Human Computer Interaction

Chapter 2: Human in HCI

Compiled by: Genet G.

 Contents

•Introduction
•Information I/O
• Visual, Auditory, Haptic
•Information stored in memory
• sensory, short-term, long-term
•Information processed and applied
• reasoning, problem solving, skill, error
•Emotion influences human capabilities
•Each person is different
 Introduction
• Computer systems are designed to assist the human
• So, lets look at areas of human psychology coming under the
general banner of cognitive psychology
• This helps to
• Understand capabilities and limitations of human beings
• Know things that we will find easy, difficult or, even, impossible,
• Only aspects of cognitive psychology which have a
bearing/manner on the use of computer systems are discussed
• how humans perceive the world around them
• how they store and process information and solve problems and
• how they physically manipulate objects
 Introduction..
• So, to understand this well simplified model of human
beings as information processing unit is vital.
Model Human Processor:
• It is a simplified view of the human processing involved
in interacting with computer systems.
• Three subsystems
• the perceptual system - handling sensory stimulus
from the outside world
• the motor system - controls actions
• the cognitive system - provides the processing
needed to connect the two
 Input–output channels
• In an interaction with a computer:
• a user
• receives information that is output by the computer, and
• responds by providing input to the computer
• That is the user’s output becomes the computer’s input and vice
versa.
• Input in the human occurs mainly through the senses
• Sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell
• Output in the human occurs mainly through the motor control of the effectors
• limbs, fingers, eyes, head and vocal system(voices)
 Vision - Physical reception
• Two stages in vision
• Physical reception of stimulus
• Processing and interpretation of stimulus
 The Eye
• Mechanism for receiving light and transforming it into electrical energy
• light reflects from objects
• images are focused upside-down on retina
• Retina contains two photoreceptor:
• Rods for low light vision and cones for colour vision
• Ganglion nerve cells used for early detection of pattern and movement
 Vision - Interpreting the signal
• Size and depth
• Visual angle indicates how much of view object occupies - relates to
size and distance from eye
• Visual acuity is ability to perceive fine detail (but limited)
• Familiar objects perceived as constant size - in spite of changes in
visual angle when far away - law of size constancy (Next figure)
• Brightness
• Subjective to reaction levels of light
• Affected by luminance of object
• Measured by just noticeable difference
• Visual acuity increases with luminance as does flicker
 Vision - Interpreting the signal….
• Colour
• made up of hue (wave length), intensity(brightness), Saturation (whiteness)
• Cones sensitive to colour wavelengths
• Around 8% of males and 1% of females suffer from color blindness

•The visual system compensates for

• Movement
• Changes in luminance

• Context is used to resolve ambiguity

 Vision - Interpreting the signal….
• Optical illusions sometimes occur due to over compensation

The Quick Brown

Fox Jumps Over the

lazy dog.

the Ponzo illusion proofreading illusion

the Muller Lyer illusion
 Vision - Interpreting the signal….
• Reading
• Several stages:
• visual pattern perceived
• decoded using internal representation of language
• interpreted using knowledge of syntax, semantics,
pragmatics
• Reading involves saccades (jerky/ irregular movements of
eyes) and fixations as well as regressions
• Perception occurs during fixations
• Word shape is important to recognition
• Negative contrast improves reading from computer screen
 Hearing
• Provides information about environment: distances, directions,
objects etc.
• Physical apparatus
• Outer ear –protects inner and amplifies sound
• middle ear –transmits sound waves as vibrations to inner ear
• inner ear –chemical transmitters are released and cause impulses in auditory nerve
• Sound
• Pitch – sound frequency
• loudness – amplitude
• Timbre – type or quality
 Hearing…
• Humans can hear frequencies from 20Hz to 15kHz
• less accurate distinguishing high frequencies than low
• Auditory system filters sounds
• can attend to sounds over background noise -example, the cocktail party phenomenon.

