Decision making under time pressure with different information sources and performance-based financial incentives - Part 1

We are witness to the communications revolution and the accompanying proliferation of narrow-purpose, mobile, computing and communication devices. Such devices tend to be smaller and lighter than their desktop and laptop counterparts. The tradeoff is that their displays and memory also tend to be relatively smaller. To date, they also rely on traditional English and/or icons for communicating with users. While icons have grown in usage, capturing any and all information using icons is impossible and/or prohibitively expensive. We examine the viability of developing new kinds of communication languages for such devices in a specific setting by considering an abstract classification task and examining the performance of subjects using a new, compact language that we have devised vis-a-vis written and spoken English. Our work draws on prior research on induced value experimentation and ex-ante system evaluation. In Part 1 of this two-part paper, we provide the necessary background, discuss the underlying motivations, and describe the construction and refinement of our experimental platform and an accompanying subject training software suite. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V All rights reserved.