Abstract

International audience; The aim of the present contribution is to test whether and to what extent cognitive load theory may account for working memory performance in the field of ergonomics. We will briefly present the theoretical and methodological principles of cognitive load theory, developed initially by Sweller (1988) in the field of educational psychology, and some of the more critical issues addressed recently. Thereafter, we report three experiments exploring the relations between the three load categories defined by cognitive load theory, by using working memory tasks. The influence of intrinsic and extrinsic cognitive load categories was explored by manipulating respectively task difficulty and time pressure. The consequences of the less documented germane load were proposed to depend on participants’ alertness that varies spontaneously across the day (Galy, Cariou, and Mélan, 2012). In order to test for additive effects between load categories, effects of intrinsic and extrinsic load were explored both separately and simultaneously, and when participants’ alertness level was either high or low. This procedure was tested in a mental arithmetic task and in a recall task performed by participants in controlled laboratory conditions and when the same arithmetic task was performed by air traffic controllers in a real-job situation. Results led to the conclusion of an additive interaction between intrinsic and extraneous cognitive load factors, in addition to modulatory effects by germane load. Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Abstract

This paper first reviews the advantages and disadvantages associated with both pre-coordination and post-coordination in classification. It then argues that we can have the advantages of both if we couple a post-coordinated (synthetic) approach to classification with a user interface that privileges the word order in search queries. Several other advantages of such an approach to classification and search are reviewed. It better captures the nature of a work (or object), addresses important issues with respect to social diversity, and facilitates user queries. It produces subject strings that resemble sentence fragments; this serves to clarify the meaning of terms within the subject string, and makes subject strings more comprehensible since humans typically think in sentences. These various benefits are then illustrated in the classification of works of music. It is shown that many important characteristics of works of music are best handled by such a system. These are generally poorly addressed, or not addressed at all, by existing approaches to the classification of music.