• Though sound can convey a remarkable amount of

information, it is rarely used to in interface design, usually
being confined to warning sounds and notifications.
• Sound could be used more extensively in interface design, to
convey information about the system state
• the ear can differentiate quite subtle sound changes and can recognize
familiar sounds without concentrating attention on the sound source.
 Touch
• Provides important feedback about environment
• May be key sense for someone who is visually impaired
• Not localized
• Stimulus received via receptors in the skin
• Thermoreceptors – heat and cold
• Nociceptors – intense pressure, heat and pain
• Mechanoreceptors – pressure (instant or continuous ) - HCI

• Some areas more sensitive than others e.g. fingers.

• Another haptic perception is Kinethesis
• awareness of body position and limbs due to receptors in the joints
 Human Memory
•There are three types of memory function:

•Sensory memory
• Buffers for stimuli received through senses
• iconic memory - visual stimuli(visualization or visible)
• echoic memory - aural stimuli(listenable)
• haptic memory - tactile stimuli(touchable)
• Continuously overwritten
 Short-term Memory
• Scratch-pad for temporary recall
• rapid access ~ 70ms
• rapid decay ~ 200ms
• limited capacity - 7± 2 chunks

• Examples
212348278493202
Patterns can be
useful as aids
0121 414 2626
to memory
HEC ATR ANU PTH ETR EET
 Long-term memory (LTM)
• Repository for all our knowledge
• slow access ~ 1/10 second
• slow decay, if any
• huge or unlimited capacity
• Two types of long-term memory structure : Episodic &
Semantic Memory Structures
• Episodic Memory Structure - serial memory of events and
experiences
• represents relationships between bits of information
• supports inference i.e. we can reconstruct the actual events from this memory
• Example - memories of what you ate for breakfast, your first day of college or graduation date of
your first degree
 Long-term memory …
• Semantic Memory Structures
• Structured memory of facts, concepts, and skills
• Semantic LTM derived from episodic LTM
• One way of representing this type of memory is using Semantic network – Model
• Items are associated
to each other in
classes, and may
inherit attributes
from parent classes.
 Long-term memory …
• Three main activities related to long-term memory: Storage or
remembering of information, forgetting and information
retrieval

• Storage of information
• Rehearsal - information moves from STM to LTM
• Total time hypothesis - amount retained proportional to rehearsal time
• Distribution of practice effect - optimized by spreading learning over time
• Structure, meaning and familiarity - information easier to remember
 Long-term memory …
•Forgetting – what causes us lose information?
• Two main theories of forgetting: decay and interference
• Decay - If information is not retrieved and rehearsed, it will
eventually be lost.
• Interference - If we acquire new information it causes the loss of
old information
• new information replaces old: retroactive interference
• old may interfere with new: proactive inhibition
• Others
• Failure to store – e.g. identify the correct Ethiopian 100 Birr
notes out of a group of forged 100 Birr notes
• Motivated Forgetting - actively work to forget memories
 Long-term memory …
• Retrieval
• Do we really forget? Debatable
• Two types of information retrieval: recall & Recognition
• Recall
• information reproduced from memory
• can be assisted by cues /reminds, e.g. categories, imagery

• Recognition
• information gives knowledge that it has been seen before
• less complex than recall
• information is the cue/remind
 Reasoning
• Reasoning is the process by which we use the knowledge to draw
conclusions or infer something new about the domain of interest
• There are a number of different types of reasoning

• Deductive Reasoning
• Deduction: derive logically necessary conclusion from given premises.
e.g. If it is Friday then she will go to work
It is Friday
Therefore she will go to work.
• Logical conclusion not necessarily correspond to our notion of truth.
e.g. If it is raining then the ground is dry
It is raining
Therefore the ground is dry conflicts with our knowledge
of what is true in the world
 Reasoning …
• Deductive Reasoning…
• When truth and logical validity clash …
e.g. Some people are babies
Some babies cry
• many people will infer that ‘Some people cry’. Which is wrong.
• we are not told that all babies are people. It is therefore logically possible
that the babies who cry are those who are not people.
• People bring world knowledge to bear
• Inductive Reasoning
• Induction - generalize from cases seen to cases unseen
e.g. all elephants we have seen have trunks,
therefore all elephants have trunks. (positive Evidence)
 Reasoning …
• Inductive Reasoning…
• Unreliable:
• can only prove false not true … but useful!
• Humans not good at using negative evidence – though we saw an
elephant without a trunk, we would be unlikely to move from our
position that ‘All elephants have trunks’. e.g. Wason's cards.

