Control Theory Measures of Tracking as Indices of Attention Allocation Strategies

Abstract

In an intelligent man-machine control system, control theory measures describing the operator's tracking performance can provide useful information concerning an operator's attentional slate. This information may be used to implement adaptive aiding procedures. Research is reviewed that relates attentional manipulations to variation in control theory parameters, and an experiment is then described in which 29 subjects performed a tracking task alone, and concurrently with a serial reaction-time task. Within the time-sharing condition, relative priorities between the two tasks were manipulated. The results are interpreted in terms of the separate effects of time-sharing and of priority manipulations upon measures of tracking gain, remnant, time-delay and response “holds,” and the feasibility of on-line measurement of those variables.