Quantitative evaluation of cognitive load by utterance using a dynamic random-dot steering task

Abstract

With the rapid development of speech recognition technology, voice operation interfaces have been applied to the medical devices. Since It needs to convert the instruction into language information to operate these devices by voice, the cognitive load is not necessarily reduced. The purpose of this study is to quantify the cognitive load by utterance. We measured the performances of a dynamic random-dot steering task, and evaluated the influence of utterance to steering accuracy by simultaneously appending a verbal fluency task. As a result, the amount of steering error under verbal fluency task was larger than under the conditon in which subjects made saccades to peripheral targets. The results indicate that the influence of utterance on the operation accuracy might be caused by attenuation of attention to the visual target. It suggests that the introduction of the voice operation device needs to be examined according to the usage scene.