EXAMINING THE EFFECTS OF ECOLOGICAL MODELS OF SITUATION DISPLAYS ON HUMAN COGNITIVE EFFORT

摘要

This paper reports on an observational study of cognitive efforts associated with ecological-based situation displays. The major performance measure is an 8-item subjective questionnaire. Participants in the study indicated on a 100-point scale,from zero (poor) to 100 (absolutely useful), their agreement withstatements addressing information factors contributing to cognitive effort measurement. Two types of situation displays were compared: scenario and ecotopic displays, respectively. A scenario-based display portrays complete information about a problemcontext. An ecotopic display presents only local information and adapts to the user's mental model in a problem context. Results revealed that an ecotopic display provides better information filtering and mental model mapping than a scenario-based display (96.53% agreement versus 75.10%). Further, there was no statistically significant difference between ecotopic and scenario-based displays in terms of the user's perception of information integration tasks (t{sub}(value) = 1.185 versus t{sub}(α= 0.05) =1.645). Other measures such as decision time, decision accuracy, workload index, and false alarms were observed but not reported in this paper.