PSYC 738 - Graduate Human Factors Seminar
Mental Workload
Spring 2024 (Rev. 1.0)
Last revised January 6, 2024

Course Description

Attention is a dominant theoretical construct in contemporary experimental psychology.  Ironically, however, this construct is difficult to define.  Hence, before we human factors types can generalize attention (and attentional mechanisms) to applied situations we will need to build some working models of attention (models that allow us to embed our work within the literature of experimental psychology as well as idiosyncratic models that meet our own personal viewpoints and philosophies).  One such family of working models conceptualizes attention as a limited mental resource which must be strategically and efficiently allocated in order to meet goal-defined performance objectives.  Measuring this allocation of resources and relating these measures to changes in performance is central to the concept of mental workload.  We will explore how applied attention research has developed into the construct of mental workload and its related theory, measurement and applications.

Auxiliary Reading List

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