Abstract
Cognitive load, the mental effort required to process information and perform tasks, affects user performance and engagement. Understanding its impact in immersive, multisensory experiences is critical for task-oriented applications like training and education. We studied the effect of cognitive load on user performance on a visual search task, performed on its own or alongside a secondary, auditory task. This effect was tested for two different search areas: 90º and 360º. Results show a decline of task performance with increased cognitive load, but with different trends between the 90º and 360º cases.
Conclusions and Future Work
In the poster we provide preliminary results of our ongoing work. We have observed a noticeable effect of cognitive load in visual search performance, but still lack objective and precise measurements of those levels of cognitive load. On top of that, the fixed order of the search area condition limits the insights regarding different trends for 90º and 360º performance. It is our intention to expand this work to provide a deeper understanding on the influence of cognitive load on task performance for multisensory environments such as VR.
Poster