Jon May

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2004

May, J. (2004) Theory in HCI. In W.S. Bainbridge (Ed.). Berkshire Encyclopaedia of Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 2, pp. 723-727. Berkshire Publishing : Great Barrington, MA.

Theory is the backbone of all sciences, but many researchers feel that the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) lacks a theory. HCI designers are often skeptical of the contribution that theory makes to their creative work. Engineers can be impatient with the abstract nature and lack of specific guidance provided by theoretical accounts of HCI. In light of these critiques, many people assert that theory has no role in HCI. To answer this assertion, one needs to understand the nature of scientific theories and review the history of theoretical development in HCI before envisaging the prospects for a theory in HCI. Private Proofs - email for preprint

Kavanagh, D.J., Andrade, J., and May, J. (2004) Beating the Urge: Implications of Research into Substance-Related Desires Addictive Behaviors, 29, 1359-1372.

Despite the advent of improved pharmacological treatments to alleviate substance-related desires, psychological approaches will continue to be required. However, the current psychological treatment that most specifically focuses on desires and their management Ñ cue exposure Ñ has not lived up to its original promise. This paper argues that current psychological approaches to desire do not adequately incorporate our knowledge about the factors that trigger, maintain and terminate episodes. It asserts that the instigation and maintenance of desires involve both associative and elaborative processes. Understanding the processes triggering the initiation of intrusive thoughts may assist in preventing some episodes, but occasional intrusions will be inevitable. A demonstration of the ineffectiveness of thought suppression may discourage its use as a coping strategy for desire-related intrusions, and mindfulness meditation plus cognitive therapy may help in accepting their occurrence and letting them go. Competing tasks may be used to reduce elaboration of desires, and competing sensory images may have particular utility. The application of these procedures during episodes that are elicited in the clinic may allow the acquisition of more effective strategies to address desires in the natural environment. doi:10.1016/j.addbeh.2004.06.009

May, J., Andrade, J., Panabokke, N., and Kavanagh, D. (2004) Images of Desire: Cognitive Models of Craving. Memory, 12(4) 447-461.

Cognitive modelling of phenomena in clinical practice allows the operationalization of otherwise diffuse, descriptive terms such as craving or flashbacks. This supports the empirical investigation of the clinical phenomena and the development of targeted treatment interventions. This paper focuses on the cognitive processes underpinning craving, which is recognised as a motivating experience in substance dependence. We use a high-level cognitive architecture, Interacting Cognitive Subsystems (ICS), to compare two theories of craving: Tiffany's theory centred on the control of automated action schemata and our own Elaborated Intrusion theory of craving. Data from a questionnaire study of the subjective aspects of everyday desires experienced by a large non-clinical population are presented. Both the data and the high-level modelling support the central claim of the Elaborated Intrusion theory that imagery is a key element of craving, providing the subjective experience and mediating much of the associated disruption of concurrent cognition. Published PDF - doi:10.1080/09658210444000061

May, J. (2004) An information Processing view of fringe consciousness Psyche URL: http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/symposia/mangan/pdf/may.pdf

Commentary on: Mangan, B. (2001) Sensation's ghost: the non-sensory"fringe" of consciousness. Psyche, 7(18), October 2001 http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v7/psyche-7-18-mangan.html

In posing the sense of 'Rightness' as a quality-of-processing measure, Mangan runs the risk of a homuncular argument, since some process needs to observe Rightness, as well as the sensory qualia. Interacting Cognitive Subsystems (ICS) is an information processing account of cognitive activity that is concordant with Mangan's arguments, but which avoids the need for any supervisory system or central executive. The approach models thought as the flow of information between nine different levels of mental representation, and includes a distinction between an unselective diffuse awareness of all active levels of representation, and a selective focal awareness of a single topic of processing. A distinction is introduced between two non-sensory representations: propositional and implicational meaning. While the propositional representations can be easily verbalised, the sensory and implicational representations can only be verbalised via propositional representations. All representations are accessible, although implications and sensory representations are harder to express verbally. As a principled model, ICS can be mapped into anatomical and neural models, supporting argumentation about physical pathways in the brain and functional pathways in the mind. PDF

Buehner, M.J. and May, J. (2004) Abolishing the effect of reinforcement delay on human causal learning. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 57B (2), 179-191.

