Workload Transition Implications for Individual and Team Performance (1993) / Chapter Skim
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9 Strategic Task Management
9 Strategic Task Management
Pages 214-228
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This chapter addresses the issue of task switching and task management at two levels. In the first part, we consider basic laboratory research that has addressed the speed with which humans can initiate, change, and cease tasks.
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The transitions are brief and hardly noticeable in everyday life, yet they are fundamentally important in understanding human behavior. Strategy Switching One approach to the study of task switching has been through the study of strategy switching.
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This is an important issue in workload transition periods, for it is evident that a change from pre- to post-transition conditions will normally require a host of different strategies to be adopted, such as a shift to more rapid performance. It should be noted, however, that most studies of rapid strategy shifting have not been carried out in high-stress conditions, and so, to some extent, the generalizability of this finding of flexibility to the tank crew environment must be treated cautiously.
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Action identification theory is very new and has not been applied to many situations, but it seems very promising, especially in the context of workload transitions. At the very least, it provides a framework in which to understand the complex tasks encountered in workload transition situations.
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A variation of the stop-signal paradigm, relevant to the discussion of activity switching, is the change-task paradigm, in which the signal to stop one activity serves as the stimulus to start a different, changed activity. The change-task signal is a type of procedural bridge between the stop task and traditional dual tasks, in which subjects respond overtly to two signals.
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From page 219... ...
Studies of the change task suggest that successful inhibition has few carryover effects for subsequent actions, which is good news for workload transition situations. Implications for Workload Transition While the research on task engagement, change, and task stopping has been carried out in fairly basic laboratory paradigms, it is possible to speculate to some extent on generalizations that might be made to more complex high-workload environments.
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Stopping time depends on the discriminability of the stop signal, but discriminability should be very clear in workload transition situations (e.g., it should be easy to tell when a battle begins)
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Our interest here is in the nature of human operator task management strategies: the appropriateness of human behavior in selecting what task to do when (Adams et al., 1991~. Turning to the operational community, one can find numerous examples of aircraft accidents (in National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)
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From page 222... ...
First, we may refer to the National Transportation Safety Board and the Aircraft Safety Reporting System reports on maladaptive task management strategies (Williams et al., 1992~. These reports are important because they illustrate the existence of a problem that has major implications for air safety (e.g., the Everglades crash referred to above)
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From page 223... ...
Subjects needed to perform tasks of three wellidentified levels of priority: the primary task of flying an accurate altitude and navigating accurately, a secondary task of solving spatial location problems, and a tertiary low-priority task involving discrete keyboard entry to be performed when time allowed. Collectively, the results of the experiment indicated that pilots performed reasonably optimally in their task management strategies.
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From page 224... ...
The value of previewed intelligence information in strategic task management should not, however, always be accepted uncritically, particularly if the preview is unreliable. Some studies have shown that preview in task management and scheduling can be detrimental if it is not entirely reliable; or if it is presented in such a way that the visual attention required to integrate and interpret the preview information competes with processing information regarding present system status (Sanderson, 1990; Wickens et al., 1991~.
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Yet it remains evident that full confidence in generalizing these results to operational environments awaits further validation research in complex scenarios. REFERENCES Adams, M.J., Y.F.
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Zbrodoff, and A.R Fostey 1983 Costs and benefits of strategy construction in a speeded discrimination task. Memory and Cognition 11:485-493.
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Kleinman, and A.R. Ephrath 1983 A dynamic decision model of human task selection performance.
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Wegner 1987 What do people think they're doing? Action identification and human behavior.
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