ITR: Managing human attention

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

Since at least the early 1900s, the supply of information and communication has been growing faster than our ability to consume it. From the information producers' viewpoint, much information is wasted, in the sense that it doesn't reach those to whom it is relevant. For the consumer, the glut of information makes it increasingly difficult to find what is relevant, useful or enjoyable. This "poverty of attention" also occurs in the domain of interpersonal communication, where informal and spontaneous interaction, a hallmark of managerial and professional work, generates interruptions and overload. In this project, the PI and his team will develop, integrate and use principles from social psychology, computer science, economics, and interaction design to devise ways of economizing on attention in a communication rich environment. Specifically, they will develop, deploy and evaluate techniques to mediate among the often competing demands of responding to a barrage of communication requests that compete for attention when performing a primary task, such as driving a car or interviewing a client. To do so, the PI team will use sensing technology and machine learning techniques to identify a worker's current task and degree of interruptibility. They will display team members' availability to a subset of communication partners and use principles developed in economics and social psychology to balance the competing demands on the worker's attention. They will also use principles developed in interaction design to build lightweight, peripheral displays and context-aware interaction techniques that allow people to briefly and simply comprehend information without disrupting their primary task. Although the principles and techniques developed will be applicable across many domains, this project will make use of a specific context for development and testing, namely improving communication efficiency of mobile health care workers caring for the elderly. The PI team consists of a social psychologist, a computer scientist, and a designer, who have been working previously both individually and jointly on problems of human attention; part of this project will involve integrating results from research efforts already underway. Broader Impacts: Issues of managing attention and information overload are pervasive in our increasingly connected and technological society. Development of principles and specific techniques for addressing these issues has the potential for large benefit and widespread impact beyond the eldercare domain. In addition, support for the project's target domain - mobile eldercare workers - offers the potential of direct social benefit to a rapidly aging population. The project will lead to better understanding of design principles for economizing on attention, to prototype development, and to lab and field testing of the models, all of which will help save on the most precious of human resources - our attention.