ABSTRACT
The underlying message for the human factors tester is that measurements of cognitive states, such as mental workload and situation awareness, are likely to remain an important component of test design for the foreseeable future. The measurement of cognitive states is an essential ingredient of human factors test and evaluation (HFTE). This chapter describes the measurement issues and techniques surrounding two of the most widely used cognitive measures in HFTE, mental workload and situation awareness. Readers with even a passing familiarity with human factors testing will presumably not need to be convinced that the measurement of mental workload is important to test and evaluation. Subjective Workload Assessment Technique (SWAT) is widely used in test and evaluation because it is generally regarded to be a well-developed, reliable, and valid metric of workload. Pro-SWAT offers a relatively low-cost method for assessing the workload of developmental systems, provided that functional tasks are well-defined and that an equipment mock-up is available.
