Impact Analysis of Situation Awareness Based on a Multitasking Difficulty Quantitative Model

Abstract

Situation awareness (SA) is a key indicator of operator task performance and behavioral safety in Human-Machine Interaction (HMI), and task difficulty is an important influencing factors in establishing and maintaining SA, especially in safety-critical scenarios such as flying and nuclear. However, the complexity and diversity of multitasking make it difficult to quantify task difficulty, which to a certain extent limits the research on cognitive research. To solve this problem, we proposed an approach to quantifying task difficulty in multitasking and analyzed the effect of task difficulty on different levels of SA through experiments in this paper. First, a task difficulty measure for a single meta-task was developed based on Shannon’s information theory, including both discrete and continuous meta-tasks. Next, a three-dimensional attribute model of meta-tasks was proposed to measure the difficulty value added by concurrent tasks based on multiple resource theory. Finally, an experiment was conducted to measure SA at different levels based on SAGAT, and SA under different levels of task difficulty was analyzed. The results showed a strong negative correlation between SA and task difficulty. Specifically, compared to SA at the comprehension and prediction levels, SA at the perceptual level was more easily influenced by task difficulty. This study can provide some reference for the quantify of task difficulty in human factors experiments, the optimization of tasks in HMI, and the selection of operator attention allocation strategies.