Designers' models of the human-computer interface

Understanding design models of the human-computer interface (HCI) may produce two types of benefits. First, interface development often requires input from two different types of experts: human factors specialists and software developers. Given the differences in their backgrounds and roles, human factors specialists and software developers may have different cognitive models of the HCI. Yet, they have to communicate about the interface as part of the design process. If they have different models, their interactions are likely to involve a certain amount of miscommunication. Second, the design process in general is likely to be guided by designers' cognitive models of the HCI, as well as by their knowledge of the user, tasks, and system. Designers do not start with a blank slate; rather they begin with a general model of the object they are designing. The author's approach to a design model of the HCI was to have three groups make judgments of categorical similarity about the components of an interface: human factors specialists with HCI design experience, software developers with HCI design experience, and a baseline group of computer users with no experience in HCI design. The components of the user interface included both display components such as windows, text, and graphics, and user interaction concepts, such as command language, editing, and help. The judgments of the three groups were analyzed using hierarchical cluster analysis and Pathfinder. These methods indicated, respectively, how the groups categorized the concepts, and network representations of the concepts for each group. The Pathfinder analysis provides greater information about local, pairwise relations among concepts, whereas the cluster analysis shows global, categorical relations to a greater extent

Intact Perceptual Priming in a Patient with Damage to the Anterior Inferior Temporal Lobes

We conducted three experiments to examine whether the anterior portion of the inferior temporal (IT) lobe is involved in the processing of visual objects in humans. In the monkey, damage to this region results in severe deficits in perception and in memory for visual objects. Our study was designed to examine both these processes in a patient (DM) with bilateral damage to the anterior portion of the inferior temporal lobe. Neuropsychological examination revealed a significant semantic impairment, and a mild deficit in the discrimination of familiar objects from nonobjects. Despite these difficulties, the results of several studies indicated that DM was able to form and retain descriptions of the structure of objects. Specifically, DM showed normal perceptual priming for familiar and novel objects on implicit memory tests, even when the objects were transformed in their size and left/right orientation. These results suggest that the anterior IT is not involved in (a) the storage of pre-..