Measuring the Mental Effort of Blind Mobility

A comparative analysis of the information processing associated with sighted and blind mobility indicates that the performance of blind pedestrians may be limited by the excessive “mental effort” demands of the task. Describes a group of experiments conducted to test the effectiveness of a secondary task as a measure of the blind mobility information processing workload. Secondary task performance is shown to be a useful index of the effects of preview and route difficulty, as well as the perceptual and cognitive demands placed on users of different mobility aids.