Do Individuals with Low Cognitive Control Benefit from Digitised Support? An individual differences study on workload, situational awareness, performance and communication
Year: 2012
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Cognitive control serves goal directed behaviour and entails the ability to 1) inhibit dominant or prepotent responses, 2) switch between tasks and mindsets and 3) update working memory. Previous research on individual differences in cognitive control and task performance mainly focused on finding relations between these different components of cognitive control and rather abstract experimental tasks. In contrast, in this thesis an applied method is adopted. To investigate the relation between individual differences in cognitive control and experienced workload, situational awareness (sa), performance and communication in an online coordination task, I joined the running Commander Zone Management project of Thales Netherlands in cooperation with TNO. Sixteen participants performed a coordination task, in which they had to remotely coordinate and support three groups of gold prospectors. Participants performed the task twice: once supported by a paper map and once supported by a digitised support system providing up to date information about the current location of each group. The results suggested that, first, people with low cognitive control benefit from a digitised support system regarding experienced workload. Second, people with high switching capacity communicate more (but shorter) when incidents occur in the paper map condition, leading to better performance. Third, there were indications that digitised support as well as a high inhibiting capacity are associated with a higher level of sa in general and especially with the level of sa concerning the projection of future actions of elements in the environment. Due to some complications during the experiment some results remained unexplained or less interpretable. However, the results from this study clearly show the importance of including individual differences in cognitive control in future development of support systems and future studies on high workload situations.
Author: E. Marcelis
Language: English
Subfield: Human Factors and Ergonomics
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W84384540