Study On The Influence Of Time Pressure And Workload On Context Consciousness And Task Decision Performance

Situational awareness results from individual information representation and processing in dynamic environmental. SA is considered as the premise of decision-making and the guarantee of safe operation. Researchers have found that various factors can induce the positive or negative effects on SA, consequently affecting decision making and safe operation. Therefore, it is worthy studying the effect of different factors on SA and decision strategy in the field of industrial securitys.Previous studies have shown that time pressure influence the decisions in static task. Different time pressure leads a change on information selecting and decision strategy, and then affects the decision quality. In addition, time, frequently occurred in dynamic environment, plays an important role on SA. Researchers also suggest that time consciousness should be included in the theoretical framework of situational awareness cognition. A lot of researches and operating data show that time pressure impede the formation of pilot’s situational awareness, and even cause a disaster. Despite the existing researches have proved that the time factor plays an important role in the decision making and situational awareness, but current experimental researches have not discuss the relationship among time pressure, situation awareness and decision-making in dynamic task. Moreover, the actual environment is especially complicated, which involves the time limitation and a myriad of workload. The cognitive mechanism about how time pressure and workload affect SA and decision-making in dynamic task is still not clear.This study investigated the relationship among time pressure, workload, SA and decision-making through three experiments in dynamic environment. Experiment 1 aims to explore the effect of time pressure by setting different time pressure via time limit control and SAGAT in airport judge task. The results showed that the accurate rate of SA and decision has significant difference in different level of time pressure. Based on the results of the experiment 1 and time perception theory, experiment 2 bring in the time clues to further discuss the effect of time factor in dynamic environment. The data results represent a significant interaction between time clues and time pressure. The objective time clue can improve the accurate rate in medium time pressure. According to the actual operation situation and the result of experiment 1 and 2, experiment 3 adopt the vision and auditory interfering task to increases the load under time pressure. The data analysis results show that the effect of dual task is significant, the accurate rate of SA and decision decreased due to the interfering task. With the deduction in time pressure, the influence of interference task has been weakened at a certain extent.Summary of experimental results and discussions, the following conclusions of this study are listed as below:(1) Time pressure has the negative impact on situation awareness and decision quality. The negative effect influence will increase with increasing time pressure.(2) Time pressure and time clues have important interaction effects on situational awareness and decision-making. Objective time clues effectively improve the situation awareness and decision quality, especially in medium time pressure.(3) Interference task increase work load and reduce the accuracy of situational awareness and decision-making. Phonological loop and visuospatial sketchpad play an important role for SA in dynamic environment.