Correlation between NASA-TLX, Task Performance and Physiological Measurements in MATB-II
Open Access
- Author:
- Shi, Xiaochen
- Graduate Program:
- Industrial Engineering
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- March 28, 2020
- Committee Members:
- Ling Rothrock, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Ling Rothrock, Program Head/Chair
Andris Freivalds, Committee Member
Yiqi Zhang, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Mental Workload
NASA-TLX
Physiological measurements
Task Performance - Abstract:
- Mental workload (MWL) is one of the most widely referenced concepts in ergonomics research and practice. Mental workload measurements can provide researcher measurements of mental workload includes self-assessment ratings, physiological measurements and task performance. The purpose of this study was to investigate the correlation between task performance, self-assessment scores and physiological data, which includes electro dermal activity and eye tracking. 15 participants were recruited for the pilot study to examine the applicability of experiment design and 7 student participants were recruited for the second experiment to test their performance for three levels of the Multi-Attribute Test Battery tasks, including tracking and resource management. The results illustrated an increasing trend and no statistically significant difference in NASA-TLX scores (p-value = 0.3594) and task performance (p-value = 0.7167) among three levels. For eye tracking, the results of pupil diameter (p-value = 0.9792) and fixation duration (p-value = 0.9839) within each task did not reveal differences associated with task difficulty. As for Electrodermal activity results, the medium level task showed a completely different pattern as it ranked the lowest in skin conductance resistance amplitude, mean value of skin conductance, sum of amplitude, maximum of phasic value and tonic value. Only the latency of skin conductance resistance shows an increasing trend with the highest R2 across the three levels. There is a covariance between the task performance and NASA-TLX scores (r-value = 0.69 for tracking and 0.56 for resource management task). The physiological measures negatively correlate with NASA-TLX score (r = -0.71) but don’t correlate with task performance (r = -0.54). All of these three mental workload measurements do not indicate a statistically significant difference among the participants for any of the three levels of tasks with p-value equal to respectively.