Examining the Influence of Different Attentional Demands and Individuals’ Cognitive Failure on Workload Assessment and Psychological Functioning

Attentional demands and individuals’ cognitive failure are hypothesized to be determinant factors for workload assessment and job analysis, although previous researches have focused merely on one aspect of attentional demands. The objective of this study was to investigate the degree to which various attentional paradigms would be demanding to the participants with different levels of cognitive failure. A total of 24 participants within three groups of low, medium, and high cognitive failure questionnaire (CFQ) scorers completed two 15-min and one 60-min tasks representing three paradigms of “divided”, “selective”, and “sustained” attention. The participants were undergraduate male students from the University of UOEH, Japan. Outcomes were measured in subjective workload, stress-arousal and anxiety level, along with performance measures. Accordingly, MANOVA and Post Hoc Tukey-test analyses between variables showed that the divided attention task created a higher workload with a better arousal level, while an increased level of frustration with a decreased level of arousal was induced by the sustained attention task. Confirming the proposed model of cognitive failure in this study, greater workload with worse psychological functioning and performance breakdown was found among the high CFQ scorers. These findings have important implications for conducting workload analysis researches in real-world or laboratory settings; focusing on attentional demand and cognitive failure may be an effective way to alleviate stress.