Abstract
The current study investigates the demands that steering places on mental resources. Instead of a conventional dual-task paradigm, participants of this study were only required to perform a steering task while task-irrelevant auditory distractor probes (environmental sounds and beep tones) were intermittently presented. The event-related potentials (ERPs), which were generated by these probes, were analyzed for their sensitivity to the steering task’s demands. The steering task required participants to counteract unpredictable roll disturbances and difficulty was manipulated either by adjusting the bandwidth of the roll disturbance or by varying the complexity of the control dynamics. A mass univariate analysis revealed that steering selectively diminishes the amplitudes of early P3, late P3, and the re-orientation negativity (RON) to task-irrelevant environmental sounds but not to beep tones. Our findings are in line with a three-stage distraction model, which interprets these ERPs to reflect the post-sensory detection of the task-irrelevant stimulus, engagement, and re-orientation back to the steering task. This interpretation is consistent with our manipulations for steering difficulty. More participants showed diminished amplitudes for these ERPs in the “hard” steering condition relative to the “easy” condition. To sum up, the current work identifies the spatiotemporal ERP components of task-irrelevant auditory probes that are sensitive to steering demands on mental resources. This provides a non-intrusive method for evaluating mental workload in novel steering environments.
Highlights
Safety concerns have strongly motivated research in determining the demands, or workload, that users experience while performing closed-loop steering tasks, particular in the context of driving a car or piloting an aircraft
The current study is the first to employ task-irrelevant eventrelated potentials (ERPs) probes in a task that allows for the systematic manipulation of different steering demands. Such task-irrelevant probes, in particular environmental sounds, continue to elicit ERPs with components that we have identified to be selectively diminished by steering demands: early P3, late P3 and re-orientation negativity (RON)
We have shown that the demands of a steering task influence how the brain responds to task-irrelevant stimuli
Summary
Safety concerns have strongly motivated research in determining the demands, or workload, that users experience while performing closed-loop steering tasks, particular in the context of driving a car or piloting an aircraft (for a general review about workload, see Kramer, 1991; Wickens, 2008; Young et al, 2015). There is no doubt that steering places high requirements on visual and motoric resources (Land and Lee, 1994; Salvucci and Gray, 2004). Some aspects of steering have been shown to require mental resources (Wickens et al, 1983, 1984). This has been typically demonstrated with the use of dual-task paradigms that induce a competition for mental resources between the primary steering task and an appropriately chosen secondary task (McLeod, 1977; Wickens and Gopher, 1977). The purpose of this article is to evaluate the demands that steering places on mental resources without requiring the user to perform a secondary task. The steering task is further manipulated for two aspects of steering that are known to influence handling difficulty, namely the bandwidth of disturbance and the complexity of (vehicle) control dynamics
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