Cognitive Design

Perceived weight, texture and hardness of an object unconsciously shapes our interpretations and judgments especially in situations involving interpersonal communications. That is the conclusion of recent research at Harvard and MIT on How Touch Influence Judgments.

Specific examples given include:

 ” Resumes reviewed on a heavy clipboard are judged to be more substantive, while a negotiator seated in a soft chair is less likely to drive a hard bargain.”

Hard, rough and heavy – all sensory states we can design for in a wide variety of circumstance.

One of the major lessons learned about how the mind works over the last couple of decades is that it is fully dependent on the body. Cognition is embodied or at least partially determined by bodily actions, interactions and so-called “memories”.   Talking with our hands, solving a problem by walking or pacing, moving to learn and so on.  Now there is new evidence that we blink as an embodiment of day dreaming.  The idea is that we blink to help shut out perceptual input that would otherwise require attention and interfere with our wandering mind.  ScienceDaily has a nice summary of the study, Out of Mind, out of Sight: Blinking Eyes Indicate Mind Wandering. To quote:

 ”What we suggest is that when you start to mind-wander, you start to gate the information even at the sensory endings — you basically close your eyelid so there’s less information coming into the brain,” says Smilek.

This is part of a shift in how scientists are thinking about the mind, he says. Psychologists are realizing that “you can’t think about these mental processes, like attention, separately from the fact that the individual’s brain is in a body, and the body’s acting in the world.” The mind doesn’t ignore the world all by itself; the eyelids help.”

Designs that support mind wandering can be important for stress management and creativity.

Our brain consumes 20-30% of our total energy (25% of glucose, 20% oxygen). It burns energy 10 times faster per unit of tissue than any other part of the body. Energy plays a big role in brain function and cognitive performance.   The makeup of this energy is complex. There is brain glucose, a number of neurotransmitters, adrenaline and more psychological components such as feeling of mental fatigue and the ability to do cognitive work.  As designers we need to be concerned with how the features and functions of an artifact impact all aspects of mental energy.  So I am always on the lookout for new scientific studies that provide insight into how to leverage mental energy with design.

A good example is recent work at the University of Pennsylvania, nicely summarized by EurekaAlert!, that provides some evidence against the glucose depletion theory of self-control. To quote:

“Kurzban’s new analysis is consistent with the neuroscience literature, which strongly implies that the marginal difference in glucose consumption by the brain from five minutes of performing a “self-control” task is unlikely in the extreme to be of any significant size. Further, research on exercise shows that burning calories through physical activity, which really does consume substantial amounts of glucose, in fact shows the reverse pattern from what the model would predict: People who have recently exercised and burned glucose are better, not worse, on the sorts of tasks used in the self-control literature.”

This means that designs aimed at boosting blood sugar levels to improve self-control may not work.   It also suggest that using activity or exercise may work (likely due to the production of mental energy via neurotransmitters or increased in self-efficacy and other psychological effects).  

In general this implies that cognitive designs need to go beyond the biological effects of sugar to emphasize the production of natural brain drugs (neurotransmitters) and mental states that correlated to the psychological ability to do mental work (e.g. meaning).

Be sure to consider the new study, Money Giveth and Money Taketh Away: The Dual Effect of Wealth on Happiness.   Key findings for cognitive designers include:

 -  A correlation between wealth (or just the thought of wealth) and the ability to savor experiences

-   The ability to savor predicts your degree of happiness

So wealth blunts our ability to savor and therefore undercuts the mechanism that is the source of most of our happiness.

Getting to the full article requires a subscription. If you don’t have one check out the recap of the study on the New Brain Blog.

XO-3 a prototype tablet computer running Android with a target price of $75.  Redesigned to deliver only essential features for a fraction of the cognitive load.

We are creating an internet of things where all objects not just computers, phones and webcams are networked and interacting with each other. Books, pens, cars, household appliances, RFID tagged objects,  body sensors or literally any “thing” is being wired and connected. This trend has big implications for cognitive designers. For example, it significantly extends the range of options for designing for behavior change.

