CSE 4849

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)

Lecture 2: The Human

Summer 2022
Dr. Hasan Mahmud | hasan@iut-dhaka.edu
 The Human
• Human Cognition and Information Processing
• Information i/o …
– Visual, Auditory, Touch, Taste, Smell
• Information stored in memory
– Sensory, Short-term, Long-term
• Information processed and applied
– Reasoning, problem solving, skill, error
• Emotion influences human capabilities
• Each person is different

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 Cognitive psychology
• It is the study of human perception, attention,
memory and knowledge, and the ways in which
these have been applied in the design of computer
interfaces.
• Cognitive psychology relates the use of computer
systems:
– How humans perceive the world around them
– How they store and process information to solve
problems
– How they physically manipulate objects
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 Cognition
• Cognition is the process by which the human gain knowledge.
• The processes which contribute to cognition include:
– Attention
– Perception and recognition
– Memory
– Learning
– Reading, speaking, and listening
– Problem-solving, planning, reasoning, decision making
• A key aim of HCI is to understand how humans interact with
computers, and to represent how knowledge is passed
between the two.

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 Cognitive Architecture
• Cognitive architectures are designed to simulate human
intelligence in a humanlike way (Newell, 1990).
– For example, the chess program that defeated Kasparov, Deep Blue,
would not qualify as a cognitive architecture because it does not solve
the problem (chess) in a humanlike way.
• Young (Gray, Young, & Kirschenbaum, 1997; Ritter & Young,
2001) defined a cognitive architecture as an embodiment of
“a scientific hypothesis about those aspects of human
cognition that are relatively constant over time and relatively
independent of task.”

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Cognitive Architecture: Characteristics
• Cognitive architecture is integrative—that is, architectures
include mechanisms to support attention, memory, problem
solving, decision making, learning, and so forth.
• Cognitive architecture has to be supplied with knowledge
needed to perform a particular task.
Cognitive architecture + Related set of knowledge = Computation Cognitive Model

• Cognitive computational model can be considered as

quantitative model as they can produce execution times, error
rates, and even learning curves.

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 Model Human Processor (MHP)
• MHP describes the cognitive process that people go
through between perception and action.
• It is important to the study of HCI because cognitive
processing can have a significant effect on
performance, including task completion time, number
of errors, and ease of use.
• This model is based on the simplified view of the
human processing involved in interacting with
computer systems. (Card, Moran, and Newell, 1983).

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 Model Human Processor (MHP)…
• The model human processor consists of three interacting systems. Each has
its own memory and processor.
• Perceptual processor: Handles sensory stimulus from the outside world
– outputs into audio storage
– outputs into visual storage
• Cognitive processor: Provides the processing needed to connect Perceptual
and Motor systems
– Outputs into working memory
– has access to:
• working memory
• long term memory
• Motor processor: Controls actions
– carries out actions
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Model Human Processor (MHP)

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 Why is the MHP Useful?
• Use empirical studies to validate the model
– Validates our understanding of the three systems
• Use model to:
– Predict and compare usability of different interface designs
• Task performance, learnability, and error rates
• No users or functional prototype required!
– Develop guidelines for interface design
• Color, spatial layout, recall, response rates, etc.
• To be useful, a model must:
– Be easy to use and learn
– Produce reasonably accurate results

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Model Human Processor (MHP)

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• Assume perceptual cycle time = 100ms

• If 20 clicks per second are played for 5 seconds, about how many clicks
could a person hear?

• If 30 clicks per second are played for 5 seconds, about how many clicks
could a person hear?

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 Human Information Processing
• Human performance P, is the function of different
information processing stages S,
P = f(S)
• The idea of human information processing is that
information enters and exits the human mind
through a series of ordered stages (Lindsay &
Norman, 1977),

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 Tutorial
• Suppose you want to design a file searching
interface for smart phones and optimize two
types memory processes, one is memory recall
and other one is memory recognition.
• Your task is to design a file searching output
interface keeping in mind the following concepts:
– Attention and sliced attention
– Memory / cognitive load
– Response time
– Cognitive computation model
– Human information processing steps

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 Tutorial
• Suppose you want to design an information based
medical health care app. The target users are mostly
rural people from remote area. Your app will take
query in natural text writing/a set of selection menus/
query dialogue and give relevant information to the
question. The challenge is:
– How to display those health help information to those
users in terms of human cognition with an aim to minimize
cognitive load
– If you introduce password protection how they will
remember or memorize the password.
– How to feel them ease and comfortable while using the
app.

