Enhance Task Performance Research Articles

Educational Status, Work Experience, Accessibility to ICT and use as Predictors of Task Performance Among Library Personnel

This study investigated educational status, work experience, accessibility to Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and ICT use as predictors of task performance among library personnel in public university libraries in South-west, Nigeria. This study employed the survey research design. Total enumeration technique and questionnaire were used to gather data from the population size of 330 library personnel, out of which 248 responded giving a response rate of 76.6%. Mean, Standard deviation, regression and multiple regression were used to answer the research questions. The study established significant relationships of educational status, work experience, access to ICT and ICT use with tasks performance of the respondents. It was further established that educational status, work experience access to ICT and ICT use were significant predictors of task performance of library personnel. The study recommended among others, that university management must give due consideration to educational status, work experience in their assessment of personnel performance and also facilitate accessibility to ICT facilities and use to enhance task performance of their library personnel in public universities in South-west, Nigeria.

Evaluation of a Visual–Tactile Multimodal Display for Surface Obstacle Avoidance During Walking

The future of human space exploration will involve extra-vehicular activities (EVAs) on foreign planetary surfaces (i.e., Mars), an activity that will have significantly different characteristics than exploration scenarios on Earth. These activities become challenging due to restricted vision and limitations placed on sensory feedback from altered gravity and the space suit. The use of a bulky, pressurized EVA suit perceptually disconnects human explorers from the hostile environment, increasing navigation workload and the risk of collision associated with traversing through unfamiliar terrain. Multimodal displays are considered as a means to provide information to the astronaut as cues to multiple sensory modalities enhance cognitive processing through taking advantage of multiple sensory resources, and are believed to communicate the risk more efficiently than unimodal cues. This paper presents a wearable multimodal interface system to examine human performance when visual, vibratory, and visual–vibratory cues are provided to aid in ground obstacle avoidance. The wearable system applies vibrotactile cues to the feet and visual cues through augmented reality glasses to convey obstacle location and proximity. Participants ( n = 16) performed an overground obstacle avoidance task with the multimodal device. Performance metrics included completion time, subjective workload, head-down time, collisions, as well as gait parameters. Results indicate that information displays enhance task performance, with the visual-only display promoting the least head-down time over tactile-only or visual–tactile displays. Head-down time was the highest for trials without a display. Results provide implications for presenting information during physically active tasks such as suited obstacle avoidance.

Influence of cognitive ability on task performance of dynamic decision making in military vehicles under different task complexity

With the increment of demands on task performance in military vehicles, reasons for task performance difference in dynamic decision making have received considerable attention. The aim of this study was to explore the reasons for performance difference of dynamic decision making in military vehicles. The different influences of cognitive ability on task performance were investigated between low and high task complexity. Task performance was assessed with task completion time and error rate. Task complexity was manipulated by altering three forms of load factor, consisting of number of alternatives, information load and interruption duration. Four types of cognitive abilities were measured, including reaction ability, memory ability, sustained attention ability and attention allocation ability. The results indicated that cognitive abilities were effective predictors of task performance. High task complexity was more detrimental to individuals with low cognitive ability in terms of operation speed, and to individuals with high cognitive ability in terms of operation accuracy. High memory ability became increasingly demanded in high complexity. The key points of enhancing task performance lay in crew selection based on cognitive ability test and pertinence training on balancing operation speed and accuracy. This study provides insights into performance difference of military vehicle crew in dynamic decision making, which has remarkable significance in current crew selection, training and task assignment.

Disentangling reward anticipation with simultaneous pupillometry / fMRI

The reward system may provide an interesting intermediate phenotype for anhedonia in affective disorders. Reward anticipation is characterized by an increase in arousal, and previous studies have linked the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) to arousal responses such as dilation of the pupil. Here, we examined pupil dynamics during a reward anticipation task in forty-six healthy human subjects and evaluated its neural correlates using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Pupil size showed a strong increase during monetary reward anticipation, a moderate increase during verbal reward anticipation and a decrease during control trials. For fMRI analyses, average pupil size and pupil change were computed in 1-s time bins during the anticipation phase. Activity in the ventral striatum was inversely related to the pupil size time course, indicating an early onset of activation and a role in reward prediction processing. Pupil dilations were linked to increased activity in the salience network (dorsal ACC and bilateral insula), which likely triggers an increase in arousal to enhance task performance. Finally, increased pupil size preceding the required motor response was associated with activity in the ventral attention network. In sum, pupillometry provides an effective tool for disentangling different phases of reward anticipation, with relevance for affective symptomatology.

