The research reported herein was designed to assess whether the presence of noise elements in a visual display affects the detection of target letters at the perceptual or feature extraction level of processing, as well as at the decision level, and more specifically, whether (a) input or processing channels operate in an independent or interactive fashion and (b) how the spatial relation between signal and noise items affects detection performance. In order to distinguish among current theories proposed to account for the influence of noise items on visual processing, a forced-choice detection task was modified to incorporate a cueing procedure, which permitted the independent variation of signal-noise similarity, confusability, and proximity. The results provide evidence for feature-specific inhibition at the perceptual level, and a theory is proposed that assumes hierarchically organized, limited-capacity feature detectors and feature-specific inhibitory channels.

The use of speech recognition in the area of office automation has received little experimental evaluation. Most speech recognition studies have involved testing in military command and control or aircraft environments. Speech control of spreadsheet and word processing programs is discussed by various manufacturers and in the popular press, yet no empirical data have been presented to substantiate its use in these applications.In one of the few studies applicable to the office environment (Murray, Van Praag, and Gilfoil, 1983), the use of speech to control cursor motion was found to be less efficient than the use of traditional cursor keys.

This presentation describes the development of the user interface for a windowing system implemented on a multi-tasking professional workstation used in the office environment. The project was completed under severe schedule restrictions which impacted the implementation tradeoffs for user interface design. The functional and user interface goals for the windowing system were as follows: • The user should be able to subdivide the screen with a different application running in each window. • The user should be able to quickly and easily move between open windows/applications. • Operation of an application within a window should be the same as when the application is full screen. • The user should be able to quickly alternate between a partial view and a full-screen view of an application.

No abstract

No abstract