Cognitive Design

Most adults have watched thousands of hours of movies. I’ve often wondered how that impacts long-term memory. Do the movie memories mix with the real-world memories and change how we interpret the world, learn and make important decisions and judgments? I bet it does, big time,  but I have not been able to find any detailed studies of the effects.

I did recently see a study on how taking photographs of an object can impact memory for the object.   According to point-and-shoot memories,  if you take a picture of an entire object you are less likely to remember details about it. However, if you zoom in on a part of the object and take a photo of the details, your memory is unaffected.  The study concludes:

“This finding highlights key differences between people’s memory and the camera’s “memory” and suggests that the additional attentional and cognitive processes engaged by this focused activity can eliminate the photo-taking-impairment effect.”

With cameras in our phones and popular ways of manipulating sharing photos (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Pic Stich, and Pinterest) camera memories are becoming a significant part of  our Next Brain.

Sourced from the Next Brain Blog

I am a fan of Wired Magazine.  It provides a rich stream of examples and ideas that reflect the best in Cognitive Design.  It includes a section on Jargon Watch. One term caught my eye this month as it captures a key lesson in cognitive design:

Mind-ready: The offhand quality that makes casual communication catchier that polished prose.

The example they give is that Facebook entries are 1.4 times more memorable than sentences in books because they match the way our minds naturally work.    Little surprise that communication in the wild resonates while highly structured communication grinds.

Source of Image: Good fit

Everyday you decide many times that you need to remember to do something in the future.   You might want to remember to buy flowers for your wife on the way home from work or take the trash out after dinner. At work you might be in a meeting and decide you need to call another client or update a file after the meeting.  The process of deciding to remember something in the future and then remembering it or not is called prospective memory.

Lapses in prospective memory are frequent even in young adults. We get busy and forget to remember. Fortunately, most lapses don’t do much damage.  Some however, as with a surgeon or airline pilot, can be very serious. So I am always on the lookout for scientific studies that have practical insights into how to avoid prospective memory lapses.

For example, new research by NASA reviews the literature on prospective memory and offers a good list of suggestions for how to avoid lapses.  The key method includes using a checklist and being very specific about when and where you must remember something (implementation intentions). The impact can be dramatic:

“Dismukes points out that having this kind of concrete plan has been shown to improve prospective memory performance by as much as two to four times in tasks such as exercising, medication adherence, breast self-examination, and homework completion.”

Other ideas include using reminder systems (phone/calendar reminders or another person), do important tasks now (avoid need for prospective memory if it is really important), do not multitask or allow for interruptions, link task to a well established habit and create reminder cues that are hard to avoid (note on your mirror).

While we have covered these suggestion in other Cognitive Design posts it is good to see them collected together. You can access the full article here (need to pay) or read a related (free) article from the same researcher,  Remembrance of Things Future: Prospective Memory in Laboratory, Workplace and Everyday Settings.

I’ve been asking many students that question lately. 

This semester I am a visiting instructor of physics at Indiana University Purdue University in Fort Wayne (IPFW). I love physics and teaching it is loaded with fundamental challenges in cognitive design. In many ways, the physics classroom is a cognitive design laboratory.  I’m hopeful the lessons I learn there will transfer to my consulting efforts in the workplace.

One of the challenges involved in helping others learn physics is correcting deeply held misconceptions about how the world works. From seemingly simple ideas about position, velocity, force and acceleration to more basic assumptions about the nature of space and time, our common sense is loaded with conceptual mistakes. We have the same challenges in the workplace only they have to do with how employees think about innovation, customers, quality and other basic notion that drives performance.

So I am always on the lookout for new scientific research into the memory of deeply held but false beliefs.  For example, Duke University just published some interesting research on the hypercorrection effect.   They found student’s confidence in their answer plays a big role in how they correct misunderstandings.  The higher the confidence the more readily the student makes a correction but without reinforcement the effect lasts about a week. More specifically:

“Although high-confidence errors may be easily corrected in the short-run, our findings suggest that one presentation of feedback is not enough to produce a long-lasting correction of deeply entrenched false knowledge,” Butler said. “Without further practice, high-confidence errors seem to be more likely to return over time.”

This means that some deeply held beliefs might not really be that hard to change, at least initially. From a teaching standpoint there is a premium on knowing  which errors occur with high confidence.  Such topics require additional work even if the initial error appears to be corrected.

How can we collect and use confidence-in-response information in the evaluation and learning process?

Image: Mark Master’s Laser Lab at IPFW.

One of the big findings in the last 20 years about how minds work has to do with memory. Memory is far from an objective record of things. Memory is dynamic and its contents are shaped and recreated by expectations, cognitive biases and social pressure.  These memory distortion factors are so powerful that not only do they change content they can spawn false memories that are stronger than the original.  A good example was recently documented by researchers exploring how social influence creates false memories.

What they found in a nutshell is that 70% of the time we will change our  memory of an event, even one we are confident of, if presented with opposing points of view from other members that participated in the event.  The social nature of the opposing point of view is reinforced with social-media style photos.  What is shocking is that almost 50% of time when we  are told that the opposing view was just a spoof (not true), we still don’t revert to the original memory.

What others think can play a dominate role in the formation and recall of memory. This has strong implications for cognitive designers working in the areas of decision-making and education.

We have covered retro design, or creating artifacts that trigger/satisfy nostalgia, many times in the Cognitive Design blog. And why not? As our population ages a “yearning for the past” will naturally increase. Meeting that yearning through cognitive design is an important source of innovation that has been tapped in many product and service lines ranging from suits and cars to Coke bottles and office equipment.

 So I am always on the lookout for new insights into why or how nostalgic designs work. Recently found a post on the blog innovation playground that provides some insight into how Nostalgic Clues Create Emotion Connections.  My favorite part:

“A nice surprise for me is now I can download a McIntosh app for my iPad. It is very smart idea, not that the app will upgrade the sound from my iTunes, but the skins with the big blue VU meter brings moments of joy even when I am not in front of my McIntosh. Now I can listen to and playback music from my iPad within the classic McIntosh experience. I can now access to my digital music library in a simple elegant interface inspired by the line of McIntosh audio equipment. Genius idea!! And it is free too!!”

High-end (and old school) stereo amplifiers use to sport big blue meters to display information. They got burned into many peoples’ brains. This example also illustrates how we can wrap existing artifacts in a retro skin. A powerful technique.

Many product and some service innovators have embraced retro design but few if any organizational or workplace designers have.  A clear opportunity. For example, how might we retain talent or improve knowledge worker productivity by satisfying a yearning for the past on the job?

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.