Final Report of Experimental Psychology Group

Abstract

The origin of the concept of “mental workload” is in the ordinary everyday experience of human beings who perform tasks which are not necessarily physically demanding but which are experienced nonetheless as exhausting and stressful. The concept reflects a genuine dimension or dimensions of human experience in daily work, including — perhaps especially — modern automatic and semi-automatic man-machine systems. As such it is a concept absolutely required for the adequate analysis and description of such tasks and for predicting, at the design stage, the future performance of such systems, and also to allow for the needs and properties of the human operator.