Cognitive Modeling

Understanding Human Cognition/ Cognitive

Processes
 What is Cognition?
• Cognition
There are multiple things that are involved in a cognition process.
Different kinds of cognition
– When cognition occurs, there should be thinking, remembering,
learning, daydreaming,
decision making, seeing, reading, writing and talking
– Including all these, our thoughts or understanding develops about
anything and this is cognition.

cognition is what we learn, remember

– from the environment and
 What is Cognition
• Cognition is "the mental action or process of
acquiring knowledge understanding through
thought, and experience, and the senses".
• When we touch, smell or observe someone
then our knowledge increases automatically
and we think why this happens and how, a
sense of curiosity develops? Then our
perception develops after observing different
things.
 What is Cognition?

• Norman (1993) gives TWO GENERAL'S MODES

OF COGNITION:
– experiential cognition
– reflective cognition
Experiential Cognition(visual perspective, learn easily)
• Is the state of mind in which we perceive, act, and
react to an event around us.
• First, we observe, then applying a technique or
action and a reaction occurs or conclusion creates
there is a complete experiment we have performed.
• Driving a car(first learn driving, learn rules where to
stop and after driving feel happiness)
• reading a book, playing a video game
 REFLECTIVE Cognition:
• It is a Slow thinking process which involve mental
efforts in which, we have to focus on single entity
• Attention
• Decision making(why, what, how, when)
• Judgement(is decision correct or not, we achieve 90%
accuracy or not )
Compare with previous research that Leads to new
ideas and creativity
Example:
Designing, learning and writing a book.
 Cognitive Models
• What are cognitive models?
Cognitive models are models of human cognition
• How are cognitive models developed?
Psychologists and cognitive scientists study how
humans perceive, think, act in laboratory tests
• What do cognitive models tell us?
Cognitive models tell us about human cognitive
strengths and weaknesses, i.e. what human are
good and bad at.
 Benefits of Cognitive Modeling
Cognitive models can help interaction designers in a
number of ways:
• Inform design decisions
Help designers produce better designs
• Extend human capabilities
Help designers produce systems that build on what
humans are already good at
• Compensate for human weaknesses
Help designers produce systems that can help people
do things that that find difficult
 Cognitive Processes
• Cognition has also been described in terms of specific
kinds of processes including
– Attention(focus on single entity, thing)
– perception and recognition
– Memory
– Learning
– reading, speaking, and listening
– problem solving, planning, reasoning, decision making

By including all these, we create our cognition.

 Attention

• Attention - process of selecting things to

concentrate on, at a point in time, from the range
of possibilities available
• Involves our auditory(audio, pitch, intensity)
and/or visual(color, location, animation,
graphics) senses. i.e. Road signs
– visual attention is like a spotlight directed towards
targets
Attention allows us to focus on relevant information when
 We have clear goals
 Information is silent (prominent) in environment
 Attention
• We are more likely to notice something if
–  We are attending to it
–  It is salient (bright, loud, or otherwise noticeable)
― automatic well-learnt processes need not much
attention
• Information at the interface should be
structured to capture users’ attention
– e.g. use perceptual boundaries (windows), color,
reverse video, sound and flashing lights
Activity: Find the price of a double room at the Holiday Inn
in Bradley
Activity: Find the price for a double room at the Quality
Inn in Columbia
 Activity
• Tullis (1987) found that the two screens produced
quite different results
– 1st screen - took an average of 5.5 seconds to search
– 2nd screen - took 3.2 seconds to search
• Why, since both displays have the same density of
information?
• Spacing
– In the 1st screen the information is bunched up together,
making it hard to search
– In the 2nd screen the characters are grouped into vertical
categories of information making it easier
Too many icons
Over use of graphics
Over use of graphics
Clean, simple design
Clean, simple designs
 Design Implications for Attention
• Make information salient when it’s needs
– Use techniques like animation, color, decoration, ordering,
sequencing and layout to draw attention
• Avoid cluttering up an interface
— Interfaces that are plain are much easier to use because it
is easier for users to find important information

— Group features together

— Show icons for group headings and commonly used functions
— Allow users to customize
 Perception

