Cognition: Memory, Attention, and Learning - Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems - page 154

The experimenters hypothesized that the increased cost of typing in the direction to
move the tile lead users to think more and learn at a higher level. When users could
just click, they created simple rules and learned implicitly (Golightly et al. 1999 ).
5.5 Summary
Memory, attention, and learning make up some of the core aspects of cognition of
users. These are well studied and well understood areas in psychology, and their
results are increasingly able to be packaged and applied to interface design.
There remain interesting areas for basic and applied research in these areas as
technology creates new opportunities. These areas include multi-tasking, pro-
spective memory aids, how to help users learn from systems, how to avoid biases
in memory, how to help users manage things they need to remember (like pass-
words), and how to direct the user's attention appropriately across both short time
spans (e.g., an hour) and long time spans (e.g., years of learning and working with
a system like Unix). Knowledge of the details of these aspects of human behavior
allow better interfaces to be built.
5.6 Other Resources
If you would like to learn more about the areas covered in this chapter, it is well
worth reading the topic by Alan Baddeley from 2004 on book on human memory.
Baddeley is one of the pioneers of human memory research as we understand it
today. This text renders his portfolio of scientific research accessible to a general
audience, offering insights that will change the way you think about your own
memory and attention:
Baddeley, A. (2004). Your memory: A user's guide. Buffalo, NY: Firefly Books.
You may well have heard of the magic number 7 about human memory before.
If you'd like to read a paper that shows how this number was demonstrated to
apply to human memory, it is worth seeing if you can get a copy of Miller's classic
paper, published in a key psychology journal, Psychological Review. We note,
however, that while this finding is still cited in the popular press as a well-known
feature of human memory, subsequent studies have added more nuance to the
observation-familiarity with the domain, modality (visual, auditory), and memory
enhancement tactics can contribute to how many items are remembered:
Miller, G. A. (1956). The magic number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our
capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63, 81-97.