Knowing Where and When to Look in a Complex Time-Critical Dual Task

High-performance time-critical human-computer systems for use in multitasking environments need to be designed with an understanding of how human cognitive strategies can coordinate the interleaving of perceptual, memory, and motor processes. This paper presents eye movement data collected for a tightly-controlled, highly-motivated, practiced dual task. In the primary task, participants tracked a target with a joystick. In the secondary task, participants keyed-in responses to objects moving across a radar. Task manipulations included: whether the currently unattended task’s stimuli were visible; presence or absence of auditory cues; and the number of radar objects to classify in succession. Eye movement analysis demonstrates that participants developed fundamentally different strategies to perform the two tasks in parallel under the various task manipulations. The experiment provides a rich set of data to guide the development of models and theory of human performance in complex dual task scenarios.