Noninvasive Physiological Measures And Workload Transitions:an Investigation Of Thresholds Using Multiple Synchronized Sensors

The purpose of this study is to determine under what conditions multiple minimally intrusive physiological sensors can be used together and validly applied for use in areas which rely on adaptive systems including adaptive automation and augmented cognition. Specifically, this dissertation investigated the physiological transitions of operator state caused by changes in the level of taskload. Three questions were evaluated including (1) Do differences exist between physiological indicators when examined between levels of difficulty? (2) Are differences of physiological indicators (which may exist) between difficulty levels affected by spatial ability? (3) Which physiological indicators (if any) account for variation in performance on a spatial task with varying difficulty levels? The Modular Cognitive State Gauge model was presented and used to determine which basic physiological sensors (EEG, ECG, EDR and eye-tracking) could validly assess changes in the utilization of two-dimensional spatial resources required to perform a spatial ability dependent task. Thirty-six volunteers (20 female, 16 male) wore minimally invasive physiological sensing devices while executing a challenging computer based puzzle task. Specifically, participants were tested with two measures of spatial ability, received training, a practice session, an experimental trial and completed a subjective workload survey. The results of this experiment confirmed that participants with low spatial ability reported higher subjective workload and performed poorer when compared to those with high spatial ability. Additionally, there were significant changes for a majority of the physiological indicators between two difficulty levels and most importantly three measures (EEG, ECG and eye-tracking) were shown to account for variability in performance on the spatial task

Making the Virtual Actual: a research model to understand music of contemporary open-world video games

The global video game industry has in part achieved its ubiquitous cultural influence through the creation of increasingly realistic gameworlds. Of these, contemporary open-world games offer vast internal environments presenting complex narrative constructs and ever-higher production values, including music content. Research into these games has typically ranged from their characteristic technical design and storytelling attributes, to ethnographic studies of their gameworlds, through to commercially based evaluations of the games’ soundtrack content. Breaking new ground by merging these disparate lines of enquiry into a cohesive whole, the purpose of this study is to examine the music of open-world game soundscapes as sociocultural artefacts. This study seeks to offer a foundation for explaining the musical functions causal to the popularity of these games according to a research model that determines and separates the constitutive musical components of a gameworld’s soundscape into diegetic categories. These components are examined according to a tripartite model with a methodological basis in game music design principles, adopting a gameworld as a virtual ethnography fieldsite, and studies of game music in culture. This study takes Grand Theft Auto V as its focus in demonstrating an application of the proposed model. As an open-world game grossing more than any other form of media and featuring more musical content than any previous title of its series, it is shown that the proposed model does greater intellectual justice to the technical, aesthetic, and sociocultural sophistication of this artefact. The development and application of the proposed research model enables a shift of analytical approach in ludomusicology from an outside-in perspective to one of an inside-out nature. In addition to its application to other games, the offered model affords theorists and game designers a valuable analytical and conceptual tool to see the virtual music of a game as anchored in the actual world.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, Elder Conservatorium of Music, 201