Applications for cognitive user modeling

Abstract

Usability of complex dynamic human computer interfaces can be evaluated by cognitive modeling to investigate cognitive processes and their underlying structures. Even though the prediction of human behavior can help to detect errors in the interaction design and cognitive demands of the future user the method is not widely applied. The time-consuming transformation of a problem "in the world" into a "computational model" and the lack of fine-grained simulation data analysis are mainly responsible for this. Having realized these drawbacks we developed HTAmap and SimTrA to simplify the development and analysis of cognitive models. HTAmap, a high-level framework for cognitive modeling, aims to reduce the modeling effort. SimTrA supports the analysis of cognitive model data on an overall and microstructure level and enables the comparison of simulated data with empirical data. This paper describes both concepts and shows their practicability on an example in the domain of process control. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.