Context and self-selection effects in name learning

• Published in: Behaviour & information technology Vol. 4; no. 1; pp. 3 - 17
• Main Authors: Jones, W. P., Landauer, T. K.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Taylor & Francis Group 01.01.1985
• ISSN: 0144-929X; 1362-3001
• DOI: 10.1080/01449298508901783

In laboratory learning tasks, people's spontaneously chosen responses to stimuli have been found to be more memorable than equivalent responses chosen by someone else. In a computing situation, this suggests that it might be desirable to let new users select their own names for commands. However, it can also be argued that new users cannot name a command effectively, because they lack sufficient knowledge concerning the overall structure of the command set and its referents. Since existing psychological research has little to say about the relationship between contextual or structural knowledge and selection mode (self versus other), these factors were crossed in an experiment where subjects learned names for different objects (personnel data categories and descriptions of text-edit operations). In subsequent recall tests, beneficial effects were observed both for context knowledge and for the self-selection of names. Several interactions involving these factors were also significant. For personnel data categories, the context manipulation had no effect on performance when subjects were allowed to select their own names, but helped if they had to learn assignments made by others. For the less familiar text editing descriptions, context information helped performance in general and considerably enhanced the benefits of self-selection.