Abstract:
Concurrent Task Management (CTM) can be defined as the process that human operators of complex systems perform to allocate their attention among multiple, simultaneous tasks. A challenge of CTM research is to create an experimental environment which is complex enough to model a real world multitasking situation. Also, this system has to be operable by participants without special qualification or extensive training. The answer to this challenge is the Task Management Environment (TME), which is a low fidelity multitasking
management program. To further explore more CTM theories, it is necessary to make an external validation of the TME. In order to perform this validation there is a previous step that is necessary in order to find the optimal TME setup to validate. The objective of this research is to look for a possible relationship in performance between continuous, discrete and mixed task scenarios. The study tested 75 participants in three different TME scenarios (continuous, discrete and mixed). The results showed that there is not a significant correlation between continuous and discrete Scenarios, and there are small correlations between continuous and mixed scenarios and discrete and mixed scenarios. These
results suggest that the optimal scenario to be tested for the validation study is a mixed scenario.
