Head-mounted displays for virtual environments facilitate an immersive experience that seems more real than an experience provided by a desk-top monitor [18]

This article investigates how and why people remember the existence of hidden information. To obtain data on this kind of memory phenomenon, we observed an experienced programmer doing her own work at her own computer. The programmer's interaction with the computer generates much more information than fits on the screen at once. Most of this information is hidden, scrolled out of the way by the programming environment to make Direct all correspondence to: Erik M. Altmann, George Mason University, Human Factors & Applied Cognition, Mailstop 2E5, Fairfax, VA 22030 USA; E-Mail: altmann@gmu.edu

Near-termmemory (NTM) is proposed as a construct foranalyx30 thememory that experts build up and use asthey solve a problem in their domain of expertise. Large amounts of information are processed in such situations, andany particular detail could become important later, so performance is facilitatedby maintaining long-termmemory access to as much detail as possible. Precise analye& of suchmemory is difficult to achieve with experimentation or observation alone, so computational simulation is used as the analyV)&J method. A computational process model grounded in cognitivetheory (Soar) is constructed to fit extensive fine-grained behavioral data from an expert programmer. The model's structures and processes are then inspected for insights into NTM. Structurally the model's NTM consists of fine-grain perceptual, semantic, and episodic items whoseavailability is tied to cues from the encoding context. Quantitatively much more detail enters NTM than is ever retriev...

interaction, artificial intelligence. People make use of hidden external information, first recalling that it exists and then finding it. This dissertation investigates the memory phenomena involved in recalling that external information exists. We present data in which a programmer navigates to hidden features in a real-world task environment. We then present a model that accounts for this navigation by encoding and using simple episodic memories for having seen a feature. The model inherits constraints from its underlying cognitive architecture, which specify that learning is passive and pervasive, and that it creates simple memories that depend on the feature itself being present as a cue. The nature of these memories requires the model to recall features to its mind’s eye as cues in order to retrieve them. This retrieval process requires domain knowledge: familiarity with features in order to imagine them, and an idea of when it would be useful to recall having seen them. Recalling that a hidden feature exists prompts the model to scroll to that feature. Thus the model’s access to external information is a function of passively-encoded episodic memories, and retrieval of these memories using knowledge. As a claim applied to people, this appears to overlap with a recently-

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A major component of any field data collection activity is finding and navigating to sample units, such as housing units and businesses. The degree of effort allocated to this phase varies widely. However, these tasks are more challenging when staff receive assignments in unfamiliar areas or when sample units are hard to find, as may be the case with unmarked

Wayfinding, the ability to recall the environment and navigate through it, is an essential cognitive skill relied upon almost every day in a person’s life. A crucial component of wayfinding is the construction of cognitive maps, mental representations of the environments through which a person travels. Age, disease or injury can severely affect cognitive mapping, making assessment of this basic survival skill particularly important to clinicians and therapists. Cognitive mapping has also been the focus of decades of basic research by cognitive psychologists. Both communities have evolved a number of techniques for assessing cognitive mapping ability. We present the Cognitive Map Probe (CMP), a new computerized tool for assessment of cognitive mapping ability that increases consistency and promises improvements in flexibility, accessibility, sensitivity and control. The CMP uses a tangible user interface that affords spatial manipulation. We describe the design of the CMP, and find that it is sensitive to factors known to affect cognitive mapping performance in extensive experimental testing.