Using Personality Factors to Predict Interface Learning Performance

The Personal Equation of Complex Individual Cognition during Visual Interface Interaction

“…For example, in our research, we have found that persons who tend to believe in that good things that happen to them are due to "luck" (an external locus of control) are predictably slower in target identification. [15]. But the same cannot be said for more cognitively complex problems, such as comparing and contrasting multi-dimensional glyphs [16]; for these tasks, believing in luck seems to give users a decided advantage.…”

“…Our recent research has demonstrated that personality factors can predict efficiency during varying task types [15]. We designed a series of tasks we asked participants to complete in two visual interfaces using the same dataset: menudriven web application, and an information visualization using direct interaction on hierarchical graphs.…”

“…The PEI has three current and future end goals: the prediction of analytical performance based on inherent differences [15], [16], the ability to inform real-time interface individuation, and the creation of fuller-bodied user profiles, broken down by the reasoning tasks performed [17].…”

“…In addition, we administered several longstanding and well-documented psychometric measures to participants [15]. These measures were created to measure personality traits such as neuroticism (a tendency toward emotional instability), extraversion (a tendency toward sociability or seeking the company of others), and trait anxiety, which is a tendency to be more anxious generally, regardless of the environment.…”

“…Post-study analysis includes evaluating the trending of the psychometric items with measured outcomes. In addition, followup testing such as factor analysis is done to isolate highly predictive psychometric items or groups of items, such as in [15] for a particular type of reasoning task. This allows us to delineate our findings by cognitive process and compare multiple interfaces or problem-solving environments in hopefully a more even fashion.…”