Informatics

Lecture 9 The Human Aspect

Introduction
We need to study
the human aspects
of informatics for a
variety of reasons

Introduction
People will be using the processed
information to make decisions
People may be the source of the
information (unwittingly?)
People are very good at some
things and very poor at others

Introduction
We can consider the human aspect
under 3 main headings:
Perception seeing/hearing etc.
Cognition understanding
Behaviour social/cultural etc.
This can only however be a very
brief overview of the topic

Perception
This is the actual process
of detecting a stimulus
the most important of
which will be visual and
aural stimuli although
undoubtedly interfaces
utilising touch, smell and
taste will develop

Vision
A number of perceptual aspects are
important in terms of how visual
stimuli are detected:
Acuity
Colour
Stereopsis
Luminance and Contrast

Acuity
The limit of human visual acuity is
better than 1 arc minute (1/60
degree)
6/6 vision (20/20) is equivalent
to 1 arc minute
We actually have several acuity
limits depending on the task:

This is the basis of the Retina Display

Colour
We can typically distinguish at least
16 million colours which corresponds
to 24 bits (R G and B channels each
of 8 bits)
Around 8% of males have some
colour deficiency there are various
types and degree:

Colour
Our sensitivity to colour peaks in the
green (555nm)

Stereopsis
We have the ability to see the
world in stereo because we have 2
eyes
In actual fact the 2 different views
play only a minor role in perceiving
depth and around 5% of people do
not have stereo vision but are
unaware of it

Luminance/Contrast
We have a dynamic range of
around 100:1 in terms of
luminance or brightness
This means that we cannot detect
contrast ratios ( the ratio of white/
black brightness) above around
100 after a certain point
everything just looks black

Luminance/Contrast
Our contrast
sensitivity depends
on the size of the
detail (the spatial
frequency) and this
can change
significantly with
age

Aural
Our hearing range is about 20Hz to
20kHz reducing at the top end
with age
Our peak sensitivity is at about
4kHz
We can spatially locate objects by
sound but the accuracy depends
on the frequency of the sound

Aural
When under high workload we can
easily disregard the audio input
(are men better at this?)
We can detect significant sounds
within very high noise levels the
cocktail party effect

Cognition
At this point we assume that a
stimulus has been perceived but
now we need to make some sense of
it:
Detect.RecogniseIdentify

Cognition
People are very good at the things
that have evolved for our survival
finding meaning in noisy or
incomplete information
We are poor at simple recall of
things that have no ecological
significance for us e.g. numbers

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Cognition
Our interpretation of what we
perceive is also influenced by
things that we have learned
through our education culture and
training we perceive what we
expect to perceive at times

A
BIRD
IN THE
THE HAND

Behavioural
Having perceived and hopefully
understood the information being
presented to us there are still things
that may affect how that information
is utilised to reach a decision
Psychology of Intelligence Analysis
Richards J Heuer Jnr

Bias
We continue to interpret events in
the same way despite new
evidence to the contrary a reevaluation is seen as cognitively
expensive.
This is the bane of Intelligence
Analysis

Error
We interpret the information
incorrectly either because of bias
or due to a mistake. Assistive
technologies can help here as can
multi-modal presentation.

Vigilance
Humans make very poor
supervisors in terms of monitoring
events which rarely change
The increasing use of automation
is actually making the situation
worse where the person is only
called on to act in an emergency

Social Engineering/Human Hacking

Psychology is increasingly being
used to gain access to information
via the weaknesses of people
Micro expressions use and detect
Body language use and detect
Neurolinguistic Programming
Etc. etc.