On the ability of virtual agents to decrease cognitive load: an experimental study
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On the ability of virtual agents to decrease cognitive load: an experimental study Florian Brachten1 · Felix Brünker1 · Nicholas R. J. Frick1 · Björn Ross1 · Stefan Stieglitz1 Received: 28 October 2019 / Revised: 22 April 2020 / Accepted: 6 June 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract When attempting to solve a problem, humans call upon cognitive resources. These resources are limited, and the degree of their utilisation is described as cognitive load. While the number of parameters to be taken into account and to be processed by modern-day knowledge workers increases, their cognitive resources do not. Research shows that too high a load can increase stress and failure rates and decrease the work satisfaction and performance of employees. It is thus in the interest of organisations to reduce the cognitive load of their employees and keep it at a moderate level. One way to achieve this may be the application of virtual assistants (VAs), software programs, that can be addressed via voice or text commands and respond to the users’ input. This study uses a laboratory experiment with N = 91 participants comparing two groups in their ability to solve a task. One group was able to make use of a VA while the other could not. Besides task performance, the cognitive load of the participants was measured. Results show that (a) cognitive load is negatively related to task performance, (b) the group using the VA performed better at the task and (c) the group using the VA had a lower cognitive load. These findings show that VAs are a viable way to support employees and can increase their performance. It adds to the growing field of IS research on VAs by expanding the field for the concept of cognitive load. Keywords Cognitive load · Virtual assistants · Chatbots · Conversational agents · Task performance · Perceived workload · NASA-TLX
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1025 7-020-00471-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Florian Brachten florian.brachten@uni‑due.de 1
Department of Computer Science and Applied Cognitive Science, Research Group Professional Communication in Electronic Media/Social Media, University of Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, Germany
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1 Introduction The working memory plays an important role in learning and processing of information. As its capacity is limited so is the amount of information that can be processed at the same time. The amount of working memory used during this processing is called cognitive load (Sweller 1988). The concept of cognitive load originates in behavioural psychology and the realm of learning but has since been transferred to research on other disciplines, amongst others to Information Systems (IS) (e.g. Hu et al. 2017). Studies have also transferred the concept to the working context and could, for example, show that work-related well-being was decreased when the cognitive load was too high (Pace et al. 2019). Even more severel
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