Everyday Appropriations of Information Technology: A Study of Creative Uses of Digital Cameras
Repurposive appropriation is a creative everyday act in which a user invents a novel use for information technology (IT) and adopts it. This study is the first to address its prevalence and predictability in the consumer IT context. In all, 2,379 respondents filled in an online questionnaire on creative uses of digital cameras, such as using them as scanners, periscopes, and storage media. The data reveal that such creative uses are adopted by about half of the users, on average, across different demographic backgrounds. Discovery of a creative use on one's own is slightly more common than is learning it from others. Most users discover the creative uses either completely on their own or wh…
Surviving task interruptions: Investigating the implications of long-term working memory theory
Typically, we have several tasks at hand, some of which are in interrupted state while others are being carried out. Most of the time, such interruptions are not disruptive to task performance. Based on the theory of Long-Term Working Memory (LTWM; Ericsson, K.A., Kintsch, W., 1995. Long-term working memory. Psychological Review, 102, 211-245), we posit that unless there are enough mental skills and resources to encode task representations to retrieval structures in long-term memory, the resulting memory traces will not enable reinstating the information, which can lead to memory losses. However, once encoded to LTWM, they are virtually safeguarded. Implications of the theory were tested in…
Computational Rationality as a Theory of Interaction
Funding Information: This work was funded by the Finnish Center for AI and Academy of Finland (“BAD” and “Human Automata”). We thank our reviewers, Xiuli Chen, Joerg Mueller, Christian Guckelsberger, Sebastiaan de Peuter, Samuel Kaski, Pierre-Alexandre Murena, Antti Keuru-lainen, Suyog Chandramouli, and Roderick Murray-Smith for their comments. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 ACM. How do people interact with computers? This fundamental question was asked by Card, Moran, and Newell in 1983 with a proposition to frame it as a question about human cognition - in other words, as a matter of how information is processed in the mind. Recently, the question has been reframed as one of adaptation: how …
Long-term working memory and interrupting messages in human – computer interaction
The extent to which memory for information content is reliable, trustworthy, and accurate is crucial in the information age. Being forced to divert attention to interrupting messages is common, however, and can cause memory loss. The memory effects of interrupting messages were investigated in three experiments. In Experiment 1, attending to an interrupting message decreased memory accuracy. Experiment 2, where four interrupting messages were used, replicated this result. In Experiment 3, an interrupting message was shown to be most disturbing when it was semantically very close to the main message. Drawing from a theory of long-term working memory it is argued that interrupting messages ca…
User Psychology: Re-assessing the Boundaries of a Discipline
Currently, efforts of psychologists to improve interactive technology have fragmented and the systemization of scientific knowledge stalled. There is no home for integrative psychological research on computer use. In this programmatic paper, we reassess three meta-scientific issues defining this discipline. As the first step, we pro- pose to extend the subject of study from the analysis of human mind in the interaction to the broader view of human as an intentional user of interactive technology. Hence, the discipline is most aptly called user psychology. Secondly, problem-solving epistemology is advocated as an alternative to the notion from natural sciences that progress in science involv…
T9+HUD: Physical Keypad and HUD can Improve Driving Performance while Typing and Driving
We introduce T9+HUD, a text entry method designed to decrease visual distraction while driving and typing. T9+HUD combines a physical 3x4 keypad on the steering wheel with a head-up-display (HUD) for projecting output on the windshield. Previous work suggests this may be a visually less demanding way to type while driving than the popular case which requires shifts of visual attention away from the road. We present a prototype design and report first results from a controlled evaluation in a driving simulator. While driving, the T9+HUD text entry rate was equal compared to a dashboard-mounted touchscreen device, but it reduced lane deviations by 70%. Furthermore, there was no significant di…
Multitasking in Driving as Optimal Adaptation Under Uncertainty
Objective The objective was to better understand how people adapt multitasking behavior when circumstances in driving change and how safe versus unsafe behaviors emerge. Background Multitasking strategies in driving adapt to changes in the task environment, but the cognitive mechanisms of this adaptation are not well known. Missing is a unifying account to explain the joint contribution of task constraints, goals, cognitive capabilities, and beliefs about the driving environment. Method We model the driver’s decision to deploy visual attention as a stochastic sequential decision-making problem and propose hierarchical reinforcement learning as a computationally tractable solution to it. The…