Table 2 JoIS contributions 2013-2016

Team cognition model based on mutual beliefs and mental subgrouping

Journal of Interaction Science2016 4:1

Dipta Mahardhika

Taro Kanno

Kazuo Furuta

User Modelling

Empirical Study

In this research, an extension of a dyadic (pair) team cognition model is proposed to describe the cognition of a team with more than two persons. This model provides a comprehensive framework for analysing the cognitive aspects of team interactions, such as team situation awareness, team memory, and human-agent interactions. One important aspect discussed in this research is a process called mental subgrouping. In a team with more than two persons, for each member to think of the other members as a single entity instead of several different individuals is natural. This behaviour is defined as mental subgrouping. By incorporating mental subgrouping into the mutual belief model, this research attempts to more accurately describe the cognition of a team from the perspective of both an outsider and the individual team members.

Interactive cognitive artifacts for enhancing situation awareness of incident commanders in mass casualty incidents

Journal of Interaction Science 2015 3:7

Cognitive artifacts

Situation awareness

Mass casualty incident command

Emergency medical services

Usability

Interaction design

Tilo Mentler

Michael Herczeg

Framework

Case study

In mass casualty incidents, several members of Emergency Medical Services have to take actions in the field in order to cope with many injured or sick people. Incident commanders are responsible for managing operations, guiding rescue forces and applying resources appropriately under extraordinary circumstances. Data required for situation assessment, projection of developments and decision making are gathered by many different emergency physicians and paramedics. They are shared by numerous face-to-face talks, radio and phone calls as well as with the aid of paper-based forms and notepaper. While these tools and means of communication support flexible modes of operation, they often lead to deficient awareness of the situation. Due to temporal delays, poor handwriting and incomplete data, information sharing in the field is hampered, delayed and faulty. Compared to established paper-based artifacts, interactive cognitive artifacts might improve the situations by exchanging and visualizing data in real-time. However, because of users’ workload and working conditions, designing mobile computer-based tools and systems for this context of use is not only a technical but also a usability challenge. Based on the results of a two-year user-centered system design project in cooperation with German Emergency Medical Services, we discuss currently used and interactive cognitive artifacts for incident commanders. Challenges and approaches for successful user interface and interaction design are described and future work is outlined.

Towards affective touch interaction: predicting mobile user emotion from finger strokes

Journal of Interaction Science 2015 3:6

Mobile Interaction

Emotional state

Touch screen

Strike and tap

Linear regression

Sachin Shah,

J. Narasimha Teja

Samit Bhattacharya

User Modelling

Empirical study

The role of affect and emotion in interactive system design is an active and recent research area. The aim is to make systems more responsive to user’s needs and expectations. The first step towards affective interaction is to recognize user’s emotional state. Literature contains many works on emotion recognition. In those works, facial muscle movement, gestures, postures and physiological signals were used for recognition. The methods are computation intensive and require extra hardware (e.g., sensors and wires). In this work, we propose a simpler model to predict the affective state of a touch screen user. The prediction is done based on the user’s touch input, namely the finger strokes. We defined seven features based on the strokes. A linear combination of these features is proposed as the predictor, which can predict a user’s affective state into one of the three states: positive (happy, excited and elated), negative (sad, anger, fear, disgust) and neutral (calm, relaxed and contented). The model alleviates the need for extra setup as well as extensive computation, making it suitable for implementation on mobile devices with limited resources. The model is developed and validated with empirical data involving 57 participants performing 7 touch input tasks. The validation study demonstrates a high prediction accuracy of 90.47%. The proposed model and its empirical development and validation are described in this paper.

Patterns to explore cognitive preferences and potential collective intelligence empathy for processing knowledge in virtual settings

