Development of a Microcomputer Based Battery of Temporal Factors Tests

Abstract

Our industrialized society places a premium on the ability to resolve visually fine-spatial detail in the environment. But the perceptual demands of new display systems may involve temporal acuity as much as spatial acuity. Inability to “switch” attention and fixation rapidly from one visual display to another may be a major factor in the “human error” component. We hypothesize that individuals differ in their temporal visual acuity and, if so, then scores on tests which tap this capability would be predictive of productivity on jobs and activities with these demand characteristics. A battery of five temporal factors tests implemented on a portable lap-top microcomputer was administered over several trials to 44 subjects. The tests exhibited satisfactory metric properties (stability, reliability), and did not appear to relate to commonly available global mental abilities. An off-the-shelf portable battery of temporal factors which stabilizes rapidly could have several important applications. First, individual differences in temporal acuity could be employed to improve job productivity to the extent that such abilities are at the basis of certain jobs and activities. Second, since time-course changes were evident with the tests, they can be used to study training implications of these temporal factors. Third, the results could be used to identify temporal aspects of visual displays for advancing understanding in engineering design.