What People Know about Electronic Devices: A Descriptive Study.
Abstract
This report presents some informal descriptive results on the nature of peoples' natural knowledge of electronic devices. In the first study, expert and non-expert subjects were given an electronic device to examine and describe orally. The devices ranged from familiar everyday devices, to those familiar only to the expert, to unusual devices unfamiliar even to an expert. In the second study, college students were asked to describe everyday devices from memory. The results suggest that device knowledge consists of the major categories of what the device is for, how it is used, its structure in terms of subdevices, its physical layout, how it works, and its behavior. A preliminary theoretical framework for device knowledge is that it consists of a hierarchy of schemas, corresponding to a hierarchial decomposition of the device into subdevices, with each level containing the major categories of information. (Author)
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 1982
- Accession Number
- ADA122189
Entities
People
- David E. Kieras
Organizations
- University of Arizona