Understanding underload

Mental workload has been shown to have an impact on performance, but it’s not just a heavy workload that can cause issues. Mental underload also has a negative effect on how people perform, although it can be harder to define. 

A recent webinar explored the issue, including what causes it, how to measure it and the mitigations that can be put in place to prevent it. CIEHF President Mark Young, Professor of Human Factors at the University of Southampton, presented the session for Eurocontrol. 

Highlighting the difficulty of defining mental underload, he said it isn’t about boredom, complacency, doing nothing or automatic processing. Instead, it’s typically caused by automation – and it’s not necessarily a problem when things are working well. But if the automation fails and there’s suddenly a sharp increase in demand on someone to step in, that’s when the negative effects of mental underload can be seen. 

Mark said: “You can be happily monitoring an automated system when something happens that goes beyond the design limits of that system and you have to step in and take over. You’re at a very low workload for a long time and then there’s s sudden spike and a need to increase activity. That’s when the underload effect can happen and we can see issues.” 

Watch the full webinar