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Functional principal components analysis of workload capacity functions

2013; Springer Science+Business Media; Volume: 45; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3758/s13428-013-0333-2

1554-3528

Devin Burns, Joseph W. Houpt, James T. Townsend, M. Endres,

Color perception and design

Workload capacity, an important concept in many areas of psychology, describes processing efficiency across changes in workload. The capacity coefficient is a function across time that provides a useful measure of this construct. Until now, most analyses of the capacity coefficient have focused on the magnitude of this function, and often only in terms of a qualitative comparison (greater than or less than one). This work explains how a functional extension of principal components analysis can capture the time-extended information of these functional data, using a small number of scalar values chosen to emphasize the variance between participants and conditions. This approach provides many possibilities for a more fine-grained study of differences in workload capacity across tasks and individuals.