Cognitive Design

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.

The most urgent cognitive design problems we face today have to do with creating artifacts that help us make and sustain the lifestyle changes needed to improve health. Much of the cost of healthcare and the morbidity and mortality we experience in advanced countries (especially the US) can be linked to lifestyle choices and otherwise avoidable health risks.

Designers that work in this space need to be aware of the enormous range of literature on causes, assessments, interventions and effectiveness that have grown up over the last 20 years or so.  A great source is the new initiative on lifestyle medicine launched by the American College of Preventative Medicine. They focus on lifestyle interventions (nutrition, physician activity, smoking cessation, safe sex, stress reduction, etc.) and the effective management of chronic diseases (asthma, diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, cancer, etc.).

Of special interest to cognitive designers  is a set of evidence-based guidelines and a supporting  literature review  for making health-related behavior change.

It is a single source for generating scientifically-grounded design insights and evaluating competing designs across the full range of health-related behavior change challenges.

I get notes and calls regularly asking about doing cognitive design for older adults. So I am always on the look out for new scientific insights into how the elderly think and feel. Found a very interesting study on Why So Many Seniors Get Swindled that claims:

“… studies using brain imaging suggest that a subset of older adults who have no diagnosable neurological or psychiatric disease may experience disproportionate, age-related decline in specific neural systems crucial for complex decision-making. New functional neuroimaging findings, along with results from behavioral, psychophysiological and structural imaging studies of the brain, indicate that these seniors may be losing their ability to make complex choices that require effective emotional processing to analyze short-term and long-term considerations. Older adults in this category fall prey to the promise of an immediate reward or a simple solution to a complicated problem. They fail to detect the longer-range adverse consequences of their actions. Finally, they may assume long-term benefits in situations where there are none. We see these characteristics as direct consequences of neurological dysfunction in systems that are critical for bringing emotion-related signals to bear on decision-making. ”

In short, changes in their frontal lobe create a new type of age-related cognitive bias towards selecting simple solutions and immediate rewards reguardless of  longer-term consequences.   

This goes much deeper than the typical assumption that the elderly are more susceptible to fraud because of loneliness, guilt or some other cognitive need, or worse, that they have some form of dementia.

Small reminders at just the right time can have a powerful impact on making health-related behavior changes. They support our efforts at self regulation and control and help us jump the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it.  This approach has been popularized through small-step programs and the idea of Nudges.

Habitwise is putting this principle into action in an interesting and visual way using bracelets and tokens. Check out this application for kids:

As they explain on the website:

“Self-care begins each morning by placing your wristband collection on one wrist. Throughout the day, simply shift the appropriate color and quantity of wristbands to your other wrist with each meal, snack and activity. One wrist shows goals for the day; the other tracks accomplishments.”

For people that don’t want to wear bracelets they offer:

The use principle is the same only you are shifting tokens from one pocket to another during the day.

The fact that these are portable, tactile, use color to convey information, offer a friendly reminder and can potentially be points of pride or self-competition means they are well-designed to support behavior change.

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.

We move around a lot and so supporting the cognition of how we navigate in a new environment for work and fun has become a big business. GPS navigation systems, location-based games and virtual roadside tours are just a few examples.

Opportunities for clever cognitive designers are endless. For a good review of the cognitive science behind getting lost and finding our way, check out the brief article, Why Humans Can’t Navigate Out of a Paper Bag in the New Scientist.   Some of the findings include that we have:

* A very weak ability (especially compared to animals) to judge distances and direction accurately.

* A strong capacity to imagine that we are someplace else.

* Mental maps built up to helps navigate an environment that can be inflexible and thwart our attempts to reorient.

* Fail to be mindful and ignore unique features in the landscape or other queues.

The article also addresses the emotional and visceral dimension of losing our way. Fear of getting lost is like the fear of public speaking.  It can be so intense that some individuals refuse to leave their homes or familiar surroundings.

