Integrating social and cognitive factors in design of human‐computer interactive communication

The effects of two social variables, job enrichment and individual/group efforts, on the cognitive processing of a text‐editing task, are examined experimentally. By analyzing the keystrokes and the pauses between keystrokes, methods are developed to examine cognitive performance on the task by investigating the hierarchical structure of the cognitive goals, by classifying the cognitive strategies used by the subjects in the task, and by determining a measure of the cognitive efficiency of the goal structure. Differences occurred in cognitive performance based upon job enrichment. Individuals in an unenriched job environment showed no evidence of understanding the cognitive strategies of the other group member in the two‐member group so that cognitive performance did not improve with group experience, dissimilarity of cognitive strategies within a group did not affect the time to perform the task in a group, and the overall group strategy was dependent only on the strategy of the typist in the text‐editing task. On the other hand, in an enriched job environment, the individual group members apparently communicated cognitive strategy information to the other group member because cognitive efficiency increased with experience in the group, dissimilarity or dispersion of cognitive strategies of individual group members caused the pause times between keystrokes to be increased, the more cognitive strategies in which the group members were exposed the more cognitively efficient was the group strategy, and job satisfaction was dependent upon the similarity of the two group members’ cognitive strategies. These results were discussed in terms of the impact of human‐human interaction on specifying the conditions of human‐computer interaction tasks.