The Processing Resource Demands of Failure Detection in Dynamic Systems

摘要

A conception of human attentional resources is presented that describes these resources, not as an undifferentiated pool of capacity, but as partitioned into separate structure-specific reservoirs related to the processes of encoding, central processing and responding. An experiment is then described in which subjects detected dynamic system failures, either while actually tracking the control dynamics (manual mode), or while passively observing an autopilot controlling the dynamics (automatic mode). Failure detection, the primary task was performed alone, and with each of two structurally different loading tasks: mental arithmetic and a critical instability tracking task. Manual detection and primary task tracking were affected by the critical tracking task but not by mental arithmetic. The opposite pattern of interference was found for automatic detection. Assuming that manual and automatic detection depend upon different information sources, these results are shown to be compatible with the concept of structure-specific resources. (Author)