Journal of Interaction Science 2015 3:5

Computer Science Telework Knowledge management

Thinking styles

Learning styles

Self-government Collective intelligence Collaborative work Cognitive patterns

Salim Chujfi

Christoph Meinel

User Modeling

Framework

Case study

Organizations continue building virtual working teams (Teleworkers) to become more dynamic as part of their strategic innovation, with great benefits to individuals, business and society. However, during such transformations it is important to note that effective knowledge communication is particularly difficult in distributed environments as well as in non-interactive settings, because the interlocutors cannot use gestures or mimicry and have to adapt their expressions without receiving any feedback, which may affect the creation of tacit knowledge. Collective Intelligence appears to be an encouraging alternative for creating knowledge. However, in this scenario it faces an important goal to be achieved, as the degree of ability of two or more individuals increases with the need to overcome barriers through the aggregation of separately processed information, whereby all actors follow similar conditions to participate in the collective. Geographically distributed organizations have the great challenge of managing people’s knowledge, not only to keep operations running, but also to promote innovation within the organization in the creation of new knowledge. The management of knowledge from Collective Intelligence represents a big difference from traditional methods of information allocation, since managing Collective Intelligence poses new requirements. For instance, semantic analysis has to merge information, coming both from the content itself and the social/individual context, and in addition, the social dynamics that emerge online have to be taken into account. This study analyses how knowledge-based organizations working with decentralized staff may need to consider the cognitive styles and social behaviors of individuals participating in their programs to effectively manage knowledge in virtual settings. It also proposes assessment taxonomies to analyze online comportments at the levels of the individual and community, in order to successfully identify characteristics to help evaluate higher effectiveness of communication. We aim at modeling measurement patterns to identify effective ways of interaction of individuals, taking into consideration their cognitive and social behaviors.

Modeling and Supporting Web-Navigation

Journal of Interaction Science 2015 3:3

Web-navigation Hyperlink Information scent Navigation support Cognitive models

Herre van Oostendorp Sonal Aggarwal

User Modelling &

Empirical Research

Navigation within a website is an important factor for the success of a website. Faster and easy web-navigation leads to better usability and reduces cognitive load on the user. Several cognitive models exist that simulate the web-navigation process. In this paper we propose a new cognitive model – CoLiDeS++Pic (based on Comprehension-based Linked model of Deliberate Search or CoLiDeS) that incorporates path adequacy and backtracking strategies. This model also takes into consideration the semantics of pictures. Firstly, we present here the results of an experiment in which we test the efficacy of support based on the new model CoLiDeS++Pic and multi-tasking under cognitively demanding situations. The results prove that the model-generated support is effective. Secondly, we also propose that in this way navigation behavior can be better modeled when compared to previous models. We verify this hypothesis by simulating the model on a mock-up website and comparing the results with a previous model CoLiDeS+. Extending our previous work we demonstrate that the performance of the new model CoLiDeS++Pic is improved compared to the preceding model CoLiDeS+. We further discuss the challenges and advantages of automating navigation support using the proposed model.

Personal ecologies of calendar artifacts

Journal of Interaction Science 2015 3:2

Calendars

Calendar work Personal artifact Ecologies Appropriation

Day-Reconstruction Method

Anke Dittmar

Laura Dardar

User Modelling

Framework

Casestudy

The use of calendars for work and personal activities has been widely investigated for decades and the term calendar work, coined by Palen (CHI 17–24,1999), refers to the many ways people employ and interact with calendars. Previous research has focused on calendar usage in specific domains or on the differences between paper and digital calendars. The current paper is positioned somewhat differently by exploring calendars as object in personal ecologies of calendar artifacts. In such personal calendar ecologies, the users, their tasks, their practices, and the calendar artifacts adapt and evolve together. In addition, individual users are typically engaged in various activities in specific contexts (realms) that are established and maintained by groups of people, supporting the overarching culture of these realms. As such, the web of common practices, activities and tasks, as well as the calendar artifacts shape the individual calendar work. To our knowledge, this article is the first study that investigates diverse personal ecologies of calendar artifacts. To this end we collected detailed user data with (a) exploratory interviews and (b) the Day-Reconstruction Method. The results indicate that the changing demands in daily life, the availability of new tools, and the participants’ knowledge about the costs and benefits of their calendar work and about the consequences of potential failures influence their tendency to explore and possibly integrate new calendar artifacts and appear implicated in the deliberate non-use of new technology. It appears that paper and digital calendar artifacts continue to co-exist. The results indicate an existing ‘appointment culture’ with a high demand of precisely scheduled episodes, and the importance of calendar artifacts for maintaining work and personal relationships in the light of the travel and new technologies for communication.

