HCI Foundations

Human Memory
Learning outcomes
 Understand on how information are perceived/heard/felt
is taken into memory.
 Familiarize with the limitations that human memory has.
 Design based on the memory constraints.
 What happens to information after I perceive?
Structure of a human memory
 From senses to memory
 act as buffers for stimuli received through the senses.
 iconic memory for visual stimuli, echoic memory for aural
stimuli and haptic memory for touch.
 Information is passed from sensory memory into short-
term memory by attention, thereby filtering the stimuli to
only those which are of interest at a given time.
 Information received by sensory memories is quickly
passed into a more permanent memory store, or
overwritten and lost.
Short-term memory (STM)
 Short-term memory or working memory acts as a
‘scratch-pad’ for temporary recall of information.
 Short-term memory can be accessed rapidly, in the order
of 70 ms.
 But information can only be held there temporarily, in the
order of 200 ms.
 Try it!!
 Limited capacity
 The ‘magic number’ 7 ± 2 items (Miller’s law, 1956)
 Information that is not retained is lost
 Retained means committed to long term memory
 Also known as learning
 Look at the following number sequence:
265397620853
 Now try the following sequence:
44 113 245 8920
Therefore chunking information can increase the short-term
memory capacity
Design principles - STM
 Keep list of Options short
 Give users tools for reducing options
 Don’t expect users to remember stuff
Long-term memory (LTM)
 Any thing remembered for more than few seconds, must
be copied from STM to LTM
 Also called as learning
 Transfer to LTM
 Association
 Repetition
Associative Memory

Source : edx
 Items are associated to each other in classes, and may inherit
attributes from parent classes. This model is known as a
semantic network

Source : edx
Memorization - repetition
 Few examples – difficult to remember
Likelihood of remembering
 Strength of Association
 Recency
 Frequency (memories not exercised will fade away)
Design focus - LTM
 Use metaphors
 Leverage standards and consistency
 Avoid asking users to memorize stuff
 Prefer recognition over recall.
Key takeaways
 Design based on the constraints and limitations put on
STM and LTM.