Cognitive Design

Machines are getting smarter and that good news for cognitive designers. It increases the range of options we have for offloading mental effort from people to machines. Lowering the cognitive load on individuals and groups during work or play is an important trend in technology.  Google helps us search the world’s information, eharmony helps us find a mate and our mobile phone helps us navigate.  So I am always on the lookout for insights into the limits and trends of artificial intelligence that might be useful for designers.

Take, IBM’s 5 in 5 for example. They provide a short introduction into how machine perception will develop over the next five years. They look at emerging machine capabilities  in all five human senses – vision, hearing, smell, touch and taste – in video and story map form.   They offer predictions within the broader view of cognitive systems.

Bottom line – cognitive designers need to be up to speed on the costs, risks and functional capabilities of current and emerging capabilities in artificial intelligence. How else can we design for how minds (people and machine) really work?

Image Source:  Innovations that will change our lives in the next five years.

When creating designs optimized for how minds work it is important to recognize that any solution can include five types of minds – individual, extended, group, emergent and machine.  An emergent mind includes any group of minds where collective intelligence develops. But is there really any such things as collective intelligence that makes emergent minds functionally different than just a group of people working together?  Recent examples such as prediction markets and various crowdsourcing models clearly imply the answer is yes but no one has demonstrated collective intelligence scientifically – until now.

A recent article in Science, Evidence of Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups, not only demonstrates a general collective intelligence for groups (much like we have already demonstrated a general intelligence for individuals) but the results have strong implications for cognitive design.   You can get a good overview of the work from an MIT press release.

“We set out to test the hypothesis that groups, like individuals, have a consistent ability to perform across different kinds of tasks,” says Anita Williams Woolley, the paper’s lead author and an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business. “Our hypothesis was confirmed,” continues Thomas W. Malone, a co-author and Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “We found that there is a general effectiveness, a group collective intelligence, which predicts a group’s performance in many situations.”  

Further they found that the strength or amount of collective intelligence:

*  did not correlate strongly to the individual intelligence found in the group

*  correlates strongly to the average ability of group members to recognize emotional states (social sensitivity) and how well the opportunity to make conversation was shared amongst group members.

There should be no surprise that groups that work better together will have a higher collective intelligence. What is useful is the empirical evidence that suggest to get that effect you need higher individual emotional intelligence on average and a mechanism that promotes a broad distribution of conversational turn-taking. This is very different than other architectures that support collective intelligence such as prediction markets and certain types of  crowdsourcing.

YourNextBrain! provides daily tips and tools for enhancing cognitive performance and building a more resilient and longer-lasting brain.

Why a new blog? My current blog, Cognitive Design, is a little over two years old. It has accumulated 435 posts, 165 comments and several thousand regular readers (as far as I can tell).  I get a steady stream of emails with insights, questions and requests which I appreciate very much. The number one request by far is for tips on designing ways to improve cognitive performance and boost brain functions. It seems readers want to know how to design programs to make themselves and others smarter in a broad sense. I cover that a bit under the categories of cognitive training, behavior change and augmented cognition but just scratched the surface.

What can we do to consciously improve our cognitive abilities and brain function? How can we train our minds for peak performance and lifelong fitness just as we train our bodies?

In researching these questions I was surprised by the number of options and the growing body of scientific research around what works.   One very interesting finding was that our concept of cognitive aging — or how the brains of middle agers and older adults work — is undergoing a paradigm shift.  There are distinct areas where cognitive performance improves with age and there may be several stages of neural/cognitive development that have gone unnoticed.

All of this has enormous cognitive design implications so I decided to launch a new blog. It is dedicated to ideas and tools for designing and building YourNextBrain! The  blog’s theme is a bit forward looking but each post will provide information you can use today and will  have a design focus. It will cover the gambit of options from those with hard scientific evidence to the more speculative applications. The Next Brain blog is new, only 38 posts so far but give it a try. I look forward to your comments and invite your participation.

The Cognitive Design Blog will continue as is so please visit regularly and share your ideas and experiences.

Have you recently completed a project that demonstrated an improvement in the cognitive or emotional functions of your clients? If so you might want to submit an application to the first annual Brain Fitness Innovation Award.  First prize carries a cash award of $2500.