Associative learning theory postulates two main determinants for human causal learning: contingency and contiguity. In line with such an account, participants in Shanks, Pearson, and Dickinson (1989) failed to discover causal relations involving delays of more than two seconds. More recent research has shown that the impact of contiguity and delay is mediated by prior knowledge about the timeframe of the causal relation in question. Buehner and May (2002; in press) demonstrated that the detrimental effect of delay can be significantly reduced if reasoners are aware of potential delays. Here we demonstrate for the first time that the negative influence of delay can be abolished completely by a subtle change in the experimental instructions. Temporal contiguity thus is not essential for human causal learning. Private PDF - DOI:10.1080/02724990344000123

Andrade, J. and May, J..(2004) Instant Notes in Cognitive Psychology. Oxford: BIOS Ltd.

Cognitive psychology, the study of human thought processes, is an increasingly broad discipline. Conventional laboratory studies are now supplemented by research using new techniques of brain imaging and computer modeling. The result for students and teachers of the subject has been to choose between hefty textbooks that cover all aspects of the field in detail, but make it hard to see the wood for the trees, and shorter books that offer only partial coverage of the field. Instant Notes in Cognitive Psychology aims to cover all the key aspects of the subject in a succinct and structured format, enabling the reader to appreciate the important developments in the field and see how new findings can help to improve our understanding of human cognition.

Students new to cognitive psychology often find the topic rather abstract. It tends to be driven not by discoveries but by attempts to explain phenomena that are already known to us, for example how we suddenly hear someone mention our name in a noisy room or why we remember some things for years and forget others immediately. At first encounter, cognitive psychology can seem a way of making familiar things strange. The benefits of studying the subject are a deeper understanding of the complexity and beauty of the processes that enable us to perform mental feats that we take for granted. We have tried to make things easy for the reader new to the field by writing clearly, dividing the subject matter into manageable chunks, and providing signposts to related topics. We have taken particular care with two topics, emotion and consciousness, that are often poorly covered or neglected altogether by other cognitive psychology texts. These are two of the most exciting areas of psychological research and constitute core aspects of human mental life, influencing many aspects of cognition and contributing hugely to our sense of who we are.

We have written this book for undergraduates taking introductory psychology or more specialized cognitive psychology courses, A-level psychology students, postgraduate students or researchers entering psychology from other disciplines, and people studying for the cognitive psychology component of the British Psychological Society qualifying examination. The book can be used as preparatory reading, a revision aid, or a core text supplemented by lectures and further reading... Buy from Amazon

Barnard P, Scott S, Taylor J, May, J. and Knightley W (2004) Paying attention to meaning. Psychological Science, 15, 179-186.

Several paradigms show that responses to one event compromise responses to a second event for around 500ms. Such effects are generally attributed to transient perceptual storage and central capacity limitations on processing perceptual information in the first event. In a task where targets could be distinguished only by their meaning, we varied the semantic relationship between distractors and targets following at different lags. Semantic relatedness alone is shown to produce a classic ³attentional blink.² We conclude by discussing how attention theory might best accommodate these effects. PDF - doi:10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.01503006.x

2003

May, J. and Barnard, P. (2003) Cognitive Task Analysis in ICS. In D. Diaper and N. Stanton (Eds) Handbook of Task Analysis in HCI pp.291-325.

Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) techniques seek to model the mental activity of a task operator. With the rise of computing artefacts, the focus of CTA has changed from supporting the tutoring of operators, to modelling knowledge application, to modelling cognitive processes. Descendants of knowledge based approaches include GOMS, and produce quantitative temporal behavioural predictions for well defined interfaces. The increasing pace of design, and the dominance of small design teams has led to a demand for more flexible techniques. This chapter describes a particular approach to CTA using a cognitive theory called Interacting Cognitive Subsystems (ICS). A CTA in ICS requires a prior task analysis to have been conducted, but the analyst then identifies the configuration of cognitive processes necessary to transform information about the task, through the phases of goal formation, action specification and action execution, for novices, occasional (normal) and expert operators. The availability of procedural knowledge, experiential and abstracted memories influence the ease of processing, and the scope a design offers for their development informs ease of learning and skill acquisition. The location of a particular form of buffered processing predicts subjective awareness of different aspects of the task, and of task complexity. Two notations supporting analysis are described. The close coupling of the analytic approach and the underlying theory enables a CTA in ICS to provide supportive evaluation, allowing iterative redesign. It is also allowing further research linking ICS to formal models of systems analysis (Syndetics) and to other methods of TA, namely TKS, to extend both techniques to collaborative and multiple task performance.Private PDF - email for offprint

Buehner, M.J. and May, J. (2003) Rethinking Temporal Contiguity and the Judgment of Causality: Effects of Prior Knowledge, Experience, and Reinforcement Procedure Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 56A, 865-890.

Time plays a pivotal role in causal inference. Nonetheless most contemporary theories of causal induction do not address the implications of temporal contiguity and delay, with the exception of associative learning theory. Shanks, Pearson, and Dickinson (1989) and several replications (Reed, 1992, 1999) have demonstrated that people fail to identify causal relations if cause and effect are separated by more than two seconds. In line with an associationist perspective, these findings have been interpreted to indicate that temporal lags universally impair causal induction. This interpretation clashes with the richness of everyday causal cognition where people apparently can reason about causal relations involving considerable delays. We look at the implications of cause-effect delays from a computational perspective and predict that delays should generally hinder reasoning performance, but that this hindrance should be alleviated if reasoners have knowledge of the delay. Two experiments demonstrated that a) the impact of delay on causal judgment depends on participants' expectations about the timeframe of the causal relation and b) the free-operant procedures used in previous studies are ill-suited to study the direct influences of delay on causal induction, because they confound delay with weaker evidence for the relation in question. Implications for contemporary causal learning theories are discussed. - QJEP:A online via Ingenta - doi: 10.1080/02724980244000675

Johnson, P., May, J., and Johnson, H. (2003) Introduction to Multiple and Collaborative Tasks. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 10(4), 277-280.

Editorial introducing Guest-edited Special Issue of ToCHI on Modelling Multiple and Collaborative tasks. - DOI: 10.1145/966930.966931

2002

Andrade, J., Kemps, E., Werniers, Y., May, J. and Szmalec, A. (2002) Insensitivity of visual short-term memory to irrelevant visual information. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, A, 55, 753-774.

Several authors have hypothesized that visuo-spatial working memory is functionally analogous to verbal working memory. Irrelevant background speech impairs verbal short-term memory.We investigated whether irrelevant visual information has an analogous effect on visual short-term memory, using a dynamic visual noise (DVN) technique known to disrupt visual imagery (Quinn and McConnell, 1996b). Experiment 1 replicated the effect of DVN on pegword imagery. Experiments 2 and 3 showed no effect of DVN on recall of static matrix patterns, despite a significant effect of a concurrent spatial tapping task. Experiment 4 showed no effect of DVN on encoding or maintenance of arrays of matrix patterns, despite testing memory by a recognition procedure to encourage visual rather than spatial processing. Serial position curves showed a oneitem recency effect typical of visual short-term memory. Experiment 5 showed no effect ofDVN on short-term recognition of Chinese characters, despite effects of visual similarity and a concurrent colour memory task that confirmed visual processing of the characters. We conclude that irrelevant visual noise does not impair visual short-term memory. Visual working memory may not be functionally analogous to verbal working memory, and different cognitive processes may underlie visual short-term memory and visual imagery. Private PDF - QJEP:A online via Ingenta - DOI:10.1080/02724980143000541

