Human Computer Interaction

e # 08
Lectur

Qudsia Yousaf

Class : BSSE Semester 4th

Credit Hours ( 3)
 Blast from the Past

What did you learn in last lecture?

08/24/2020
 After reading this students should be able to understand

What is meant by Attention

Types of Attention
 Selective Attention
 Divided Attention

Attention as capacity allocation

Factors Affecting Attention
 Stress
 Vigilance

 Mental Workload

 Visual Search

Human Error
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 What is meant by Attention?

Definition: ‘the concentration of mental effort on sensory

or mental events’,

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 Attention
 Attention is very important for many human activity.

Failures in attention cause accidents

 Driver using mobile phones while driving
 Control room operators not knowing which instrument/device to attend to

In order to make good design we need to understand the capabilities

and limitations of attention

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 Form of Attention
Attention is important in the design and operation of safety-
critical interactive systems.
Two forms of attention:
 Selective attention
 Divided attention.

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 Selective Attention
Selective (or focused) attention generally refers to whether
or not we become aware of sensory information.

Choosing to focus on one activity amongst many.

 Such as carrying out a conversation with a friend in a crowded
room.

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 Selective Attention (Spotlight Model)

William James Model

The term “spotlight” was inspired by the work of William James, who described attention as having a focus, a
margin, and a fringe. The focus is the central area that extracts “high-resolution” information from the visual
scene where attention is directed. Surrounding the focus is the fringe of attention, which extracts information in
a much more crude fashion. This fringe extends out to a specified area, and the cutoff is called the margin.
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 Test for investigating Selective Attention

The Dichotic listening test is a psychological test commonly used to investigate selective attention within the 
auditory system and is a subtopic of cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Specifically, it is "used as a behavioral test
for hemispheric lateralization of speech sound perception."[1] During a standard dichotic listening test, a participant is
presented with two different auditory stimuli simultaneously (usually speech). The different stimuli are directed into
different ears over headphones.[2] Research Participants were instructed to repeat aloud the words they heard in one ea
while a different message was presented to the other ear. As a result of focusing to repeat the words, participants notice
little of the message to the other ear, often not even realizing that at some point it changed from English to German. At
the same time, participants did notice when the voice in the unattended ear changed from a male’s to a female’s,
suggesting that the selectivity of consciousness can work to tune in some information."[3]
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 Divided Attention
Divided Attention:
 Mental resources are divided between while multi-tasking.

Performance of two simultaneously executed tasks would be poorer

than attending to just one at a time.
 Watching TV and talking to a person
 Talking on phone and driving a car

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 Divided Attention
Video
Count yellow stars
Count yellow stars + red crosses

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 Attention as capacity allocation
We have a limited amount of processing power at our disposal
 some tasks require relatively little processing power and others require more
This explains how we can divide our attention across a number of tasks
depending on
 The demand level
 Our experience in executing them.
Other variables that effect attention allocation are:
 Our state of arousal
 enduring dispositions,
 momentary intentions
  enduring dispositions (automatic influences on attention) and momentary intentions (a
conscious decision to attend to something). 

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 Attention as capacity allocation
Enduring dispositions: Rules for allocating capacity not under
voluntary control
 e.g. hearing your own name spoken
 What else?

Momentary Intentions:
 voluntary shifts in attention
Arousal: how awake we are.

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 Automatic and Controlled Processing
Schneider and Shiffrin (1977) observed that we are capable of both automatic
and controlled information processing.
Automatic processing: for easy tasks (depending on our expertise)
Controlled processing: for unfamiliar and difficult tasks.
 Practice makes controlled processing automatic i.e driving

Controlled processing is consciously directing attention towards a task. It is slow

and limited in capacity
Automatic processing is not subject to conscious awareness. It is fast and
unaffected by capacity limitations

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 Stroop Effect

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 Factors Affecting Attention
Stress
Vigilance
Mental Workload
Visual Search

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 Stress
Stress can be due to external stimuli such as noise, turbulence, bright
lights etc

Stress can also be psychological such as anxiety, fatigue , danger,

threat or lack of sleep

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 Stress

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 What does the graph Say?
There is an optimal level of arousal
After reaching that level performance deteriorates

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 Vigilance
Vigilance is a term applied to the execution of a task wherein an
individual is required to monitor an instrument or situation for a
signal
If you are on a pirate ship imagine you are the look out
You have to look out for
 Ships you can raid
 Signs of dangers such as rocks or icebergs

 It’s a boring job being alone in the middle

of the night staring at water

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 Vigilance
What does it have to do with HCI?
 If your designing a system where an operator may have to monitor
some thing you have to ensure that important things draw his
attention

 Such as warning signal that a reactor is over heating

 On the other hand you have to also ensure that less important or less
urgent information doesn’t draw attention away from critical things

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 Vigilance

The designers of satellite navigation systems in cars have to consider

this issue.

The challenge for the designers of these systems is

 to attract the attention of the driver without distracting him or her, and
 to avoid habituation – that is, the driver learning to ignore the nagging voice.

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 Vigilance
So the designers have to ensure that when your car’s navigation is trying to warn
you that your about to fall off a cliff you pay attention

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 Visual Search
Visual search is our ability to locate particular items in a visual scene.
 For example, locating a single letter in a block of miscellaneous characters.

Important in avoiding poorly designed interactive systems

Searching tends to be directed towards where the target is expected to be.
 Large and bright and changing (e.g. flashing, which may be used for warnings).

 These visual features can be used to direct attention,

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 Mental Workload
Mental workload addresses issues such as
 How busy is the user or operator?

 How difficult are the tasks assigned to him or her – will he or she be able to
deal with an additional workload?

 A classic example of this occurred in the 1970s when it was decided to remove
the third crew member from a flight team on board in a medium to large
passenger jet. The Federal Aviation Administration now requires measures of
the mental workload on the crew prior to the certification of a new aircraft or
new control system.

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 NASA TLX Sheet

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 Human Error
Human error is primarily responsible in 60–90 percent of all major
accidents

Interactive systems should be designed so that the chances of error is

minimized

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 Human Error
In a study 24 ordinary men and women to wire an electric plug.
They found that only five succeeded in doing so safely, despite the
fact that 23 of the 24 had wired a plug in the previous 12 months.
In analyzing the results of this study it was found that a number of
different factors contributed to these failures, including:
 Failure to read the instructions
 Inability to formulate an appropriate mental model

 Failure of the plug designers to provide clear physical constraints on

erroneous actions. This last point was regarded as the most significant.

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 Understanding action slips
Action slips are actions which have deviated from what was intended
such as sending an e-mail and forgetting the intended attachment.
Designers should design to minimize the chance of slips.
For example, ‘wizards’ prompt people for, and help them recall, the
steps that need to be undertaken to complete a task, such as
installing a application.

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 Action Slips : Wizards

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 Action Slips : Wizards

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 Action Slips
Sometimes action slips are encouraged by
designers!!!!
Not a good practice
No one will publically admit to it
 E.g. designing so that user “accidently”

clicks on ad in a mobile app

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 Action Slips

Takes me to an adv

Need to click
This to watch
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 Reference
Read Chapter 22 of text book topic Attention
 Designing interactive System by Benyon Pearson Education Limited

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 Summary
What is meant by Attention
Types of Attention
 Selective Attention
 Divided Attention

Attention as capacity allocation

Factors Affecting Attention
 Stress
 Vigilance

 Mental Workload

 Visual Search

Human Error
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 Key Learning Points
Dichotic Effect
Workload
Stroop Effect
NASA TLX Sheet

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