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 GOMS Model
• According to the GOMS model, cognitive structure consists of four components:
– (1) a set of goals,
– (2) a set of operators,
– (3) a set of methods for achieving the goals, and
– (4) a set of selection rules for choosing among competing methods. (IF THEN rules)
• Example: Deleting a sentence (Goal)

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 GOMS
• Goals are
– what a user tries to accomplish, and can be defined at different levels of
abstraction.
– They can also be broken down into sub-goals, thus constructing a hierarchy.
• Operators are
– Elementary actions which are used to accomplish a goal. They can be perceptual
cognitive or motor.
– They are atomic and cannot be further decomposed. Different GOMS variants
have different operators.
– Typically they are context free, that is, their execution time does not depend on
the current state of the system.
• Methods are
– Procedural algorithms for accomplishing a goal (or subgoal). Several methods
may accomplish the same goal.
• Finally, selection rules are
– used to select the appropriate method for achieving a specific goal. They
represent the user’s knowledge of how to accomplish the task.
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 Input-Output Channels
• Information i/o …
– Vision
– Hearing
– Touch

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 Vision
• Human vision is a highly complex activity with
a range of physical and perceptual limitations,
yet it is the primary source of information for
the average person.
• Visual perception can be divided in to two
stages:
– Physical reception of stimulus from outside world
– Processing and interpretation of stimulus

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 The Eye - physical reception
• The eye is a mechanism for receiving light and
transforming it into electrical energy
– Light reflects from objects in the world and their images
are focused upside-down on the back of the eye.
– The receptors in the eye transform it into electrical signals
which are passed to the brain.

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 The Eye - physical reception...
• The eye has a number
of important components:

– The cornea and lens at the

front of the eye focus the light
into a sharp image on the
back of the eye, the retina.

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 The Eye - physical reception...
• The retina is light sensitive and
contains two types of photoreceptor:
rods and cones.
• Rods are high sensitive to light and
therefore allow us to see under a low
level of illumination.
• Unable to resolve fine detail and
subject to light saturation
– reason for temporary blindness while
moving from a darkened room into
sunlight
• There are approximately 120 million of
rods per eye which are mainly situated
towards the edge of the retina.
• Rods dominates the peripheral vision
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 The Eye - physical reception...
• Cones are less sensitive to light than rods and can therefore
tolerate more light.
– Cones are responsible for colour vision.
– The eye has approximately 6 million cones, mainly concentrated
on the fovea, a small area of the retina on which images are
fixated
• Retina contains a blind spot where the optic nerve enters the
eye. The blind spot has no rods and cones.
• The retina has also some specialized cells called ganglion cells.
There are two types of ganglion cells:
– X-cells: concentrated on fovea and are responsible for the early
detection of pattern
– Y-cells: are more widely distributed in the retina and are
responsible for the early detection of movement.
– The distribution of theses cells means that, while we may not be
able to detect changes in pattern in peripheral vision, we can
perceive movement.
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 The Eye - physical reception...
• Blind spot testing

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The Eye - physical reception...

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 Interpreting the signal
• Perceiving Size
– The size of image is specified as a visual angle.
– If we draw a line from the top of the object to central point on
the front of the eye and a second line from the bottom of the
object to the same point, then the visual angle of the object is
the angle between these two lines.
– visual angle indicates how much of the field of view is taken by
the object
– Visual angle measurement is given by either degree or minutes
of arc, where 1 degree equivalent to 60 minutes of arc.

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 Visual perception – visual angle

Visual angle is affected by both the size of the object and the distance from the eye
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Relationship between Visual Angle, Object
Size, Focal Length.

𝑂𝑏𝑗𝑒𝑐𝑡 𝑆𝑖𝑧𝑒
𝑉𝑖𝑠𝑢𝑎𝑙 𝐴𝑛𝑔𝑙𝑒 = 2. tan−1 2
𝑂𝑏𝑗𝑒𝑐𝑡 𝐷𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒

𝑤𝑖𝑑𝑡ℎ2 + 𝑙𝑒𝑛𝑔𝑡ℎ2
𝑃𝑖𝑥𝑒𝑙 𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑦 =
𝑠𝑐𝑟𝑒𝑒𝑛_𝑠𝑖𝑧𝑒 (𝑑𝑖𝑎𝑔𝑜𝑛𝑎𝑙)

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Visual perception – Visual acuity

– Visual acuity is the ability to perceive fine

detail (limited)
– familiar objects perceived as constant size
(in spite of changes in visual angle when far away)

– Cues like overlapping help perception of

size and depth

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 Visual perception – Depth
• Human visual system perceives depth using both physiological
and psychological cues
• Depth cues can be based on binocular (two eyes) or
monocular (one eye) vision
• Psychological cues
• Physiological cues – Retinal image size