May J, Buehner MJ and Duke D (2002) Continuity and Cognition. International Journal on Universal Access in the Information Society. 1, 252-262

Designing an artefact for continuous interaction requires the designer to consider the way that the human user can perceive and evaluate its observable behaviour, in order to make inferences about its state and plan and execute their own stream of continuous behaviour. Understanding the human point of view in continuous interaction requires an understanding of human causal reasoning, of the way humans perceive and structure the world, and about human cognition. We present a framework for representing human cognition and show briefly how it relates to the analysis of structure in continuous interaction, and the ways in which it may be applied in design. PDF

2001

May, J. (2001) Human-Computer Interaction. In N. J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes (editors) International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Pergamon, Oxford. pp. 7031-7035. Private PDF - Science Direct Abstract

May, J (2001) Specifying the Central Executive may require complexity. In J.Andrade (ed) Working Memory in Perspective. Psychology Press: Hove. pp261-277.

The Central Executive (CE) component of the Baddeley and Hitch (1974) model of Working Memory (WM) was initially intended to avoid the need for the model to deal with phenomena that went beyond the scope of short term memory problems. The application of the model beyond laboratory tasks has inevitably brought more and more of these 'complex' aspects of task performance into play. While the general conception of the CE as an attentional organiser or contention scheduler has allowed some of these aspects to be dealt with, there remains no detailed account of how the CE is organised, nor how it functions, and more importantly, how it might fail to function. With the rise of interest in 'dysexecutive syndrome' this has become a critical problem for the application of the WM model.

In this chapter, I argue that the problem lies in the absence of a clear distinction in the WM model between processing and storage resources, and in the lack of detail about how the CE communicates with the slave subsystems. This has led to two possible views on the operation of the slave subsystems. They can either be conceived of as storage mechanisms that passively receive their particular form of representation from the CE, hold it, and then return it to the CE for processing; or they can actively process and modify the representations themselves, organising and elaborating the content. The latter role requires the development and application of stored knowledge by each subsystem, something that is not specified within the original conception of WM. These two views are not always recognised as being distinct by WM researchers.

An alternative approach is exemplified by Barnard (1985; 1999). The emphasis of his Interacting Cognitive Subsystems (ICS) model is upon the flow of mental representations between different levels of representation, and in the competition for processing resources within each cognitive subsystem rather than between them. This chapter follows on from the previous chapter by presenting an account of CE phenomena within the ICS model. As a more detailed description, ICS is able to make distinctions where the WM model cannot, particularly with regard to the internal functions of all subsystems and on the interchange of information between the two central subsystems. The breadth of the ICS model means that is less economical in its accounts of traditional WM tasks, but as the scope of research moves onto more complex tasks, especially the investigation of the role of the CE, a more highly specified model may be necessary. Private PDF - email for copy

Duke, D.J., Duce, D.A., Barnard, P.J., and May, J. (2001) Human-Computer Protocols. In C. Stephanidis (Ed),Universal Access In HCI, Volume 3 of the Proceedings of HCI International 2001. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp. 296-300. ISBN 0-8058-3609-8 (Volume 3)

We have recently developed an approach to modelling interaction that encompasses not just the device, but also aspects of a cognitive model. This integrated framework, called syndetic modelling, has been used to reason about the interplay between cognitive and computational resources deployed within an interaction. Here, a new view on this integrated framework is described. We consider the interaction between user and device as forming a hierarchy of protocols, covering different levels of abstraction over the information exchanged. As the protocol is layered, we can discuss interaction in terms of different levels of granularity, better accommodating the representation of new technologies such as vision tracking and speech which can be considered as 'continuous' at some levels. We conclude by summarising classes of mathematical representation that can be utilised to represent and reason within such a model. Private PDF - DOI: 10.1007/s10209-002-0026-6

Barnard, P.J., May, J., Duke, D. and Duce, D. (2001) Macrotheory for Systems of Interactors. In J.M. Carroll, (Ed.), Human Computer Interaction in the New Millennium. New York: ACM Press. pp 31-52.

