Cognitive Studies in Error Repetition Phenomena and Cognitive Ageing

Research Project

Project/Area Number	15500174
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
Allocation Type	Single-year Grants
Section	一般
Research Field	Cognitive science
Research Institution	HOSEI University
Principal Investigator	HARADA T.Etsuko HOSEI University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Professor, 社会学部, 教授 (90217498)
Project Period (FY)	2003 – 2004
Project Status	Completed (Fiscal Year 2004)
Budget Amount *help	¥3,700,000 (Direct Cost: ¥3,700,000) Fiscal Year 2004: ¥1,200,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,200,000) Fiscal Year 2003: ¥2,500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,500,000)
Keywords	cognitive ageing / error repetition / Human-artifacts interactions / divided attention (dual tasks) / spatial randomness / perceptual salience / analysis of eye movements / deduction in inhibition / 注意分割 / 系列・並列処理 / 眼球運動による注視点分析 / 認知的高齢化 / エラー反復現象 / 二重過程モデル / 漢字選択課題 / 眼球運動 / 系列処理 / 並列処理
Research Abstract	Elder users of IT-based equipments often show continual repetitions of the same erroneous operations in daily lives and also in the usability testing labs. Investigating this phenomenon is important for making usable designs for the elderly, and also interesting because cognitive aging has some specific effects on inhibition from the past experiences when selecting one from plural response candidates. In this study, we have tried to identify factors of this error repetitions phenomenon, using a simple Kanji-selection task, which were composed with a context sentence and four candidates ; a target word, a lure word (homophone of the target), and two dummy words. When displaying four candidates in line, there were no error repetitions observed both with young (undergraduate students) and elder (upper 65 years old) participants. However, some different trends with spatial relationships between the target word and the lure word were observed, according to ‘which one is the left?'. Investiga … More ting with different displaying conditions in temporal natures showed that participants tested their answer in a sequential fashion, from left to right, and these strategic natures was not different with two age groups. These results indicated that inclinations of the relationships to the goal (target) within multiple candidates おn the same screen has effects on human decision making processes to choose one of them. Based on these results, the display conditions was changed to align candidates in random position and added some perceptual saliences with colors, and the results showed some error repetitions, both with young and old participants. In addition, under divided-attention condition with young participants showed large amount of error repetitions. These results and the dual processing hypothesis implied that error repetition phenomena might occur, not mainly with fortification of automatic processes but with weakening of conscious controlled processes. Some implications for designing products interfaces can be extracted from these results, especially for preventing serious error repetition with elder users. Less