Is Explicit Information Important for Performance in Dynamic Systems?

摘要

In order to gain some insight in how to assist understanding and performance indynamic systems, participants were asked to interact with a predator-prey system on apersonal computer. Their task was to achieve equilibrium by controlling the size of thepredator population. Results were presented in line graphs in all three conditions. Inone condition pictures illustrating the population sizes was added, intended to make thisinformation more explicit. In a second condition pictures illustrated the prevailingconditions in the system, to explicitly suggest conclusions to be drawn and actions to betaken. Although this was expected to facilitate performance, the results revealed anequally low performance in all groups. The overall success rate was 33%. This could beexplained either as failure in interpreting the line graphs and/or the pictures not beingexplicit enough to assist deduction. Further research is needed to settle which was thecase.