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.

Many studies have shown that we may tend toward lying, cheating or other unethical behaviors if we believe our identities are hidden. Being anonymous can have a big impact on behavior. A new study, Good Lamps are the Best Police, show that darkness encourages self-interested or unethical behavior even when it does not hide our identity. You can find a PDF version of the study in draft form (for free) here.

The researchers suggest that the perception of darkness creates the illusion of anonymity in our minds even when we consciously know are identity will be known.

“Departing from this body of work, we suggest that darkness does more than simply produce conditions of actual anonymity. We contend that darkness may create a sense of illusory anonymity that disinhibits self-interested and unethical behaviors. Individuals in a room with slightly dimmed lighting or people who have donned a pair of sunglasses may feel anonymous not because the associated darkness significantly reduces others’ ability to see or identify them, but because they are anchored on their own phenomenological experience of darkness. When individuals in such circumstances experience darkness and, consequently, impaired vision, they generalize that experience to others, expecting that others will conversely have difficulty perceiving or seeing them.” 

Clear implications for the cognitive designer interesting in leveraging the effects of lighting and other devices that can create a false sense of anonymity.

The PEW Research Center just released a major study on how Americans consume news. The findings show that the cognition involved definitely involves  opportunistic information foragaging across multiple sources.

“Some 46% of Americans say they get news from four to six media platforms on a typical day. Just 7% get their news from a single media platform on a typical day.” 

Also of interest to cognitive designers is the finding that consumer do participate in the creation of the news but typically fall far short of citizen journalism. They create content by comments and reposting.

 ”37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.”

The report is loaded with findings on the psychographics of newsies.  See for example, top reasons people follow the news.  If you read the report and find other results relevant to cognitive design, please post a comment.

Cognitive design is about understanding and meeting the intellectual, affective, motivational and volitional needs of users. One powerful need that designers often fail to consider is the deep-rooted need for equality and fairness.  Just how deep-rooted is this need? Researcher at the California Institute of Technology and Trinity College conducting a brain scanning study found:

“… that the reward centers in the human brain respond more strongly when a poor person receives a financial reward than when a rich person does. The surprising thing? This activity pattern holds true even if the brain being looked at is in the rich person’s head, rather than the poor person’s.”

The implications for cognitive designers are clear – including features that invoke a sense of fairness should increase pleasure and the positive mental energy created through interaction and use.

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.

Procrastinating or putting things off when it is not in our best interest to do so is a common problem. According to research reported on Psychology Today:

“Everyone procrastinate sometimes, but 20 percent of people are true procrastinators. They consistently avoid difficult tasks and deliberately look for distractions, which, unfortunately, are increasingly available. Procrastination in large part reflects our difficulty in regulating emotions and to accurately predict how we will feel tomorrow, or the next day. Procrastinators say they perform better under pressure, but that’s just one of many lies they tell themselves. Since procrastinators are made and not born, it’s possible to overcome procrastination—with effort.”

This makes procrastination a major cognitive design challenge. As with all such challenges the first step is to understand the underlying cognitive processes and needs.

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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 McKinsey Quarterly has an excellent article, Engage Consumers to Manage Healthcare Demand, that offers some insights for cognitive designers working on changing health-related behaviors.

The article looks at three approaches to changing behavior:

1. Education about health and preventative care
2. Encouraging increased role in selection of healthcare provider and services
3. Incentives and disincentive for health behavior change

Nothing new for readers of this blog. But they also point out:

* Effective education requires integrating information from multiple sources and customizing on the basis of an individual’s psychographic profile.

* Encouraging consumers to be more proactive about making choices about services and providers requires providing objective (third party) information on price, quality and availability

* Providing incentives must be targeted on behaviors that are open to incentives (not all are) and should be combined with support programs.

Such refinements reflect an increased understanding and willingness to meet the cognitive needs of the healthcare consumers.   We need another dose or 10 of that!

What we see strongly determines how we think, feel and ultimately act. A common sense statement but when you understand the specifics you have a powerful tool for priming and influencing behavior change.

Take for example the research results in ScienceDaily on Play it Forward: Elevation Leads to Altruistic Behavior.  They demonstrate that if I see someone being helped it will cause me to feel elevation (a positive feeling of being uplifted) and that in turn causes me to help others.  To quote:

“The results of this second experiment were striking — the participants who viewed the uplifting TV clip spent almost twice as long helping the research assistant than participants who saw the neutral TV clip or the comedy clip, indicating that elevation may lead to helping behavior.” 

This suggests that cognitive designers able to create products, services, experiences or other artifacts that elevate, will produce not only a distinctly positive think-and-feel but will also trigger prosocial behaviors.

Yes if we can preserve the cognitive factors that make them work.

Mississippi is in trouble when it comes to health and healthcare.   According to the National Institute of Health (NIH) they have the highest rates of obesity, hypertension and teenage pregnancy in the country. Their infant mortality rate is 50% higher than average and 20% of the population has no health insurance.

They have spent millions but report in a recent NIH news story:

“We’ve been attacking this problem over and over again with just heartbreaking results,” said Shirley, chairman of the Jackson Medical Mall Foundation, a one-stop health care facility for Mississippi’s underserved.

Now they are trying to import a health service delivery model, called the Health House from the middle east.  The Health House developed during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war is simple but apparently very effective.  

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