Literature Review

Today, I continued the literature review. The focus is on the experiment design.

The paper Reducing Cognitive Load by Mixing Auditory and Visual Presentation Modes (Mousavi, Low & Sweller, 1995) introduced 6 experiments, which tested the hypotheses in levels.Experiments are designed according to the results from the previous experiments, to test some new hypotheses, so that at last, they could explain the whole thing more thoroughly and clearly. Although, for the honours project, the time may not allow me to do more than one experiment, it is a good idea to apply in the further study.

Another paper, Free-form Pen-Input as Evidence of Cognitive Load and Expertise (Ruiz, Taib & Chen, 2011), explored the use of the scratchpad and the cognitive load. I think the reason for why pen input needs to be researched is quite important for me. It provides background information for my project.

Literature Review - 4

Today, I reviewed some papers on pen input in details. I want to get some inspiration for my experiment design from those papers. I summarised their experiments in the table.

From my opinion, the second one which asks participants to compose sentences from the given words is too complicated, especially for the recognition part. As to the math problems, it also has too many variables in the experiment. What is more, the aim of this experiment is to help to improve the student learning process, so it is not very close to my purpose. Therefore, I prefer the map-task and target-finding.

My issue is that it is still unsure whether I could get access to the external dataset on time. Therefore, I am preparing to design some simple experiment.

Literature Review - 3

Today I read through parts of an online tutorial  named Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Human Factors Awareness Course, which covers some branches of Human-Computer Interaction. Specifically, I read Human Factors Model and Cognition sections in details. If I can get access to the research dataset to analyse the cognitive states of the team working, I will also go through the last section -- Team Performance.

In the sub-section introducing working memory, it used the Wicken's Model, which stresses a different aspect than Baddeley's Model. It focused on the human information processing, starting from outside stimuli to the perception and response mechanism. In this model, working memory plays a critical role in the selection of decision and response. I think this model can be used to explain some performance in the actual experiments.

* The picture is from http://www.hf.faa.gov/Webtraining/Cognition/CogFinal008.htm

Then, I also read a paper "Using Pen Input Features as Indices of Cognitive Load" from our research group, which is very close to my topic. It helped me to get a brief idea of how to collect pen input and use the Malahanobis distance (MDIST), a weighted Euclidean distance, to measure the degeneration of shapes, which could be an indicator of cognitive overload.

The supervisor reminded me to think about my experiment design within these two weeks, so I will find some papers on the experiment collecting pen input.

Reference
http://www.hf.faa.gov/Webtraining/Cognition/CogFinal008.htm

Ruiz, N., Taib, R., Shi, Y., Choi, E. & Fang, C., 2007, Using Pen Input Features as Indices of Cognitive Load, 9th international conference on Multimodal interfaces, USA

Literature Review - 2

Today, I had a meeting with the supervisor discussing the direction of the literature searching.

The supervisor recommended some important conferences to me, like ICMI (International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces), CHI (ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems), some workshops and a local forum OzCHI. Additionally, it would also be useful to browse some pages for the leading teams working in the same research areas.

We also talked about some concerns of the published time of the papers, because some papers are written about ten years ago. I was not sure whether I should read them. From the Research Method Lecture in the uni, it recommended the papers published within about three years. Of course, for the basic theories, the published time does not matter very much,  but if I do want to know the current condition of the research area, I have to find more up to date ones. Finally, I decided to pay more attention to the papers from conferences held in 2011.

Literature Review - 1

Spending three months on a summer research project, which is also about the measurement of human cognitive state, I've collected some famous, important and basic papers in this area. 

In order to lay a more concrete foundation, I decide to reread some very important papers in this week, and for those which are also relevant but I didn't have enough time to read in details before, I would spend more time on them this time.

The basic theories behind this research project is Baddeley's Working Memory Model and the Cognitive Load Theory (CLT). First of all, I reread Alan Baddeley's Working Memory (1992), which discussed the central executive and the two subsidiary systems -- phonological loop for auditory information and the visuospatial sketch pad for the visual information in the working memory. I also searched the later paper of Baddeley published about ten years after the previous one. It introduced another component in the working memory called episodic buffer, which holds the temporary multimodal code.

Then, I also reviewed another paper talking about the cognitive load measurement (Fred Paas, et al., 2003). This paper explained the definition of cognitive load theory and three main measurements. If I am going to design my own experiment, I think the task performance and subjective rating are the top choices.

Reference

Baddeley, A., 1992, Working Memory, Science, 1992 255: 556-559

Baddeley, A., 2000, The episodic buffer: a new component of working memory, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 4., No. 11

Paas, F., Tuovinen, J., Tabbers, H. & Van Gerven, P., 2003, Cognitive Load Measurement as a Means to Advance Cognitive Load Theory, Educational Psychologist, 38(1), 63-71