Cognitive Design

The cognition behind completing other people’s sentences is decisively explored in the article, Predicting Syntax  published in the March Issue of the Journal Language. The article argues our ability to predict what others are going to say comes from knowledge of linguistic probabilities that in turn are developed through day-to-day experience with language. We have knowledge of most probable phrases in a wide variety of contexts and use that knowledge to do many things including completing other peoples sentences.

Discovering the “probable phrases” at work in a given context should provide important insights for guiding all sorts of cognitive design efforts.  A few are mentioned in a press release by the Linguistic Society of America:

“This intrinsic ability to predict based on probability has implications for language comprehension. Educators engaged in foreign language instruction might effectively focus their initial efforts on the most probable sentence constructions. Entrepreneurs engaged in marketing their products or services might use the most probable phrases in preparing their advertising messages. These research findings on linguistic probability may also be helpful in making computerized language more natural. Another practical application would be in the refinement of tools used in profiling and diagnosing those with language disorders. As noted by the authors in an interview, “Linguistic patterns are important in predicting comprehension. If we can make better use of these patterns to enhance comprehension, then we can improve people’s ability to understand one another.” 

Interested to hear from readers that have suggestions for how we can discover probable phrases during the design process.

YourNextBrain! provides daily tips and tools for enhancing cognitive performance and building a more resilient and longer-lasting brain.

Why a new blog? My current blog, Cognitive Design, is a little over two years old. It has accumulated 435 posts, 165 comments and several thousand regular readers (as far as I can tell).  I get a steady stream of emails with insights, questions and requests which I appreciate very much. The number one request by far is for tips on designing ways to improve cognitive performance and boost brain functions. It seems readers want to know how to design programs to make themselves and others smarter in a broad sense. I cover that a bit under the categories of cognitive training, behavior change and augmented cognition but just scratched the surface.

What can we do to consciously improve our cognitive abilities and brain function? How can we train our minds for peak performance and lifelong fitness just as we train our bodies?

In researching these questions I was surprised by the number of options and the growing body of scientific research around what works.   One very interesting finding was that our concept of cognitive aging — or how the brains of middle agers and older adults work — is undergoing a paradigm shift.  There are distinct areas where cognitive performance improves with age and there may be several stages of neural/cognitive development that have gone unnoticed.

All of this has enormous cognitive design implications so I decided to launch a new blog. It is dedicated to ideas and tools for designing and building YourNextBrain! The  blog’s theme is a bit forward looking but each post will provide information you can use today and will  have a design focus. It will cover the gambit of options from those with hard scientific evidence to the more speculative applications. The Next Brain blog is new, only 38 posts so far but give it a try. I look forward to your comments and invite your participation.

The Cognitive Design Blog will continue as is so please visit regularly and share your ideas and experiences.

As we age the performance of working memory changes.  A big change that researchers have recently uncovered is that we lose the capacity to filter out irrelevant information when we try and form memories.   The inability to ignore distractions leads to hyper-binding or encoding irrelevant bits of information. I covered this earlier in Hyper-Binding and Memory in Elderly.

But what is a cognitive designer to do? How can we adjust our designs to overcome this change in the performance of working memory?   One approach involves making older adults aware of potential distraction before they occur. In principle this could help them focus or use metacognition to compensate.  A new study just reported in Cortex, an international journal focused on cognition and the nervous system, dashes any hopes of that working.

(more…)

If you see a problem in your neighborhood, or anywhere for that matter, and want to take low-hassle but decisive action, the new site  SeeClickFix might be for you. The site is  a distributed sensing and community problem solving application.  It is a great platform not only for citizens that want to report and track issues (and watch areas) but governments, community agencies or other groups that want to mobilize and involve their constituents.   

We like to keep things the same, even if it means making errors or receiving less benefit from a situation.  This effect is called the status quo bias. For example, employees will accept the default asset allocation selection in a retirement plan while at the same time understanding that this will likely not produce the best return for them.  The amount of mental energy it takes to think through and select an alternative is not worth the potential future financial benefit.  Plus there is the potential negative emotional energy associated with taking responsibility for the choice and the worry and even anxiety that may produce.  This is not irrationality but it does illustrate the unique cognitive calculus of the status quo bias.  We are very sensitive to (put a huge premium on) the amount of mental energy things take. We don’t want our heads to blow up!

