Cognitive Design

Androids or human like robots are growing in numbers. We see them in video games and films as well as in the real-world as service bots.    Some androids gives us the creeps others we like. A brain scanning study just reported from UC San Diego, Your Brain on Androids, helps to explain this difference.  It turns out that androids that look too human but don’t also move in a perfectly human way, give us the creeps. On the other hand, androids that move more like robots and look more like robots are fine.

Our brains expect a match between the level of human-like appearance and motion

Not a surprise to readers of the cognitive design blog. If it looks human but moves robot we have colliding mental models and cognitive dissonance.  If the visual differences are subtle and we cannot put our finder on the source of cognitive dissonance it could get creepy.  The importance of the UC San Diego study is that they saw this in our neural hardware and were able to study the range of the effect.  The finding are summarized in terms of the “uncanny valley effect” when our feelings about an android suddenly go negative because it looks too human.

From a cognitive design perspective, this finding about the mismatch between appearance and motion could generalize across artifacts to produce opportunities for innovation.   For example, looks like a car but does not move like a car. The challenge is to find a way to leverage it to produce interest or positive mental energy.  In this example, a human doing a robot dance has nearly 6 million view.

 Source of Image: UC San Diego news release.

One of the big findings in the last 20 years about how minds work has to do with memory. Memory is far from an objective record of things. Memory is dynamic and its contents are shaped and recreated by expectations, cognitive biases and social pressure.  These memory distortion factors are so powerful that not only do they change content they can spawn false memories that are stronger than the original.  A good example was recently documented by researchers exploring how social influence creates false memories.

What they found in a nutshell is that 70% of the time we will change our  memory of an event, even one we are confident of, if presented with opposing points of view from other members that participated in the event.  The social nature of the opposing point of view is reinforced with social-media style photos.  What is shocking is that almost 50% of time when we  are told that the opposing view was just a spoof (not true), we still don’t revert to the original memory.

What others think can play a dominate role in the formation and recall of memory. This has strong implications for cognitive designers working in the areas of decision-making and education.

Learning & the Brain is hosting another fantastic conference that examines how the latest findings neuroscience and psychology can be applied to education. Scheduled for November in Boston, Preparing 21st Century Minds will cover: Cognitive Training and Technology; Instructing Innovation and Imagination; Critical Thinking and Reflection; Connecting Culture, Collaboration and Moral; and Leveraging the Strengths and Talents of Special Minds.

The conference includes several workshops and a tour of MIT’s brain scanning facility.  If you have work to share, proposal for poster sessions are open until October 15, 2011.

Source of Image: 21st Century Digital Learner 

Many things can keep us from reaching our goals including ourselves. Indeed, our ability to regulate our thoughts, feelings and reactions to the challenges we encounter when working towards goals strongly determines success.   My ability to self regulate shapes for example, how I deal with frustration or the impulse to do something more enjoyable; if I take risks to learn new things; and ultimately whether I give up or keep going.

Cognitive designers focused on creating programs to help people achieve lasting behavior change or reach other goals must pay special attention to the psychology of self regulation.

That is why I am always on the lookout for studies that take a scientific look at how well the various tactics for self regulation work. For example, consider the study just published on the Self-Regulation of Priming Effects on Behavior.  In this study researchers completed three experiments to see if implementation intentions or the formulation of if-then plans improved self regulation. They found that they worked!

An if-then plan involves imagining potential defeaters to your intent on  reaching a goal and then making a plan to avoid or counteract its effects, if the defeater happens to surface. For instances, if my goal is to lose weight and I know I have trouble resisting cookies, I might make a plan that says “if I encounter a cookie then I will chew a piece of gum”.   Although simplistic, it is our ability to learn which types of if-then plans work that determines how well we learn new behaviors from experience.

Deadline for submission is August 3, 2011 by 5pm EDT 

STEM or science, technology, engineering and mathematics is a big driver of innovation and economic progress in the US. Providing high-quality public education in STEM is therefore vital to growing the US economy.  Our global rankings in STEM education have been slipping and elective enrollment in STEM areas has been falling.  The old model of STEM fails to meet the psychological needs and demands of 21st century students in the US.

Teaching and learning STEM involves all dimensions of our minds – intellectual, emotional, motivational and volitional and therefore retooling it is a major cognitive design challenge.   Making real progress in public STEM education requires designing new learning processes optimized for how the minds of US students really work.

