2006 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Studies in usability of IT-based equipments and cognitive aging : the mechanism of error-repetition phenomena
| Project/Area Number |
16091211
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Priority Areas
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Review Section |
Science and Engineering
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| Research Institution | Hosei University |
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Principal Investigator |
HARADA Etsuko T. Hosei University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Professor (90217498)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2004 – 2006
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| Keywords | cognitive ageing / error repetition phenomena / Human-artifacts interactions / divided attention(dual tasks) / spatial randomness / perceptual salience / task switching / designs of user interface |
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| 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 old users, and also it is interesting because cognitive aging has some specific effects on inhibition from the past experiences when selecting one from plural response candidates.
In the series of experiments 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, with the display conditions with spatial randomness in which every three candidates were not on a line, participants showed some error repetitions, and especially high probabilities of error repetitions were observed under divided-attention condition with young participants.
Comparing two other more attention-loaded conditions, i.e., the 'answering the wrong answer' conditions and the task-switching conditions, error rates increased in both conditions; however, rising in error-repetition probability was observed only with task-switching condition. The relation between error-repetition phenomenon and the task switching loads was also confirmed with experiments in which participants' groups those were poor and good at another task-switching tasks were compared.
It was suggested that keeping of multiple goals is a main factor of error repetition phenomena, and that the duality of goals in using IT-based equipments for especially old users who have little mental models was the main source of error-repetition phenomena with elder people.
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Research Products
(7 results)
