Cognitive Psychology: The Early Years.

It’s 1967, and you want to study the difficult task of driving. But you don’t have fancy simulators or computer screens. Instead, you have a real car and some engineering knowledge. What do you do? Go full scale and run an experiment that periodically obstructs your view of the road ON THE HIGHWAY:

Thanks to Matt Peterson and http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/cogworks/?view=modules.misc.senders for this!

More is not always better!

Microsoft Office has been accused of bloat for many years now, and Microsoft Word has been no exception to this criticism. To some extent, this is unavoidable: Word needs to be such a general-purpose product that you have to cram it full of features in order to get as many people to use it as possible. Of course, each of those users only needs a subset of those features. I use the Word Count feature when I’m writing a manuscript for a journal that has a strict word count, but most users have no need for it. For creative writers, a majority of the features in Word are useless - tables, graphs, even fonts - are unnecessary and clutter up the creative process.

Steven Poole has written an excellent blog post about his history with electronic writing and promotes a program called WriteRoom that does away with all the distractions and interruptions that Word and computers in general provide. Writing suddenly looks like paper again with WriteRoom:

This application would likely drive me crazy, as I often need PDFs and spreadsheets open as I write my scientific manuscripts. But for those that just need to write, the distraction-less interface of WriteRoom is likely as close as you can get to computerized perfection.

Research from GMU’s Arch Lab featured on local news

Here’s a link to a news story done by the local Fox station for their nightly news. They explore how research done by professors and fellow graduate students in the human factors program improves transportation safety by understanding flying and driving performance in the face of interruptions.

Link to the video.

The link should work with Firefox and Internet Explorer (no Safari) - the usability of this site could DEFINITELY use some work.

Great New York Times article on Social Robots

Robots have long been a sci-fi favorite, but the robots we traditionally think about have been a failure. Sure, we have robots that can search through debris and do incredibly dangerous or tedious jobs that humans don’t want to do. This is good for humanity, but this is not the general-purpose robot we all think of. The word robot was coined in 1942 (Wikipedia), but what robots do we have in general use today? We have the Roomba… and that’s about it. The attempt to create a robot with sophisticated artificial intelligence has not been successful. We don’t understand enough about human cognition to try and implement it in an artifical being.

Well, there’s been a new push in robotics recently to develop so-called “Social Robots.” They do not take care of us - instead, we interact and take care of them. These robots are not a one-way butler or maid. Instead, we interact with them, and then we develop an affinity for them. They may not be able to go grocery shopping for us, but the can still act on our behalf.

I’ve mentioned how detrimental interruptions are to our workflow before, and researchers are working on metric to determine how engrossed we are with our work - keypresses or mouse clicks/minute, eyetracking, etc. I personally would be disconcerted if my Mac’s built-in camera was watching me to determine if I was busy. However, a little desk trinket that appears to be a cute toy could easily earn a place on my desk and also monitor my keypress rate and even my eye movements. If it were squishy, yellow and adorable (see video below), I’d be more likely to adopt such a monitoring technology. This is all about tapping into some kind of social need. Instead of trying to get robots to mimic our cognition, we use our understanding of the human psyche to build robots that we want to interact with. It’s a fascinating example of understanding how humans function and designing a system around that.

The New York Times has a great article about this new field, which you can read about here. Or, if the link goes away, you can read a PDF here.

So who in the world cares about social robots? They certainly can’t do your laundry, wash your dishes, or walk your dog. But these social robots hit some intrinsic need. Perhaps, a need…. to dance:

Flash drives, old computers, and Windows

There are a healthy number of older PCs at work that I have to use sometimes. These aren’t old 386s - just older Pentium 4s or the occasional Pentium 3. Nonetheless, they all have USB 1.1, which is slower and older than the current USB 2.0 standard. When I plug my USB flash drive into one of these older computers, I get a message:

OK, fine. It can perform faster! I’ll click on the balloon:

So there are no faster ports on my computer. Even though Windows said that it can perform faster. In reality, it can’t. You know what the worst part of it is? Every time I plug my flash drive in, I GET THE SAME ALERT MESSAGE. Therefore, every time I plug my flash drive in, I get interrupted from my train of thought, have to deal with the alert box, and try to resume my original task. This is not easy (Altmann & Trafton, 2002), and it’s totally annoying.

Today, I wanted to eject my flash drive (named JasonFlash) from the computer, so I clicked in the Safely Remove Hardware button in the tray, and I get:

There’s an external hard drive (named Seagate) attached to the computer. Which one do I want to eject? I don’t have a clue! Windows lets users give their devices names. Maybe Windows should use those names sometimes - give us some retrieval cues so we know which device is the external hard drive that should never be removed and the flash drive that goes everywhere with me.

I have a feeling this is the first of many posts about Windows.