Human-Systems Interaction (ISEN 330) Vocab

Working Memory

Stage of information processing that works a variety of mental activities such as rehearsing, planning, understanding, visualizing, decision making, and problem solving.

T/F: Working memory is permenant.

F, it’s a temporary, effort-demanding store.

T/F: Selective attention guarantees perception.

F, selective attention does not guarantee perception, but it is usually necessary to achieve it.

Four factors that drive selective attention:

Salience, effort, expectancy, value

Salience

attentional capture, contributes to bottom, up processing

Change blindness/ inattentional blindness

when salient features are not noticed

Cocktail party effect

When our attention is suddenly caught by an external stimulus

Bottom-up processing depends on:

the physical make up of the stimulus

Top-down processing depends on:

knowledge and context, depends on expectancies stored form experience in the long term memory

Unitization

joins the physical stimulus and the experience

T/F: Comprehension relies on working memory.

T

T/F: Perception relies on working memory

F

What is the capacity of working memory

7 ± 2 chunks

What binds chunks of information together

Familiarity with the links or association between the units, a familiarity based upon past experience and therefore related to long-term memory.

Limits of working memory:

Capacity, time, confusability and similarity, availability and type of attention

Semantic/declarative memory

The ability to remember from general knowledge

Episodic memory

memory for specific events

procedural memory

memory of how to do things - can be harder to explain than semantic & episodic

Mechanisms of Long-Term Memory retrieval

Strength (due to repeated retrieval), associations, working memory and long-term mem interaction (form more and richer associations that can be made with other items), Forgetting

Schema

the knowledge structure about a particular topic

Mental model

our understanding of system components, how the system works, and how to use it

Cognitive maps

Mental representations of spatial information, like the layout of a city, a room, or workplace. Ex. the cognitive map of your classroom may have the orientation of the direction you face when you sit in it

Factors affecting attentional demand (mental workload)

Degree of proficiency, cognitive complexity, working memory demands

Multiple resource theory

tasks using different resources interfere less with each other than tasks using the same resources

T/F: Auditory and Visual material involve higher levels of perception that are not distinct between the two modalities.

T

T/F: Spatial and Verbal are codes of processing.

T, because of code separation, driving (visual-spatial), can be shared with talking (verbal)