Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Human error while performing well-learned tasks on a com-puter is an infrequent, but pervasive problem. Such errors areoften attributed to memory deficits, such as loss of activation orinterference with other tasks (Altmann & Trafton, 2002). Weare arguing that this view neglects the role of the environment.As embodied beings, humans make extensive use of externalcues during the planning and execution of tasks. In this paper,we study how the visual interaction with a computer interfaceis linked to user errors. Gaze recordings confirm our hypoth-esis that the use of the environment increases when memorybecomes weak. An existing cognitive model of sequential ac-tion and procedural error (Halbrügge, Quade, & Engelbrecht,2015) is extended to account for the observed gaze behavior.