From: dave@prc.unisys.com (David Lee Matuszek)
Subject: Re: More Defense of CLI (there, I changed the subject ... )
Organization: Paoli Research Center - Paoli, PA
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1992 20:21:13 GMT

In article <6203.2adadad3@hayes.com> bcoleman@hayes.com (Bill Coleman) writes:
>In article <1992Oct12.221502.12684@nwnexus.WA.COM>, kanefsky@halcyon.com (Steve Kanefsky) writes:
>>>
>>>With the mouse, you have to think of where the menu is, then you REACH OUT
>>>AND GRAB IT. There's almost no cognitive load.
>> 
>> This is utter nonsense.  
>
>It is not.
>
>> They keyboard is, in fact, easier to reach out
>> and grab than a menu on the screen, because you are literally
>> reaching out and grabbing it, rather than going through the mouse 
>
>Not true.
>
>A two-year old can use a mouse. You don't need to even spell or understand
>what letters are to use a mouse. All you have to do is move it like you move
>it on the screen. Simple.

I'd like to add my $0.02 here, before people start protesting that
they're not two years old any more.

The point isn't that a two-year old can use a mouse.  The point is
that things people learn early in life are more deep-seated and
fundamental, and require less higher-level intellectual activity.

You can use a mouse literally without thinking about it.  On occasion,
working with someone else at their terminal, I have been momentarily
frustrated because I couldn't get to the mouse to point at something
on the screen, only to realize I could use a finger for this purpose.
(Admittedly, I'm highly practiced with the mouse.)

Learning the alphabet, learning to read, and learning to use a
keyboard are all HARD, and involve intense mental effort.  It may not
seem that way now, since you learned these things so long ago, but it
was a lot of work at the time.  Today the intellectual activity is
unconscious, or nearly so, but it's still substantial compared with
the effort of grabbing a physical object (the mouse) and waving it
around.

Humans have a surprisingly limited "mental bandwidth."  The
psychologist George Miller published, in 1956, an article entitled
"The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our
capacity for processing information."  (Psychological Review 63,
p. 81-97).  Citing a variety of experiments, he showed how even trivial
tasks took mental processing power away from other, concurrent tasks;
a lot of work has been done since on "cognitive load."  Ignore this
work at your own risk.

I personally use the commoner keyboard shortcuts all the time, such as
control-C and control-V, but I don't think I have ever used them
without thinking of the letter (except in highly repetitive tasks,
where I fall into a physical pattern).  Even this trivial effort of
thinking of the name of the letter is (usually) greater than the
mental effort expended in using the mouse; sure, there are exceptions.
Neither the mouse nor the keyboard requires much of a mental effort,
but there are cases where I'm deeply involved (have no mental
bandwidth to spare), and trivial distractions do add up.

Hence, I find the argument perfectly plausable that keyboard commands
seem faster than mousing (but aren't) because the increased mental
effort "fills up the time," thereby distorting one's perception of
time.  Certainly, I have yet to see any alternative explanation.

  --dave

-- 

It isn't pollution that's harming the environment.  It's the
impurities in our air and water that are doing it.
                -- Vice President Dan Quayle