Continuing with the recent success of ORCHID affiliated researchers at this years Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI2014), we are happy to announce that our paper – “Measuring the Effect of Think Aloud Protocols on Workload using fNIRS” has been accepted at the prestigious conference. Below are the associated bibliography entry and abstract:

Pike, M., Maior, A. H., Porcheron, M., Sharples. S and Wilson, L. M. (2014). Measuring the Effect of Think Aloud Protocols on Workload using fNIRS To appear in: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’14). ACM Press.

Abstract

The Think Aloud Protocol (TAP) is a verbalisation technique widely employed in HCI user studies to give insight into user experience, yet little work has explored the impact that TAPs have on participants during user studies. This paper utilises a brain sensing technique, fNIRS, to observe the effect that TAPs have on participants. Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a brain sensing technology that offers the potential to provide continuous, detailed insight into brain activity, enabling an objective view of cognitive processes during complex tasks. Participants were asked to perform a mathematical task under 4 conditions: nonsense verbalisations, passive concurrent think aloud protocol, invasive concurrent think aloud protocol, and a baseline of silence. Subjective ratings and performance measures were collected during the study. Our results provide a novel view into the effect that different forms of verbalisation have on workload during tasks. Further, the results provide a means for estimating the effect of spoken artefacts when measuring workload, which is another step towards our goal of proactively involving fNIRS analysis in ecologically valid user studies.

This paper gives an early indication of the brain imaging technology fNIRS value as a rich source of evaluation information when utilised in a user study setting. The technology can aid us in understanding at a cognitive level, the impact a particular interface (in the context of a task) may have upon an individual who is interacting with it. This may inform designers of potential issues relating to their interfaces before it is released, potentially reducing the risk of the user experiencing an erroneous interaction (e.g. wrong button is pushed, information is misinterpreted, next step is unknown, etc). In relation to ORCHID, this is especially important when we consider the disaster management domain application vignette originally proposed, for example, envisage a situation where a team of emergency workers cooperate through a standard smartphone interface. During non-situational testing, certain factors such as stress, emotional trauma and exhaustion are difficult to simulate effectively, and as such potentially burdensome interaction features may not be identified in the smartphone system. However, using fNIRS we will be able to identify relative increases in cognitive actions (described as Mental Workload) on a per interaction basis, allowing us to identify potentially problematic elements associated with the system.

This is just one of the potential application areas, we are also exploring adaptive interfaces – consider in the same emergency worker scenario, a situation where the workers are wearing a portable fNIRS sensor. What if we could adapt the information needs of an individual response worker to his/her available cognitive resources? This would ensure the efficiency of the response system as a whole (e.g. all response workers are working efficiently) without them entering a state of mental overload i.e. a state where there is more information than they are able to process – clearly a dangerous state to enter during an emergency situation.

We believe that this research offers an exciting new avenue of research that is especially relevant to the core research areas that ORCHID is interested in exploring. Feel free to get in touch with suggestions, comments and collaborations that you think will benefit from this type of research.