Reactive Information Displays

Reactive Information Displays (RIDs) that track and react to a user’s attention, to present the right information at the right place and in the right time, constitute a relatively unexplored frontier in HumanComputer Interaction. While research on this topic has a two-decade history, advances have been sporadic. One reason may be the difficulty in developing models for predicting the user’s attention trajectory and information needs. This paper describes a cognitive model of comprehension and problem solving in visuo-spatial and causal reasoning tasks, points out how principles derived from the model suggest an approach to RID design, and discusses results from an experiment that compared problem solving from a static display and four kinds of RIDs. Results indicate that RIDs have the potential to enhance user performance.