Design of Everyday Things [117]
5 Confirmatory evidence comes from the fact that although long-term residents of Britain still complain that they confuse the one-pound coin with the five-pence coin, newcomers (and children) do not have the same confusion. This is because the long-term residents are working with their original set of descriptions, which did not easily accommodate the distinctions between these two coins. Newcomers, however, start off with no preconceptions and must form a set of descriptions to distinguish among all the coins; in this situation, the one-pound coin offers no particular problems. In the United States, the one-dollar coin never became popular and is no longer being made, so the equivalent observations cannot be made.
6 The suggestion that memory storage and retrieval is mediated through partial descriptions was put forth in a paper with Danny Bobrow (Norman & Bobrow, 1979). We argued that, in general, the required specificity of a description depends on the set of items among which a person is trying to distinguish. Memory retrieval can therefore involve a prolonged series of attempts when the initial retrieval description yields the wrong result, so that the person must keep trying to retrieve the desired item, each retrieval attempt coming closer to the answer and helping to make the description more precise.
7 D. C. Rubin & W. T. Wallace (1987), Rhyme and reason: Integral properties of words (Unpublished manuscript). Given just the cues for meaning (the first task), the people Rubin and Wallace tested could get the three target words used in these examples only o percent, 4 percent, and o percent of the time, respectively. Similarly, when the same target words were cued only by rhymes, they still did quite poorly, guessing the targets correctly only o percent, o percent, and 4 percent of the time, respectively. Thus, each cue alone offered little assistance. Combining the meaning cue with the rhyming cue led to perfect performance: the people got the target words 100 percent of the time.
8 A. B. Lord (1960), The singer of tales (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 27.
9 Lord (1960) points out that this length is excessive, probably produced only during the special circumstances in which Homer (or some other singer) dictated the story slowly and repetitively to the person who first wrote it down. Normally the length would be varied to accommodate the whims of the audience, and no normal audience could sit through 27,000 lines.
10 The quotation is from ‘Ali Baba and the forty thieves, in The Arabian nights: Tales of wonder and magnificence, selected and edited by Padraic Colum, from the translation by Edward William Lane (New York: Macmillan, 1953). The names here are in an unfamiliar form. We are much more used to having the magic phrase be “Open Sesame,” but according to Colum, “Simsim” is the authentic transliteration.
11 The quote comes from Winograd & Soloway’s interesting study (1986), On forgetting the locations of things stored in special places, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 115, 366-372.
12 The description is taken from an earlier book, Learning and memory (Norman, 1982).
13 Landauer (1986) provides the most sophisticated attempt I have yet seen to estimate the amount of material people might know in his Cognitive Science article “How much do people remember? Some estimates of the quantity of learned information in long-term memory.”
14 This story is taken from Hutchins, Hollan, & Norman (1986, p. 113), slightly reworded. I am of course indebted to our renamed colleague for allowing his thought processes to be aired in public.
15 Surprisingly little is known about the properties of mental models. There are two books with Mental models as their title, one the report of a conference, edited by Gentner and Stevens (1983), the other, by Johnson-Laird (1983), an examination of a particular form of mental model that might be used in problem solving and reasoning. The first