Making the Case for Measuring Mental Effort

Zugal, Stefan and Pinggera, Jakob and Reijers, Hajo and Reichert, Manfred and Weber, Barbara (2012) Making the Case for Measuring Mental Effort. In: Proc. 2nd Workshop on Experiences and Empirical Studies in Software Modelling (EESSMod 2012), September 30, 2012, Innsbruck, Austria.

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Abstract

To empirically investigate conceptual modeling languages, subjects are typically confronted with experimental tasks, such as the creation, modification or understanding of conceptual models. Thereby, accuracy, i.e., the amount of correctly performed tasks divided by the number of total tasks, is usually used to assess performance. Even though accuracy is widely adopted, it is connected to two often overlooked problems. First, accuracy is a rather insensitive measure. Second, for tasks of low complexity, the measurement of accuracy may be distorted by peculiarities of the human mind. In order to tackle these problems, we propose to additionally assess the subject's mental effort, i.e., the mental resources required to perform a task. In particular, we show how aforementioned problems connected to accuracy can be resolved, that mental effort is a valid measure of performance and how mental effort can easily be assessed in empirical research.

Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Uncontrolled Keywords: Experimentation, Human Factors, Measurement, Experimental Design
Subjects: DBIS Research > Publications
Depositing User: Prof. Dr. Manfred Reichert
Date Deposited: 26 Oct 2012 22:28
Last Modified: 27 Oct 2012 08:53
URI: http://dbis.eprints.uni-ulm.de/id/eprint/869

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