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Functional principal components analysis of workload capacity functions
Devin M Burns1, Joseph W Houpt, James T Townsend
1Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, 1101 E 10th St, Bloomington, IN, 47405, USA, devburns@indiana.edu.
Abstract:
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.
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