ITR: Managing human attention

至少自20世纪初以来，信息和通信的供应增长速度一直快于我们的消费能力。从信息生产者的角度来看，许多信息被浪费了，因为它没有到达与之相关的人手中。对于消费者来说，信息的过剩使他们越来越难找到相关、有用或令人愉快的东西。这种“注意力贫乏”也出现在人际交流领域，非正式和自发的互动是管理和专业工作的标志，会造成干扰和负担过重。在这个项目中，PI和他的团队将开发、整合和使用社会心理学、计算机科学、经济学和交互设计的原理，以设计在丰富的沟通环境中节省注意力的方法。具体地说，他们将开发、部署和评估技术，以在经常相互竞争的需求之间进行调解，以回应在执行主要任务时争夺注意力的大量沟通请求，如开车或采访客户。为此，PI团队将使用传感技术和机器学习技术来确定工人的当前任务和可中断程度。他们将展示团队成员对部分沟通伙伴的可用性，并使用经济学和社会心理学中制定的原则来平衡对员工注意力的相互竞争的需求。他们还将使用交互设计中开发的原则来构建轻量级、外围显示和上下文感知交互技术，使人们能够在不中断主要任务的情况下简短而简单地理解信息。虽然开发的原则和技术将适用于许多领域，但该项目将利用特定的开发和测试环境，即提高照顾老年人的流动医护人员的沟通效率。PI团队由一名社会心理学家、一名计算机科学家和一名设计师组成，他们之前一直在单独和联合研究人类注意力问题；该项目的一部分将涉及整合已在进行的研究工作的结果。更广泛的影响：在我们日益互联的技术社会中，管理注意力和信息过载的问题无处不在。制定解决这些问题的原则和具体技术有可能在老年护理领域以外产生巨大的好处和广泛的影响。此外，对该项目的目标领域--流动老年护理工作者--的支持有可能为迅速老龄化的人口带来直接的社会效益。该项目将有助于更好地理解节省注意力的设计原则、原型开发以及模型的实验室和现场测试，所有这些都将有助于节省最宝贵的人力资源--我们的注意力。

Since at least the early 1900s, the supply of information and communication has been growing faster than our ability to consume it. From the information producers' viewpoint, much information is wasted, in the sense that it doesn't reach those to whom it is relevant. For the consumer, the glut of information makes it increasingly difficult to find what is relevant, useful or enjoyable. This "poverty of attention" also occurs in the domain of interpersonal communication, where informal and spontaneous interaction, a hallmark of managerial and professional work, generates interruptions and overload. In this project, the PI and his team will develop, integrate and use principles from social psychology, computer science, economics, and interaction design to devise ways of economizing on attention in a communication rich environment. Specifically, they will develop, deploy and evaluate techniques to mediate among the often competing demands of responding to a barrage of communication requests that compete for attention when performing a primary task, such as driving a car or interviewing a client. To do so, the PI team will use sensing technology and machine learning techniques to identify a worker's current task and degree of interruptibility. They will display team members' availability to a subset of communication partners and use principles developed in economics and social psychology to balance the competing demands on the worker's attention. They will also use principles developed in interaction design to build lightweight, peripheral displays and context-aware interaction techniques that allow people to briefly and simply comprehend information without disrupting their primary task. Although the principles and techniques developed will be applicable across many domains, this project will make use of a specific context for development and testing, namely improving communication efficiency of mobile health care workers caring for the elderly. The PI team consists of a social psychologist, a computer scientist, and a designer, who have been working previously both individually and jointly on problems of human attention; part of this project will involve integrating results from research efforts already underway. Broader Impacts: Issues of managing attention and information overload are pervasive in our increasingly connected and technological society. Development of principles and specific techniques for addressing these issues has the potential for large benefit and widespread impact beyond the eldercare domain. In addition, support for the project's target domain - mobile eldercare workers - offers the potential of direct social benefit to a rapidly aging population. The project will lead to better understanding of design principles for economizing on attention, to prototype development, and to lab and field testing of the models, all of which will help save on the most precious of human resources - our attention.