Analogical Interfaces

NSF IRI-9020603
This research addressed the questions of: 1) cognitive mechanisms involved in high bandwidth interaction with our environment and 2) methods to exploit those mechanisms for HCI. The research investigated the hypothesis that, in humans, even highly abstract cognition is strongly dependent on information processed automatically through attunements to constraints in our environment. By approaching cognitive difficulty as an allocation of processing problem methods were developed to minimize difficulty by constructing equivalent situations (analogies) which substitute externalized constraints for internalized rules. Research included two sets of psychological experiments involving problem isomorphs and process visualizations and development of a general method for deriving efficient analogies. This project supported a dissertation and eighteen technical publications.