THE EFFECT OF KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION AND PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPE ON HUMAN UNDERSTANDING IN THE HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERFACE (EXPERT SYSTEMS, MANAGEMENT INFORMATION, DEDUCTIVE LOGIC, DECISION SUPPORT, MYERS-BRIGGS)

People need to understand the logic of an information system because they must tell the system what to do, how to do it, and determine what the system did. Because of the limits of human memory, the logic of the system must be represented in a form that both people and computers can use.; One hundred thirty graduate and undergraduate business students participated in an experiment to evaluate the effect on human understanding of representation type and psychological type. A story represented in English was compared to a story represented in predicate logic. Psychological type was measured with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Human understanding was measured with an inference recognition test. The hypothesis was that sensing psychological types perform better with predicate logic than with English while intuitive psychological types perform better with English than with predicate logic.; The results of the experiment supported the hypothesis that representation type and psychological type interact to effect human understanding; however, both sensing and intuitive psychological types performed better with predicate logic. The interaction occurred because the sensing psychological types performed as well with English as with predicate logic while the intuitive psychological types performed well with predicate logic but poorly with English.; English is not the best representation type for helping the intuitive psychological type to understand the logic of an information system. The results of this experiment show that it is not correct to assume that English is always superior to any other representation regardless of the people using the system.; In designing the human-computer interface, the alternative representations should be evaluated using an experimental design to determine their effect of different psychological types of users. The results of an experiment may show that the representation that is easy for the computer may also be the best for the people using the system.