Reference Information
Using Language Complexity to Measure Cognitive Load for Adaptive Interaction Design
- M. Asif Khawaja, Fang Chen, and Nadine Marcus
- IUI 2010, Hong Kong, China
Using Language Complexity to Measure Cognitive Load for Adaptive Interaction Design
- M. Asif Khawaja, Fang Chen, and Nadine Marcus
- IUI 2010, Hong Kong, China
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| Not exactly what this paper is talking about, but it's pretty American. |
This particular study was designed to measure the cognitive load of a person during more strenuous and less strenuous tasks. As the cognitive load increases, stress can increase with it and make it more difficult for a person to perform a crucial task. The writers of this paper hope to expand in this field with their study so better design can be implemented.
They noted that they used data from a previous study with people of bushfire management teams. The tasks the teams had to carry out had varying degrees of difficulty and time constraints, so this worked out well for collecting data. Essentially, they made transcripts the speech used by the team members, and analyzed it for word usage and complexity and sentence format. Their hypothesis was that as difficulty and stress increased, vocabulary complexity decreased while sentence structure would become longer, more complicated, and also incomplete.
They were correct about sentence structure, but vocabulary complexity increased with difficulty and stress. This was opposite to what they predicted, but they think this kind of data can help shed some light on the proper measuring of cognitive load in the future. They would like to improve their further studies by adding more grammatical and language parameters so they can include more parts of speech in the study.
Discussion
I had never really thought about this cognitive load idea before, and honestly I would have thought vocabulary would go down with stress level. I’ve never paid attention to how I behave under stress, but I might pay more attention. Also, the cognitive load seemed similar to how a person’s mood directly affects how well they can be open to figuring something out. This kind of work seems pretty abstract, but I can definitely see how it can be extremely helpful in increasing productivity overall.
I had never really thought about this cognitive load idea before, and honestly I would have thought vocabulary would go down with stress level. I’ve never paid attention to how I behave under stress, but I might pay more attention. Also, the cognitive load seemed similar to how a person’s mood directly affects how well they can be open to figuring something out. This kind of work seems pretty abstract, but I can definitely see how it can be extremely helpful in increasing productivity overall.
I wish they had given some kind of explanation as to why vocabulary complexity decreases, since I and I think most people would think when you are nervous you are just trying to finish your speech and try to make yourself clear.
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