Improving performance of repetitive computer-based tasks through visual stimuli tailored to the individual

Abstract

When humans conduct simple and repetitive tasks, their task performance can decrease depending on time. At this time, by deciding stimulus timing and delivering stimuli to humans, speed and accuracy of the task can be improved. To clearly investigate the effectiveness of such stimuli, we designed this study as repetitive tasks on a PC that could be conducted simply and were not much affected by other environmental variables. For our experiment, a total of 20 participants were asked to perform mouse pointing and keyboard typing tasks; usual speed and accuracy of each participant on each task were determined after completing the task. Next, the participant’s level of concentration was assessed using several metrics. When concentration was deemed to have declined during the task, a stimulus was delivered to the participant in the form of a screen flash, which resulted in an increased focus on the task. Through the proposed approach, speed was boosted by 11.6% on a pointing task and 3.8% on a typing task. Moreover, these results were found to be statistically significant in analysis of variance and paired t test. Our experiments and studies focus on improvements in reaction time caused by effect of stimulus and our presented approach.