A cognitive modeling of the user's exploratory behavior with prior knowledge

Abstract

Users tend to learn and use system functions and mechanisms through interacting with devices without referring to manuals or task instructions. In this exploratory behavior, a user's non-planned, opportunistic interaction activity is guided by the user's current knowledge and the system's responses. The user's interaction reasoning is bidirectional, including both top-down and bottom-up search processes. A top-down search is usually task-based and a bottom-up search is predominantly device-oriented. In this paper, we probe a method of cognitive modeling to account for the user's exploratory behavior. This cognitive model includes the user's prior knowledge of declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, and meta-knowledge. Declarative knowledge concerns the characteristics and structures of tasks and interfaces. Procedural knowledge more directly affects the selection of the operations and sequences during exploration. Meta-knowledge is the knowledge that guides the use of the user's task knowledge and interface knowledge. Through user observations, we analyzed users' opportunistic behavior while interacting with two convergence devices, and elicited the users' prior knowledge utilized during the exploration.