Monocular depth cues

– Accommodation – Linear perspective
Oculomotor cues
– Convergence – Texture gradient
– Binocular parallax Binocular depth cues – Overlapping
– Monocular movement parallax – Aerial perspective
– Shades and shadow

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 Interpreting the signal...
• Brightness
– Subjective reaction to levels of light
– Affected by luminance of object
– Measured by just noticeable difference
– Contrast is the function of the luminance of an object and the
luminance of its background
– Visual acuity increases with luminance as does flicker

• Colour
– Made up of hue, intensity, saturation
– Cones sensitive to colour wavelengths
– Blue acuity is lowest
– 8% males and 1% females colour blind

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 Human color perception
• Human vision
– Retina of human eye consists of an array of rods and three kinds of cones as
receptors
– Rods are for night vision
• Rod-shaped
• Highly sensitive
• Operate at night
• Gray-scale vision
– Cones are for color vision
• Cone-shaped
• Less sensitive
• Operate in high light
• Three kinds of cones:
– L-cone: most sensitive to Red light
– M-cone: most sensitive to Green light
– S-cone: most sensitive to Blue light

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 Perceiving color
• Color is emotional
– Psychological and cultural
– Physiological: some colors excite neurons in the
brain more than others (red)
• Color is good for segmentation (grouping)
– Reduce the amount of time to search for
information
– Too many colors can increase search time
• Color is good for drawing attention

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 Perceiving Color…
• As we age,
– Lens yellows & absorbs shorter wavelengths that is sensitivity to blue is even
more reduced
– Fluid between lens and retina absorbs more light
– Perceive a lower level of brightness
• Design implications
– Do not rely on blue for text or small objects
– Older users need brighter colors
– Do not display simultaneously highly saturated extreme colors. i.e. no
cyan/blue at the same time as red because it requires constant refocusing.
– Use pastel colors
– Opponent color go well. i.e. red and green, yellow and blue etc.
– Older users need higher brightness levels to distinguish colors.
– Avoid red and green in the periphery, yellow and blue works in the periphery.
– Avoid pure blue for text, lines and small shapes.

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 Interpreting the signal (cont)
• Visual processing involves the transformation and interpretation of
a complete image, from the light that is thrown on the retina.
• Our expectations affect the way an image perceived. For example
distance is irrelevant to size perception.
• The visual system compensates for:
– movement
– changes in luminance.
• Context is used to resolve ambiguity
• Optical illusions sometimes occur due to over compensation

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Optical Illusions

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Optical Illusions

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 Reading Text
• Perception and processing of text is a special case that is
important for designing interface.
• The reading process consists of several stages:
1. The visual pattern of the word on the page is perceived
2. It is then decoded using internal representation of language
3. interpreted using knowledge of syntax, semantics, pragmatics
• Reading involves saccades and fixations
• Perception occurs during fixations periods, which account for
approximately 94% of the time elapsed.
• The eye moves backwards over the text as well as forwards, in
what are known as regressions. If the text is complex there
will be more regressions.
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 Reading Text…

• The shpaes of the fsrit and lsat lrettes might be more

sginifinact that the shpaes of the itenral letetrs

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 Reading Text...
• Adults read approximately 250 words a minute.
– It is unlikely that, words are scanned serially, character by character,
since experiments have shown that words can be recognized as quickly
as single characters
• We read extended text passages more quickly in lowercase
than uppercase

• Word shape is important to recognition

– Removing the word shape clues is detrimental to reading speed and
accuracy

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 Reading Text...
• The speed at which text can be read is a measure of its
legibility.
– Experiments have shown that standard font sizes of 9 to 12 are equally
legible.
– There is a evidence that reading from a computer screen is slower
than from a book.
• Negative contrast (dark characters on a light screen) improves
reading from computer screen than positive contrast.

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 Text: design considerations
• Legibility
• Size
• Typefaces
• Type weight
• Kerning
• Leading
• Use of capital letters

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 Hearing
• The sense of hearing is often considered as secondary to
sight.
– What sounds can you hear?
– Where are they coming from?
– What is making them?
– How far away the sound is?
– Which direction the sound is coming From ?
• Provides information about environment:
distances, directions, objects etc.

