Paper Reading 25: Using Language Complexity to Measure Cognitive Load for Adaptive Interaction Design

Reference Information:

Title: Using Language Complexity to Measure Cognitive Load for Adaptive Interaction Design
Names of authors: M. Asif Khawaja, Fang Chen, Nadine Marcus
Presentation venue: IUI '10 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces

Summary:

Performing any task exerts some amount of cognitive load on the brain. This load increases as the complexity of the task and the number of the tasks increase. An adaptive interaction system, which is aware of the users’ current cognitive load, can change its response, presentation and interaction flow to improve users’ experience and their task performance. In this paper, the authors propose a novel speech content analysis approach for measuring users’ cognitive load, based on their language and dialogue complexity. The authors have analysed the transcribed speech of operators working in computerized incident control rooms and involved in highly complex bushfire management tasks in Australia. The resulting patterns of language complexity show significant differences between the speech from cognitively low load and high load tasks. The authors also discuss the value of using this approach of cognitive load measurement for user interface evaluation and interaction design improvement.

Discussion:

The paper was very interesting to read. I wasn't aware of the effect that cognitive load has on our actions how tasks with heavy cognitive should be performed. It was interesting to know that performing a job slowly delivers better performance is a task is very complex. I always thought that performing a job task slowly makes it ineffective, however, it does make sense that some tasks need to be performed slowly since more caution has to be taken while performing complex tasks.