Part of this trend includes using everyday objects as interfaces. For some interesting examples check out Core77′s 1-hour design challenge on gestural interfaces. They are still open for submissions if you are feeling creative.

My favorite is shown to the right. According to the designer: “Here’s a credit card that gets more jagged the more you use it! Be sure to pay it off before it becomes so sharp that you can’t even use it (without special gloves, sold separately).”

The Science of Willpower Blog has an interesting post on behavior change. They review research that reveals:

Slapping a tax on unhealthy foods improves eating habits more effectively than making healthy foods cheaper. 

Making food cheaper just means we buy more of the good stuff, we don’t stop buying the bad stuff. What the study found was:

“Give someone a fresh vegetable, and they’ll add it into their existing diet. But it’s not going to replace the french fries. And we’ve seen in other cases — taxing cigarettes, rising gasoline prices — that higher prices really can change habits.”

The questions is why does increasing prices work better? One insight offered in the post is – taxes tend to make us mad and that might interfere with the craving or compulsion that drives the bad habit.  It could be more about the negative mental energy that is generated than the economic logic.

When changing behaviors the onset of a craving can defeat the best intentions, strongest will and well-funded health program. Cravings are specific and powerful. They have more visceral force than emotions or drive states such as hunger.  In doing cognitive design for behavior change I always ask – are cravings a factor?

According to research just published in the journal, Current Directions in Psychological Sciences, and reported on here, mental imagery plays a key role in the cognition of forming and defeating food cravings.

“Results of one study showed that the strength of participants’ cravings was linked to how vividly they imagined the food. Mental imagery (imagining food or anything else) takes up cognitive resources, or brain power. Studies have shown that when subjects are imagining something, they have a hard time completing various cognitive tasks. In one experiment, volunteers who were craving chocolate recalled fewer words and took longer to solve math problems than volunteers who were not craving chocolate. These links between food cravings and mental imagery, along with the findings that mental imagery takes up cognitive resources, may help to explain why food cravings can be so disruptive: As we are imagining a specific food, much of our brain power is focused on that food, and we have a hard time with other tasks.”

Additional research illustrates how imagery can be used to defeat a food craving:

“The results of one experiment revealed that volunteers who had been craving a food reported reduced food cravings after they formed images of common sights (for example, they were asked to imagine the appearance of a rainbow) or smells (they were asked to imagine the smell of eucalyptus).” 

This is good news for the cognitive designer looking for specific tools for managing the effects of cravings. It also suggest a more fundamental insight – indulging in mental images burns significant cognitive resources.

In a later post I will explore the role of supernormal stimuli in creating cravings.

Or at least that is the consensus view of organizational scientists that contributed to the important new volume, Worker Engagement: A Handbook of Essential Theory and Research.

This is no surprise to cognitive designers. The entire field turns on the assumption that interaction can be modeled as the exchange of mental energy.  To oversimplify, I put mental effort and energy into my work and I get some out. If in general I get more out than I put in, I an invigorated and experience engagement. If on average I get less mental energy out than I put in, I am headed towards burnout and potential exhaustion.

The concept of energy appears throughout the book but gets the most advanced treatment in chapter six, Feeling energetic at work: On Vigor’s antecedents. To quote:

“Vigor refers to individuals’ feelings that they possess physical strength, emotional energy, and cognitive liveliness, a set of interrelated affective states experienced at work.”

Vigor and the mental energy that drives it plays a key role in the job demands and resources (JD-R) model of worker engagement, the theoretical centerpiece of the handbook.

Design thinking  is critical for interventions that drive higher levels of worker engagement. As the author points out:

“I argue that people feel ongoing changes in the physical, cognitive and emotional energy levels that they posses and these changes are related to specific positive features of their work environment and specific characteristics of their jobs.”

Cognitive design can contribute to tuning these features as we have work hard to define the factors and variables that characterize the use and generation of mental energy. See for example an excerpt on mental energy analysis from a workshop I gave at the 2009 Design Research Conference. Said more directly, the JD-R model puts cognitive design in the center of our efforts to improve worker engagement.

Check out all the top rate illusions here.