Cognitive Design

Fast Company has a great article on The 10 most Addictive Sounds in World.  Here is how they were found:

“Buyology Inc. and Elias Arts, a sound identity company in New York, wired up 50 volunteers and measured their galvanic, pupil and brainwave responses to sounds using the latest neuroscience-based research methods. We learned that sound has remarkable power. This may not be surprising for many, but it was certainly surprising to realize just how many commercial brands over the past 20 years have made their way into the world’s 10 most powerful and addictive sounds–beating some of the most familiar and comforting sounds of nature.”

I won’t spoil any surprise by listing the sounds in this post, especially since the article includes a section for those that want to take a QUIZ . Be sure to listen to the sounds and ask yourself – can you ignore many of these? I think not.

The lesson for cognitive designers is simple, be sure to go beyond the visual when doing sensorial design. We often forget about the cognitive power of sound.

The diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM) provides a formal classification system for understanding the many ways in which our minds don’t work properly. It is published by the American Psychiatric Society and is widely used in the US as a standard tool for psychiatric diagnosis.  The fifth version of the manual (DSM-5) has been under development for the last 10 years and is due out on May 2013. An advanced look at the DSM-5 has been officially released and generated considerable reaction. For an overview of the changes and potential implications check out the reviews in the Psychiatric Times and The World of Psychology.

The PsyBlog has done a post outlining 10 key studies in social psychology all of which have immediate relevance to problems and challenges in cognitive design. Topics covered include:

1. Believing everything you read

2. Truth about self-deception

3. When rewards backfire

4. Groups fail to share

5. Thought suppression

6. The Chameleon effect

7. Other people’s expectations

8. Situations not personality

9. Gaps in self knowledge

10. Stereotypes

The post recaps each article and provides a link for further reading. You can even vote on your favorite.

Ever wonder how people with 1000+ friends on Facebook, MySpace or some other social networking site manage it? Said another way (and I get this question frequently) from a cognitive standpoint, how many friends can we interact with meaningfully on a social networking site?

One answer, according to a recent post on Physorg Blog is approximately 150. The post draws on work that was done in the early 90s by Robin Dunbar:

 ”Dunbar reached the value of Dunbar’s number by studying a wide range of societies throughout history, including social circles from Neolithic and Roman times, to the modern office, and in non-human primates. The value of 150 is an approximation and there is no precise value, but Dunbar found that social groups larger than around this number tended to splinter.”

Research reported by FaceBook tends to support this number. Dunbar argues that this limit is imposed by the structure/function of our Neocortex.

One implication of this is that the current generation of social networking technology does little or nothing to amplify my capacity for managing relationships meaningfully. This presents a challenge to the cognitive designer:

How can the next generation of social networking software be designed from a cognitive standpoint to increase my social intelligence so that I can meaningfully manage 300 relationships?

Wiley InterScience just announced a new journal, WIREs Cognitive Science, that should be very useful for designers. Full access to content is free (for a limited time) and part of the purpose of the journal is to be:

“An authoritative, encyclopedic resource addressing key topics from diverse research perspectives” 

This should make it a goldmine for the cognitive designer interested in taking a evidence-based approach. For example, in the very first issue, an article on Deductive Reasoning, looks at the role of deductive reasoning from the point of view of logic, psychology and artificial intelligence. It provides a precise review of logical inference, probabilistic models, mental models and conditional reasoning.

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How we perceive the world, learn, think, plan, emote, imagine the future and perform other mental activities is strongly influenced by our physical bodies. In short, cognition is embodied and as designers we need to factor that into our work.

The Association for Psychological Sciences has an excellent article on their site, The Body of Knowledge: Understanding Embodied Cognition that is written in a designer friendly way.  There are a number of scientific insights loaded with design implications including how:

1. Physical sensation of temperature is related to judgments about friendliness and other social relationships.
2.  Perceptions of environmental cleanliness and color is related to our judgement about morality. Or as the authors point out “Just as feeling distant from other people makes us feel cold, feeling immoral makes us feel physically unclean.”
3.  Our bodies sway back and fourth as we reflect on the past or project into the future.

And many more.   Seemingly small bodily effects with big mental impact. Just the stuff a cognitive designer wants to leverage.

[24 more photos from the exhibition can be found here.]

Using 147,456 processors and 144 terabytes of working memory IBM simulated the working of a Cat’s cerebral cortex at 1/100th its normal speed. This surpassed previous records of 40% of a mouse’s brain (2006) and 100% of a rat’s brain (2007). A mere 1% of the human cerebral cortex has been simulated.

These simulation might generate profound new insights into how minds work. In the future they could also act as a computerized test-bed for cognitive designers.

There have been many recent studies highlighting the important role of mirror neurons  in generating empathy. Now there is more evidence that chemosensory information may be key.  Chemosensory processing has to do with the sensing of chemicals through smell. Chemosensory ability is an important but often neglected sense from a design standpoint unless of course you design fragrances or foods.

 Finished reading a study on chemosensory abilities that demonstrates using brain scans that we can detect the chemicals associated with fear/anxiety even though the sweat given off is indistinguishable from the smell of other sweats, such as sport sweat. Induction of Empathy by the Smell of Anxiety finds:

In sum, the processing of chemosensory anxiety signals engages significantly more neuronal resources than the chemosensory processing of sport sweat. The odors were hardly detectable and the odors could not be differentiated regarding their intensity, pleasantness, unpleasantness or familiarity. Accordingly, it is concluded that the human brain automatically guides physiological adjustments to chemosensory anxiety signals, without being dependent on conscious mediation. However, in contrast to other modalities, the physiological adjustments in response to chemosensory anxiety signals seem to be mainly related to an automatic contagion of the feeling. In other words, smelling the feelings of others could be termed as an incorporation of the chemical expressions and thus the feelings of others.

For the cognitive designer the implications are clear, don’t forget the nose when you are creating artifacts meant to inspire empathy in users.

Design a guided imagery experiment to reveal what people really think-and-feel 

 Figuring out what people really think and feel is the big problem in cognitive design. After all, most of what we know (memory) is implicit and cannot be readily called to mind and reported. Simply asking people what they think and feel fails to produce interesting results. That is why we do protocol studies, build prototypes and ask people to bring in pictures that resonate with them. All so we can play detective and try and infer what cognitive biases, mental models, metaphors and other implicit memories are beneath the surface driving thoughts and feelings.

 I was reading a post, Mind over Matter: Imagery in the Classroom, on the Eide Neurolearning Blog and it reminded me of powerful technique for getting at implicit or unconscious memories – mental imagery.  The post links to a chapter by Kosslyn and Moulton on Mental Imagery and Implicit Memory.  This is a must read for cognitive designers for several reasons.

 First, it provides ample scientific evidence for the claim that asking people to imagine doing something and reporting on the experience (a guided imagery experiment) is a powerful way to reveal how they really think about things.

More specifically, it argues how we simulate things in our mind (imagine doing and feeling things via imagination) provides many clues into the content of implicit memories. This make sense because in the absence of direct perception to guide our thinking we  must rely of what we assume to know, or what we know unconsciously to construct events, project behaviors and simulate feelings.

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