ABSTRACT
Human-computer interaction (HCI) is fundamentally an information-processing task. When interacting with a computer or any technological device, a user has specific goals and subgoals in his or her mind. This chapter aims to survey methods used to study human information processing and summarize the major findings and the theoretical frameworks developed to explain them. It analyses the methods, findings, and theories to HCI issues to illustrate their use. The rise of the human information-processing approach in psychology is closely coupled with the growth of the fields of cognitive psychology, human factors, and human engineering. Any theoretical approach makes certain presuppositions and tends to favor some methods and techniques over others. Information-processing researchers have used behavioral and, to an ever-increasing extent, psychophysiological and neuroimaging measures, with an emphasis on chronometric methods. Signal detection theory is often used as the basis for analyzing data from such tasks.
