Examining the Effects of Ecological Models of Situation Displays on Human Cognitive Effort

Abstract

This paper reports on an observational study of cognitive efforts associated with ecological-based situation displays. The major performance measure is an 8-item subjective questionnaire. Participants in the study indicated on a 100-point scale, from zero (poor) to 100 (absolutely useful), their agreement with statements addressing information factors contributing to cognitive effort measurement. Two types of situation displays were compared: scenario and ecotopic displays, respectively. A scenario-based display portrays complete information about a problem context. An ecotopic display presents only local information and adapts to the user's mental model in a problem context. Results revealed that an ecotopic display provides better information filtering and mental model mapping than a scenario-based display (96.53% agreement versus 75.10%). Further, there was no statistically significant difference between ecotopic and scenario-based displays in terms of the user's perception of information integration tasks (tvalue = 1.185 versus ta = 0.05 = 1.645). Other measures such as decision time, decision accuracy, workload index, and false alarms were observed but not reported in this paper.