Time-Sharing Manual Control and Memory Search: The Joint Effects of Input and Output Modality Competition, Priorities and Control Order

摘要

This report addresses some of the issues that must be considered as voice recognition and synthesis (VRAS) technology is integrated into complex man-machine system environments. These issues include the input and output channels demanded by competing activities, task difficulty or workload, the allocation of attention and the nature of the task that - spatial or verbal - will be interfaced with VRAS. The present experiment addresses primarily the first three issues within the framework of multiple resource theory. Ten subjects performed first and second order tracking tasks either alone or concurrently with a Sternberg Memory Search Task with a set size of three letters. In different conditions the memory search task was presented either auditorily (A) or visually (V), and responses were executed with either a speech response (S), or manually (M). These generated four input/output combinations: AS, VS, AM, VM, that could be defined in terms of an increasing degree of resource overlap with the VM tracking task.