부산대학교 도서관

Human multitasking performance is important in many areas, such as defense, medicine, and everyday life. However, multitasking can be difficult to research due to a lack of objective metrics. This gap is remedied by applying information theory-based models to multitasking systems. The human operator informatic model is a throughput model that has been successfully applied to the multiple attribute task battery (MATB) software. In this study, auditory and haptic cueing were applied to the monitoring and targeting components of MATB, respectively. Interestingly, overall information throughput was not significantly affected by the cueing. These results can be traced to a mathematical change in operator strategy. In the presence of multisensory cueing, operators responded at higher information rates to the monitoring and targeting components; however, this came at a proportional cost to the communications and resource components. We propose that each operator has an information throughput capacity—an asymptotic limit to the amount of information he/she can process. This theoretical limit is analogous to the “channel capacity” for single tasking proposed by Miller in 1956.