This pilot study aims to find a way to measure "presence" as a proxy for ecological validity in driving simulators. The underlying assumption is that a person experiencing a strong sense of presence in the virtual environment will react as if it were real. We measure "presence" through the "presence" given to the driving task. We hypothesize that the greater the attention given to the primary driving task, the more the subject will experience spatial presence. "Attention" was varied by adding a second task and oncoming traffic; we then analyzed behavioral measures of driving performance and subjective "presence". The main result is a lack of congruence between subjective and behavioral measures. Although behavioral differences were observed between the various experimental conditions, there was no significant difference in subjective measures of presence. One explanation for this result could be that in all experimental conditions the driving activity did not require high-level cognitive processes, and was instead based on bottom-up attentional processes. Many of the processes involved in driving seem to be automatic, and this study argues for the concomitant use of subjective measures (such as questionnaires) and objective measures to assess presence in driving simulators. Furthermore, the development of a sensitive measure of presence seems to require more challenging scenarios in terms of controlled attention, cognitive involvement and more specifically, the emotions induced by the media. Participants are clearly aware that they are not exposed to any physical danger when using the simulator and the problem of their motivation must be taken into consideration. Another major problem is to establish the extent to which they are absorbed in the simulated driving task. A significant challenge for future research is the emotional validity of driving.
The use of calendars for work and personal activities has been widely investigated for decades and the term calendar work, coined by Palen (CHI 17-24,1999), refers to the many ways people employ and interact with calendars. Previous research has focused on calendar usage in specific domains or on the differences between paper and digital calendars. The current paper is positioned somewhat differently by exploring calendars as object in personal ecologies of calendar artifacts. In such personal calendar ecologies, the users, their tasks, their practices, and the calendar artifacts adapt and evolve together. In addition, individual users are typically engaged in various activities in specific contexts (realms) that are established and maintained by groups of people, supporting the overarching culture of these realms. As such, the web of common practices, activities and tasks, as well as the calendar artifacts shape the individual calendar work. To our knowledge, this article is the first study that investigates diverse personal ecologies of calendar artifacts. To this end we collected detailed user data with (a) exploratory interviews and (b) the Day-Reconstruction Method. The results indicate that the changing demands in daily life, the availability of new tools, and the participants´ knowledge about the costs and benefits of their calendar work and about the consequences of potential failures influence their tendency to explore and possibly integrate new calendar artifacts and appear implicated in the deliberate non-use of new technology. It appears that paper and digital calendar artifacts continue to co-exist. The results indicate an existing "appointment culture" with a high demand of precisely scheduled episodes, and the importance of calendar artifacts for maintaining work and personal relationships in the light of the travel and new technologies for communication.
Navigation within a website is an important factor for the success of a website. Faster and easy web-navigation leads to better usability and reduces cognitive load on the user. Several cognitive models exist that simulate the web-navigation process. In this paper we propose a new cognitive model - CoLiDeS++Pic (based on Comprehension-based Linked model of Deliberate Search or CoLiDeS) that incorporates path adequacy and backtracking strategies. This model also takes into consideration the semantics of pictures. Firstly, we present here the results of an experiment in which we test the efficacy of support based on the new model CoLiDeS++Pic and multi-tasking under cognitively demanding situations. The results prove that the model-generated support is effective. Secondly, we also propose that in this way navigation behavior can be better modeled when compared to previous models. We verify this hypothesis by simulating the model on a mock-up website and comparing the results with a previous model CoLiDeS+. Extending our previous work we demonstrate that the performance of the new model CoLiDeS++Pic is improved compared to the preceding model CoLiDeS+. We further discuss the challenges and advantages of automating navigation support using the proposed model.
Organizations continue building virtual working teams (Teleworkers) to become more dynamic as part of their strategic innovation, with great benefits to individuals, business and society. However, during such transformations it is important to note that effective knowledge communication is particularly difficult in distributed environments as well as in non-interactive settings, because the interlocutors cannot use gestures or mimicry and have to adapt their expressions without receiving any feedback, which may affect the creation of tacit knowledge. Collective Intelligence appears to be an encouraging alternative for creating knowledge. However, in this scenario it faces an important goal to be achieved, as the degree of ability of two or more individuals increases with the need to overcome barriers through the aggregation of separately processed information, whereby all actors follow similar conditions to participate in the collective. Geographically distributed organizations have the great challenge of managing people´s knowledge, not only to keep operations running, but also to promote innovation within the organization in the creation of new knowledge. The management of knowledge from Collective Intelligence represents a big difference from traditional methods of information allocation, since managing Collective Intelligence poses new requirements. For instance, semantic analysis has to merge information, coming both from the content itself and the social/individual context, and in addition, the social dynamics that emerge online have to be taken into account. This study analyses how knowledge-based organizations working with decentralized staff may need to consider the cognitive styles and social behaviors of individuals participating in their programs to effectively manage knowledge in virtual settings. It also proposes assessment taxonomies to analyze online comportments at the levels of the individual and community, in order to successfully identify characteristics to help evaluate higher effectiveness of communication. We aim at modeling measurement patterns to identify effective ways of interaction of individuals, taking into consideration their cognitive and social behaviors.
The role of affect and emotion in interactive system design is an active and recent research area. The aim is to make systems more responsive to user´s needs and expectations. The first step towards affective interaction is to recognize user´s emotional state. Literature contains many works on emotion recognition. In those works, facial muscle movement, gestures, postures and physiological signals were used for recognition. The methods are computation intensive and require extra hardware (e.g., sensors and wires). In this work, we propose a simpler model to predict the affective state of a touch screen user. The prediction is done based on the user´s touch input, namely the finger strokes. We defined seven features based on the strokes. A linear combination of these features is proposed as the predictor, which can predict a user´s affective state into one of the three states: positive (happy, excited and elated), negative (sad, anger, fear, disgust) and neutral (calm, relaxed and contented). The model alleviates the need for extra setup as well as extensive computation, making it suitable for implementation on mobile devices with limited resources. The model is developed and validated with empirical data involving 57 participants performing 7 touch input tasks. The validation study demonstrates a high prediction accuracy of 90.47 %. The proposed model and its empirical development and validation are described in this paper.
In mass casualty incidents, several members of Emergency Medical Services have to take actions in the field in order to cope with many injured or sick people. Incident commanders are responsible for managing operations, guiding rescue forces and applying resources appropriately under extraordinary circumstances. Data required for situation assessment, projection of developments and decision making are gathered by many different emergency physicians and paramedics. They are shared by numerous face-to-face talks, radio and phone calls as well as with the aid of paper-based forms and notepaper. While these tools and means of communication support flexible modes of operation, they often lead to deficient awareness of the situation. Due to temporal delays, poor handwriting and incomplete data, information sharing in the field is hampered, delayed and faulty. Compared to established paper-based artifacts, interactive cognitive artifacts might improve the situations by exchanging and visualizing data in real-time. However, because of user´s workload and working conditions, designing mobile computer-based tools and systems for this context of use is not only a technical but also a usability challenge. Based on the results of a two-year user-centered system design project in cooperation with German Emergency Medical Services, we discuss currently used and interactive cognitive artifacts for incident commanders. Challenges and approaches for successful user interface and interaction design are described and future work is outlined.
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