The Effect of Cognitive Workload, Job Enrichment Environment, and Spatial Ability on Goal Structures and Strategies

Abstract

The cognitive strategies used in the performance of human-computer interaction tasks have often been described in terms of goal stack models which are equivalent to hierarchical structures of goals and sub-goals. Effects of cognitive workload, spatial ability and job enrichment (JE) environment were evaluated by using goal structures and the quality of output. Studies were performed on a memo text-editing task to evaluate methods to determine the cognitive goal structures by analyzing the keystrokes and the pauses between keystrokes. The keystrokes provide information about the nodes and goals in the structures while the pauses between keystrokes provide information about the hierarchical structure of the goals. The cognitive goal structures of individual subjects were analyzed quantitatively according to the efficiency of the strategy and the depth and breadth of the strategy. The measures of cognitive goal structures were affected by environmental manipulations of the task in an experimental study of subjects using a text-editor. In particular, in a high workload condition, performance depended upon the spatial ability of the subjects. The goal structures of high spatial subjects became shallower as workload increased and the goal structures of the low spatial subjects did not change appreciably. In the high JE condition, the high spatial subjects developed more efficient cognitive strategies while in the low JE condition these high spatial subjects were less efficient. For the low spatial subjects, job enrichment had no effect. Overall, high spatial subjects changed their cognitive goal structures and strategies dependent upon the environmental conditions whereas the low spatial subjects were invariant under different environmental conditions.