The Auditory N-back Task: An Unstable Measurement Standard?
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Abstract
The Auditory N-back Task: An Unstable Measurement Standard? Introduction Standardized reference tasks must remain stable across repeated use to serve as reliable benchmarks. The auditory N-back (ISO 14198, 2019) is the primary cognitive reference task in driving research, used to calibrate workload estimates from the ISO Detection Response Task (DRT; ISO 17488, 2016), validate IVIS interactions, and induce cognitive load in automated driving studies. Yet the stability of N-back performance over
Summary
HFES conference proceedings report documenting N-back temporal instability. Two experiments: Exp 1 found 10 participants showing systematic N-back accuracy increases and cognitive demand decreases across 26+ on-road sessions. Exp 2 confirmed strategy-based improvement (not sequence-specific) by showing equivalent performance on novel digit sequences.
Key finding
N-back accuracy and DRT-based workload measures show systematic drift over repeated on-road sessions, attributable to general strategy acquisition (subvocal rehearsal, automatization) rather than sequence-specific learning.
Methodology
Exp 1: 10 participants, repeated measures across sessions. Exp 2: 20 participants, Old/New sequence comparison. On-road driving paradigm with DRT and NASA-TLX.
Sample size: Exp 1: N=10; Exp 2: N=20
Quality score: 5 / 5