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 Hearing...
• Physical apparatus:
– outer ear: protects inner and amplifies sound
– middle ear: transmits sound waves as vibrations to inner ear
– inner ear: chemical transmitters are released and cause impulses in auditory nerve
• Sound
– pitch
• 20Hz – 15KHz frequency
• Human is less accurate in distinguishing high frequencies than low ones
• Tuned to 3KHz by shape of outer ear
– Loudness
• Amplitude, is a psychological property of sound
• Our ears are capable to cope with 0 to 160db (pain at 130db!)
• Prolonged exposure above 85 dB can cause hearing damage noise-induced hearing
loss (NIHL)
– Timbre
• type or quality
• ‘signature’ of sound source
• complex set of resonance overlaying the fundamental frequency

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 Hearing (cont)
• Humans can hear frequencies from 20Hz to 15kHz
– less accurate distinguishing high frequencies than low.

• Auditory system filters sounds

– can attend to sounds over background noise.
– for example, the cocktail party phenomenon.

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 Touch
• Provides important feedback about environment.
• May be key sense for someone who is visually impaired.
• Stimulus received via receptors in the skin:
– thermoreceptors – heat and cold
– nociceptors – pain
– mechanoreceptors –pressure
(some instant, some continuous)

• Some areas more sensitive than others e.g. fingers. (Two point threshold
test)
• Kinesthesis - awareness of body position
– affects comfort and performance.

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 Movement
• Time taken to respond to stimulus:
reaction time + movement time
• Movement time dependent on age, fitness etc.
• Reaction time - dependent on stimulus type:
– visual ~ 200ms
– auditory ~ 150 ms
– pain ~ 700ms

• Increasing reaction time decreases accuracy in the unskilled

operator but not in the skilled operator.

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 Movement ...
• Fitts’ Law predicts that the time to point at an object using a device
is a function of the distance from the target object and the object’s
size.

• Fitts' Law predicts the time taken in pointing tasks to hit/reach a

specific screen target:
Mt = a + b log2(D/S + 1)
where: a and b are empirically determined constants
Mt is movement time
D is Distance
S is Size of target

 targets as large as possible distances as small as possible

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 Implications of Fitts’ law
• Implications of Fitts’ law in HCI design:
– The slope of the function (b) may vary across different
control devices, in which case movement times will be
faster for the devices that yield lower slopes.
– Card, English, and Burr (1978) conducted a study that
evaluated how efficient text keys, step keys, a mouse, and
a joystick are at a text-selection task in which users
selected text by positioning the cursor on the desired area
and pressing a button or key.

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 Memory
• Memory stores factual knowledge and contains knowledge
of actions or procedures.
• Memory allows us
– To repeat actions
– To use languages
– To receive new information through our sensors
• Memory gives us the sense of identity, by preserving
information from our past experiences.
• Some questions that leads us to know the capability and
limitations of memory are:
– How does memory work?
– How do we remember arbitrary lists such as those generated in memory
games?
– Why do some people remember more easily than others?
– What happen when we forget?
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 Memory...

There are three types of memory function:

Sensory memories

Short-term memory or working memory

Long-term memory

Selection of stimuli governed by level of arousal.

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 Sensory memory
• The sensory memory act as buffers for stimuli received
through the senses.
• A sensory memory exists for each sensory channel:
– iconic memory: visual stimuli
• Information remains in iconic memory very briefly, in order of 0.5
seconds.
– echoic memory: aural stimuli
• Allows brief ‘play-back’ of information.
– haptic memory: tactile stimuli
• Examples
– “sparkler” trail
– stereo sound
• Continuously overwritten

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Iconic Memory

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 Short-term memory (STM)
• Short-term memory or working memory act as scratch-pad for
temporary recall.
– E.g. Calculate the multiplication, 45x3
• Short-term memory has the properties of :
– rapid access ~ 70ms
– rapid decay ~ 200ms
– limited capacity - 7± 2 chunks
• What is your digit span?

• Two basic methods of measuring short-term memory:

– Determining the length of sequence that can be remembered in order
– Items to be freely recalled in any order
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 Examples

212348278493202

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 Examples

11 224 124 6060

HEC ATR ANU PTH ETR EET

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 Examples

11 224 124 6060

Chunking of information can increase the short-term memory capacity

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 Examples

HEC ATR ANU PTH ETR EET

Patterns can be useful as aids to memory.

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 Long-term memory (LTM)
• Repository for all our experimental knowledge, factual
information, procedural rules of behaviour.
– slow access ~ 1/10 second
– slow decay, if any
– huge or unlimited capacity
• Two types of LTM
– Episodic: represents our memory of events and experiences in a serial
form.
– Semantic: is the structured memory of facts, concepts, and skills that we
have acquired.
– The information in semantic memory is derived from that of episodic memory,
such that we can learn new facts or concepts from our experiences.

