Psychology

1
Psychology

• Cognitive
• Post-cognitive
• Social
• and not the emotional stuff

2
Cognitive Psychology

• Head stuff
• Human information processing model
• Memory short vs. long term
• 7 2 items can be held in STM at once
• Memory or remembering??
• Mental models how we reason
• Very useful in HCI (single-user systems)

3
Post-cognitive

• Beyond knowledge in the head looks at culture,
  artefacts, language etc
• Distributed cognition
• Activity theory
• Situated action

4
Distributed Cognition (Hutchins)

• University of California, San Diego
• Knowledge in the head in the world
• Very detailed analyses of people work
• Changes in the way information is represented
  mechanisms by which it passes around
• Deck of ship use of compass etc

5
A use of distributed cognition

• Group of 3 students writing an essay
• Compared how they worked face to face to using
  phone shared editing software
• Build up of shared understanding
• f2f talk, writing (on shared pieces of paper)
  consultation of books and lecture notes
• distributed talk, use of editor, books/notes
• through repairing breakdowns / disputes

6
Breakdown repair
C We've got a problem with um if you look the
line just above um point 1 and what you've got
(.) is halfway along, threshold step function er
and that's wrongN Right. Tum tum tum tum -
somethingC It should be "relies on a easily
differentiable"S Yeah, I mean it's not easily
takenC threshold
functionC Yeah - a step function isn't and it
can't be used S Right, sorryC And I
explain that later on in my part
7
Appealing to external authority
S No no, you could teach them, I'm sure C No!
That wasn't teaching. What it was doing was, you
were setting up the state N No, I think you're
getting confused with Hopfield nets there,
Charles C Simon! N No, I think you are.
Hopfield nets you set up the er S Yeah I've got
N the weights initially and it's all a bit of a
fix S I've actually I've got a formula in
front of me em. It says perceptron training
delta wj equals target minus output times the
input. C OK do it
8
Activity theory (Engeström)

• From Soviet psychology developed further by Kari
  Kuuti, Bonnie Nardi
• An activity
• has a motive
• is a collective phenomenon
• has a subject, who understands the motive
• exists in transforms an environment
• has a history cultural background.

9
Activity model
Artefact (computer)
User
Task
Community
Rules
Division of labour
10
Situated action (Lave / Wenger)

• What people do think about is based on the
  context within which they do it
• e.g. learning in a classroom is not necessarily
  transferable outside it
• Learning involves apprenticeship
• People work learn within communities of
  practice
• informal, pervasive
• based on traditions, values, knowledge

11
Social psychology cooperation

• Nature of cooperation prisoners dilemma game
  (Axelrod)

Silence
Defection
Silence
1/1
0/5
5/0
3/3
Defection
12
Social psychology groups

• Group lifecycle forming, storming, norming,
  performing
• Group topography wheel gt circle???
• Group dynamics roles, leadership,
  decision-making, conflict