ABSTRACT
In-vehicle technologies are becoming less visual manual and more cognitively oriented. This trend includes technologies such as speech interaction, which alleviates visual-manual demand shifting the focus to cognitive demand. For our purposes, cognitive workload is defined as the load incurred by a human operator by a given task(s). Because of this technological shift to the cognitive, it follows that the ways to assess cognitive workload should be evaluated in more detail. This is especially important for industries needing to quantify, predict, and test how cognitively demanding a system is in order to derive distraction or to optimize conditions for the safest in-vehicle interaction. Detection response tasks (DRTs) have been suggested as sensitive to cognitive workload and therefore a good technique to employ to measure cognitive workload. The specific aim of the current study was to assess how sensitive DRTs are to cognitive workload. The DRTs evaluated are the remote DRT, head mounted DRT and tactile DRT. The DRTs were tested under dual-task/static and triple-task/dynamic settings. In addition to the DRTs, five cognitively loading tasks, artificial and naturalistic, were used to manipulate cognitive workload in two difficulty levels: easy and difficult. Results reveal how sensitive the DRTs are to cognitive workload and to variations thereof, as well as how DRTs perform in different settings. Implications and future directions will be discussed.
