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The Emergence of Interactive Behavior: A Model of Rational Menu Search

Published: 18 April 2015 Publication History

Abstract

One reason that human interaction with technology is difficult to understand is because the way in which people perform interactive tasks is highly adaptive. One such interactive task is menu search. In the current article we test the hypothesis that menu search is rationally adapted to (1) the ecological structure of interaction, (2) cognitive and perceptual limits, and (3) the goal to maximise the trade-off between speed and accuracy. Unlike in previous models, no assumptions are made about the strategies available to or adopted by users, rather the menu search problem is specified as a reinforcement learning problem and behaviour emerges by finding the optimal Markov Decision Process (MDP). The model is tested against existing empirical findings concerning the effect of menu organisation and menu length. The model predicts the effect of these variables on task completion time and eye movements. The discussion considers the pros and cons of the modelling approach relative to other well-known mod- elling approaches.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2015
4290 pages
ISBN:9781450331456
DOI:10.1145/2702123
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 18 April 2015

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Author Tags

  1. cognitive modelling
  2. eye movements
  3. interaction science
  4. markov decision process
  5. menu search
  6. reinforcement learning
  7. visual search

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  • EU-funded SPEEDD
  • Air Force Office of Scientific Research

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CHI '15
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CHI '15: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 18 - 23, 2015
Seoul, Republic of Korea

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CHI '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 486 of 2,120 submissions, 23%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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