Sharon Wood

University of Sussex · Department of Informatics

Objective: To investigate effective methods for communicating the personalized risks of alcohol consumption, particularly to young people. Methods: An interactive computerized blood alcohol content calculator was implemented in Flash based on literature findings for effectively communicating risk. Young people were consulted on attitudes to the...

Only very few studies exist linking preference in controller usage to physiological effects and user experience (UX). While many games already feature different controller layouts, there is a lack of research on whether giving control to participants over their button choices affects their UX in the game. In our study, participants were given two p...

Problem solving involves adapting known problem solving methods and strategies to the task at hand (Schunn & Reder, 2001) and cognitive flexibility is considered to be "the human ability to adapt the cognitive processing strategies to face new and unexpected conditions of the environment" (Cañas et al., 2005, p. 95). This work presents an ACT-R 6.0...

Past estimates of the numbers of migrants caused to relocate as a result of climate change have ranged from millions to billions worldwide. Attempts to quantify the numbers of people affected have commonly been based around calculating the numbers of ‘environmental refugees’ by projecting physical climate changes, such as sea-level rise or rainfall...

There is an urgent need for interventions to assist teenagers and young adults in appreciating the physical and social risks of binge drinking. While research on the health risks associated with alcohol abuse is well developed, the translation and communication of this knowledge to young people is not. This paper describes a prototype visualisation...

Recent research in attention indicates it involves three anatomical networks concerned with alerting, orienting and executive control (cf. Posner & Fan, 2007). The Attentional Network Test (ANT) provides a behavioral measure of the efficiencies of these three networks within a single task (Fan, MaCandliss, Sommer, Raz & Posner, 2002). This work ada...

Computer simulations, or microworlds, have been used for studying various topics including problem solving. This work investigates strategies for complex, dynamic problem solving in a fire-fighting microworld. Using data from a study by Cañas, Antolí, Fajardo & Salmerón (2005), an ACT-R cognitive model is developed with the aim of providing insight...

This work builds upon a model of performance for the Attentional Network Test (ANT) implemented in ACT-R 6.0 (Hussain & Wood, 2008; 2009) to simulate neglect conditions related to mild Traumatic Brain Injury (mTBI) and their effect on the attentional networks of alerting, orienting and executive control (cf. Posner & Fan, 2007). The model is evalua...

Posner and colleagues [38,40] assert that attention comprises three distinct anatomical areas of the brain responsible for separate aspects of attention, namely alerting, orienting and executive control. Based on this view of attention, the work presented here computationally models the attentional networks task (ANT) which can be used to assess th...

The Trainee Teacher Support System (TTSS) is a computer based advisory system for trainee teachers. Development work, in the form of a feasibility study, has been conducted over the past three years. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the application of expert systems technology and artificial intelligence techniques to the formalisat...

In HCI research there is a body of work concerned with the development of systems capable of reasoning about users’ attention and how this might be most effectively guided for specific applications. We present eight issues relevant to this endeavour: What is attention? How can attention be measured? How do graphical displays interact with attention...

Although many researchers feel that an autonomous system, capable of behaving appropriately in an uncertain environment, must have an internal representation (world model) of entities, events and situations it perceives in the world, research into active vision, inattentional amnesia (Rensink, 2000b; Wolfe, 1999) and change blindness (Rensink, 2000...

Reactive systems are, generally, highly successful for dynamic uncertain domains. Analysing why this should be so indicates the main criterion for success is that information apprehended about a given situation can render it certain enough to reliably inform action. A case is made for informing action by dynamic world modelling for domains where th...

Extended Abstract Introduction The case for enactive perception argues for perception to be understood in the context of sensorimotor activity. Indeed, Rensink (2000) presents visual perception itself as the active indexing of a sparse set of 'just in time' scene representations to a rich and detailed world which serves as its own best model (cf. B...

This paper describes work in progress, presenting the motivation for and background to work in coupling selective perception with previous work in situational modelling. The work extends the agent architecture underlying the AUTODRIVE system (Wood, 1993) which operates in a simulated driving domain. This system makes decisions for driver agents who...

Intelligent agency describes programs that perceive and act rationally (Russell & Norvig, 1995). Planning has an important role to play in satisfying the rationality constraint of intelligent agency; however, its relationship to other aspects of intelligent agency must be addressed if we are to extend the field into realtime dynamic applications. T...

Learning algorithms typically model the acquisition of conceptual knowledge from some start state to some fixed learned end state. Natural associative learning demonstrates a more comprehensive range of processes which complement this static view of learning. An experimental regimen is presented for evaluating learning algorithms against this wider...

Domain applications in planning vary in the extent to which situational uncertainty can undermine the ability of an agent to act successfully. For domains in which observation alone is unable to render the outcome to a situation certain enough to inform action, plan recognition plays a crucial role in dynamically modelling situational outcomes. It...

The background to this work is the simulation of a planner who operates in a dynamic environment, by recognising the plans of others and predicting future events. The domain is that of a driver who must negotiate a route, obeying traffic regulations, and taking account of and avoiding collisions with other vehicles- The world of the driver is repre...

The variation of the migratory response to climate has been shown by a number of events. At one extreme, the experience of the US Gulf coast with Hurricane Katrina in 2005 showed the ability of a single climate event to induce considerable displacement of the human population. By contrast, studies of migration of agricultural populations in the Sah...

This paper explores the role of cues in ma- nipulating attention with the purpose of understanding their potential value to attention aware systems design. Four dimensions of attentional processing are presented along which recent findings in the attention literature can be conceptualised: (1) Locus of control; (2) Spatial cue information; (3) Sema...

Attempts to quantify the numbers of migrants generated by changes in climate have commonly been calculated by projecting physical climate changes on an exposed population. These studies generally make simplistic assumptions about the response of an individual to variations in climate. However, empirical evidence of environmentally induced migration...

In HCI research there is a body of work concerned with the development of systems capable of reasoning about users' attention and how this might be most effectively guided for specific applications. The design of systems capable of assessing user attention, evaluating the ef-fectiveness of focus of attention and capturing, shifting or maintaining a...

Las técnicas de modelado empírico son la única simulación eficaz de las migraciones motivadas por una compleja combinación de riesgos y oportunidades.