Final HCI Seminar for this academic year:

Time/Place: Wednesday, April 30 , McBryde 212, 4 pm

Speaker: Professor Steven D. Sheetz, Accounting

Title: 3D Cognitive Maps: What, Why, and How

Recently group support systems (GSS) technology has been applied to
support a cognitive mapping approach that attempts to identify
perceptions shared by group members. The approach implements common
cognitive mapping techniques beginning with brainstorming of concepts,
classification of the concepts into categories, rating the importance
of the categories, and identifying causal relationships between
categories.  Several "side benefits" result from using the technology.
One side benefit is the ability to enhance the cognitive maps with
other responses of the participants.  One such enhancement is
inclusion of the perceived "importance" of categories directly in the
cognitive map.  Three measures of perceived "importance" of the
categories are available from data collected using the GSS approach to
cognitive mapping.  The first measure is the category ratings of
importance, the second measure the number of concepts placed in each
category during classification, and the third measure is the number
relationships connected to the categories in the cognitive map.  The
first measure is provided explicitly by the participants, the second
and third measures are derived from the participant's responses to
other questions, thus they are implicit ratings of importance.  By
combining these measures to represent the importance of categories in
the cognitive maps, participants can see how their implicit responses
are congruent (or incongruent) with their explicit importance
ratings. Difficult issues remaining to be addressed and future
research directions will be discussed.