|
|
|
-- Kitajima (1999)Kitajima, M. (1999). Successful technology must enable people to utilize existing cognitive skills. In Humane Interfaces: Questions of method and practice in Cognitive Technology (J.P. Marsh, B. Gorayska, and J.L. Mey, Eds.), 307-325. Elsevier.
Successful technology must enable people to utilize existing cognitive skills.Many of our activities are purposeful because we interact with our environment to achieve specific goals. What we actually do at a given moment, however, is determined not only by the goals and the environment but also by the knowledge utilized to comprehend the situation. To select what to do, we integrate these sources of information: goals, information from the environment, and knowledge relevant to the current situation. This is especially true when we must discover the actions necessary to accomplish goals in unfamiliar situations. In this chapter, text comprehension is regarded as one of the fundamental cognitive skills that could be applied to deal with these situations. Text comprehension is a highly automated collection of cognitive processes that make use of massive amounts of knowledge stored in long-term memory. Readers activate knowledge from long-term memory relevant to the current reading goal and integrate this knowledge with the current goal and representation of text. Conflict among activated knowledge elements may exist which necessitates an integration process to arbitrate this conflict within an appropriate time frame. The goals of reading are diverse - from collecting information from technical documentation and solving word problems to guessing who a criminal might be in a detective story - but people still apply a universal, and fundamental primary text comprehension skill to each comprehension activity. This chapter suggests yet another goal-directed activity where the text comprehension skill is employed -- interacting with graphical user interfaces (GUI). In this activity, people read task descriptions and interact with computer applications to achieve their tasks. Objects on the screen replace the text of ordinary reading. This chapter presents a comprehension-based model for these processes, called the LInked model of Comprehension-based Action planning and Instruction taking (LICAI). This model is based on the construction-integration theory, a well-established cognitive model of text comprehension, developed by Kintsch (1988). Text comprehension is probably one of the most fundamental skills people employ when they interact with their environment in goal-directed activities. However, when this skill is applied to different domains such as human-computer interaction, it might not work properly if the environment is not designed to facilitate its use. Therefore, I suggest that the LICAI model be used to identify cognitive problems that might occur when people engage in activities where they take instructions to perform tasks. A LICAI simulation is presented to demonstrate this point. This chapter begins by describing an example situation identifying two fundamental cognitive processes indispensable to generating comprehension-based, goal-directed interactive activities. One is the goal formation process, and the other is the goal-action mapping process. Experimental results supporting the goal formation process are then described. The next section describes the LICAI model, which assumes that these activities are controlled by the comprehension processes; it is followed by a simple simulation of taking realistic instructions to perform tasks. Results are summarized in light of factors to be considered in designing instructions and interface displays that conform to the comprehension processes.
Download
|