taskrelevant

Taskrelevant is an adjective describing information, cues, or features that are pertinent to a specific task and necessary for achieving its goals. It stands in contrast to task-irrelevant information, which does not contribute to task performance.

In cognitive psychology and related fields, task relevance guides attention and working memory. Individuals tend to prioritize task-relevant features while filtering out distractors. The relevance of certain cues can be dynamic, varying with goals, context, and expertise.

In human-computer interaction and data science, foregrounding task-relevant cues helps reduce cognitive load and errors. In machine learning, task-relevant features are those that contribute to predicting the target variable; feature selection aims to identify and retain these features while discarding irrelevant ones.

Assessing task relevance involves experimental measures such as reaction times and error rates, as well as user feedback and performance outcomes. Relevance is context-dependent; a cue may be task-relevant in one setting and not in another, and requests for information can shift with changing objectives, environments, or safety considerations.

Example: a surgeon monitoring vital signs is focusing on task-relevant information, while ambient room lighting is generally not task-relevant in that moment. In analytics, demographic factors like age or income may be task-relevant for a model predicting credit risk, whereas other non-informative features may be considered irrelevant. See also relevance, attention, feature selection, and task switching.