Cognitive Science and Its Applications for Human-computer Interaction

Book excerpt: The field of human-computer interaction is striving to provide the conceptual foundations for designing computer tools and the environment needed to perform increasingly complex and specialized tasks. To achieve this goal, human-computer interaction relies on the meeting of specialized, expert minds. This book is organized around the theme of multidisciplinary research and the contribution of cognitive science to research projects. Research projects may have overlapping goals, but use widely diverse methodologies, or use similar methodologies to investigate quite different questions. The methodologies and techniques come from diverse fields: scaling and measurement, computer science, experimental psychology, and linguistics. These act in synergy to solve the problems posed by human-computer interaction. Each of the research projects presented in this book investigate some critical question on the path of progress in human-computer interaction.