Naïve and experienced judgments of stimulus-response compatibility: implications for interface design

Area of Science:

• Human-Computer Interaction
• Cognitive Psychology
• Usability Engineering

Background:

• Design guidelines often recommend stimulus-response (S-R) compatibility for optimal performance.
• Prior research indicates that users' intuitive judgments of S-R mapping effectiveness can be inaccurate.
• Designers may not reliably predict which display-control configurations lead to superior user performance.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the accuracy of naïve judgments regarding stimulus-response compatibility.
• To examine the influence of S-R mode relations and mapping presentation (pure vs. mixed) on performance judgments.
• To assess how user experience with different S-R configurations affects performance estimations.

Main Methods:

• Conducted three experiments using two-choice tasks with left-right spatial stimuli and responses.
• Evaluated performance judgments under conditions of S-R mode relations and pure versus mixed mapping presentations.
• Compared initial performance judgments with those made after gaining experience with various S-R configurations.

Main Results:

• Initial performance judgments for two-choice and four-choice S-R tasks were found to be inaccurate.
• Naïve judgments did not reliably predict actual performance differences between compatible and incompatible mappings.
• User performance estimations improved significantly with limited experience using the tested S-R configurations.

Conclusions:

• Users' initial, unaided judgments of stimulus-response compatibility are unreliable for design decisions.
• Experience significantly enhances the accuracy of performance estimations for S-R configurations.
• Designers should consider user training or iterative testing rather than relying solely on intuitive judgments of S-R compatibility.