Cognitive Design

When we design for how the mind works we can achieve some interesting effects by focusing on the body, or so says the theory of embodied cognition. In this theory cognitive processes are strongly determined by the bodies interaction with the world. For example, taking a walk to think something out or making a complex point with our hands.

A new insight comes from a recent study at Ohio State on How Body Posture Affects Confidence in Your Own Thoughts.

“Students who held the upright, confident posture were much more likely to rate themselves in line with the positive or negative traits they wrote down.

In other words, if they wrote positive traits about themselves, they rated themselves more highly, and if they wrote negative traits about themselves, they rated themselves lower.”

The implication for designers  is clear – adjusting body posture may change the intensity of beliefs even on important issues.

Images (of words) shown so fast that you cannot consciously see them do have an impact on your cognition. This is true especially if they are negative (agony, despair, murder) versus positive (cheerful, flower peace) or so found an interesting study at UCL’s Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience.

“Today the journal Emotion publishes a study led by Professor Nilli Lavie, which provides evidence that people are able to process emotional information from subliminal images and demonstrates conclusively that even under such conditions, information of negative value is better detected than information of positive value. “ 

 Not that anyone is using subliminals in design any more.