High-level psychological concepts

Compared to detailed information processing models, the psychological concepts on this page are more abstract. They don't have quantitative predictive qualities but they can be very useful in gaining a general understanding of how people understand and interact with products.

Mental models (see section 3.4.1)

Mental models refer to people's internal representations, which they use to make sense of the world. Often people incorrect use a product because they have an incorrect mental model of how the product works.

Here are some examples to discuss:

• If a cursor is frozen, does hitting the monitor help?
• Does turning the temperature control away from cool for a car air conditioner save gas?
• For the Java programming language, can the equality symbol (i.e. "==") be used to test if two String objects have the same sequence of characters?

Modes of information processing

• Bottom-up processing. Representations are built based on directly perceived patterns.
• Top-down processing. Representations are built using expectations of what is being perceived.

When we consider top-down processing, the context often affects how people perceive and interpret objects.