Measuring User Response to Attention Guidance Using the Integrated Cognitive User Assistance System

Humans are limited in their attentional capacity and miss salient cues when multitasking. We built a platform, ICUa (Integrated Cognitive User assistance) that simulates parts of MATBII, a computer-based multitasking testbed, adding gaze-based attention guidance in an attempt to improve multitasking performance. ICUa uses software agents for monitoring the interface, human behavior and eye gaze in order to guide attention (displaying highlights and arrows). We varied the difficulty of our testbed and found effects on human performance (based on error times) and characterized the types of errors that occurred with higher difficulty and how agent response changed. There was no clear effect of ICUa guidance on gaze patterns or human performance. The visual guidance we deployed may not be sufficient to measurably influence behavior. Future work will develop the detection eye gaze patterns and effective cues to redirect attention using this human-agent interface for experiments on attention guidance.