21CT030 / 21IT040 – HUMAN COMPUTER

INTERACTION

UNIT 1 & LP 1 - FOUNDATIONS OF HCI

TOPIC:
The Human - Input-Output Channels - Human Memory

1. INTRODUCTION
❖ We start with the human, the central character in any discussion of interactive systems.
❖ The human, the user, is, after all, the one whom computer systems are designed to assist.
❖ The requirements of the user should therefore be our first priority
❖ In order to design something for someone, we need to understand their capabilities and
limitations. We need to know if there are things that they will find difficult or, even,
impossible. It will also help us to know what people find easy and how we can help them by
encouraging these things.
❖ We will look at aspects of cognitive psychology which have a bearing on the use of
computer systems, how humans perceive the world around them, how they store and process
information and solve problems, and how they physically manipulate objects.
❖ The user was used as an information processing system, to make the analogy closer to that
of a conventional computer system.
❖ Information comes in, is stored and processed, and information is passed out .Therefore,
there are three components of this system: input–output, memory and processing. We
humans are dealing with an intelligent information-processing system, and processing
therefore includes problem solving, learning, and, consequently, making mistakes .
❖ The human, unlike the computer, is also influenced by external factors such as the social and
organizational environment, and we need to be aware of these influences as well .

1.1 Human’s Input Output Channels

❖ A person’s interaction with the outside world occurs through information being received
and sent; input and output.
 ❖ In interaction with a computer, the human input is the data output by the computer vice
versa. Input in humans occurs mainly through the senses and output through the motor
controls of the effectors. There are five major senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell.
❖ Vision, hearing and touch are the most important senses in HCI. The fingers, voice, eyes,
head and body position are the primary effectors.
❖ A human can be viewed as information the processing system, for example, a simple model:
❖ Information received and responses given via input-output channels.

❖ Information stored in memory.

❖ Information processed and applied in various ways.

The capabilities of humans in these areas are important to design, as are individual differences.

I. 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. We can roughly divide visual perception into
two stages:
1.The physical reception of the stimulus from the outside world

2.The processing and interpretation of that stimulus.

The eye is a mechanism for receiving light and transforming it into electrical energy.
❑ Light
➢ is reflected from objects in the world
➢ Or is produced from a light source (e.g. a display)
➢ and their image is 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.
❑ 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.
❑ The retina is light sensitive and contains two types of photoreceptor:
➢ rods
➢ Cones
❑ retina contains rods for low light vision and cones for color vision

Visual perception
Perceiving Color
❖ Color is usually regarded as being made up of three components
❖ Hue: Hue is determined by the spectral wavelength of the light.
❖ Intensity: Intensity is the brightness of the color
 ❖ Saturation: saturation is the amount of whiteness in the color.
❖ 8% males and 1% females are color blind
❖ Commonly being unable to discriminate between red and green

Reading
There are several stages in the reading process.
1.First, the visual pattern of the word on the page is perceived.
2.Second, it is then decoded with reference to an internal representation of language.
3.Third language processing include syntactic and semantic analysis and operate on
phrases or sentences.
We are most concerned with the first two stages of this process and how they influence
interface design. During reading, the eye makes jerky movements called saccades followed
by fixations. Perception occurs during the fixation 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.

II. Hearing

❖ The sense of hearing is often considered secondary to sight, but we tend to underestimate the
amount of information that we receive through our ears.
❖ The auditory system can convey a lot of information about our environment.
❖ It begins with vibrations in the air or sound waves.
❖ The ear receives these vibrations and transmits them, through various stages, to the auditory
nerves.
 ❖ The auditory system performs some filtering of the sounds received, allowing us to ignore
background noise and concentrate on important information.
❖ Sound can convey a remarkable amount of information. It is rarely used to its potential in
interface design, usually being confined to warning sounds and notifications. The exception is
multimedia, which may include music, voice commentary and sound effects. This suggests that
sound could be used more extensively in interface design, to convey information about the
system state.
❖ We are selective in our hearing.
III. Touch

❖ The third and last of the senses that we will consider is touch.
❖ Although this sense is often viewed as less important than sight or hearing, we can’t imagine life
without it.
❖ Touch provides us with vital information about our environment.
❖ The apparatus of touch differs from that of sight and hearing in that it is not localized.
❖ We receive stimuli through the skin.
❖ The skin contains three types of sensory receptor:
➢ Thermoreceptors respond to heat and cold,
➢ Nociceptors respond to intense pressure, heat and pain.
➢ Mechanoreceptors respond to pressure.

1.1 Human Memory

❖ Memory refers to the processes that are used to acquire, store, retain and later retrieve
information.
❖ There are three stages of memory, and they are sensory memory, long term memory & short-term
memory as shown in the figure below.

I) Sensory Memory
❖ Sensory memory is an ultra-short-term memory and decays or degrades very quickly.
❖ Sensory memory is the earliest stage of memory.
❖ During this stage, sensory information from the environment is stored for a very brief period of
time, generally for no longer than a half-second for visual information and 3 or 4 seconds for
auditory information.
❖ Unlike other types of memory, the sensory memory cannot be prolonged via rehearsal.
❖ The sensory memories act as buffers for stimuli received through the senses. A sensory memory
exists for each sensory channel:
❖ Iconic memory for visual stimuli.
❖ Echoic memory for aural stimuli.
❖ Haptic memory for touch.
❖ These memories are constantly overwritten by new information coming in on these channels.

II) Short Term Memory

❖ Short term memory is also known as active memory.
❖ It is the information; we are currently aware of or thinking about.
❖ Most of the information stored in active memory will be kept for approximately 20 to 30
seconds.
❖ For example, in order to understand this sentence, the beginning of the sentence needs to be held
in mind while the rest is read, a task which is carried out by the short term memory.
❖ Short term memory has a limited capacity.
 There are two basic methods for measuring memory capacity.
1. Length of a sequence which can be remembered in order.
2. The second allows items to be freely recalled in any order.

III) Long term memory

❖ Long term memory is intended for the long-time storage of information.
❖ Here we store factual information, experiential knowledge, procedural rules of behavior and in
fact, everything that we ‘know’.
❖ It contains knowledge we possess.
❖ Information received in short term memory is transferred to long term memory and encoded
within it, a process we call learning.
❖ However, there is also some evidence that long-term memory does also encode to some extent
by sound.
❖ For example, when we cannot quite remember a word, but it is “on the tip of the tongue”, this is
usually based on the sound of a word, not its meaning.
❖ It differs from short-term memory in a number of significant ways:
❖ It has a huge if not unlimited, capacity
❖ It has a relatively slow access time of approximately a tenth of a second.
❖ Forgetting occurs more slowly in long-term memory.

There are two types of long-term memory :

❖ Episodic memory
❖ Semantic memory