Canonical Behavior Patterns

In the development of cognitive models, data are often collected in the form of behavioral protocols — sequences of actions performed by the user during the execution of a task. Behavioral protocols have been employed to study a wide variet

Finding Canonical Behaviors in User Protocols

While the collection of behavioral protocols has been common practice in human-computer interaction research for many years, the analysis of large protocol data sets is often extremely tedious and time-consuming, and automated analysis methods have been slow to develop. This paper proposes an automated method of protocol analysis to find canonical behaviors — a small subset of protocols that is most representative of the full data set, providing a reasonable “big picture ” view of the data with as few protocols as possible. The automated method takes advantage of recent algorithmic developments in computational vision, modifying them to allow for distance measures between behavioral protocols. The paper includes an application of the method to web-browsing protocols, showing how the canonical behaviors found by the method match well to sets of behaviors identified by expert human coders