Synaptic organization and division of labor in the exceptionally polymorphic ant Pheidole rhea

Social insect polyphenisms provide models to examine the neural basis of division of labor and anatomy of the invertebrate social brain. Worker size-related behavior is hypothesized to enhance task performance, raising questions concerning the integration of morphology, behavior, and cellular neuroarchitecture, and how variation in sensory inputs and cognitive demands of behaviorally differentiated workers is reflected in higher-order processing ability. We used the highly polymorphic ant Pheidole rhea, which has three distinct worker size classes – minors, soldiers, and supersoldiers – to examine variation in synaptic circuitry across worker size and social role. We hypothesized that the density and size of synaptic complexes (microglomeruli, MG) would be positively associated with behavioral repertoire and the relative size of the mushroom bodies (MB). Supersoldiers had significantly larger and less dense MG in the lip (olfactory region) of the MB calyx (MBC), and larger MG in the collar (visual region) compared to minors. Soldiers were intermediate in synaptic phenotype: they did not differ significantly in MG density from minors and supersoldiers, had MG of similar size to minors in the lip, and did not differ from these two worker groups in MG size in the collar. Results suggest a complex relationship between MG density, size, behavior, and worker body size involving a conserved and plastic neurobiological development plan, although workers show strong variation in size and social role.

Attention allocation for human multi-robot control: Cognitive analysis based on behavior data and hidden states

Abstract Human multi-robot interaction exploits both the human operator's high-level decision-making skills and the robotic agents’ vigorous computing and motion abilities. While controlling multi-robot teams, an operator's attention must constantly shift between individual robots to maintain sufficient situation awareness. To conserve an operator's attentional resources, a robot with self-reflect capability on its abnormal status can help an operator focus her attention on emergent tasks rather than unneeded routine checks. With the proposing self-reflect aids, the human-robot interaction becomes a queuing framework, where the robots act as the clients to request for interaction and an operator acts as the server to respond these job requests. This paper examined two types of queuing schemes, the self-paced Open-queue identifying all robots’ normal/abnormal conditions, whereas the forced-paced shortest-job-first (SJF) queue showing a single robot's request at one time by following the SJF approach. As a robot may miscarry its experienced failures in various situations, the effects of imperfect automation were also investigated in this paper. The results suggest that the SJF attentional scheduling approach can provide stable performance in both primary (locate potential targets) and secondary (resolve robots’ failures) tasks, regardless of the system's reliability levels. However, the conventional results (e.g., number of targets marked) only present little information about users’ underlying cognitive strategies and may fail to reflect the user's true intent. As understanding users’ intentions is critical to providing appropriate cognitive aids to enhance task performance, a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is used to examine operators’ underlying cognitive intent and identify the unobservable cognitive states. The HMM results demonstrate fundamental differences among the queuing mechanisms and reliability conditions. The findings suggest that HMM can be helpful in investigating the use of human cognitive resources under multitasking environments.

Dynamic modulation of the perceptual load on microsaccades during a selective spatial attention task

Selective spatial attention enhances task performance at restricted regions within the visual field. The magnitude of this effect depends on the level of attentional load, which determines the efficiency of distractor rejection. Mechanisms of attentional load include perceptual selection and/or cognitive control involving working memory. Recent studies have provided evidence that microsaccades are influenced by spatial attention. Therefore, microsaccade activities may be exploited to help understand the dynamic control of selective attention under different load levels. However, previous reports in humans on the effect of attentional load on microsaccades are inconsistent, and it is not clear to what extent these results and the dynamic changes of microsaccade activities are similar in monkeys. We trained monkeys to perform a color detection task in which the perceptual load was manipulated by task difficulty with limited involvement of working memory. Our results indicate that during the task with high perceptual load, the rate and amplitude of microsaccades immediately before the target color change were significantly suppressed. We also found that the occurrence of microsaccades before the monkeys’ detection response deteriorated their performance, especially in the hard task. We propose that the activity of microsaccades might be an efficacious indicator of the perceptual load.

