Cognitive Design

As citizens we make a lot of common sense assumptions about how minds work. There are so-called folk psychological explanations for how we learn, make decisions, solve problems, manage emotions, remember things and so on. Such assumption, especially since they are based on common sense, play an important role in social interactions but are in fact false or misleading. As cognitive designers seeking to optimize artifacts for how minds actually work, we don’t have the luxury of taking folk psychology at face value. We must be very careful to challenge folk psychological assumptions.

The PsyBlog has a recent post, Our Minds are Black Boxes - Even to Ourselves, that illustrate this point very well. They reviewed a study from 1977 designed to test assumptions about intelligence, flexibility in problem, likeability and sympathy. The study found that subjects had exceptionally poor judgment about how minds work when it comes to flexibility, likeabilty and sympathy but were reasonable accurate when it comes to intelligence.

I believe this is one of the reasons we need cognitive design so badly today. Our organizations, management practices, products and services have been designed using natural but faulty assumptions about how minds work.   This would be similar to using cartoon physics in the design of bridges. It would work for many things but unfortunately fail fatally for others.

The scientific study of happiness has had a big uptick over the last 3-5 years. This has been good for cognitive designers interested in trying to create a happy “think-and-feel” in their artifacts.  Tough going to be sure so I am always on the look out  for science-based work with design hints.

Check on the post on EurekAlert! covering happiness research in the US. It is statistically robust and it maps happiness to US states.  Digging into the causes and correlations could reveal many hints for designers looking to create artifacts that make us happy.  Rankings are shown below.

 Andrew Oswald/ Wu ranking of happiness levels by US State

1. Louisiana
2. Hawaii
3. Florida
4. Tennessee
5. Arizona
6. Mississippi
7. Montana
8. South Carolina
9. Alabama
10. Maine
11. Alaska
12. North Carolina
13. Wyoming
14. Idaho
15. South Dakota
16. Texas
17. Arkansas
18. Vermont
19. Georgia
20. Oklahoma
21. Colorado
22. Delaware
23. Utah
24. New Mexico
25. North Dakota
26. Minnesota
27. New Hampshire
28. Virginia
29. Wisconsin
30. Oregon
31. Iowa
32. Kansas
33. Nebraska
34. West Virginia
35. Kentucky
36. Washington
37. District of Columbia
38. Missouri
39. Nevada
40. Maryland
41. Pennsylvania
42. Rhode Island
43. Massachusetts
44. Ohio
45. Illinois
46. California
47. Indiana
48. Michigan
49. New Jersey
50. Connecticut
51. New York

 Where do you live? Are you that happy?

The ScienceDaily blog reviews yet another new report on the incidental brain/cognitive training impact of playing video games. Racing, Shooting and Zapping your Way to Better Visual Skills, reports:

“According to a new study in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, regular gamers are fast and accurate information processors, not only during game play, but in real-life situations as well.”

 And here is the skinny:

 Playing video games enhances performance on mental rotation skills, visual and spatial memory, and tasks requiring divided attention.

In short,  playing the right type of video games strengthens visual cognition automatically or incidentally. What I would like to see is a study of these incidental brain training effects compared to those with software packages that have been explicitly engineered to improve visual cognition.

Cognitive designer’s delight in such examples because they show us how to create artifacts that naturally make users smarter.   Imagine remaking your product or service so that it naturally makes your customers smarter. In my workshop on cognitive design I show how you can do this with any product or service, even a paper clip.  Redesigning products and services to create a think-and-feel that incidentally build customer’s mental skills is a powerful way to use cognitive design to differentiate your offering.

Four new experimental studies confirm what many cognitive designers suspected – we are over confident when it comes to predicting our ability to control urges and impulses. Described in the research article, Restraint Bias: How the Illusion of Self-Restraint Promotes Impulsive Behavior, the authors get right to designable-insights:

“This biased perception of restraint had important consequences for people’s self-control strategies. Inflated impulse-control beliefs led people to overexpose themselves to temptation, thereby promoting impulsive behavior.”

 If you don’t have access to the journal, you can get more info in the blog post, Step Away from the Cookie Jar!

Be sure to test for the restraint bias in your next behavior change project.

