In-class group project presentation
From IEOR 170 Spring 2007
Required Readings
- The Human Information Processor by Card, Moran, Newell. The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction, Chap 2.2 Human Performance.
Discussions
Please post your critiques/commments on the required readings below. To do that, first login by using your user name and password, then click the "edit" tab on the top part of this page (between the "discussion" page and the "history" page), New to wikis? Read the Wiki editing guide. . Hint - Please put a whole line == ~~~~ == at the beginning of your submitted critique, so the wiki system will index, sign and date your submission automatically.
[edit] Andrew prasetyo 12:00, 21 March 2007 (PDT)
“Human Performance”
This article is trying to quantify human performance in terms of cognitive process, motor skill, and response time. The author also provides different measures and examples of cognitive process as the task is getting more and more complex. As the complexity of the task increases, the time required to process is also increasing. However, as the users get more familiar with the task (like a practice), the time to complete the task also decreases. It is interesting to note that, the time decreases rapidly for novice to moderate user, but it levels out for the moderate to experienced users. In addition, the article mentions the importance of Fitt’s law in determining the response time of human motor skill. Thus, I believe Fitt’s law is a determining factor in quantifying human performance as I see it used very broadly in psychology and human computer interactions. I also found this article is too full with mathematical details, which sometimes are hard to follow though they are significant for the article. Thus, I think it’s better if the author put more qualitative analyses to balance the quantitative ones.
[edit] Hong How Quek 12:42, 21 March 2007 (PDT)
I realized I read section 2.2 already for the previous reading when I didn't have to, but nonetheless, I really liked the examples the article highlighted to illustrate how we can quantify the way the Model Human Processor will react to particular activities if we know some of its parameters, such as its cycle time Tp. The article also elucidated some very interesting laws, such as the power law of practice which relates the time it takes to perform a trial with the number of trials, as well as the rationality principle. With a lot of these actions quantified and presented as mathematical formula, I can better understand how various factors affect things like human reaction and so on.
[edit] Patrick Liu
“Human Performance”
This article is very similar to the readings that were assigned on Monday. In fact the first half of it was part of the reading for last Monday. I honestly do not really understand this article. The rationality principle states that Goals + Task + Operations + Inputs + Knowledge + Process-limits Behavior. I do not believe that this is actually a principle. It seems to me that this article details natural behaviors as if they are some sort of formula that everyone can apprehend. I do not believe that everyone is capable of any one specific behavior as long as you follow the “principles” stated in this article. Human beings are not the same as computers. Computers are created by human beings and although our brains are similar and can be compared to a CPU it is not quite the same. I wish that the complexities of the human body could be solved through formulas and equations or inequalities, but the simple fact is that all brains are different and all humans work differently so to quantify or categorize all the humans on the planet seems incredulous. This article does not interest me at all, it is too long, has too many difficult to understand graphs, and goes against my ideologies.
[edit] Nicolas Suryono 13:35, 21 March 2007 (PDT)
“The Information Capacity of the Human Motor System in Controlling the Amplitude of Movement”
I think I already read this article in the previous reading. Basically, this article provides interesting information about the human motor system. Based on the experiment conducted, it seems that the performance increased when the speed and the amplitude decrease. This is make sense because when we put more effort to the specified task, the success rate will decrease as discussed in class before.
[edit] Michael Chen 3:30, 21 March 2007 (PDT)
“Human Performance”
This article provided quite a lot of laws regarding the speed of different human actions/perceptions as related to the model of humans as an integration of systems. The article itself, while trying to spice things up by providing examples, was a very dry article and was very hard to read through. It went through different types of human processes, starting with human perception, then human actions, with the reintroduction of Fitt's Law, and finally discussed the processes of human recall and other mental processes. Considering they were trying to model things in the human mind, I felt that the processes that they were measuring were the most appropiate and objective.
[edit] Umber Masood 16:35, 21 March 2007 (PDT)
Chapter 2.2 Human Performance
This reading was interesting. I liked the examples of the calculator and keyboard. I agree with one of the conclusions made in the reading that the first and last words in a list are remembered better than the words in the middle. I have found this to be true from past experience. The principles covered in the reading are very important to design.
[edit] Christine Shih 16:50, 21 March 2007 (PDT)
"The Model Human Processor"
This article talks about how the human mind is like a information processing system. It can be described as 1) a set of memories and processes together with 2) a set of principles. The human model processor can be divided up into 3 interacting subsystems:perpetual, motor, and cognitive. The perceptual system deals with sensors and buffer memories. The cognitive system receives symbolically coded info from the sensory images and stores in memory. The motor system carries out responses. The three subsystems work together. This article also explain principles such as the rationality principle and problem space principle.
[edit] Siu Pan Lam 09:42, 23 March 2007 (PDT)
"The Model Human Processor"
In this chapter, the author discusses some of the basic principles on human information processing system, which is a continuation of the previous reading that was assigned this week. Specifically, the author attempts to predict human gross behavior by analyzing the human mind as an information processing system. I find it interesting to read about working memory because it is a principle that was discussed previously in our lecture. That principle is called the Discrimination Principle, which states that it is more difficult to recall an item if there are other similar items in memory. In particular, the author states that interference in working memory can be divided into accoustic and semantic interference. Accoustic interference is interference from items that sound alike, while semantic interference is interference from items that have similar meaning. I agree with the author that items in our working memory are usually more sensitive to accoustic interference than semantic interference. In some sense, this is intuitive because we might not know the meanings of all the words as we do not have a complete vocabulary. Therefore, semantic interference might be less influential to our working memory in that sense.
[edit] Asmita Karandikar 20:44, 1 April 2007 (PDT)
"Human Performance"
This reading discussed many examples of how human performance can be quantified in the areas of perception, motor skills, simple decisions, learning and retrieval, and problem solving. Although I found the technical details to be confusing at times, especially towards the end of the reading, I thought that the examples and how they were solved were very interesting. It is apparent that these questions, such as the amount of time it takes for a simple reaction, might have been difficult to quantify, and therefore answer, without the results of the Model Human Processor. Another part of the reading that I thought was interesting and could relate to was the section discussing learning and retrieval, and how it is common for programmers to be unable to recall how to use an old system after learning a new one. I have experienced a similar problem when I’m using a computer program that has a different way of executing commands than another program that I also use. After I have used one of them for an extended period of time, it is difficult for me to adjust right away to the other one.
