The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction
The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction
Human Problem Solving
User technology—from pointing to pondering
HPW '86 Proceedings of the ACM Conference on The history of personal workstations
Computer support for knowledge workers: A review of laboratory experiments
ACM SIGMIS Database
Modeling the user in natural language systems
Computational Linguistics - Special issue on user modeling
User technology: from pointing to pondering
A history of personal workstations
Usability and hardcopy manuals: evaluating research designs and methods
SIGDOC '90 Proceedings of the 8th annual international conference on Systems documentation
Getting around the task-artifact cycle: how to make claims and design by scenario
ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)
The user's mental model of an information retrieval system
SIGIR '85 Proceedings of the 8th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
A mental model can help with learning to operate a complex device
CHI '93 INTERACT '93 and CHI '93 Conference Companion on Human Factors in Computing Systems
The influence of mental models and goals on search patterns during web interaction
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
An Authoring Technology for Multidevice Web Applications
IEEE Pervasive Computing
FRAGILITY IN EXPERTISE: A STUDY IN REACTIVE SCHEDULING
ACM SIGCHI Bulletin
The nature of device models: the yoked state space hypothesis and some experiments with text editors
Human-Computer Interaction
Internalization and the use specificity of sevice knowledge
Human-Computer Interaction
Straight-party voting: what do voters think?
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security - Special issue on electronic voting
The roles of conceptual device models and user goals in avoiding device initialization errors
Interacting with Computers
The impact of task complexity on people's mental models of MedlinePlus
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
Technology Acceptance and Performance: An Investigation into Requisite Knowledge
Information Resources Management Journal
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It has often been suggested that users understand and reason about complex systems on the basis of a mental model of the system's internal mechanics. This paper describes an empirical study of how mental model knowledge is used in operating a stack calculator. One group of naive users were taught step-by-step procedures for solving typical problems on the calculator. A second group of naive users were taught the same procedures in conjunction with an explicit model of the calculator's stack mechanism. The users then solved problems on the calculator while thinking aloud. Analysis of the performance of these two groups indicates that the model had little effect in routine problem solving situations, but significantly improved performance for novel problems. Analyses of the think-aloud protocols indicate that the users employed five distinct modes of problem solving: skilled methods, problem reduction strategies, a conversion algorithm, model-based problem space search, and methods-based problem space search. Skilled methods, problem reduction strategies and the conversion algorithm were used for solving more routine problems and did not necessarily depend on mental model knowledge. Problem space search was used in the novel problems. For the model users, the states and operations of the stack mechanism served as the problem space to be searched for a problem solution. In contrast, the no-model users employed a less effective search strategy based on the recombination of pieces of known procedures. These results indicate that explicitly teaching naive users an appropriate mental model of a system can provide a psychologically effective and robust basis for operating the machine.