[ont.events] SUNY Buffalo Cognitive/Linguistic Sciences--D. Norman

rapaport@ (William J. Rapaport) (12/16/87)

                STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT BUFFALO

                     The Steering Committee of the

              GRADUATE STUDIES AND RESEARCH INITIATIVE IN

                   COGNITIVE AND LINGUISTIC SCIENCES

                                PRESENTS

                            DONALD A. NORMAN

                    Institute for Cognitive Science
                  University of California, San Diego

                   THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY THINGS

How do we manage the tasks of everyday life?  The traditional answer  is
that  we  engage  in  problem solving, planning, and thought.  How do we
know what to do?  Again, the traditional answer is  that  we  learn,  in
part  through  experience,  in part through instruction.  I suggest that
this view is misleading.  Less planning and problem solving is  required
than  is  commonly  supposed.   Many  tasks  need never be learned:  the
proper behavior is obvious from the start.  The problem space  for  most
everyday  tasks  is  shallow  or narrow, not wide and deep as the tradi-
tional approach suggests.  The minimization of the problem space  occurs
because  natural  and contrived properties of the environment combine to
constrain the set of possible actions.  The effect is as if one had  put
the knowledge required to do a thing on the thing itself:  the knowledge
is in the world.

I show that seven stages are relevant to the performance of  an  action,
including  three  stages  for execution of an act, three for evaluation,
and a goal stage.  Consideration of the rule of each stage,  along  with
the  principles  of natural mappings and natural constraints, leads to a
set of psychological principles for  design.   Couple  these  principles
with  the  suggestion that most real tasks are shallow or narrow, and we
start to have a psychology of everyday things and everyday actions.

The talk itself is meant to be light and enjoyable.  However, there  are
profound implications for the type of theory one develops for simulating
cognitive computation.  There are  serious  implications  for  massively
parallel  structures  (what  we  call Parallel Distributed Processing or
connectionist approaches), for memory storage and retrieval via descrip-
tions  or coarse coding, and, in general, for a central role for pattern
matching, constraint satisficing, and nonsymbolic processing  mechanisms
in  human cognition.   But the main implications of the work are for the
design of understandable and usable objects.

                        Monday, February 1, 1988
                               4:00 P.M.
                        Park 280, Amherst Campus

There will also be an informal evening discussion at a place and time to
be  announced.   Call  Bill  Rapaport (Computer Science, (716) 636-3193,
3180) for further information.