Cognitive Design

A one-day symposium, Headspace, was held in New York to explore the broad design implications of scent. Seed magazine covers it with a  great slide show, The Scent of Design.  It is worth a look from a cognitive design standpoint. One item that caught my interest:

Yuka Hiyoshi and Ayse Birsel of Birsel+Seck worked with thier perfume team to explore the profound connections between memories and scents. They decided to craft odors based upon the concept of “threshold moments”—life experiences that are at once deeply personal and yet collectively shared by nearly all people. Hiyoshi and Birsel’s objects are designed to fit in the palm of your hand, playing on the powerful capacity of scent to capture a specific moment in time.

These threshold moment are birth babyhood, puberty, sex, partnership, empty nest and death.  The objects are pebbles and prototypes are shown below.

The simple act of moving marbles up or down facilitates the recall and valence of emotional memories  or so claims a new paper, Motor Action and Emotional Memory in the journal Cognition. You can find a good overview of the work in this press release from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Test subjects were asked to push glass marbles up or down while recounting an autobiographical memory that was either positive (tell me about the last time your felt proud of yourself) or negative (describe when you last felt ashamed). Here is what they report:

  “When prompted to tell positive memories, participants began recounting their experiences faster during upward movements, but when prompted to tell negative memories, they responded faster during downward movements. Memory retrieval was most efficient when participants’ motions matched the spatial directions that metaphors in language associate with positive and negative emotions. “

The metaphors play a key role:

‘These data suggest that spatial metaphors for emotion aren’t just in language’, Casasanto says, ’linguistic metaphors correspond to mental metaphors, and activating the mental metaphor ‘good is up’ can cause us to think happier thoughts.’

It is not clear how strong these effects are, or if they will be reproduced by other experiments. No matter, small behaviors that may trigger big mental events are always of interest to cognitive designers.

As we age the performance of working memory changes.  A big change that researchers have recently uncovered is that we lose the capacity to filter out irrelevant information when we try and form memories.   The inability to ignore distractions leads to hyper-binding or encoding irrelevant bits of information. I covered this earlier in Hyper-Binding and Memory in Elderly.

But what is a cognitive designer to do? How can we adjust our designs to overcome this change in the performance of working memory?   One approach involves making older adults aware of potential distraction before they occur. In principle this could help them focus or use metacognition to compensate.  A new study just reported in Cortex, an international journal focused on cognition and the nervous system, dashes any hopes of that working.

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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.

As we age we begin to bind or encode non-relevant bits of information into the memories we form.  This is called hyper-binding and reveals an interesting increase in bandwidth but decrease in discrimination in memory formation in the elderly.   This may have significant implications for the cognitive designer.

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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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I am often asked by clients and students, what can cognitive design do to help us with stereotypes? For example, consider the belief (and supporting mental models) that female drivers are way worse than male drivers.  Further, how can we differentiate harmful stereotypes from useful generalizations?

The first step, as is always the case in cognitive design, is to make sure we understand what cognitive psychology and neuroscience have to say on the matter.  Cognitive design starts with the best scientific model of the “workflow between the ears” that we can muster. Fortunately, there has been a lot of work on stereotypes lately. Take for instance the link that Gina Farag shared recently on Biases the Blind: The role of stereotypes in decision-making processes.  It is a treasure chest full of designable insights, including:

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The frequency and duration of exposure to information as well as the length of the rest period between exposures all impact how well we can learn new information.

Balancing these variables to optimize memory function or “managing your learning schedule” is well beyond most of us and even the most well intentioned instructors-  until now.  A new type of memory enhancer that uses adaptive algorithms are beginning to appear. Technology Review has a good article, An App so you’ll never forget, that focuses on the latest,  a new iPhone app smart.fm.  Definitely cognitive design in action.

Check out this short video on the science behind smart.fm

Designing artifacts that generate deep personal meaning is tricky work.  

Autobiographical memories (AM) or memories about our personal history are a key component of self identity. As such designs that activate AM can often generate waves of deep meaning and mental energy.  Tokens, mementos, family heirlooms and retro designs are common examples. But the opportunities for cognitive design go deeper.

Some designers go further and make use so-called flash bulb memories  or AM burnt deeply and in rich detail into our brains. These range from the first encounter with our true love to presidential assassinations.

However, an exciting new book on the development of AM suggests that there is far more to the story because the development of conscious self, integrated personality and AMs are all intertwined.  That being the case, designs that leverage autobiographic memory should tap a mother load of meaning.

I’ve extract 8 design guidelines from the book and am going to test them out.

I have blogged many times on various designs aimed at improving medication adherence. Remembering to take your meds and remembering to refill your perscriptions are serious cognitive design challenges, especially for the elderly taking many medications.

Enter the GlowCaps product from Vitality. You use special caps:

and this gadget that plugs easily into a wall socket.

The gadget pulses orange when it is time to take a pill, sends a weekly update to someone you designate (for social support), connects to your pharmacy and automatically reorders and sends a monthly report to you and your doctor indicating if you missed, met or exceeded your compliance goals. You are provided an incentive to exceed your goals.

I imagine there is some set up involved. Although I have not tested it yet, this appears to have a lot of the right stuff from a cognitive design perspective.