Does Motion Intensity Impair Cognition in HCI? The Critical Role of Physical Motion-Visual Target Directional Congruency

TL;DR

The findings suggest that motion's impact on cognition is not monolithic, and that system design for mobile HCI can be informed by strategies that actively shape motion, such as minimizing lateral interference while maximizing directional congruency.

Abstract

Human-computer interaction (HCI) increasingly occurs in motion-rich environments. The ability to accurately and rapidly respond to directional visual cues is critical in these contexts. How whole-body motion and individual differences affect human perception and reaction to these directional cues is therefore a key, yet an underexplored question for HCI. This study used a 6-DOF motion platform to measure task performance on a visual direction judgment task. We analyzed performance by decomposing the complex motion into two distinct components: a task-irrelevant lateral interference component and a task-aligned directional congruency component. Results indicate that increased motion intensity lengthened reaction times. This effect was primarily driven by the lateral interference component, and this detrimental impact was disproportionately amplified for individuals with high motion sickness susceptibility. Conversely, directional congruency, where motion direction matched the visual cue, improved performance for all participants. These findings suggest that motion's impact on cognition is not monolithic, and that system design for mobile HCI can be informed by strategies that actively shape motion, such as minimizing lateral interference while maximizing directional congruency.

Figures (9)

• Figure 1: Experimental setup and procedure. (a--b) The 6-DOF motion platform and participant seating. (c--e) Hardware details showing IMU placement, safety harness, and actuators. (f) The visual direction judgment task interface. (g) Timeline of a single trial.
• Figure 2: Session timeline. Participants completed a pre-motion baseline block, three motion blocks labelled Motion1 to Motion3 with the order counterbalanced using a Latin-square design, and a post-motion block. Braking intervals separated phases. NASA--TLX was administered after each phase and the raw total score was used as RTLX for analysis, spanning RTLX_1 to RTLX_5. MSSQ was assessed once per participant to quantify motion-sickness susceptibility.
• Figure 3: Descriptive checks of platform motion and reaction time across the five motion conditions. (a) Root-mean-square (RMS) acceleration (g) on each IMU axis (AccX/AccY/AccZ) as a function of motion condition (Baseline, Low, Medium, High, Post-motion). (b) Trial-level reaction time (RT, ms) distributions across motion conditions for correct trials after standard RT filtering (gray points); boxplots summarize the trial-level distributions. Thin lines connect each participant’s condition-wise mean RT to show within-participant trajectories; colored overlays summarize group-level trends by MSSQ susceptibility (Low/Mean/High). (c) Hexbin density of the two motion components (Lateral Interference vs. Directional Congruency) for the three motion-present conditions (Low/Medium/High), with color indicating trial counts.
• Figure 4: Mean NASA-TLX (RTLX) total scores across motion conditions (Baseline, Low, Medium, High, Post-motion). Error bars denote 95% confidence intervals of participant means. Asterisks indicate significant post-hoc pairwise differences (* $p<.05$, ** $p<.01$).
• Figure 5: Post-hoc probe of the Motion Condition $\times$ MSSQ interaction for reaction time. Bars are model-estimated marginal means of back-transformed RT (ms) at different levels of MSSQ; error bars are 95% Wald confidence intervals. Asterisks denote Tukey-adjusted pairwise contrasts within each MSSQ level ($^{*}p<.05$, $^{**}p<.01$, $^{***}p<.001$).