Cognitive Design

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.

Tools of the mind is an interesting approach to teaching young children to improve their capacity for self regulation (control of social, emotional and cognitive behaviors) via dramatic game play.

The approach, based on the work of Vygotsky, is highlighted in a NYT article, Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self Control.

“In one experiment, 4-year-old children were first asked to stand still for as long as they could. They typically did not make it past a minute. But when the kids played a make-believe game in which they were guards at a factory, they were able to stand at attention for more than four minutes. In another experiment, prekindergarten-age children were asked to memorize a list of unrelated words. Then they played “grocery store” and were asked to memorize a similar list of words — this time, though, as a shopping list. In the play situation, on average, the children were able to remember twice as many words. Bodrova and Leong say they see the same effect in Tools of the Mind classrooms: when their students spend more time on dramatic play, not only does their level of self-control improve, but so do their language skills.”

It is easy to imagine extending this effect with a properly designed video game.   My real hope it that some if this will transfer to building self regulatory strength in adults

Sleep is a unique mental state and designing things to “get a good night’s sleep” is definitely within the scope of cognitive design. So I am always on the look-out for devices, scientific studies and techniques that relate to sleep.

 Check out the Zeo personal sleep coach. It is a home sleep monitoring device including headband  that captures the electrical activity associated with your sleeping patterns.

The product comes with web-based journaling software to help you gain insights into the causes and effects of a good night sleep.

Finally, you are encouraged to develop a 7-step sleep fitness program to optimize the quality of your sleep.

A designer scent – SerenaScent - combines three active plant chemicals (mostly trees) into a spray that claims to curb the effects of long-term stress including degraded memory function. It is a new product being marketed by NeuroAuroma Laboratories and received a write-up in Cosmetics Design that includes the following:

“Specifically it greatly reduces the structural changes that occur in the hippocampus [a part of the brain associated with memory and spatial orientation] during prolonged stress thus maintaining normal memory function,”he explained.” 

I have not reviewed the publications or tested the product yet. Checking in to see if any readers have.

Image a device, implanted in your brain, that allows you to tune the neurochemistry of motivation to make difficult tasks easy and even immensely enjoyable. That is the idea behind, iPlant, a conceptual design for Human application (10 years out?) but already working in some mammals.  The device generates dopamine (reward drug)  or a powerful motivator to repeat what you just did such as exercise, avoid eating a cookie (self-regulation), study a difficult passage  and so on.

Check out this YouTube that introduces the concept.   For a more robust introduction, check out this longer video that explains how iPlant relates to deep brain stimulation devices already in human use.

It will be interesting to see which hits the market first – brain implants (or hopefully a less invasive device) to control motivation or the so-called “self control” pill. No matter, it looks like good old fashion will power may soon be supercharged by some application of augmented cognition. I am sure that is a good thing.

On the website, they claim the drink will enhance your cognition:

“ In addition, it is well documented that L-Theanine increases mental awareness, helps in relaxation without causing sleepiness, reduces stress and anxiety,  improves cognition, concentration and sleep quality.” 

I wonder what they taste like?  Can’t be as good as a Red Bull.