A Preliminary Investigation on Vicarious Observation of Mental Workload

Abstract

The primary objective of this study is to conduct an initial investigation into the possibility of reliably predicting mental workload (MWL) just from task observation. In order to accomplish the goal of this study, a completely repeated-measures design was implemented. Twenty-one participants were instructed to examine sampling videos of individual MATB and combined subtasks at two different levels of demand. Afterwards, participants were instructed to subjectively assess the MWL of the task using the NASA-TLX scale. The findings suggest that participants can differentiate the mental workload (MWL) of the system monitoring task, but not the other subtasks or the tasks when they are combined. The findings also indicate that the ratings for the subtask varied significantly between different degrees of pressure. The results can be elucidated via the perspective of signal detection and heuristics theories. This paper also addresses the methodological constraints and potential practical application.