ABSTRACT
A scientific psychology should not only help us to understand our own human nature, it should help us in our practical affairs. The information-processing view will lead to a surge of new ways for making psychology relevant to our human needs. What might an applied information-processing psychology of human-computer interfaces be like and how might it be used? When psychology is applied in the context of a specific task, much of the activity hardly seems like psychology at all, but rather like an analysis of the task itself. The psychology of the human-computer interface is generally individual psychology: the study of a human behaving within a non-human environment. The information-processing revolution in cognitive psychology is just beginning. An applied psychology that is theory-based, in the sense of articulating a mechanism underlying the observed phenomena, has advantages of insight and integration over a purely empirical approach.
