Abstract
An approach for measuring the cognitive complexity of visual display formats is presented. The approach involves modeling both the knowledge that can be extracted from a format and the knowledge an operator brings to a task. A semantic network formalism is developed to capture task-relevant knowledge, from which four orthogonal predictor measures of cognitive complexity are derived. In an experiment, seven different avionic missions, performed with the aid of a horizontal situation display, were studied, and three of the predictor measures were found to correlate significantly with observed task difficulty. The results indicate that a semantic network formalism can be used to produce an objective metric of format quality in terms of cognitive complexity.
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