RLS patients show better nocturnal performance in the Simon task due to diminished visuo-motor priming

ObjectiveThe restless legs syndrome (RLS) is characterized by sensory-motor symptoms which usually occur predominantly at rest in the evening and at night. It is assumed that this circadian rhythm is caused by low dopamine levels in the evening. Yet, it has never been investigated whether RLS patients show diurnal variations in cognitive functions modulated by dopamine and what neurophysiological and functional neuroanatomical processes underlie such modulations. MethodsWe used a Simon task combined with EEG and source localization to investigate whether top-down response selection and/or automatic visuo-motor priming are subject to diurnal changes in RLS patients, as compared to matched healthy controls. ResultsWe found that RLS patients showed better task performance due to reduced visuo-motor priming in the evening, as reflected by smaller early lateralized readiness potential (e-LRP) amplitudes and decreased activation of the superior parietal cortex and premotor cortex. Top-down response selection and early attentional processing were unaffected by RLS. ConclusionsCounterintuitively, RLS patients show enhanced task performance in the evening, i.e. when experiencing dopaminergic deficiency. Yet, this may be explained by deficits in visuo-motor priming that lead to reduced false response tendencies. SignificanceThis study reveals a counterintuitive circadian variation of cognitive functions in RLS patients.

Thalamic projections sustain prefrontal activity during working memory maintenance.

The mediodorsal thalamus (MD) shares reciprocal connectivity with the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and decreased MD-PFC connectivity is observed in schizophrenia patients. Patients also display cognitive deficits including impairments in working memory, but a mechanistic link between thalamo-prefrontal circuit function and working memory is missing. Here, using pathway-specific inhibition we found directional interactions between MD and medial PFC (mPFC), with MD-to-mPFC supporting working memory maintenance and mPFC-to-MD supporting subsequent choice. We further identify mPFC neurons that display elevated spiking during the delay, a feature that was absent on error trials and required MD inputs for sustained maintenance. Strikingly, delay-tuned neurons had minimal overlap with spatially-tuned neurons and each mPFC population exhibited mutually exclusive dependence on MD and hippocampal inputs. These findings indicate a role for the MD in sustaining prefrontal activity during working memory maintenance. Consistent with this idea we found that enhancing MD excitability was sufficient to enhance task performance.

Enhancement of Task Performance Aided by Music

Our study demonstrates the enhancement of task performance aided by music. Task performance and associated physiological changes were studied in participants who listened to music (Indian classical instrument or Indo jazz). Their mood and their perceived emotions were evaluated using positive and negative affect schedule and self assessment manikin scales, and their pulse rate was measured. Visual Go and No-go trials were given as task stimuli and task performance was measured. Changes in the mean pulse rate were significantly low (P < 0.05) during Indo jazz. We conclude that Indian classical instrument and Indo jazz induced positive effects and enhanced task performance.

Factors Affecting the Use of Costing Systems toward Managerial Performancein Vietnamese Public Hospitals

This study investigates contextual and behavioral factors affecting the use of costing systems toward managerial performance among Vietnam’s public hospitals. The PLS-SEM results based on survey data from 262 mid-level managers from various departments indicate that top management support, decentralization of decision making, perceived technical validity, and perceived environmental uncertainty are important drivers of the use of costing systems, which in turn enhances task performance. The findings suggest that Vietnamese public hospitals should not underestimate the contextual and behavioral factors involved in facilitating the functioning of costing systems toward better performance outcomes. This study adds to limited research on behavioral accounting in Vietnamese public hospitals.

Expectations impact short-term memory through changes in connectivity between attention- and task-related brain regions

Over the recent years, neuroimaging studies have investigated the neural mechanisms underlying the influence of expectations on perception. However, it seems equally reasonable to assume that expectations impact cognitive functions. Here we used fMRI to explore the role of expectations on task performance and its underlying neural mechanisms. 43 healthy participants were randomly assigned to two groups. Using verbal instructions, group 1 was led to believe that pain enhances task performance while group 2 was instructed that pain hampers their performance. All participants performed a Rapid-Serial-Visual-Presentation (RSVP) Task (target detection and short-term memory component) with or without concomitant painful heat stimulation during 3T fMRI scanning. As hypothesized, short-term memory performance showed an interaction between painful stimulation and expectation. Positive expectations induced stronger neural activation in the right inferior parietal cortex (IPC) during painful stimulation than negative expectation. Moreover, IPC displayed differential functional coupling with the left inferior occipital cortex under pain as a function of expectancy. Our data show that an individual's expectation can influence cognitive performance in a visual short-term memory task which is associated with activity and connectivity changes in brain areas implicated in attentional processing and task performance.

Transcranial direct current stimulation can enhance ability in motor imagery tasks.