This is an important finding for cognitive designers as there are many service experiences that involve a little navigation and therefore could easily trip over the fear of getting lost.

How we think-and-feel about animals will strongly determine the success of any product or service that is developed for pet owners. Said another way, cognitive design can be a real differentiator in the pet industry.

But how do we think and feel about animals? Recent research by Indiana University sociologist, David Blouin, sheds some interesting light on the mental model of dog owners. As reported in ScienceDaily, he argues:

“Dog ownership attitudes fell into three categories: Humanist, where dogs were highly valued and considered close companions, like pseudo people; protectionists might be vegetarians and they greatly valued animals in general, not just as pets; dominionists saw animals as separate and less important than people, often using the dogs for hunting and pest control and requiring them to live outdoors.”

He has done additional research on Animal Meanings, that has produced interesting findings as well:

“I describe various attitudes and treatments of dogs and explain some of their important determinants. Contrary to previous research, I find no relationship between gender, race, age, area of residence, or income and attitudes. Also contrary to previous research, I find that education is negatively associated with attitudes.”

A lack of correlation between demographics and the mental model of dog owners signals the need to do more cognitive modeling than traditional market research.

Yes, at least for some people in some circumstances according to an interesting new fMRI study covered in Seed Magazine as Truth or Lies:

“What they found is that honesty is an automatic process—but only for some people. Comparing scans from tests with and without the opportunity to cheat, the scientists found that for honest subjects, deciding to be honest took no extra brain activity. But for others, the dishonest group, both deciding to lie and deciding to tell the truth required extra activity in the areas of the brain associated with critical thinking and self-control.”

For cognitive designers working on ethics/moral related challenges this has some important implications.

First, develop a psychographic profile for picking out those folks in your target group that require behavior change, short of doing an fMRI study. Bombarding folks that have already learned the “moral behaviors” with irrelevant attempts to change will be disorienting and counter productive.  Second, design policies, rewards, processes and other environmental factors to make the honest choice require far less mental energy (critical reasoning and self control) than the dishonest choice.

Any product, service or experience that heightens our sense of inclusion – or feeling that we belong to a group – generates considerable positive mental energy through meaning, association, security and identity effects.  This turns on the idea that people are “social animals” and have a deep need to be part of the pack.

On the flip side, products, services or experiences that leave us feeling alienated or even rejected run the risk of generating a river of negative mental energy.  The old idea that rejection “hurts” is at work here.  Found an interesting item in the UCLA newsroom that indicates just how deep this effect may go.

The findings give weight to the common notion that rejection “hurts” by showing that a gene regulating the body’s most potent painkillers — mu-opioids — is involved in socially painful experiences too, said study co-author Naomi Eisenberger, UCLA assistant professor of psychology and director of UCLA’s Social and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory.

Inclusion and rejection are powerful psychological forces, ones that appear to be rooted in genetics.  They are a deep well of mental energy for the sensitive cognitive designer.

There is an interesting article in Slate that talks about our fundamental drive to seek out information and how modern communication devices from Google to email and Twitter help us take it to the next level. I like how the article begins to zero in on the fact that the root-level craving here is not so much the information we find but the mental stimulation (energy) we get from the act of seeking. A couple of quotes to drive that home:

It is an emotional state Panksepp tried many names for: curiosity, interest, foraging, anticipation, craving, expectancy. He finally settled on seeking. Panksepp has spent decades mapping the emotional systems of the brain he believes are shared by all mammals, and he says, “Seeking is the granddaddy of the systems.”

The juice that fuels the seeking system is the neurotransmitter dopamine. The dopamine circuits “promote states of eagerness and directed purpose,” Panksepp writes. It’s a state humans love to be in. So good does it feel that we seek out activities, or substances, that keep this system aroused—cocaine and amphetamines, drugs of stimulation, are particularly effective at stirring it.

Seeking is fundamental just because we are hardwired to behave in a way that maximizes personal mental energy. The lesson for designers is clear – irresistible designs are those that deeply stir cognition to create mental energy.