary, goal-directed direction of attention.
What is exogenous orienting?: Involuntary, stimulus-driven direction of attention.
What does the Posner cueing task demonstrate?: Invalid cues produce longer reaction times because attention must be redirected to the target location.
What is visual search?: Searching a field containing target items and nontarget items.
What is a serial search?: Examining items one at a time; generally slower as the number of items increases.
What is a parallel search?: Processing multiple items or features across the visual field at once.
What is a self-terminating search?: A search that stops when the target is found.
What is an exhaustive search?: A search that continues until all relevant targets have been found.
What factors influence visual search time?: Search type, number of items/targets, target features, and similarity between targets and distractors.
Why are single-feature searches often faster?: A single distinctive feature can be detected efficiently without checking every item individually.
Why are conjunction searches often slower?: Targets defined by two or more features require more attention to distinguish from distractors.
How can visual search time be reduced?: Reduce clutter, remove distractors, use location cues, make targets salient, and reduce target set.
What is the SEEV model used for?: Predicting visual scanning and attention allocation across areas of interest in a workplace.
What does SEEV stand for?: Salience, Effort, Expectancy, and Value.
What is salience in SEEV?: A positive influence on scanning; noticeable features like brightness or size attract attention.
What is effort in SEEV?: A negative influence on scanning; greater effort, such as head movement, discourages looking.
What is expectancy in SEEV?: A positive influence on scanning; areas expected to provide new information receive attention.
What is value in SEEV?: A positive influence on scanning; important information receives more attention, especially if missing it is costly.
What is an area of interest (AOI)?: A defined region of a visual workspace analyzed for how often people look at it.
What is the N-SEEV model used for?: Predicting how quickly a person will notice an event.
What factors influence noticing in N-SEEV?: Eccentricity, cognitive or perceptual load, salience, and expectancy.
What is eccentricity in N-SEEV?: The visual-angle distance between an event and the attention area; greater distance delays noticing.
What is change blindness?: Failure to notice a change in the environment when attention is directed elsewhere.
What is inattentional blindness?: Failure to notice an existing object or event because attention is occupied elsewhere.
How do change blindness and inattentional blindness differ?: Change blindness is missing a change; inattentional blindness is missing an existing object or event.
What is cognitive tunneling?: Over-focusing on one source of information while neglecting other relevant information.
What is attentional fixation?: Persistently focusing attention on one object, location, or interpretation longer than appropriate.
What are black swan events?: Extremely unexpected events that people may fail to anticipate or notice.
How can SEEV and N-SEEV inform display design?: Make important information salient, keep frequent areas close, place critical warnings visibly, and account for load.
What is Broadbent's filter or bottleneck theory?: Information enters a limited channel one item at a time; irrelevant information is filtered out early.
What is a key limitation of early filter theory?: It struggles to explain how personally meaningful unattended information can still be processed.
What is attenuation theory?: Unattended information is weakened rather than blocked, allowing meaningful information to be noticed.
What is late-selection theory?: Selection occurs later in processing, allowing familiar or relevant information to be processed first.
What is the unitary resource model?: Attention draws on a general, limited pool of resources allocated across different tasks.
What happens when unitary attention capacity is exceeded?: Performance on one or more tasks declines.
What does it mean that attentional capacity is flexible?: The effort allocated to a task can vary with demands, arousal, and priorities.
What is the multiple resource model?: Attention draws on multiple partly separate resource pools; interference depends on shared resources.
What makes multitasking easier or harder?: Task difficulty, shared resources, element confusion, and task-switching success or failure.
How does cognitive effort affect multitasking?: More effort helps meet demands, but resources are limited so allocating more to one task leaves fewer for others.
What is a primary task in multitasking?: The task given priority or protection when resources compete.
What is a secondary task in multitasking?: The task more likely to suffer performance losses when resources are limited.
What is crosstalk in multitasking?: Interference or confusion between tasks because their information or processes overlap.
How can task similarity affect multitasking?: Similar materials cause confusion, while compatible rules can sometimes improve time-sharing performance.
Why does task switching occur?: People cannot fully perform some tasks simultaneously, so they alternate attention between them.
What is attentional tunneling during task switching?: Focusing on one task and forgetting to return to another task after an interruption.
What is STOM?: The Strategic Task Overload Model, explaining task-switching choices through task attractiveness.
What four attributes influence task attractiveness in STOM?: Saliency, priority, difficulty, and interest.
How does saliency affect task switching?: More salient tasks tend to be more attractive to switch to.
