Chapter 4: Cognitive Aspects (3720)

Chapter 4: Cognitive Aspects (3720)

1. The study of human cognition can help us understand the impact of multitasking on human behavior.

2. provide insights into other types of digital behaviors, such as decision-making, searching, and designing

3. 4.2 What Is Cognition?

   • Experiential cognition is a state of mind where people perceive, act, and react to events around them intuitively and effortlessly
     • driving a car
     • Fast thinking
       • instinctive, reflexive, and effortless, and it has no sense of voluntary control.
   • Reflective cognition involves mental effort, attention, judgment, and decision-making, which can lead to new ideas and creativity
     • designing, learning, and writing a report.
   • Cognition has also been described in terms of specific kinds of processes
     • • Attention
       • central to everyday life
       • process is easy or difficult depends on
         • (1) whether someone has clear goals
           • When someone is not sure exactly what they are looking for, they may browse through information
           • If someone knows exactly what they want to find out, they try to match this with the information that is available
         • (2) whether the information they need is salient in the environment.
           • The way information is displayed can also greatly influence how easy or difficult it is to comprehend
       • many people now multitask, frequently switching their attention among different tasks.
         • multitasking can be detrimental to performance
     • • Perception
       • how information is acquired from the environment via the five sense organs (vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch)
     • • Memory
       • recalling various kinds of knowledge
       • Personal Information Management
         • The design challenge here is deciding which is the best way of helping users organize their content so that it can be easily searched
         • Naming is the most common means of encoding content
         • adding metadata to documents
       • Memory Load and Passwords
         • how to manage security concerns
         • multifactor authentication (MFA)
         • Design Implications
     • • Learning
       • closely connected with memory
       • Incidental learning occurs without any intention to learn
       • intentional learning is goal-directed with the goal of being able to remember it.
       • people find it hard to learn by reading a set of instructions in a manual. Instead, they much prefer to learn through doing.
     • • Reading, speaking, and listening
       • three forms of language processing
       • One similarity is that the meaning of sentences or phrases is the same regardless of the mode
       • differences between the three modes
         • Written language is permanent while listening is transient.
         • Reading can be quicker than speaking or listening
         • Listening requires less cognitive effort than reading or speaking
         • Listening requires less cognitive effort than reading or speaking
       • applications have been developed either to capitalize on people’s reading, writing, and listening skills
         • interactive books and apps
         • Speech-recognition systems
         • Speech-output systems
         • Natural-language interfaces
         • Tactile interfaces that allow people who are visually impaired to read graphs
     • • Problem-solving, planning, reasoning, and decision-making
       • involving reflective cognition.
       • making a choice involves weighing up the costs and benefits of different courses of action
       • an effective design strategy is to make key information about a product highly salient
         • provide just enough information, and in the right form, to facilitate good choices.
     • many of these cognitive processes are interdependent

4. 4.3 Cognitive Frameworks

   • 4.3.1 Mental Models
     • Mental models are used by people when needing to reason
     • internal constructions of some aspect of the external world that are manipulated, enabling predictions and inferences to be made
     • Using incorrect mental models to guide behavior is surprisingly common.
     • How can user experience (UX) designers help people to develop better mental models?
       • • Clear and easy-to-follow instructions
       • • Appropriate online help, tutorials, and context-sensitive guidance
       • • Background information that can be accessed
       • • Affordances of what actions an interface allows
   • 4.3.2 Gulfs of Execution and Evaluation
     • describe the gaps that exist between the user and the interface
     • gulf of execution
       • The distance from the user to the physical system
       • This can be achieved on the one hand, by designing usable interfaces that match the psychological characteristics of the user
     • gulf of evaluation
       • the distance from the physical system to the user
       • This can be achieved on the other hand, by the user learning to create goals, plans, and action sequences that fit with how the interface works.
     • when bridging the gap, reduce the cognitive effort required to perform a task
   • 4.3.3. Information Processing
     • The information processing model provides a basis from which to make predictions about human performance.
     • the mind is an information processor
     • based on modeling mental activities that happen exclusively inside the head

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