Converging measures of workload capacity

Abstract

Does processing more than one stimulus concurrently impede or facilitate performance relative to processing just one stimulus? This fundamental question about workload capacity was surprisingly difficult to address empirically until Townsend and Nozawa (1995) developed a set of nonparametric analyses called systems factorial technology. We develop an alternative parametric approach based on the linear ballistic accumulator decision model (Brown & Heathcote, 2008), which uses the model's parameter estimates to measure processing capacity. We show that these two methods have complementary strengths, and that, in a data set where participants varied greatly in capacity, the two approaches provide converging evidence.