Effect of Start Position on Human Performance in Steering Tasks

The steering law has been a robust and powerful model for studying steering tasks in human-computer interaction. This paper investigated the effect of four kinds of start position (left, right, top and bottom) on human performance in straight and circular steering tasks respectively. Experimental results showed that the steering law still held for all of the four start positions for both straight and circular steering tasks. No statistically significant differences of the user performance, such as MT (Movement Time), SD (Standard Deviation), and OPM (Out of Path Movement) were observed among the four start positions in the circular steering task. However, there was significant difference of the value of SD among the four start positions in the straight steering task. Vertical steering resulted in more SD than horizontal steering. These results will be useful for further research and experiment design.