Cognitive Design

SharpBrains is running a virtual summit covering many aspects of cognitive health and performance:

“The SharpBrains Summit features a dream team of over 30 speakers who are leaders in industry and research to discuss emerging research, tools and best practices for cognitive health and performance. This innovative event will expose health and insurance providers, developers, innovators at Fortune 500 companies, investors and researchers, to the opportunities, partnerships, trends, and standards of the rapidly evolving cognitive fitness field.”

Hopefully some readers will participate and share their insights by posting here.  I will collect responses and other notes and blog on the event next week.

Many people get considerable mental energy from boasting but don’t want to seem boastful.  The question for the cognitive designer is how can we create experiences that give client’s the mental lift of boasting without the downside of appearing too self promoting?  There is no easy way, but the literature provides some guidance:

 1. Have the person who is hearing the boast prompt the telling of it with a question. This effect indicates “self promotion in response to a question is perceived more positively”.

2.  Have a third-party, especially one that is neutral, do the boasting. This effect indicates that you are less likely to seem boastful if someone else sings your praises.  For some, such reputational effects are even more psychological pleasurable (mental energy) than direct telling.

The question and third-party effects give hints on how to keep a positive valence to the mental energy/emotion that comes from boasting.

[24 more photos from the exhibition can be found here.]

The Research Digest Blog reports on a study that provides important insights into medical decision-making for cognitive designers. The study focused on how text summaries improved (or not) the interpretation of graphical data about a patient’s state in a neonatal intensive care unit (ICU). They found:

‘Overall, these results confirm that in a neonatal ICU, human generated descriptions of time series physiological measures are better able to support medical decision-making than graphs with trend lines,’ the researchers said. ”

The post goes on to talk about the high labor cost associated with generating text summaries and the emergence of new software that can generate summaries automatically.

Successful video games are packed-full of cognitive design insights. So I am always on the look out for games that offer a “new category” of cognitive experience for users.  The idea is to reverse engineer them and apply their high-impact features and functions to other design challenges.

In 2009 the killerApp from a cognitive design standpoint has to be Sony’s Flower.  In flower you are the wind and make a poem through interaction with flowers and landscapes. All this happens by using a single button (any button) and tilting your controller while listening to a zen-like soundtrack.  Sounds a bit mushy (the category is called Zen gaming) but it is capturing the cognition of millions. The question for the cognitive designer is how does it work?

 I’ve included a still below but check out this this 4 minute video clip. Better, spend some time with the actual game.

The NIH and AHRQ are spending $15M to find out.  

Comparative effectiveness research in healthcare, or studies on the relative cost and benefit of specific diagnostics and treatments, is a hot topic. Doing this type of research will empirically determine, for example, if there is any clinical benefit to a more expensive or frequent diagnostic imaging technique.

Doing the research is one thing, getting providers to use it in delivering care is another. And that will be a big problem. To help solve the problem, the National Institute of Health (NIH) and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) are offering $15M in grant money to purse clinical trials on Using Behavioral Economics Research for Nudging Comparative Effectiveness Research.

Here is the purpose of the grant as specified in the executive summary:

(more…)

In previous posts we have examined how important fairness and reciprocity are when designing service recovery processes. Indeed, I argued that these psychological effects and the meaning states they create are far more important than the monetary factors involved.

A colleague recently shared material on the field of cognitive economics that provides an interesting scientific footing for this position and other aspects of cognitive design. An excellent reference site can be found here. A specific article on how we trade economic value for fairness and reciprocity can be found in: In Search of Homo Economicus.

Eating too fast and not taking time to feel how full you are (satiated) can lead to overeating. Enter the Mandometer, a computerized scale that monitors weight changes in your plate of food during eating to advise on consumption speed and to send prompts asking you to pause and check for feelings of fullness.

And it appears to work. According to a post on Scientific American:

“In a study published January 5 in the British Medical Journal, participants who received Mandometer assistance for one year lost significantly more body mass index (BMI), which is a measure of weight based on height, than those who did not. In fact, the Mandometer group, but not the control group, achieved the reduction in BMI that the authors had previously determined was necessary to lead to a difference in body composition and metabolism. ”

The device used under clinical supervision is also being applied to retrain those with eating disorders. Watch a demo video here.

[Source: Fast Company] 

Using 147,456 processors and 144 terabytes of working memory IBM simulated the working of a Cat’s cerebral cortex at 1/100th its normal speed. This surpassed previous records of 40% of a mouse’s brain (2006) and 100% of a rat’s brain (2007). A mere 1% of the human cerebral cortex has been simulated.

These simulation might generate profound new insights into how minds work. In the future they could also act as a computerized test-bed for cognitive designers.