Information technologies now offer what appear to be almost boundless possibilities for supporting human endeavor and interaction. While we can develop technologies with relative ease, developing theories of interaction is considerably harder. Historically, the advance of theory has lagged design by a substantial margin. Some now argue that theory should be abandoned. Others envisage only a minor role for theory as the interdisciplinary story of HCI unfolds. We argue the case for continued intellectual investment in theory development. We envisage new forms of theory based around the concept of 'systems of interactors' and the mathematical modeling of their behavior. An overlapped structure of macro- and microtheories is explored as a possible basis not only for explanation and prediction, but also for binding together the contributions from different disciplines. Novel routes to formalizing and applying such theories provide a host of interesting and tractable problems for research in the new millennium. Private PDF - email for copy

Kavanagh, D., Freese, S., Andrade, J. and May, J., (2001) Effects of Visuospatial Tasks on Desensitization to Emotive MemoriesBritish Journal of Clinical Psychology, 40, 267-280.

Objectives: Intrusive memories of extreme trauma can disrupt a stepwise approach to imaginal exposure. Concurrent tasks that load the visuo-spatial sketchpad (VSSP) of working memory reduce the vividness of recalled images. This study tested whether relief of distress from competing VSSP tasks during imaginal exposure is at the cost of impaired desensitization.

Design: This study examined repeated exposure to emotive memories using 18 unselected undergraduates and a within-subjects design with 3 exposure conditions (Eye Movement; Visual Noise; Exposure Alone) in random, counterbalanced order.

Method: At Baseline, participants recalled positive and negative experiences, and rated the vividness and emotiveness of each image. A different positive and negative recollection were then used for each condition. Vividness and emotiveness were rated after each of 8 exposure trials. At a Post-exposure session a week later, participants rated each image without any concurrent task.

Results: Consistent with previous research, vividness and distress during imaging were lower during eye movements than in exposure alone, with passive visual interference giving intermediate results. A reduction in emotional responses from Baseline to Post was of similar size for the 3 conditions.

Conclusion: Visuospatial tasks may offer a temporary response aid for imaginal exposure without affecting desensitization. PDF

Barnard, P., Scott, S. and May, J., (2001) When the Central Executive lets us down: schemas, attention and load in a generative working memory task, Memory, 9, 209-221.

Participants were asked to generate a single sequence of numbers in between two bounds. By varying the requested sequence length and way in which the question is posed, this paradigm enables assessment of the contributions to central executive functioning of schema, focus of attention, and load. With sequences of three or four numbers, a quarter of the sample failed fully to comply with the instructions. They generated an incorrect number of numbers or went outside the specified bounds. With sequences of six numbers, more than half of the sample infringed one or more of the constraints. Participants consistently generated sequences with particular generic properties. The overall frequency and patterns of infringements suggest that a substantial proportion of participants focused their conceptual attention on sequence content and often neglected the problem of how the length and boundary constraints were going to be evaluated either before or during response delivery. Private PDF - Memory online via Ingenta - doi: 10.1080/09658210143000191

Scott, S. Barnard, P.J. and May, J. (2001) Specifying executive function in random generation tasks. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 54A, 641-664.

The Interacting Cognitive Subsystems framework, ICS (Barnard, 1985) proposes that central executive phenomena can be accounted for by two autonomous subsystems, which process different forms of meaning: propositional and schematic (implicational) meanings. The apparent supervisory role of the executive arises from limitations on the exchange of information between these and other cognitive subsystems. This general proposal is elaborated in four experiments in which a total of 1,293 participants are asked to spontaneously generate a large verbal number to varying task constraints, with the intention of specifying the representations of number and task that underlie responses. Responses change systematically according to participants' use of explicit propositional information provided by the instructions, and inferred implicational information about what the experimenter is requesting. There was a high error rate (between 6% and 24%), participants producing responses that did not fall within the large range indicated by the instructions. The studies support the distinction between propositional and implicational processing in executive function, and provide a framework for understanding normal executive representations and processes. Private PDF - QJEP:A Online via Ingenta - doi: 10.1080/02724980042000327