For $0.99 an iPhone app called eCBT from MindApps that is the first phone-based application of cognitive behavioral therapy for mood disorders that I am aware of

It’s not that cognitive designers are moody,  but eCBT is such a cool application of cognitive design.

Second, for the more scholarly designer, or just anyone wanting to get back to first principles for the holidays, there is for $99 a new edition of the classic, Cognitive Psychology: A Student’s Handbook.    Check out the table of contents and free chapter on attention and performance here. I especially like Chapter 15 on Cognition and Emotion. Is the illusory distinction between intellect and effect beginning to slip away?  That would be a great present!

Feel free to share your gift ideas.

Design a guided imagery experiment to reveal what people really think-and-feel 

 Figuring out what people really think and feel is the big problem in cognitive design. After all, most of what we know (memory) is implicit and cannot be readily called to mind and reported. Simply asking people what they think and feel fails to produce interesting results. That is why we do protocol studies, build prototypes and ask people to bring in pictures that resonate with them. All so we can play detective and try and infer what cognitive biases, mental models, metaphors and other implicit memories are beneath the surface driving thoughts and feelings.

 I was reading a post, Mind over Matter: Imagery in the Classroom, on the Eide Neurolearning Blog and it reminded me of powerful technique for getting at implicit or unconscious memories – mental imagery.  The post links to a chapter by Kosslyn and Moulton on Mental Imagery and Implicit Memory.  This is a must read for cognitive designers for several reasons.

 First, it provides ample scientific evidence for the claim that asking people to imagine doing something and reporting on the experience (a guided imagery experiment) is a powerful way to reveal how they really think about things.

More specifically, it argues how we simulate things in our mind (imagine doing and feeling things via imagination) provides many clues into the content of implicit memories. This make sense because in the absence of direct perception to guide our thinking we  must rely of what we assume to know, or what we know unconsciously to construct events, project behaviors and simulate feelings.

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Check out the paper, Designing for Doubt, that argues sensor-rich mobile phones can be used to design personal measurement instruments that will enable a powerful new wave of citizen science. Citizen science or “street science” involves the public in the collection and analysis of data to conduct large-scale professional grade scientific work.  With web-based crowdsoucring platforms it has seen considerable growth.  Add to that souped-up cell phones and you might change the game in how some of modern science is done.

 Designing such tools and platforms presents many challenges for the cognitive designer.  Chief among them is to insure the appropriate mental discipline when forming a hypothesis, collecting data, analyzing data and conducting other scientific activities by non-scientifically trained yet highly motivated citizens.

The technology and market research company, Forrester, has chimed in on the important issue of how to apply emotional design to differentiate your web site. The report is a bit pricey at $499 but you can find a post on the CMS wire that covers the key concepts and techniques here.  What I like is that they put cognition or more specifically, emotional needs, center stage.  They advocate ethnographic analysis and the importance of non-verbal signals (e.g. facial expressions) for uncovering hidden needs. Music to the ears of the cognitive designer.

Although it contains no new insights or techniques for readers of this blog, the report makes for a nice reference when you are trying to make the case for cognitive design.

I am often asked by clients and students, what can cognitive design do to help us with stereotypes? For example, consider the belief (and supporting mental models) that female drivers are way worse than male drivers.  Further, how can we differentiate harmful stereotypes from useful generalizations?

The first step, as is always the case in cognitive design, is to make sure we understand what cognitive psychology and neuroscience have to say on the matter.  Cognitive design starts with the best scientific model of the “workflow between the ears” that we can muster. Fortunately, there has been a lot of work on stereotypes lately. Take for instance the link that Gina Farag shared recently on Biases the Blind: The role of stereotypes in decision-making processes.  It is a treasure chest full of designable insights, including:

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Artifacts that work by creating and sustaining hope in people represent some of the most powerful cognitive designs on the planet. Consider for example the holy cross and the lottery ticket.  Examples of hope-generating designs span a tremendous range precisely because there are many flavors of hope. To see this check out the post on PsyCentral on The 7 Kinds of Hope. The kinds include inborn, chosen, borrowed, bargainer’s, unrealistic, false and mature.  

First step in the cognitive design of a hope-generating artifact? Pick your flavor.