Alternative Indices of Performance: An Exploration of Eye Gaze Metrics in a Visual Puzzle Task.

摘要

When an operator's cognitive resources exceed demands, a 'red line' of performance may be crossed after which performance breaks down. Traditional approaches to state assessment use secondary tasks (e.g., mental arithmetic) or secondary physiological measures (e.g., heart rate variability) for state assessment. The current work was motivated by dynamic systems theory which indicates that there are meaningful patterns of variability in 'primary' behaviors (e.g., required activities) which might provide a measure of operator state. The present work uses eye gaze as a primary measure in a visual puzzle task. The goal of Experiment 1 was to determine if performance changes in a visual puzzle task were reflected in eye gaze. The results of Experiment 1 suggest that there are impacts of task demands on gaze patterns, for both conventional and dynamic gaze metrics. There were also significant of practice that could be interpreted as learning or strategy shifts. The results of Experiment 2 show a significant improvement in performance in the task accompanied by change in gaze patterns; and that the dynamic measure of diagonal recurrence was systematically related to this performance change. This suggests that non-conventional measures of dynamic structure provide additional & complimentary information about operator state.