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When you look at a graph, table or indeed any diagram or illustration, what do you see? And, how does the eye, nay brain, choose what we look at first?
Colour, shade, dimension all aid the process, but sadly, disparate animal that we are, we all choose differently no matter what. So, if how we present the information is the key to how we digest it, what is the key to how we present it? Baffled?
Well one Huddersfield lecturer wasn't, to the extent that he's even received an award from the international Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) - a body of world-wide membership - for his work on tracking the movement of people's eyes.
Cognitive psychologist Dr David Peebles (pictured left), together with a colleague at the University of Sussex, were the recipients of this year's prestigious Jerome H. Ely Human Factors Article Award for the most outstanding article in the 2003 volume of the Society's journal, Human Factors . The award was presented at the HFES Annual Meeting, held in New Orleans last year.
David's research, in the emerging field of 'human-information interaction', sought to understand the basic thinking processes that are involved when people use diagrams and other forms of information artefact. His two main aims being to develop a theory of the mental processes and representations that allow people to interrogate what they see, and to discover which diagrams are more suitable for the task, or should we say... more pleasing to the eye.
Heavy stuff, but not as science fictional as it sounds, as David explains: "My research won the award because it combined two state-of-the-art techniques - eye-tracking and a process called 'cognitive modelling'. Using the eye tracker, I recorded where people were looking as they solved problems using the two types of graph that displayed the same information, but in different visual form. This gave me a good idea of the information they were retrieving from where their eyes were moving.
"The second part of the study involved writing computer programs that carried out the tasks using the same graphs. One of the main assumptions of cognitive science is that human thinking can be understood as computation or information processing, or quite simply, what goes on in people's heads can be simulated on computers."
The computer system David uses to write the programs, ACT-R, has simulated eyes and hands that can look over the graphs, and, even more surprisingly, can move the mouse and type responses using the keyboard!
Says David: "Using these programs, I can simulate the actions of the people in the experiment. I can record where the computer programs look as they interact with the diagram and the time it takes the programs to solve the problems. If the programs look at the same parts of the diagram in the same order and time as the people, this is good evidence that the program is using the same set of computational procedures as the people to solve the problem."
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