Eleanor F. Toye

Thought-Bubbles Help Children with Autism Acquire an Alternative to a Theory of Mind

Children with autism have specific difficulties understanding complex mental states like thought, belief, and false belief and their effects on behaviour. Such children benefit from focused teaching, where beliefs are likened to photographs-in-the-head. Here two studies, one with seven participants and one with 10, tested a picture- in-the-head strategy for dealing with thoughts and behaviour by teaching children with autism about cartoon thought-bubbles as a device for representing such mental states. This prosthetic device led children with autism to pass not only false belief tests, but also related theory of mind tests. These results confirm earlier findings of the efficacy of picture-in-the-head teaching about mental states, but go further in showing that thought-bubble training more easily extends to children’s understanding of thoughts (not just behaviour) and to enhanced performance on several transfer tasks. Thought-bubbles provide a theoretically interesting as well as an especially easy and effective teaching technique.

The fuzzy felt ethnography--understanding the programming patterns of domestic appliances

In this paper, we discuss domestic appliance use based on an ethnographic study of nine households. Specifically, we look at which domestic appliances users choose to “program”, and break them into two categories for analysis; those that allow users to program actions for the future and those that allow for macro creation to make repeated tasks easier. We also look at domestic programming habits based on gender.

The domestic economy: a broader unit of analysis for end user programming

Domestic ubicomp applications often assume individual users will program and configure their technology in isolation, decoupled from complex domestic environments in which they are situated. To investigate this assumption, we conducted a two week study of VCR use by eight families. Each household member old enough to write completed a diary, interviews were conducted before and after, and information on demographics and appliance ownership was collected. Our key finding supports the notion of the domestic economy and the trading of programming expertise. We use the Attention Investment paradigm, and discuss how the model fits with multi-user programming situations. We discuss the importance of the parent v/s child roles in VCR use, as well as, the tension between direct manipulation (e.g. pressing record) and programming ahead of time. We propose that future work on end user programming must focus on the household as a domestic system rather than on the individual.

Tangible interface for collaborative information retrieval

Most information retrieval (IR) interfaces are designed for a single user working with a dedicated interface. We present a system in which the IR interface has been fully integrated into a collaborative context of discussion or debate relating to the query topic. By using a tangible user interface, we support multiple users interacting simultaneously to refine the query. Integration with more powerful back-end query processing is still in progress, but we have already been able to evaluate the prototype interface in a real context of use, and confirmed that it can improve relevance rankings compared to single-user dedicated search engines such as Google.

How do we program the home? Gender, attention investment, and the psychology of programming at home

We report a series of studies investigating the choices that users make between direct manipulation and abstract programming strategies when operating domestic appliances. We characterise these strategic choices in terms of the Attention Investment model of abstraction use. We then describe an experiment that investigates the estimation biases influencing the individual parameters of that model. These biases are linked to gender in a way that explains some gender differences in discretionary appliance use. Finally, we suggest design strategies that might compensate for those gender-linked estimation biases, and therefore make programmable features of future homes more accessible to a wider range of users.

Teaching rhetorical skills with a tangible user interface

We describe Webkit, an application which uses a large-screen graphical user interface and a tangible user interface to teach children important rhetorical skills. We discuss our evaluation of this application and possible future directions for computer-supported rhetorical applications.