• Getting information or extracting from the

environment.
– Refers that how information is acquired with the help of
different sensory organs (eyes, ears, fingers) and
transformed into experience (sound, taste, objects).
i.e. Biryani pre-defined taste before tasting
– Design representations that are readily
perceivable, e.g.
– Text should be readable
– Icons should be easy to distinguish and read
– Information should be organized and easy to remember
 Perception
• A general design principle is that information needs
to be represented in an appropriate form to facilitate
the perception and recognition of its underlying
meaning.
Is color contrast good? Find Italian
Are borders and white space better? Find French
 Activity
• Weller (2004) found people took less time to
locate items for information that was grouped
– using a border (2nd screen) compared
with using color contrast (1st screen)
• Some argue that too much white space on
web pages is detrimental to search
– Makes it hard to find information
• Do you agree?
Which is easiest to read and why?
 Design Implications(suggestions) of
Perception
• Information needs to be represented in ways that are
easily recognized
– The meaning of icons and symbols should be obvious
– Sounds should be easily distinguished from each other
– Text should be easily distinguished from its background
– Speech should be easily distinguished and understood
 Memory
• To act properly, we recall or remind different types of
information
• It enables to us to do many things
– It allows to remember someone face
– Some one name
– First, we encode, Filtering then retrieves the information (where and
when)
 Processing in memory
• Encoding is first stage of memory
– determines which information is attended to in the
environment and how it is interpreted
• The more attention paid to something…
• The more it is processed in terms of thinking about it and
comparing it with other knowledge…
• The more likely it is to be remembered
– e.g. when learning about HCI, it is much better to reflect upon it,
carry out exercises, have discussions with others about it, and write
notes than just passively read a book, listen to a lecture or watch a
video about it
 Context is important
• Context affects the extent to which information can
be subsequently retrieved
• Sometimes it can be difficult for people to recall
information that was encoded in a different context:
– You are on a train and someone comes up to you and says
hello. You don’t recognize him for a few moments but then
realize it is one of your neighbors. You are only used to
seeing your neighbor in the hallway of your apartment
block and seeing him out of context makes him difficult to
recognize initially”
 Activity

• Try to remember the dates of your grandparents’ birthday

• Try to remember the cover of the last two DVDs you bought or
rented
• Which was easiest? Why?
• People are very good at remembering visual cues about things
–e.g. the color of items, the location of objects and marks
on an object
• They find it more difficult to learn and remember arbitrary
material
–e.g. birthdays and phone numbers
 Recognition versus recall

• Command-based interfaces require users to

recall from memory a name from a possible set
of 100s
• GUIs provide visually-based options that users
need only browse through until they recognize
one
• Web browsers, MP3 players, etc., provide lists
of visited URLs, song titles etc., that support
recognition memory
 The problem with the classic ‘7+-2’

• George Miller’s (1956) theory of how much

information people can remember
• People’s immediate memory capacity is very
limited
• Many designers think this is useful finding for
interaction design
• But…
 What some designers get up to…

• Present only 7 options on a menu

• Display only 7 icons on a tool bar
• Have no more than 7 bullets in a list
• Place only 7 items on a pull down menu
• Place only 7 tabs on the top of a website page

– But this is wrong? Why?

 Why?

• Inappropriate application of the theory

• People can scan lists of bullets, tabs, menu
items for the one they want
• They don’t have to recall them from memory
having only briefly heard or seen them
• Sometimes a small number of items is good
• But depends on task and available screen estate
 Personal information management

• Personal information management is a growing

problem for many users
– vast numbers of documents, images, music files,
video clips, emails, attachments, bookmarks, etc.,
– where and how to save them all, then remembering
what they were called and where to find them again
– but can be difficult to remember, especially when
have 1000s and 1000s
– How might such a process be facilitated taking into
account people’s memory abilities?
 Personal information management

• Memory involves 2 processes

– recall-directed and recognition-based scanning
• File management systems should be designed
to optimize both kinds of memory processes
– e.g. Search box and history list
• Help users encode files in richer ways
– Provide them with ways of saving files using color,
flagging, image, flexible text, time stamping, etc
 Design Implications for Memory
• Don’t overload users’ memories with complicated
procedures for carrying out tasks
– Keep procedures short and make them consistent
• Design interfaces that promote recognition rather
than recall
– Menus, icons, feedback, etc.
• Provide users with various ways of encoding
information to help them remember
– e.g. categories, labels, color, flagging, time stamping
 Learning

• How to learn to use a computer-based application

• Using a computer-based application to understand a
given topic
• People find it hard to learn by following instructions
in a manual
– prefer to learn by doing
 Design Implications for Learning
• Design interfaces to encourage exploration
– Allow users to explore possibilities and undo
mistakes
• Design interfaces that constrain and guide
– Guide users to help them select appropriate
actions
 Reading, Speaking and Listening
• Language can be used to convey meaning in different
ways that have different qualities
– Writing is permanent, listening is transient
– Reading is quicker, listening is easier
– Written is grammatical, listening is ungrammatical
• People differ in their preference and ability to use
language
– Some prefer listening to reading and speaking to writing
– Some have difficulty recognizing written language
– Some have difficulty hearing spoken language
 Design Implications for Reading, Speaking
and Listening

• Keep spoken menus to a minimum

– It’s hard to remember more than a few spoken
options
• Allow text to be resized
– Users should be able to resize text to make it
easier for them to read
Problem-Solving, Planning, Reasoning

• The degree of reflective cognition depends

on a person’s experience and skill
– Novices tend to act through trial-and-error, exploring and
experimenting with ways of doing things
• They are likely to be slow, make mistakes and generally be
inefficient
• Experts tend to reflect more upon what they want to
achieve and then select optimal strategies
– They are likely to be able to think ahead and consider
the consequences of actions
 Design Implications of Reasoning

• Provide additional information to users who

wish to better understand more about the
activities they are engaged in
– As users gain experience with a product they may
want more information about their activities to
support more reflective cognition