Accession Number:

ADA191448

Title:

Performance Effectiveness and the Work/Rest Cycle.

Descriptive Note:

Final rept. 1 Oct 83-31 Dec 87,

Corporate Author:

ILLINOIS UNIV AT URBANA

Personal Author(s):

• Birch, David

Report Date:

1988-02-01

Pagination or Media Count:

17.0

Abstract:

The supervisor-monitor of a modern automated system is called upon to perform continuously a variety of cognitive tasks over prolonged periods of time. Such work is structured by the characteristics of the system, by the particular requirements of the individual tasks to be carried out, and by the motivational and cognitive processes that take place as the work goes on. It is useful to refer to the scheduling of these events and to inquire about the structure of work that emerges as a consequence of this scheduling. Six new studies directed to the understanding of how scheduling of events occurs in continuous work have resulted in significant progress theoretically on problems of scheduling and in applications of the theory. New models and extensions of existing models to the continuous behavioral situation are reported. Three other studies, each addressed to different aspects of the structure of tasks as determined by motivation and cognition, provide new information about continuous work in three different settings during single-task and dual-task tracking, while making predictions of system criterion values from multiple cue values that differ in validity and redundancy, and while judging similarities of visual inputs from symbolic representations of the stimuli.

Descriptors:

• *REST
• *WORK
• AUTOMATION
• BEHAVIOR
• COGNITION
• MODELS
• MOTIVATION
• PREDICTIONS
• REDUNDANCY
• REST
• SCHEDULING
• STIMULI
• SYMBOLS
• THEORY
• TIME INTERVALS

Subject Categories:

• Anatomy and Physiology
• Psychology

Distribution Statement:

APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE