Cognitive Representation of Common Ground in User Interfaces

Abstract

We argue that Clark’s theory of participant representations of common ground in joint activities between people is relevant to the design of human-computer interaction. Features of common ground can be shown to exist in current interaction models suggesting that computers as sophisticated information processors can be legitimately construed as participants in the interactive process. Software, though, is rarely designed to explain itself or to demonstrate a knowledgeable awareness of the user’s concerns. We describe an effort to provide a principled basis for this capacity in the form of an embedded cognitive simulation representing an application’s task and user related common ground.

This work was conducted at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory with sponsorship from the Office of Naval Research.