ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews representative applications of measures to workload assessment in multi-task environments. Electrical brain activity, as measured by the electroencephalographic (EEG), has been successfully applied to monitor workload in a number of multi-task environments. Several investigators have reported experiments in multi-task environments that demonstrated the sensitivity of either the alpha or theta bands to variations in the workload or demand associated with task performance. The results of these experiments indicate that EEG analyses, particularly in the alpha and theta bands, can demonstrate sensitivity to workload differences in several multi-task environments. Subjective measures of workload are the most commonly used measures in multi-task environments due to their relative ease of use and their face validity. New models of operator workload may be necessary to explain physiological and performance data in multi-task environments since single-task data. The chapter also explains the relationship between physiological and subjective measures.
