User Performance with Audio: The effect of subjects' cognitive styles

Abstract

This work is concerned with the issue of user performance with audio interfaces. We examine how people perform when assigned with simple purely audio tasks. We define 'user performance' as the ratio of correct score divided by the time to complete the task. A test was devised to examine how the user cognitive style classification is related to user performance when dealing with audio tasks. Performance was significantly different between all tasks except for two cases. Subjects performed best where the level of cognitive demands placed on them were low and prefer tasks that use 'Speech', rather than 'Non-Speech'. Cognitive style was not found to be a significant factor influencing performance where all subjects performed well, but subjects' Verbal-Imagery classification was found to be a significant factor for the more complex tasks.