7 E 4 K
If a card has a vowel on one side it has an even number on the other

Is this true? How many cards do you need to turn over to find out? ….
and which cards?
 Reasoning …
• Abductive reasoning
• reasoning from event to cause
e.g. Sam drives fast when drunk.
If I see Sam driving fast, assume drunk.
• Unreliable:
• can lead to false explanations –
• E.g. The reason for driving fast may because “she is called to an
emergency”

• This can lead to problems in using interactive systems

• If an event always follows an action, the user will infer that the
event is caused by the action unless evidence to the contrary is
made available.
 Problem solving
• Process of finding solution to unfamiliar task using knowledge we
have.
• Several theories - different views on how people solve problems

• Gestalt
• problem solving both productive and reproductive
• productive draws on insight/understanding and restructuring of
problem
• attractive but not enough evidence to explain ‘insight’ etc.
• move away from behaviourism and led towards information
processing theories
• Reproductive
• problem solving draws on previous experience
 Problem solving…
•Problem space theory - Proposed by Newell and Simon
• Problem space comprises problem states
• Problem has an initial state and a goal state and people use the operators
to move from the former to the latter
• Problem solving involves generating states using legal operators
• Usually problem space is huge; hence heuristics may be employed to
select operators, e.g. means-ends analysis
• Analogy
• analogical mapping
• novel problems in new domain?
• use knowledge of similar problem from similar domain
• analogical mapping difficult if domains are semantically different
 Problem solving…
• Skill acquisition
• Skilled activity characterized by chunking
• lot of information is chunked to optimize STM
• conceptual rather than superficial grouping of problems
• information is structured more effectively
• Example Chess players
• Chess masters remember board configurations and good moves
associated with them
• It seems therefore that expert players ‘chunk’ the board
configuration in order to hold it in short-term memory
 Problem solving…
• Errors and mental models
Why do we make mistakes?
• Changes in the context of skilled behavior
• If a pattern of behavior has become automatic and we change some
aspect of it, the more familiar pattern may break through and cause
an error.
• E.g. intend to stop at the shop on the way home
• Mental models.
• errors due to an incorrect understanding, or model, of a situation or
system
• E.g. does not have a full understanding of the working of the whole system
• E.g. Lift button
 Emotion
• Affect influences how we respond to situations
• positive  creative problem solving
• negative  narrow thinking
“Negative affect/touch can make it harder to do even easy tasks; positive
affect can make it easier to do difficult tasks” (Donald Norman)
• Emotion clearly involves both cognitive and physical responses to
stimuli
• The biological response to physical stimuli is called affect
• Implications for interface design
• stress will increase the difficulty of problem solving
• relaxed users will be more forgiving of shortcomings in design
• aesthetically pleasing and rewarding interfaces will increase positive affect
 Individual differences
• Everyone has no similar capabilities and limitations, therefore we
can't make generalizations
• long term differences
– sex, physical and intellectual abilities
• short term differences
– effect of stress or fatigue
• Still others change through time
– age

Ask yourself:
will design decision exclude section of user population?
 Psychology and the Design of
Interactive System
• Some direct applications
• recognition is easier than recall  allow users to select
commands from a set rather than input them directly
• However, correct application generally requires understanding of
context in psychology, and an understanding of particular
experimental conditions
• A lot of knowledge has been distilled in
• guidelines
• cognitive models
• experimental and analytic evaluation techniques