Naïve and experienced judgments of stimuluS—Response compatibility: implications for interface design

Abstract

Many design guidelines encourage maintaining stimulus—response compatibility whenever possible. Payne found that naïve judgments for different stimulus—response (S—R) mappings were not very accurate, and suggested that designers may not be able to predict whether a particular display-control configuration will lead to better performance than another. Three experiments were conducted to determine whether naïve judgments for two-choice tasks in which stimuli and responses involve left—right spatial information are sensitive to (a) the influence of S—R mode relations and (b) pure versus mixed presentation of compatible and incompatible mappings. Initial performance judgments for these conditions were not very accurate, nor were those for four-choice tasks of the type studied by Payne, but subjects' estimates of performance improved with relatively little experience using the different S—R configurations.