Previous studies have shown that motor-related areas are activated when individuals perform the hand mental rotation task (HMRT), which is used as a motor imagery task. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a noninvasive method of cortical stimulation, and anodal tDCS enhances the excitability of target regions. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of tDCS during the HMRT. Eighteen healthy, right-handed participants in this study performed the HMRT before (pre) and immediately after (post) anodal or sham tDCS. Both anodal and sham tDCS were applied to the left scalp over the hand-knob area for 10 min with a current intensity of 1 mA. Reaction times and error rates were analyzed and compared. As main results, reaction times were significantly shorter for postanodal tDCS than for preanodal tDCS (P<0.01) or postsham tDCS (P<0.05). No significant differences in reaction times were observed between presham and postsham tDCS. These findings indicate that anodal tDCS during the HMRT can enhance task performance.

A Meta-Analysis of the Impact of Situationally Induced Achievement Goals on Task Performance

The purpose of this research was to meta-analyze studies which experimentally induced an achievement goal state to examine its causal effect on the individual’s performance at the task at hand, and to investigate the moderator effects of feedback anticipation and time pressure. The data set comprised 19 papers, 79 individual effect sizes, and 3,482 participants. Performance measures represented task performance across a variety of tasks. The findings indicate that relative to avoidance goals (either performance-avoidance goals or mastery-avoidance goals), approach goals (either mastery-approach goals or performance-approach goals) enhance task performance. Furthermore, relative to performance-approach goals, mastery-approach goals lead to better performance, particularly when individuals do not anticipate feedback and when there is no time pressure. Implications and future directions for research are discussed.

A review of metaheuristics in robotics

Metaheuristics have a substantial history in fine-tuning machine learning algorithms. They gained tremendous popularity in many application domains. Robotics on the other hand is a wide research discipline that embraces artificial intelligence in a complex individually-thinking robot and distributed robots. Recently, metaheuristics made a significant impact on the application areas of collaborating robotics. This new trend of collaborating robotics, offers the possibility of enhanced task performance, high reliability, low unit complexity and decreased cost over traditional robotic systems. Collaborating robots however are more than just networks of independent agents; they are potentially reconfigurable networks of communicating agents capable of coordinated sensing and interaction with the environment. On the conceptual level, these bots can be empowered by the logics of metaheuristic algorithms which share the same functionalities and capabilities. This paper reviews the recent advances of metaheuristic algorithms on robotics applications. A taxonomy is provided as a reference for robotics designers.

Trusting is for Doing: On Goals, Mindsets, and Trust

In this paper we seek to disentangle goals and trust, and argue that people’s goals while interacting with other people is likely to influence the experience of trust. This again builds on the assumptions that trust is not merely a basis for decisions but a factor that influences (often favorably) other valued outcomes. Our experience of trust helps us display trust which furthers relational goals (e.g. developing work-relationships). Thus, this paper adopts a pragmatic perspective on trust (Fiske, 1992; James, 1890): Paraphrasing Fiske (1992) and replacing thinking with trusting we argue that “trusting is for doing”. People’s experience of trust constitutes not only a basis for decisions but serves important ends in its own right, enabling people to interact with ease and confidence. People’s experience of trust not only influences peoples’ selection of goals but also influences peoples’ ability to attain those goals once selected. Trust enhances peoples’ ability to effectively influence other people in that people tend to trust people who trust (Williams, 2007, Weber, Malhotra & Murnighan, 2005). Trusting likewise reduces the load on peoples’ information processing capacity, and enables people to more effectively focus on task-interaction enhancing task performance (Schmeichel & Baumeister, 2004). The effects of goals on trust we suggest tend to be automatic, often unconscious and uncontrolled (Bargh & Williams, 2007).

Reward Motivation Enhances Task Coding in Frontoparietal Cortex.

Reward motivation often enhances task performance, but the neural mechanisms underlying such cognitive enhancement remain unclear. Here, we used a multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) approach to test the hypothesis that motivation-related enhancement of cognitive control results from improved encoding and representation of task set information. Participants underwent two fMRI sessions of cued task switching, the first under baseline conditions, and the second with randomly intermixed reward incentive and no-incentive trials. Information about the upcoming task could be successfully decoded from cue-related activation patterns in a set of frontoparietal regions typically associated with task control. More critically, MVPA classifiers trained on the baseline session had significantly higher decoding accuracy on incentive than non-incentive trials, with decoding improvement mediating reward-related enhancement of behavioral performance. These results strongly support the hypothesis that reward motivation enhances cognitive control, by improving the discriminability of task-relevant information coded and maintained in frontoparietal brain regions.