How does priority affect task switching?: Higher-priority tasks tend to be more attractive to switch to.
How does difficulty affect task switching in STOM?: More difficult tasks tend to be less attractive to switch to.
How does interest affect task switching?: More interesting tasks tend to be more attractive to switch to.
What are the three classes of decision-making research?: Normative, information processing, and naturalistic/dynamic.
What are the three features of decision making?: Uncertainty, judgment, and decision.
What is uncertainty?: The outcome is unknown; risk concerns the chance of an undesirable outcome.
What is judgment?: An assessment or classification made while interpreting information.
What is a decision?: A choice between possible actions.
What are the four stages of the decision model?: 1. Perceive cues. 2. Assess situation. 3. Choose action. 4. Monitor and correct.
What is the confirmation loop in the decision model?: Returning to gather more cues when information is insufficient to assess the situation confidently.
What is the difference between confirmation and monitoring?: Confirmation gathers info before choice; monitoring evaluates outcomes and adjusts after choice.
What is diagnostic value?: How much evidence a cue provides for or against a hypothesis.
What is cue reliability?: How likely a cue is to be accurate or trustworthy.
Can a cue have high diagnostic value but low reliability?: Yes. It may be highly informative if true but unreliable as evidence.
What is saliency bias in decision making?: Vivid or noticeable information captures attention even when it is not the most relevant evidence.
What is the as-if heuristic?: Treating all cues as if they have equal value despite differing reliability or diagnostic value.
How do people estimate averages?: They generally estimate the mean of a set of values fairly well.
How do people estimate variability?: They often underestimate the spread of values and focus on extremes.
How do people judge very small probabilities?: They may treat very small probabilities similarly, viewing vastly different odds as equally unlikely.
How do people interpret trends and randomness incorrectly?: They extend curves as straight lines and expect random events to alternate too regularly.
What is a heuristic?: A mental shortcut that saves effort and often works but can be less accurate than thorough analysis.
What is a bias?: A systematic distortion in how people evaluate information, probabilities, or outcomes.
What is availability bias?: Believing an event is more likely because examples come to mind easily.
What is anchoring bias?: Relying too heavily on an initial number or piece of information and adjusting insufficiently.
What is confirmation bias?: Seeking, interpreting, or remembering information supporting an existing belief.
What is overconfidence?: Being more confident in a judgment than the evidence justifies.
How do people misjudge rare events?: Underestimate memorable negative events they cannot recall and overestimate desirable possibilities.
What is loss aversion?: Losses generally feel more significant than equivalent gains.
What is the endowment effect?: Valuing something more once it belongs to you than before owning it.
What is direct retrieval?: Reusing a previous solution without checking if the current situation differs.
Why do defaults strongly influence decisions?: Decision making requires effort, so people often stick with preselected options.
What is a compensatory decision strategy?: Scoring options on multiple attributes and combining scores so strengths compensate for weaknesses.
What is elimination by aspects?: Removing options failing an important criterion, then applying additional criteria to remaining options.
What is satisficing?: Choosing the first option meeting an acceptable threshold rather than searching for the absolute best.
Are compensatory choice, elimination by aspects, and satisficing mutually exclusive?: No. People may eliminate unacceptable options and then compare the remaining choices.
What is expected value?: The average payoff of an option when possible outcomes are weighted by probabilities.
Why is a successful outcome not proof of a good decision?: Luck can produce good outcomes from poor decisions; hindsight bias makes outcomes seem predictable.
Are experts always right?: No. Expertise helps, but experts remain vulnerable to errors and biases.
What is framing?: Presenting information so that consequences are salient and easy to understand or picture.
How can lowering the cost of compliance improve decisions?: Making the desired or safe action easier increases the likelihood people will perform it.
What is a nudge?: A subtle change in choice architecture making a behavior easier or more likely without eliminating alternatives.
What is a sludge?: Friction or barriers making an action harder to complete, discouraging it.
Can nudges and sludges be good or bad?: Yes. Their effects depend on the goal and whose interests they serve.
What generally does not work well by itself to improve decision making?: Warnings, instructions, learning about biases, or practice without timely feedback.
What methods can improve decision making?: Practice debiasing, asking what might go wrong, providing feedback, and redesigning environments.
At which decision stage do many predictable errors occur?: Stage 2: situation assessment, where people interpret cues and rely on heuristics and biases.
What is the overall design lesson from decision-making research?: Do not rely on people knowing about biases; design environments that reduce effort and support better choices.