Task analysis

About: Task analysis is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 10432 publications have been published within this topic receiving 283481 citations.

Measuring Situation Awareness in complex systems: Comparison of measures study

Abstract: Assessing operator situation awareness is a key component of sociotechnical system design and evaluation. This article describes a study that was undertaken in order to compare two different situation awareness measures (a freeze probe recall approach and a post trial subjective rating approach) when used to assess participant situation awareness during a military planning task. The results indicate that only the participant situation awareness scores derived via the freeze probe recall method produced a statistically significant correlation with performance on the planning task and also that there was no significant correlation between the two methods, which suggests that they were measuring different aspects of participant situation awareness during the trials. In conclusion, the findings, whilst raising doubts over the validity of the post trial subjective rating approach, offer validation evidence for the use of freeze probe recall approaches to measure situation awareness during simulated tasks. The findings are subsequently discussed with regard to their wider implications for the future measurement of situation awareness in complex collaborative systems. Relevance to industry Situation Awareness is a critical commodity for teams working in industrial systems. Accordingly, designers and analysts require reliable and valid methods for assessing the impact of new systems, interfaces, training programs and procedures on the level of situation awareness held by operators. This article presents a review and comparison of situation awareness measurement approaches for use in complex industrial systems and provides recommendations on the types of methods to use during future situation awareness assessments.

Competition Between Endogenous and Exogenous Orienting of Visual Attention

Abstract: The relation between reflexive and voluntary orienting of visual attention was investigated with 4 experiments: a simple detection task, a localization task, a saccade toward the target task, and a target identification task in which discrimination difficulty was manipulated. Endogenous and exogenous orienting cues were presented in each trial and their validity was manipulated orthogonally to examine whether attention mechanisms are mediated by separate systems and whether they have additive and independent effects on visual detection and discrimination. The results showed that each orienting mechanism developed its typical and independent effect in every case except for the difficult identification task. A theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between endogenous and exogenous orienting of attention is proposed, tested, and confirmed.

12-in-1: Multi-Task Vision and Language Representation Learning

Abstract: Much of vision-and-language research focuses on a small but diverse set of independent tasks and supporting datasets often studied in isolation; however, the visually-grounded language understanding skills required for success at these tasks overlap significantly. In this work, we investigate these relationships between vision-and-language tasks by developing a large-scale, multi-task model. Our approach culminates in a single model on 12 datasets from four broad categories of task including visual question answering, caption-based image retrieval, grounding referring expressions, and multimodal verification. Compared to independently trained single-task models, this represents a reduction from approximately 3 billion parameters to 270 million while simultaneously improving performance by 2.05 points on average across tasks. We use our multi-task framework to perform in-depth analysis of the effect of joint training diverse tasks. Further, we show that finetuning task-specific models from our single multi-task model can lead to further improvements, achieving performance at or above the state-of-the-art.

Task complexity, the Cognition Hypothesis and second language learning and performance

Abstract: In this paper we describe a taxonomy of task demands which distinguishes between Task Complexity, Task Condition and Task Difficulty. We then describe three theoretical claims and predictions of the Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson 2001, 2003b, 2005a) concerning the effects of task complexity on: (a) language production; (b) interaction and uptake of information available in the input to tasks; and (c) individual differences-task interactions. Finally we summarize the findings of the empirical studies in this special issue which all address one or more of these predictions and point to some directions for continuing, future research into the effects of task complexity on learning and performance. 1. The Cognition Hypothesis: Task complexity, task design and task sequencing This special issue consists of a theoretical overview of two models of attention that have prompted extensive research into the effects of task demands on selective attention and co-ordination of attentional resources during dual and multitask performance, followed by four empirical studies examining the effects of manipulating dimensions of task complexity on; (i) the accuracy, fluency and complexity of second language (L2) speech production; (ii) the extent of interaction and uptake of premodified input occurring during task performance, and iii) learner perceptions of task difficulty. A great number of previous studies have examined the effects of one or another aspect of L2 task demands, such as the availability of planning time (see Ellis 2005), or the nature and extent of participation on tasks (see Pica, Kanagy and Falodun 1993), individually. Drawing on this, and other previous research the studies in this special issue all address the issue of task complexity in the Triadic Componential Framework (Robinson 2001, 2005a, 2007a) which specifies component dimensions of task complexity in terms of three superordinate cognitive, interactive and learner factors in order that each dimension can be studied separately, and also that