Motivation and autonomy are fundamental concepts in Human–Computer Interaction (HCI), yet in User Experience (UX) research they have remained surprisingly peripheral. We draw on Self-Determination Theory (SDT) to analyse autonomous and non-autonomous patterns of motivation in 497 interaction experiences. Using latent profile analysis, we identify five distinct patterns of motivation in technology use—‘motivational profiles’—associated with significant differences in need satisfaction, affect, and perceived usability. Users’ descriptions of these experiences also reveal qualitative differences between profiles: from intentional, purposive engagement, to compulsive use which users themselves consider unhealthy. Our results complicate exclusively positive notions of intrinsic motivation and clarify how extrinsic motivation can contribute to positive UX. Based on these findings, we identify open questions for UX and SDT: addressing ‘hedonic amotivation’—negative experiences in activities which are intrinsically motivated but not otherwise valued—and ‘design for internalisation’—scaffolding healthy and sustainable patterns of engagement over time.

Positive and negative affective states are respectively associated with optimistic and pessimistic expectations regarding future reward. One mechanism that might underlie these affect-related expectation biases is attention to positive- versus negative-valence features (e.g., attending to the positive reviews of a restaurant versus its expensive price). Here we tested the effects of experimentally induced positive and negative affect on feature-based attention in 120 participants completing a compound-generalization task with eye-tracking. We found that participants' reward expectations for novel compound stimuli were modulated in an affect-congruent way: positive affect induction increased reward expectations for compounds, whereas negative affect induction decreased reward expectations. Computational modelling and eye-tracking analyses each revealed that these effects were driven by affect-congruent changes in participants' allocation of attention to high- versus low-value features of compounds. These results provide mechanistic insight into a process by which affect produces biases in generalized reward expectations.

The philosophical construct readiness-to-hand describes focused, intuitive, tool use, and has been linked to tool-embodiment and immersion. The construct has been influential in HCI and design for decades, but researchers currently lack appropriate measures and tools to investigate it empirically. To support such empirical work we investigate the possibility of operationalising readiness-to-hand in measurements of multfractality in movement, building on recent work in cognitive science. We conduct two experiments (N=44, N=30) investigating multifractality in mouse movements during a computer game, replicating prior results and contributing new findings. Our results show that multifractality correlates with dimensions associated with readiness-to-hand, including skill and task-engagement, during tool breakdown, task learning and normal play. We describe future possibilities for the application of these methods in HCI, supporting such work by sharing scripts and data (https://osf.io/2hm9u/), and introducing a new data-driven approach to parameter selection.

In a dynamic world, an accurate model of the environment is vital for survival, and agents ought regularly to seek out new information with which to update their world models. This aspect of behaviour is not captured well by classical theories of decision making, and the cognitive mechanisms of information seeking are poorly understood. In particular, it is not known whether information is valued only for its instrumental use, or whether humans also assign it a non-instrumental intrinsic value. To address this question, the present study assessed preference for non-instrumental information among 80 healthy participants in two experiments. Participants performed a novel information preference task in which they could choose to pay a monetary cost to receive advance information about the outcome of a monetary lottery. Importantly, acquiring information did not alter lottery outcome probabilities. We found that participants were willing to incur considerable monetary costs to acquire payoff-irrelevant information about the lottery outcome. This behaviour was well explained by a computational cognitive model in which information preference resulted from aversion to temporally prolonged uncertainty. These results strongly suggest that humans assign an intrinsic value to information in a manner inconsistent with normative accounts of decision making under uncertainty. This intrinsic value may be associated with adaptive behaviour in real-world environments by producing a bias towards exploratory and information-seeking behaviour.

Detecting a Radio Frequency device such as a Push-to-Talk (PTT) radio has several military and civilian applications. Detecting PTT radios can be used in search and rescue applications and in providing early detection and warning of existing PTT radios that were previously unknown. This study analyzes the ability of using two tone intermodulation distortion as a way of detecting PTT radios, along with determining ways of improving or increasing this response. Two probing frequencies from a standoff transmitter arrive at the PTT radio and mix in the non-linear components of its radio receiver. As a result, a portion of this mixed response is reflected back. Our results have shown that this response can then be detected, in a semi-noisy environment, to determine the presence of this PTT radio receiver. We have seen that as the magnitude of the probing power increases the PTT radio can be detected from greater distances. However, we have also found that a limiting factor in our experiments is that as the probing power increases the passive intermodulation distortion of the testing system increases as well, therefore making it more difficult to distinguish the nonlinear response of the PTT radio from the non-linear response of the measuring equipment. Future work inlcudes using a coded probing signal which would allow for digital signal processing techniques to be used.

According to Monk et al. (2004a Monk, A.F., et al., 2004a. Why are mobile phones annoying? Behaviour & Information Technology, 23 (1), 33–42. doi: 10.1080/01449290310001638496[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]. Why are mobile phones annoying? Behaviour and Information Technology, 23 (1), 33–42), mobile phone conversations are annoying to overhear due to an involuntary need-to-listen in order to predict the inaudible half of the conversation. However, previous support for this need-to-listen explanation of annoyance has failed to consider the confound that mobile phone conversations also have less predictable acoustic patterns and has only investigated ‘neutral’ conversations. By staging mobile and face-to-face conversations in public, this study further supports the need-to-listen explanation. By removing the need-to-listen to the content of a mobile conversation through introducing foreign speech, bystanders no longer perceived the conversation as more annoying than a conversation between two co-present individuals, supporting the need-to-listen explanation over unpredictable acoustics. In two further experiments manipulating conversational content (‘neutral’ vs. ‘intriguing’), findings suggest that the need-to-listen to mobile phone conversations is not inherently annoying; it can be annoying or possibly even ‘interesting’ depending on the conversational content.