Abstract
Today's ever-increasing amount of data places new demands on cognitive ergonomics and requires new design ideas to ensure successful human-data interaction. Our aim was to identify the cognitive factors that must be considered when designing systems to improve decision-making based on large amounts of data. We constructed a task that simulates the typical cognitive demands people encounter in data analysis situations. We demonstrate some essential cognitive limitations using a behavioural experiment with 20 participants. The studied task presented the participants with critical and noncritical attributes that contained information on two groups of people. They had to select the response option (group) with the higher level of critical attributes. The results showed that accuracy of judgement decreased as the amount of information increased, and that judgement was affected by irrelevant information. Our results thus demonstrate critical cognitive limitations when people utilise data and suggest a cognitive bias in data-based decision-making. Therefore, when designing for cognition, we should consider the human cognitive limitations that are manifested in a data analysis context. Furthermore, we need general cognitive ergonomic guidelines for design that support the utilisation of data and improve data-based decision-making.
Original language | English |
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Journal | Behaviour & Information Technology |
Volume | 38 |
Issue number | 10 |
Pages (from-to) | 1038-1047 |
Number of pages | 10 |
ISSN | 0144-929X |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 3 Oct 2019 |
MoE publication type | A1 Journal article-refereed |
Fields of Science
- 113 Computer and information sciences
- Human-data interaction
- cognition
- decision-making
- cognitive ergonomics
- INFORMATION
- DECISIONS
- MEMORY
- ORDER