SharpBrains is hosting the award and they have assembled a world-class panel of judges.  Here is what they want:

“The awards will recognize organizations that are devising and implementing results-oriented and scalable initiatives that demonstrate their commitment to the brain fitness of their clients, members, patients, students or employees, and showcase innovative uses of non-invasive tools to improve cognitive and emotional functions and “real-world” outcomes.”

The contest should surface many insights useful for cognitive designers.

             [Image Source:  Sharpbrains] 

Having computers help us make decisions is a growing trend in both professional and consumer life.  Computers help us make decisions by providing access to information,  analyzing and displaying information, making recommendations,  critiquing human decisions and in some cases making the full decision automatically. The question is – do we make better decisions with or without computers? Do computers make good decision assistants?

The answer depends on if the  software has been designed to work in a naturalistic fashion (i.e. is designed for how our minds actually work). Or so argues, John Maule a professor of human decision making in a keynote speech at the 9th International Conference on Naturalistic Decision Making.

In his speech professor Maule points out that computers help us in many ways by overcoming our limitations for storing and processing information but warns:

 “…because many computer systems have been developed without a full understanding of how people actually think, computers can lead people to make bad decisions”

He points out that few systems allow us to balance intuitive and analytical approaches, help us avoid the confirmation bias and provide functional support for recognition-primed decision making versus a logical-rational approach.  All great clues for how to design people-machine systems that are optimized decision-makers!

How does our ability to remember, think, plan, decide, learn and manage emotions change with age? What methods (exercise, diet, cognitive training, social interaction, stress management) can be used to help minimize cognitive decline?  How do we distinguish normal cognitive aging from a cognitive disease? Pressing questions as Baby Boomers begin to hit 65 in mass.

These questions are being taken up by a new public-private Research Partnership on Cognitive Aging.  Some $28M is already flowing into 17 research projects.

“These grants will make it possible for researchers to further pursue basic research in this area and to devise interventions that could be experimentally tested for their ability to improve cognitive function in older people,” 

The research is basic and still in the formative stages but it should be a great source of insights for cognitive designer. I will watch the progress of the 17 projects and share designable insights as they surface.

In the meantime, if you have insights into how to design for the aging mind please leave a comment and share your experiences with other readers.

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?

Wireless neural implant translates thoughts directly into speech as fast as in a normal speaker.   Read the story here.

One research group reports that we have a distinct pattern of neural activity approximately 30 seconds before making a error in a routine or monotonous task. As the authors point out:

“Our findings provide insights into the brain network dynamics preceding human performance errors and suggest that monitoring of the identified precursor states may help in avoiding human errors in critical real-world situations.” 

If this holds up it is great news for designers of augmented cognition applications. 

Cognitive designers seek to go beyond usability and look-and-feel to create specific mental states or a “think-and-feel”. Designing for pleasure, emotion, meaning, pain relief and improved decision making, learning and behavioral self-control are only a few of the application areas.  The goal is to optimize our designs for how minds work. 

Taking a systematic approach to cognitive design requires that we can somehow get between the ears of the people we are designing for and understand inner mental life and how it is shaped by features, functions and forms.

So I am always on the look out for new tools and techniques for modeling mental states and processes. The holy grail is neural decoding or the ability to translate measurable data on brain activity into the meaning of thoughts, emotions and actions. In short, directly reading the mind. The state of the art in neural decoding was discussed at a recent Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago.  The New Scientist offers an excellence synopsis in Brain Scanner Can Tell What You are Thinking About.

Nothing yet for the designer’s toolkit but some very interesting developments:

“He (Jack Gallant) and colleague Shinji Nishimoto showed that they could create a crude reproduction of a movie clip that someone was watching just by viewing their brain activity. Others at the same meeting claimed that such neural decoding could be used to read memories and future plans – and even to diagnose eating disorders.” 

Being able to accurately and cost effectively translate biometric information from our nervous systems into the corresponding thoughts, feeling, motivations and intentions will be one of the major innovations of the 21st century.  Among other things, it will provide the foundation needed to take an exacting approach to optimizing our designs for how minds really work. Cognitive design unleashed.