Air Force–Multi-Attribute Task Battery (AF-MATB)

This task was originally developed by the National Aeronautics and Space (NASA) to evaluate human performance metrics during a multitasking test paradigm⁴³. The AF-MATB is a modified version of the original task created by NASA that incorporates the Human Operator Informatic Model that evaluates both human performance and strategy on multitasking^44–46. The model calculates the amount of information an operator can process as “throughput capacity” by calculating the differences between the number of stimuli displayed versus the number of stimuli to which the participant responded. The task requires the operator to simultaneously monitor and respond to four separate cognitive process tasks shown on a visual monitor, with each task in a separate quadrant of the display. The cognitive processes tested included a visual system alert monitoring task (lights, dials, and system monitoring metric), a visual–motor tracking task (targeting metric), an auditory communication monitoring task (communication metric), and a visual resource management task (resource management metric). Therefore, there are four subtasks that test four different aspects of cognition and from those four subtasks, we get six different metrics (1 from each subtask, except for the visual system alert monitoring task has 3 metrics). We also computed an overall score metric for the entire task that included the 6 aforementioned metrics. Participants performed the AF-MATB program for 20 min at a medium-high-difficulty level.