The Structural Constraint and The Strategic Control of Attention Allocation

174 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1983.Two aspects of time-sharing performance were studied: time-sharing efficiency (joint performance) and attention allocation optimality (consistency of protecting the performance of the high priority task). Time-sharing performance was evaluated as: (a) structural configurations of the time-shared tasks, (b) dynamics of the difficulty changes, and (c) strategic allocation training. A secondary task technique was employed. Five pairs of structurally different dual tasks were investigated. Time-sharing efficiency decreased whereas resource allocation optimality increased with increasing degrees of resource overlap between the time-shared tasks. Subjects were able to maintain the average, but not the moment by moment, high priority performance under the dynamic difficulty condition. Strategy training was more successful in improving resource allocation for the task pairs utilizing common resources than separate resources. Two implications of these results are noteworthy. First, the structural effects suggest that the different processing resources defined by the structure-specific resource model may have different functional properties and attention mechanisms. Second, the time-sharing efficiency and allocation optimality tradeoff suggests that task designers need to weight the benefits of time-sharing efficiency against those of allocation optimality in making multitask design decisions.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD