The Influence Of Culture On Vigilance Performance And Perceived Workload

Thanks to the advancement in automation technology, the role of operators in the system has shifted from controllers to system supervisors, who need to monitor the automated system and remain vigilant. Thus, the need for operators to sustain attention is crucial to the automated systems. Over 40 years of cross-cultural psychology research has shown that a wide range of psychological processes are influenced by culture, especially the attention process. As the vigilance task has a wide application in more and more areas, exploring the effects of culture on vigilance task is of great importance for practical applications of vigilance research, especially for system design, personnel selection/training, etc.The purpose of this research was to examine whether cultural differences(Chinese VS Americans) influence operator performance with the vigilance task. We designed two experiments to examine the impact of cultural differences on(1) single vigilance task, and(2) dual vigilance tasks. In both of the experiments, we measured the workload, fatigue, and stress induced by the tasks, in addition to task performance.The results showed that with both single vigilance task and dual vigilance tasks, Americans showed significantly better performance than Chinese. Moreover, Americans showed smaller performance variation than Chinese. With a single vigilance task, Chinese perceived a higher level of workload than Americans. Particularly, Chinese reported higher physical demand and effort demand. With dual vigilance tasks, however, American perceived a higher level of workload than Chinese. Particularly, Americans reported more mental demand and higher frustration. In both experiments, the physical fatigue of Chinese was significantly higher than Americans, but Americans reported significantly a higher level of boredom than Chinese.