In theory, the harder a decision the more mental energy it requires and therefore the stronger the status quo bias should be.  A recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides evidence for that and even identifies the region of the brain that is active when we overcome the bias. This could prove an important result for those investing in a neuromarketing approach to complex products and services.

Working for a difficult boss is a big challenge. Working for a bullying, abusive or aggressive boss can be a nightmare.   Dealing with such difficult relationships is in fact a cognitive design problem.  Toxic relationships are most often rooted in unmet cognitive (intellectual, affective, motivational, volitional) needs.  

Discovering the unmet needs is the first step in designing a fix. A new article on Strategy+Business,  The Real Reason Your Boss is a Bully, offers some interesting insight. They bypass the often quoted psychological needs of ambition and need to feel powerful to get to a much more widespread issue:

“In fact, the authors conclude that aggressive behavior on the part of managers is often the result of self-recognized incompetence; in other words, vindictive bosses may be in over their heads — and their feelings of inadequacy cause them to take out their frustrations on subordinates.”

This finding clearly outlines the aggressive manager’s unmet cognitive needs.

With all the computing power in your car why don’t we treat it as another mobile computing platform?  Although this raises potential safety concerns it also creates the possibility of meeting the cognitive needs of drivers in new ways to improve safety, fuel efficiency and the quality of the driving experience.

 The Technology Review reports that this idea is about to get some legs. In  Creating Apps Just for Cars they describe a new class-based collaboration between Ford and the University of Michigan. The idea is that student teams with  conceive, design and prototype mobile apps for use in cars. 

 [Source: New Course - Cloud Computing in the Commute]

The goal is to avoid simply porting existing mobile apps and to develop ones that uniquely meet the needs of drivers. According to the article:

We’re not interested in apps that could be running on your smart phone and moving it into your car,” says Noble. Instead, the students are developing unique apps, such as a “green mileage” application, or a crowd-sourced app to track road conditions and traffic. “The challenge is to find a killer app and then build it,” Noble says. 

I am very interested in hearing about ideas for “killer apps” from readers, especially ones that make use of cognitive design principles.

Your iPhone, Android, Blackberry or other Smart Phone can be a powerful tool for doing design research, prototype testing and other fieldwork in cognitive design.   Besides basic mobile communication, video capture and GPS functionality new apps are creating some intriguing possibilities.

Take for example, Stickybits.  Here is what you do:

1. Download the free app and turn your smart phone into a bar code scanner.

2. Buy some labels – about 30 to 50 cents apiece depending upon how many you buy.

3. Associate digital content (photos, music, documents, videos, URLs, etc.) with your label.

4. Attach the label to some object.

Anytime someone scans the label they see your digital content! Example applications mentioned on the website include: Attaching a video to a birthday card, a resume to a business card and recipes to a cereal box.

A very creative app ripe with implications for designers. I am going to challenge Northwestern students in my Cognitive Design class this summer to use Stickybits in the design process.

Have you recently completed a project that demonstrated an improvement in the cognitive or emotional functions of your clients? If so you might want to submit an application to the first annual Brain Fitness Innovation Award.  First prize carries a cash award of $2500.

SharpBrains is hosting the award and they have assembled a world-class panel of judges.  Here is what they want:

“The awards will recognize organizations that are devising and implementing results-oriented and scalable initiatives that demonstrate their commitment to the brain fitness of their clients, members, patients, students or employees, and showcase innovative uses of non-invasive tools to improve cognitive and emotional functions and “real-world” outcomes.”

The contest should surface many insights useful for cognitive designers.

             [Image Source:  Sharpbrains] 

Having computers help us make decisions is a growing trend in both professional and consumer life.  Computers help us make decisions by providing access to information,  analyzing and displaying information, making recommendations,  critiquing human decisions and in some cases making the full decision automatically. The question is – do we make better decisions with or without computers? Do computers make good decision assistants?

The answer depends on if the  software has been designed to work in a naturalistic fashion (i.e. is designed for how our minds actually work). Or so argues, John Maule a professor of human decision making in a keynote speech at the 9th International Conference on Naturalistic Decision Making.

In his speech professor Maule points out that computers help us in many ways by overcoming our limitations for storing and processing information but warns:

 “…because many computer systems have been developed without a full understanding of how people actually think, computers can lead people to make bad decisions”

He points out that few systems allow us to balance intuitive and analytical approaches, help us avoid the confirmation bias and provide functional support for recognition-primed decision making versus a logical-rational approach.  All great clues for how to design people-machine systems that are optimized decision-makers!