Naive and experienced judgments of stimulus-response compatibility: implications for interface design

Many design guidelines encourage maintaining stimulus-response compatibility whenever possible. Payne found that naive judgments for different stimulus response (S-R) mappings were not very accurate, and suggested that designers may not be able to predict whether a particular display-control configuration will lead to better performance than another. Three experiments were conducted to determine whether naive judgments for two-choice tasks in which stimuli and responses involve left-right spatial information are sensitive to (a) the influence of S-R mode relations and (b) pure versus mixed presentation of compatible and incompatible mappings. Initial performance judgments for these conditions were not very accurate, nor were those for four-choice tasks of the type studied by Payne, but subjects' estimates of performance improved with relatively little experience using the different S-R configurations.