Modeling Attention Allocation in a Complex Dual Task with and without Auditory Cues

Navy watchstanding operations increasingly involve informationsaturated environments in which operators must attend to more than one critical task display at a time [1]. In response, the Navy is pursuing a model-based understanding of human performance in multitask settings. Empirical studies with a complex dual task and related cognitive modeling work in the authors’ lab suggest that auditory cueing is an effective strategy for mediating operators’ attention [2,3,4]. Characterizing the effects of widely separated displays on performance and effort is an important ancillary concern, and a series of cognitive models developed with the EPIC cognitive architecture [5] is used for this purpose. These cognitive models verify a key finding from an empirical study; namely, time spent on the primary, relatively stateless, tracking task is regulated by state information retained from the secondary, radar task. These findings suggest that in multitask settings, operators use relatively simple state information about a task they are about to leave to gauge how long they can attend to other matters before they must return.