Task elaboration or label following: an empirical study of representation in human-computer interaction

Abstract

A study measured the time experienced Macintosh users took to create a graph from pre-existing daa including the assignment of vtiables to axes in a dialog box. The study revealed that the task took less time when the items in the dialog box were labeled in terms of one problem representation, even when the instructions were written in terms of another. The Kitajima and Poison model explains this as resulting from the problem representation being elaborated with task-speeific schemata during the instruction comprehension process.