The concept of “presence” as a measure of ecological validity in driving simulators

Journal of Interaction Science 2015 3:1

Driving simulator Spatial presence Attention Ecological validity Cognitive involvement

Christophe Deniaud

Vincent Honnet

Benoit Jeanne

Daniel Mestre

Methodology and Metric development

This pilot study aims to find a way to measure ‘presence’ as a proxy for ecological validity in driving simulators. The underlying assumption is that a person experiencing a strong sense of presence in the virtual environment will react as if it were real. We measure ‘presence’ through the ‘attention’ given to the driving task. We hypothesize that the greater the attention given to the primary driving task, the more the subject will experience spatial presence. ‘Attention’ was varied by adding a second task and oncoming traffic; we then analyzed behavioral measures of driving performance and subjective ‘presence’. The main result is a lack of congruence between subjective and behavioral measures. Although behavioral differences were observed between the various experimental conditions, there was no significant difference in subjective measures of presence. One explanation for this result could be that in all experimental conditions the driving activity did not require high-level cognitive processes, and was instead based on bottom-up attentional processes. Many of the processes involved in driving seem to be automatic, and this study argues for the concomitant use of subjective measures (such as questionnaires) and objective measures to assess presence in driving simulators. Furthermore, the development of a sensitive measure of presence seems to require more challenging scenarios in terms of controlled attention, cognitive involvement and more specifically, the emotions induced by the media. Participants are clearly aware that they are not exposed to any physical danger when using the simulator and the problem of their motivation must be taken into consideration. Another major problem is to establish the extent to which they are absorbed in the simulated driving task. A significant challenge for future research is the emotional validity of driving.

Predicting upper-bound text entry speeds for discrete-tilt-based input on smartphones

Journal of Interaction Science 2014 2:3

Mobile Interaction

Text entry

Tilt interaction

Mobile devices Predictive models

Sandi Ljubic

Vlado Glavinic

Mihael Kukec

User Modeling

Empirical study

Motion sensors integrated into contemporary smartphones allow the introduction of new mobile interaction paradigms, here including tilt-based input control in the mobile context. Namely, as opposed to existing implementations that typically apply continuous feedback on tilting, we define Pitch and Roll movement sequences that change the orientation of the mobile device as discrete-tilt input primitives. The respective commands are then used to manage text entry within three discrete-tilt-based methods thus introduced: keyboard bisection, single cursor, and quad cursor. Each method is based on the use of a particular QWERTY-based keyboard layout with related strategy for character input. We model upper-bound text entry speeds for the input methods, taking into account both movement aspects and language context. The movement model corresponds to both the tilt-based shortest path between two consequent characters, which is theoretically defined, and the time of discrete-tilt execution, which is obtained from user testing experiment we conducted. The linguistic model, comprising digraph statistics, is constructed basing on available English corpora. This modeling approach provides discrete-tilt-based text entry speed predictions representing efficiency rates for expert behavior, i.e. for optimal performance. The results obtained enable the evaluation of the proposed designs without need to test with real users, and can furthermore serve as a baseline for efficiency of text entry implementations that rely on discrete tilt.

Efficient computer operation for users with a neuromuscular disease with OnScreenDualScribe

Journal of Interaction Science 2014, 2:2

Human-computer interaction

Universal Access

Keyboard replacement

Mouse emulator

Word prediction Ambiguous keyboards

Dysarthria

Neuromuscular diseases

Friedreich’s Ataxia

Torsten Felzer

Ian MacKenzie Stephan Rinderknecht

Development and Testing of novel interaction artifact for disabled.

Case study

Prototype

We developed a tool based on a modified number pad to empower persons with certain diseases, in particular of neuromuscular origin, to efficiently operate a computer and enter text. As the keypad lies securely in both hands, the system is ideal for someone who has motor problems using a full-size keyboard. The software offers various assistive techniques. For example, text entry is facilitated with the help of word prediction, and an ambiguous mode with word-level disambiguation allows text entry using the entire Latin alphabet with six keys.

In addition to describing the system, we analyze the ambiguous mode and the influence of dictionary size. Initial empirical results with the system, which is already in operation, indicate that it indeed represents a viable alternative by decreasing effort without increasing the time to operate a computer.

This journal article mainly differs from the related proceedings paper through an extended literature review and analyses regarding dictionary size.

Friending adolescents on social networking websites: a feasible research tool

Journal of Interaction Science 2014 2:1

Adolescent social networking website

Online friends over 12 months period

Friending Internet Social media Research methods

Libby N Brockman

Dimitri A Christakis Megan A Moreno

Empirical Study

Methodology

Objective

Social networking sites (SNSs) are increasingly used for research. This paper reports on two studies examining the feasibility of friending adolescents on SNSs for research purposes.