Intensive cognitive training in schizophrenia enhances working memory and associated prefrontal cortical efficiency in a manner that drives long-term functional gains

We investigated whether intensive computerized cognitive training in schizophrenia could improve working memory performance and increase signal efficiency of associated middle frontal gyri (MFG) circuits in a functionally meaningful manner. Thirty schizophrenia participants and 13 healthy comparison participants underwent fMRI scanning during a letter N-back working memory task. Schizophrenia participants were then randomly assigned to either 80h (16weeks) of cognitive training or a computer games control condition. After this intervention, participants completed a second fMRI N-back scanning session. At baseline, during 2-back working memory trials, healthy participants showed the largest and most significant activation in bilateral MFG, which correlated with task performance. Schizophrenia participants showed impaired working memory, hypoactivation in left MFG, and no correlation between bilateral MFG signal and task performance. After training, schizophrenia participants improved their 2-back working memory performance and showed increased activation in left MFG. They also demonstrated a significant association between enhanced task performance and right MFG signal, similar to healthy participants. Both task performance and brain activity in right MFG after training predicted better generalized working memory at 6-month follow-up. Furthermore, task performance and brain activity within bilateral MFG predicted better occupational functioning at 6-month follow-up. No such findings were observed in the computer games control participants. Working memory impairments in schizophrenia and its underlying neural correlates in MFG can be improved by intensive computerized cognitive training; these improvements generalize beyond the trained task and are associated with enduring effects on cognition and functioning 6months after the intervention.

Development of a frequency-separated knob with variable change rates by rotation speed

The principle of frequency separation is a design method to display different information or feedback in accordance with the frequency of interaction between users and systems. This principle can be usefully applied to the design of knobs. Particularly, their rotation speed can be a meaningful criterion for applying the principle. Hence a knob can be developed, which shows change rates varying depending on its rotation speed. Such a knob would be more efficient than conventional knobs with constant change rate. We developed a prototype of frequency-separated knobs that has different combinations of the number of rotation speed steps and the size of the variation of change rate. With this prototype, we conducted an experiment to examine whether a speed frequency-separated knob enhances users' task performance. The results showed that the newly designed knob was effective in enhancing task performance, and that task efficiency was the best when its change rate increases exponentially and its rotation speed has three steps. We conducted another experiment to investigate how a more rapid exponential increase of change rate and a more number of steps of rotation speed influence users' task performance. The results showed that merely increasing both the size of the variation of change rates and the number of speed steps did not result in better task performance. Although two experimental results cannot easily be generalized to other contexts, they still offer practical information useful for designing a speed frequency-separated knob in various consumer electronics and control panels of industrial systems.

Dynamic modulation of shared sensory and motor cortical rhythms mediates speech and non-speech discrimination performance.

Oscillatory models of speech processing have proposed that rhythmic cortical oscillations in sensory and motor regions modulate speech sound processing from the bottom-up via phase reset at low frequencies (3–10 Hz) and from the top-down via the disinhibition of alpha/beta rhythms (8–30 Hz). To investigate how the proposed rhythms mediate perceptual performance, electroencephalographic (EEG) was recorded while participants passively listened to or actively identified speech and tone-sweeps in a two-force choice in noise discrimination task presented at high and low signal-to-noise ratios. EEG data were decomposed using independent component analysis and clustered across participants using principle component methods in EEGLAB. Left and right hemisphere sensorimotor and posterior temporal lobe clusters were identified. Alpha and beta suppression was associated with active tasks only in sensorimotor and temporal clusters. In posterior temporal clusters, increases in phase reset at low frequencies were driven by the quality of bottom-up acoustic information for speech and non-speech stimuli, whereas phase reset in sensorimotor clusters was associated with top-down active task demands. A comparison of correct discrimination trials to those identified at chance showed an earlier performance related effect for the left sensorimotor cluster relative to the left-temporal lobe cluster during the syllable discrimination task only. The right sensorimotor cluster was associated with performance related differences for tone–sweep stimuli only. Findings are consistent with internal model accounts suggesting that early efferent sensorimotor models transmitted along alpha and beta channels reflect a release from inhibition related to active attention to auditory discrimination. Results are discussed in the broader context of dynamic, oscillatory models of cognition proposing that top-down internally generated states interact with bottom-up sensory processing to enhance task performance.