New Models of Intuition – Design Implications?
Monday, April 11th, 2011
Over the last 30 years cognitive science has revealed a new and significantly different understanding of how minds work. Little of this new view has been factored into management, education, healthcare, communications and other cognition-intense activities. This creates opportunities for those interested in translating the science into new frameworks, methods and products aimed at creating more brain-smart practices. And the science continues to advanced – it is a moving target!
Take for example, the idea of dual-processing models of cognition that were popularized so well by the book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. The key idea is that we have two types of mental processes – automatic and deliberate – and most of what we do between our ears is automatic. Now more and more researchers are calling this simple distinction in question, claiming sub-classifications within both deliberate and automatic processing. One clear example is the work being done at Max Planck Institute. It is summarized nicely in Beyond Dual-Process Models.
The researchers focus on the automatic or intuitive processes and argue for four classes based on the cognitive process involved. The classes include association, matching, accumulation and constructive.
Such refinements suggest a number of possibilities for the design of education or decision-making applications. For example, the researchers talk about the different role of affect (emotion) in each model. Further, leveraging these sub forms of intuition might also be a way to lower the cognitive load of various activities. While these model are very much in the research phase, they signal the start of an important refinement in the science used by cognitive designers.
