Cognitive Psychology Meets Data Management: State of the Art and Future Directions

Data definition and data manipulation language platforms of a DBMS are often human-centric. For instance, declarative queries are often formulated by humans or their results are directly consumed by humans. Consequently, superior and effective design of these platforms needs to be informed by theories from cognitive psychology, a branch of psychology that studies how individuals think and process information. In this tutorial, we review and summarize the state of the art in the emerging paradigm of psychology theory-informed design of human-centric components of a DBMS. In this paradigm, the design of the human-centric components is guided by theories from cognitive psychology in addition to theories from computer science. We review techniques and frameworks that embrace this paradigm in the arena of database querying. To guide future work in this arena, the tutorial proposes open problems and new research directions.