Information systems and task demand: an exploratory pupillometry study of computerized decision making

Information systems (IS) play an important role in successful execution of organizational decisions, and the ensuing tasks that rely on those decisions. Because decision making models show that cognitive load has a significant impact on how people use information systems, objective measurement of cognitive load becomes both relevant and important in IS research. In this paper, we manipulate task demand during a decision making task in four different ways. We then investigate how increasing task demand affects a user’s pupil data during interaction with a computerized decision aid. Our results suggest that pupillometry has the potential to serve as a reliable, objective, continuous and unobtrusive measure of task demand and that the adaptive decision making theory may serve as a suitable framework for studying user pupillary responses in the IS domain.