ABSTRACT
The fundamental idea is that the contents of people’s knowledge, including their theories and beliefs, can be an important explanatory concept for understanding users’ behavior in relation to systems. This idea may seem obvious and straightforward, but in fact it suggests research questions that go against the grain of most contemporary cognitive psychology, which has concerned itself much more with the general limits of the human-information-processing system, such as the constraints on attention, retrieval, and processing. Thus, cognitive psychology tends to focus on the structure of the mind, rather than its contents. (The major exception to the rule that cognitive psychology has been obsessed with architecture over content is the work on expertise, and even here, recent work has focused on explanations of extreme performance in terms of general independent variables such as “motivated practice,” i.e., Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Romer (1993), rather than epistemological analysis.)
Refocusing attention on mental content about particular domains is what made mental models a popular idea in the early 1980s, such as the papers in Gentner and Stevens (1983). For example, work on naïve physics (i.e., McClosky, 1983) attempts to explain people’s reasoning about the physical world, not in terms of working memory limits or particular representations, but in terms of their beliefs about the world, such as the nature of their theories of mechanics or electricity, for example. This focus on people’s knowledge, theories, and beliefs about particular domains transfers naturally to questions in HCI, where practical interest may focus on how users conceive the workings of a particular device, how their beliefs shape their interactive behavior, and what lessons may be drawn for design.