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 Long-term memory (cont.)
• Semantic memory structure
– provides access to information
– represents relationships between bits of information
– supports inference

• Model: semantic network

– inheritance – child nodes inherit properties of parent nodes
– relationships between bits of information explicit
– supports inference through inheritance

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LTM - semantic network

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Representations of knowledge

• Semantic network representation

• Frame-based knowledge representation
• Script-based knowledge representation
• Condition-action rules as production rules

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 LTM processes
• There are three main activities related to long-
term memory:
1. Storage or remember of information
2. Forgetting the information
3. Retrieval of information

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 LTM - Storage of information
• Rehearsal
– information moves from STM to LTM

• Total time hypothesis [Ebbinghaus]

– amount retained proportional to rehearsal time

• Distribution of practice effect [Baddeley]

– optimized by spreading learning over time

• Structure, meaning and familiarity

– information easier to remember

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• Which list is easier to remember?

List A: Faith Age Cold Tenet Quiet Logic Idea Value Past Large

List B: Boat Tree Cat Child Rug Plate Church Gun Flame Head

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 LTM - Forgetting
Decay
– information is lost gradually but very slowly

Interference
– new information replaces old: retroactive interference
– old may interfere with new: proactive inhibition

so may not forget at all memory is selective …

… affected by emotion – can subconsciously `choose' to forget

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 LTM - retrieval
Recall
– Information reproduced from memory can be assisted by cues, e.G.
Categories, imagery

Recognition
– Information gives knowledge that it has been seen before
– Less complex than recall - information is cue

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 Thinking
Reasoning
deduction, induction, abduction
Problem solving
 Reasoning
• Reasoning is the process by which we use the
knowledge we have to draw a conclusion or
infer something new about the domain of
interest.
• Different types of reasoning are:
– Deductive
– Inductive
– Abductive

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 Deductive Reasoning
• Deduction:
– Derive logically necessary conclusion from given premises.
e.g. If it is friday then she will go to work
It is friday
Therefore she will go to work.

• Logical conclusion not necessarily true:

e.g. If it is raining then the ground is dry
It is raining
Therefore the ground is dry

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 Deduction (cont.)
• When truth and logical validity clash …
e.g. Some people are babies
Some babies cry
Inference - Some people cry
Correct?

• People bring world knowledge to bear

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 Inductive Reasoning
• Induction:
– Induction is generalizing from cases we have seen to infer information
about cases we have not seen.
– e.g. all elephants we have seen have trunks therefore all elephants
have trunks.

• Unreliable:
– can only prove false not true

… but useful!
• Humans not good at using negative evidence
e.g. Wason's cards.

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 Wason's cards

7 E 4 K
If a card has a vowel on one side it has an even number on the other

Is this true?

How many cards do you need to turn over to find out?

…. and which cards?

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 Abductive reasoning
• Reasoning from event to cause
e.g. Sam drives fast when drunk.
If I see Sam driving fast, assume drunk.

• Unreliable:
– Can lead to false explanations

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 Problem solving
• If reasoning is a means for inferring new
information from what is already known,
problem solving is the process of finding a
solution to an unfamiliar task, using the
knowledge we have.

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 Errors and mental models
Why do we make mistakes and can we avoid them?
In order to answer these question we need to understand the
types of error,
• Slips
– right intention, but failed to do it right
– Causes: poor physical skill, inattention etc.
– Change to aspect of skilled behaviour can cause slip

• Mistakes
– Wrong intention
– Cause: incorrect understanding
Humans create mental models to explain behaviour.
If wrong (different from actual system) errors can occur

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 Emotion

• Various theories of how emotion works

– James-Lange: emotion is our interpretation of a physiological
response to a stimuli
– Cannon: emotion is a psychological response to a stimuli
– Schacter-Singer: emotion is the result of our evaluation of our
physiological responses, in the light of the whole situation we are
in
• Emotion clearly involves both cognitive and physical
responses to stimuli

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 Emotion (cont.)
• The biological response to physical stimuli is called affect

• Affect influences how we respond to situations

– positive  creative problem solving
– negative  narrow thinking

“Negative affect can make it harder to do even

easy tasks; positive affect can make it easier to
do difficult tasks”
(Donald Norman)

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 Emotion (cont.)
• Implications for interface design
– Stress will increase the difficulty of problem
solving
– Relaxed users will be more forgiving of
shortcomings in design
– Aesthetically pleasing and rewarding interfaces
will increase positive affect

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 Individual differences
• Long term
– Sex, physical and intellectual abilities
• Short term
– Effect of stress or fatigue
• Changing
– Age

Ask yourself:
Will design decision exclude section of user population?

CSE 4849 | HCI | Summer 2022 95