One approach to improve STEM education is to more deeply involve professionals, companies and other community resources with STEM expertise in the learning process. To help bring focus to this approach, Changemakers working with the Carnegie Corporation and The Opportunity Equation has launched a STEM competition around the theme:

“Partnering for Excellence: Innovations in Science + Technology + Engineering + Math Education, an online collaborative competition, will spur creative ways for companies, universities, and other organizations with expertise in the STEM fields to partner with the public schools that need their talent. We are looking for models that bring STEM expertise into public schools, thereby using resources from the private and not-for-profit sectors in new ways to further student learning designed with a “long term, part time” approach (see visual below)”

As of this post there are a 101 entries. The deadline for submission is 5pm ET on August 3rd.  While there are several cash prizes to win, the real value might be in the community-based feedback you received on your proposal.

Placebos, or rituals dressed up as medical treatments that lack any active ingredients, definitely abate symptoms in many circumstances.  They can change how we think-and-feel about our illness or disease. Indeed, they are so effective at moving our hearts and minds we have explored their implications as a more general tool for organizational and individual change here on the cognitive design blog.

But an important question remains, do they go beyond heart-and-mind impact to create the underlying physiological changes that drugs with active ingredients do? Is belief somehow altering biology? The answer appears to be no, at least within the scope of a recent clinical study of placebos reported by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.  They studied the physiological impacts of placebos on Asthma patients and found:

 ”while placebos had no effect on lung function (one of the key objective measures that physicians depend on in treating asthma patients) when it came to patient-reported outcomes, placebos were equally as effective as albuterol in helping to relieve patients’ discomfort and their self-described asthma symptoms.”

Abating symptoms and relieving discomfort is a significant psychological impact.

This is a very important finding for cognitive designers. It demonstrates that designs (in this case a placebo) that create distinct think-and-feel effects deliver significant value even if they do not produce underlying changes in physiology. Placebos as “pure play” cognitive designs create real value!

Over the last 30 years or so  cognitive science has empirically shattered many of our basic assumptions about how the mind works.  For example, we traditionally viewed human memory as a passive observe-store-record device that objectively captured information about the world. Now we understand memory as actively being constructed (rather than recorded) from information, expectations and mental models. We dynamically create our understanding of the world, we don’t document it like a tape recorder.

To see how dramatically our understanding of what we hear is shaped by the expectations we have, take six minutes to experience Stairway to Heaven Run Backwards.

Priming effects or other features and functions that create expectations before perceptions, are powerful cognitive design techniques.  We make perceptions we do not have them.

According to research from Columbia Business School, we tend to artificially complicate our decision-making processes to match our expectation of hard a choice should be.  The harder we think a choice should be, the more complex we make the decision-making process. These artificial complications lead to poor decision outcomes and appear to infest a wide-range of life decisions about jobs, major purchases, choice of doctors and so on.  For example, I may pass on the best choice if it comes too quickly or easily when I expect the choice to be hard.

A release of EurekAlert sums of the key finding nicely:

“…. under certain conditions, consumers actually complicate their choices and bolster inferior options. Specifically, when an important decision seems too easy, consumers artificially reconstruct their preferences in a manner that increases choice conflict. The researchers conclude that when it comes to big decisions, people try to achieve a match between the expected effort of making a choice and the effort they think they should make in order to reach the decision. They term this the “effort compatibility principle”.?

Examples of preferences that shift to increase choice conflict included items such as size of the team you would work on when comparing job offers and if a doctor would make house calls or not when selecting doctors. These factors did not matter until a clearly superior choice was presented, making the decision “too easy” compared to the subject’s expectation.  Rather than select the best choice based on criteria they subject did prefer, they made irrelevant factors important to complicate the choice.

Whether this is the effort compatibility principle in action, or just represents we don’t really know what we prefer until pushed, the findings are important for cognitive designers.

Not only do we need to find and manage cognitive biases that may be at work to oversimplify or distort a decision-making process, we must also be on the look out for and manage expectation effects that can over complicate or distort a decision-making process.

We may be blinded to the easy win when we think the decision should be hard.

Source for Image: Retropolis Transit Authority.

Cold and lonely. Warm and secure.  Both appear to be deeply rooted (perhaps innate) in how our minds work, or so recent research reviewed in Hot Baths May Cure Loneliness reports.

And it is not just about the soothing effects of water. A warm cup of coffee, an ice cold conference room and a hot home cooked meal all reflect this mood-altering mechanisms.

Interested to hear from readers that have successfully used temperature in their designs or innovations.

Technology review has a provocative article on Lovotics (Love + Robotics) that introduces the “new science of engineering human, robot love.”  Looking beyond industrial, service and social robots, we have lovotics or devices designed for the emotion of love.   One is pictured below.

Check out this two minute video on its design and operation. Even if this may be a bit extreme, there is little doubt that robotic devices on many types are evoking emotional states in people. Human-robot relationship management is on the rise.

Interested to hear from readers on the cognitive design of human-robot emotional relationships.