Methods

Study 1 took place on http://www.MySpace.com where public profiles belonging to 18-year-old adolescents received a friend request from an unknown physician. Study 2 took place on http://www.Facebook.com where college freshmen from two US universities, enrolled in an ongoing research study, received a friend request from a known researcher’s profile. Acceptance and retention rates of friend requests were calculated for both studies.

Results

Study 1: 127 participants received a friend request; participants were 18 years-old, 62.2% male and 51.8% Caucasian. 49.6% accepted the friend request. After 9 months, 76% maintained the online friendship, 12.7% defriended the study profile and 11% deactivated their profile. Study 2: 338 participants received a friend request; participants were 18 years-old, 56.5% female and 75.1% Caucasian. 99.7% accepted the friend request. Over 12 months, 3.3% defriended the study profile and 4.1% deactivated their profile. These actions were often temporary; the overall 12-month friendship retention rate was 96.1%.

Conclusion

Friending adolescents on SNSs is feasible and friending adolescents from a familiar profile may be more effective for maintaining online friendship with research participants over time.

Associations between internet use and fitness among college students: an experience sampling approach

Journal of Interaction Science 2013 1:4

Megan A Moreno

Lauren A Jelenchick

Rosalind Koff

Jens C Eickhoff

Natalie Goniu

Angela Davis

Henry N Young

Elizabeth D Cox

Dimitri A Christakis

Empirical study

Objective

Almost a third of college students are obese, placing them at risk for adult obesity and its complications. Internet use may be one factor contributing to college student obesity. The purpose of this study was to examine associations of college student internet use with physical activity and fitness.

Methods

Older adolescents between 18 and 23 years were recruited from a large university. Using experience sampling method, participants received 6 randomly-timed text message surveys for 7 days. Survey questions assessed whether they were currently online, for how long and current online activities. Participants also completed the International Physical Activity questionnaire and reported their body mass index. Multivariate models assessed the association of internet use with physical activity and fitness.

Results

Among 189 participants, the mean age was 18.9 (SD = 0.9), 58.8% were female and most were Caucasian (90.5%). Greater internet use was associated with fewer days per week of vigorous intensity exercise (p < 0.001). Participants who spent less than 1 h/day online reported a mean of 3.2 days per week of vigorous intensity exercise (SD = 2.0), those with 3 or more hours online daily reported 1.4 (SD = 2.1). Those who reported internet activities focused on academics reported increased days of vigorous intensity exercise compared to those who reported internet activity focused on social networking sites (p < 0.001).

Conclusions

There were no significant associations between internet use time and BMI. Findings suggest that both online time and particular online activities may be associated with decreased vigorous physical activity. Future efforts should consider reframing internet use guidelines for this population around both time and activities.

Open source and accessibility: advantages and limitations

Journal of Interaction Science 2013 1:2

Open source

Human factors Accessibility

Usability

Inclusivity

Gamification

Michael Heron

Vicki L Hanson

Ian Ricketts

Theory and Framework

In this paper we discuss the open source process as it relates to accessibility software. Open source is a development model that has shown considerable benefits in a number of application areas. However the nature of accessibility tools and the intended users of such software products raise issues that must be addressed by the developer before users encounter the tools in real world contexts. In this paper we discuss the nature of the open source process, how it functions, and the motivations with regards to participation that developers self-report. We then explain the impact of these elements of the open source process as they relate to adaptive accessibility software. We use some specific examples of issues raised from the adoption of open source via a discussion of the ACCESS Framework, an accessibility engine designed to provide cross-platform accessibility support through plug-ins.

Usability of mobile applications: literature review and rationale for a new usability model

Journal of Interaction Science 2013 1:1

Rachel Harrison

Derek Flood

David Duce

Theory and Framework

The usefulness of mobile devices has increased greatly in recent years allowing users to perform more tasks in a mobile context. This increase in usefulness has come at the expense of the usability of these devices in some contexts. We conducted a small review of mobile usability models and found that usability is usually measured in terms of three attributes; effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. Other attributes, such as cognitive load, tend to be overlooked in the usability models that are most prominent despite their likely impact on the success or failure of an application. To remedy this we introduces the PACMAD (People At the Centre of Mobile Application Development) usability model which was designed to address the limitations of existing usability models when applied to mobile devices. PACMAD brings together significant attributes from different usability models in order to create a more comprehensive model. None of the attributes that it includes are new, but the existing prominent usability models ignore one or more of them. This could lead to an incomplete usability evaluation. We performed a literature search to compile a collection of studies that evaluate mobile applications and then evaluated the studies using our model.