ABSTRACT

Research at a work location can give a very good analogy of the task conducted in real life, but has the disadvantage that unexpected disturbances can occur and it can be very difficult to set up an adequate research environment. Conducting an experiment within a laboratory provides a stable and controllable research environment, but tasks to be performed often lack a strong resemblance with the situation in the outside world. One reason is that the laboratory environment itself does not provide a good resemblance with the office location, while, additionally, the tasks conducted by the subject do not completely comply with the real-life task to be performed at the office. Often the level of abstraction is too high in these laboratory tasks also. Moreover, in most of the laboratory studies, emotional and motivational factors are not included, while these are very important in real life. Another aspect is related to the work domain as a whole and the place of separate tasks in that domain (Vicente, 1999); often in a laboratory experiment there is almost no connection between (sub-)tasks that have to be performed in a certain sequence, while in real-life situations the result of a preceding sub-task is decisive for the choice of subsequent task elements or task strategies to be followed.