ABSTRACT

Debate centres on the difficulty to distinguish precisely whether cognitive or perceptual load determines performance in tasks such as the Halford Graphical Relational Complexity Task (HGRCT). In this task, visual information is presented, and participants are asked to perform a series of mental operations that require working memory (WM) to complete the task. This study compared performance on purely visual as well as a cognitive task over arity, defined as the “amount of information to be remembered” and so a measure of working-memory load. Errors increased generally with increasing arity. However, reaction-time (RT) slopes revealed small to moderate increases over arity for the visual task while there was a major increase in the RT slope in the cognitive task. It cannot be ruled out that visual information load increases task difficulty, however, the difference in magnitude of the RT slopes over arity indicates that resolving the HGRCT is mainly dependent upon performance in cognitive mechanisms and may be relatively uninfluenced by the performance of perceptual memory systems.

摘要

争论的焦点是难以准确区分是认知负荷还是知觉负荷决定了在哈尔福德图形关系复杂性任务 (HGRCT) 等任务中的表现。在这项任务中，呈现视觉信息，并要求参与者执行一系列需要工作记忆 (WM) 的心理操作才能完成任务。这项研究比较了纯视觉和认知任务的表现，后者被定义为“要记住的信息量”，因此是工作记忆负荷的衡量标准。错误通常随着数量的增加而增加。然而，反应时间 (RT) 斜率显示，视觉任务的反应时间 (RT) 斜率略有增加，而认知任务的 RT 斜率显着增加。不排除视觉信息负荷增加任务难度，