MODALITY INTERACTIONS IN MULTITASKING: SPATIAL AND VERBAL RESOURCE PRIMING VS. CONFLICT

The integration of real-time measures of participants’ spatial and verbal working memory usage into operational systems could assist in managing information flow, thereby enhancing human performance of complex tasks. This paper presents an experiment to evaluate participant performance during tasks requiring either spatial or verbal working memory resources. The study was designed to investigate whether an operator performing two tasks tapping the same working memory resource would exhibit an improvement in performance (due to memory resource priming) or a degradation of performance (due to memory resource conflict). Scenarios presented simplified versions of command and control tasks designed to test working memory in operational simulations. Tasks were presented in visual-aural pairs with homogenous or heterogeneous working memory demand. Participants were asked to monitor missile IDs and locations while distinguishing missile status and spatial sounds. Results of the study found that the performance of participants involved in visually presented verbal tasks is degraded when they simultaneously attempt to complete aurally presented verbal tasks. No such degradation was observed for homogenous spatial working memory pairs. Future efforts will incorporate these results into intelligent mitigation strategies that enable operators to maximize their cognitive resources and optimize performance on complex tasks in an operational environment.