Ergonomic Deliverables May 28, 2021

The Business of Ergonomics Podcast

Measures of Mental Workload

Reference: Wilson, R. & Corlett, N. Evaluation of Humanwork, 3rd ed. Taylor &
Francis, 2005.

There are many methods you can measure mental workload depending on the type
of equipment that you have access to, the scope of the project, and the project
budget! The three major types of mental workload measurements are performance-
based, subjective, and physiological. In this post, I’m going to focus on subjective
measures since this is the measurement tool that I’ve used in my past assessments
and what I find to be reliable.

Subjective measures involve asking the workers about their own awareness of the
cognitive effort needed to complete a task. These are low-cost and easy to
administer. In addition, subjective measures have a high degree of face validity. What
this means is that when someone tells you that they feel they have to put a lot of
effort into it, then the experience reflects the execution of the process.

If you are interested in performing these types of evaluations, you need to know the
three rating scales that have dominated the literature. The three well-established
tools are the following:

1. Cooper-Harper Rating Scale. This employs a single 10-point scale, each point
having a verbal descriptor.
2. National Aeronautical and Space Administration Task Load Index (NASA-
TLX). Uses a multi-dimensional scale to measure operator task performance.
3. Subjective Workload Assessment Technique (SWAT). Uses three scales
designed to measure time load, mental effort load, and psychological stress
load. .

Those are three widely used workload measurement tools that you may come across
if you want to get into these types of assessments.

NASA-TLX
I want to highlight NASA-TLX because I've used this tool before and it has been
valuable. NASA-TLX was developed by the Human Performance Group at NASA. This
tool asks operators to make ratings on six subscales, which includes:

1. Mental demand
2. Physical demand
3. Temporal Demand
4. Performance
5. Effort
6. Frustration Level