Time-on-Task Effects within a Probabilistic Task Environment

Abstract

The emergence of complex automated systems in the workplace has been viewed by many as shifting the kind of work people are asked to perform. This shift has tended to be toward more cognitively-oriented tasks, such as those associated with inferential decision making. In addition, it is very likely the future workplace will require that people perform cognitive tasks for continuous periods of time. The present findings indicate that statistically significant decrements in accuracy of performance on a multicue-judgment task were evident over the course of a continuously performed 4-hr. computerized work experiment. In contrast, performance accuracy on two analytical tasks remained high during the experiment. These results are evaluated in the context of the fatigue explanation for decrements found in research on continuous performance.