May, J., Alcock, K. and Robinson, L. and Mwita, C. (2001) A computerised test of speed of language comprehension unconfounded by literacy. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 15, 433-444

A computerised version of the Silly Sentences task developed for use with children (Baddeley et al, 1995) is found to be equivalent to the pencil-and-paper version from the SCOLP Test (Baddeley et al, 1992) with UK undergraduates, and is usable by a sample of young UK children. Because the sentences are presented aloud instead of being written, the computerised test is not affected by literacy skills. Translated into Kiswahili, the task was used in Tanzanian schools, despite the absence of an electricity supply and a very different cultural background. The decision latencies had a test-retest reliability of 0.69 over 5 months, and were independent of age and baseline decision speed. The task appears appropriate for longitudinal studies, including those in developing countries. Given its simplicity and the correlations with the original SCOLP version of the task, it may also be useful in studies on literate adults. PDF - doi: 10.1002/acp.715

2000

Barnard, P. and May, J. (2000) Towards a theory-based form of cognitive task analysis of broad scope and applicability. In J. M. C. Schraagen, S. F. Chipman, and V. L. Shalin (Eds.) Cognitive Task Analysis. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. pp 147-163.

All forms of task analysis rely on the idea that human action can be decomposed, and that the decomposition can be used to reason about what people should do and know to complete a task. With simple technologies, the process of developing an analytic focus was readily tractable. The allocation of function among people in a team and between people and technology was straightforward. Tasks were thought of as primarily involving vigilance, perceptual-motor skill, memory, decision making, communications, or some simple combination of these capabilities. Today, the situation is less straightforward. As tasks have become more intricate, knowledge intensive and subject to increasingly integrated forms of technological support, traditional forms of task decomposition appear to have overly restricted scope. It is unlikely that there will be a universally applicable form of cognitive task analysis (CTA). Indeed, in this volume, the very diversity of approaches to the definition of CTA, and to its conduct at individual and team levels, well illustrates the extent of the wider problem. Methods or models developed to deal with specific situations are of undeniable value in that they are used to generate predictions about performance times, human error, or to support other forms of reasoning about how tasks are best carried out by a team in a setting. However, any method is likely to remain of limited utility if its use is restricted to a specific type of task, application domain, or technology. Ideally, the methods and models we develop should generalize from one task context to another, and from one generation of technology to the next. They should also be able to address, at least to some level of approximation, the complete web of relationships that bind together the perceptual, motor, cognitive and even emotional facets of human performance. The requirement of being able to generalize implies a role for theoretical principles. The requirement of being able to address all facets of mental life implies a role for an integrated, macro-theory of our mental architecture rather than relying upon a collection of micro-theories. We follow Newell's (1989) vision that more unified forms of cognitive theory are not only desirable but a tractable research problem. As with the EPIC mental architecture (Kieras et al., this volume), we also assume that practical forms of CTA with enhanced scope can be approached from the standpoint of theoretical constraints on human mental representation and information processing. PDF

May, J (2000) Perceptual Principles and Computer Graphics. Computer Graphics Forum, 19, 271-279.

Now that the technology allows us to present photorealistic animations of scenically lit objects acting in real-time, the problem of computer graphics has changed from making displays recognisable, to ensuring that users notice what they are intended to see, without being distracted by irrelevant information. Worse than that, the use of veridical information runs the risk of introducing unpredictable sources of information, that can lead users to infer all sorts of unwanted details. Traditional visual theory, based upon bottom-up models of feature extraction from the retinal image, cannot inform us about these aspects of perception. Broader based cognitive theories are required that integrate visual perception with attention, memory, emotion and inference. Theories such as Barnard's Interacting Cognitive Subsystems enable phenomena such as change blindness and the craft principles of film editing to be interpreted within a common framework, supporting extrapolation to computer graphics. PDF - DOI: 10.1111/1467-8659.00320

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