Mental workload is commonly defined as the proportion of a person's total mental capacity in use at a given moment. A measure of mental workload would have utility in a number of rehabilitation medicine applications, but no method has been adequately examined for these purposes. A candidate measure is the intersaccadic interval (ISI), which is the duration between two successive saccades. Previous studies indicate that ISI length may be linked to mental workload, but this link is poorly understood for tasks that are not primarily visual. Therefore, the current study was an investigation of ISI and workload intensity in three non-visual tasks: mental arithmetic, verbal fluency, and audio perception. Workload was manipulated through changes in task difficulty as well as study participant motivation level. An analysis of eye movements and other experimental workload measures indicated a significant association between audio perceptual workload and ISI length.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/17705 |
| Date | 22 September 2009 |
| Creators | Pierce, Eldon Todd |
| Contributors | Fernie, Geoff, Green, Robin |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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