The Impact Of Psychological Workload And Coping Style On The Performance Of Alert Tasks

In the modern industrial psychology research field, It has important significance to discuss how to improve the efficiency of the vigilance task operation, for it can improve the design of the man-machine system.With the progress of modern science and technology, studies of vigilance tasks are more and more possible to get people's attention.There are two types of vigilance tasksxognitive vigilance tasks and sensory vigilance tasks.Studies have found that not only the concepts, both also the development trends of change with operating time between cognitive vigilance tasks and sensory vigilance tasks are different.And these tasks are often limited to one kind of load level, and it lacks some kind of studies that discuss the differences between the two types of tasks under different load levels in related fields.From the perspective of the influence factors of vigilance tasks, previous studies mostly focus on the variables about tasks themselves, such as operation time,but little attention has been paid to the variables about subjects, variables like stress coping styles seldom appear in the vigilance tasks'study.In addition, with the development of modernization and the popularity of electronic automatic control applications,humans face more mental load although they can get rid of the heavy manual load step by step.Mental load will not only affects the work efficiency, but will affects human's physical and mental health. So we can think that it is very necessary to discuss the relationship between mental workload,coping styles and task performance, for it can provide the task operators with referential suggestions about enhancing their abilities of psychological stress and mental load tolerance.This study refers to Deaton and Parasuraman's experiment(1993) on cognitive and sensory vigilance tasks, by using two factors mixed experimental design, the whole study is divided into two experiments.With 96 college students as subjects, the study discusses how the mental workload levels and coping styles affect the performance of vigilance tasks.The results of the study are:(1) Mental workload has different influences on the performance of the two vigilance tasks:mental workload has significant impact on the hit rate and correct response time of two tasks, with no significant influence on the false rate.In cognitive vigilance tasks, the higher the level of mental workload, the lower the hit rate, and the longer the correct reaction time; while in sensory vigilance tasks, mental workload and hit rate show the inverted u-shaped curve relationship.(2) Coping styles have different effects on the performance of the two vigilance tasks:although the two tasks all find that the hit rate of active coping group is significantly higher than passive coping group, and the false rate is significantly lower,there is still some difference between the two tasks. The two coping groups in the previous task have no significant difference on reaction time, while the correct response time of active coping group is significantly lower than the passive coping group in the latter task.(3) The interaction effect between coping styles,mental workload and the vigilance tasks performance is different. In cognitive vigilance tasks, the low load level task for passive coping group can be done more quickly and accurately, high load level task for active coping group can be done more quickly and accurately. In sensory vigilance tasks, no matter under what kind of load level, the performance of active coping group is superior to the passive coping group.Based on the above results,we can get the following conclusions:(l) Mental workload has different influence on different aspects of vigilance task performance, and the influence also may be different due to task types. This challenges the conventional idea that they are inverted u-shaped curve relationship,and this also confirms that the relationship between the mental load and work performance is not immutable, both inverted u-shaped relationship and negative correlation between the two have their own rationality.(2) Coping styles have important effects on vigilance task performance. When facing different mental load levels, we should use different kinds of coping styles to attain better result.From the perspective of mental workload and the coping styles, this study discusses the relationship between the two variables and the performance of cognitive and sensory vigilance tasks, so it can provide reliable advice for effectively improve vigilance task performance. Future research can be further combined with the research methods of cognitive neuroscience, using the double task research pattern to study the neural mechanisms that how mental load and coping styles affect the vigilance task performance.