Effect of motion and motivation on task performance, workload and motion sickness

Abstract

Following the literature review, our goal was to study the effect and interaction of motion sickness and motivation on cognitive performance in a reading comprehension task and the associated workload with the task. We chose UCKAT reading tasks for our cognitive task, monetary incentive and ranks as our motivator and a multisine sickening motion profile on a simulator as
our motion variable. We exposed participants to 4 conditions, employing a within-subject experiment design, manipulating our independent variables motion and motivation. We collected motion sickness data via the motion sickness susceptibility questionnaire, misery scale and motion
sickness assessment questionnaire; motivation data via the situational motivation scale; workload data via the NASA TLX workload scale and task performance data via the total score obtained, the total time spent on the task and the average time spent per question. We found that our motion profile caused motion sickness in participants, with some evidence for habituation. We also found some evidence for training effects present in our data. Performance decrements, associated workload and motivation scores across the 4 conditions were statistically similar and we could not conclusively prove our hypotheses. Further analysis showed that amotivation scores almost showed significant effect on task performance which does match anecdotal evidence. MSAQ scores also negatively affected how much time people could spend on a cognitive task. We found that workload scores of participants increased significantly with increase in motion sickness which could give
us an insight on performing cognitive tasks under sickness. Overall, our experiment design could not show the trends that we had hypothesized, and we obtained partial results via our secondary analysis. Our findings indicate that further attention is to be given to the motivation variable to make it more robust. Further, a much large sample size is needed to better test our hypotheses, with perhaps, a mixed subject design for our study. Our study also showed an unexpected interaction of lateral and londitudinal motion profiles, causing significantly higher levels of sickness than what was predicted using existing models, which warrants further research into the same.