Cognitive Design

Drake Bennett at the Boston Globe may be helping to popularize a key concept in cognitive design. In the article, Easy = True: How ‘cognitive fluency’ shapes what we believe, how we invest, and who will become the next supermodel, he reviews what has recently been learned about how cognitive load/fit strongly influences choice, perception, learning and other mental activities.

The key points made will be nothing new to readers of this blog. For example:

“Psychologists have determined, for example, that shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names do indeed significantly outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names. Other studies have shown that when presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process – even totally nonsubstantive changes like writing it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme or simply repeating it – can alter people’s judgment of the truth of the statement, along with their evaluation of the intelligence of the statement’s author and their confidence in their own judgments and abilities. Similar manipulations can get subjects to be more forgiving, more adventurous, and more open about their personal shortcomings.” 

My hope is that his journalistic reporting will help accelerate understanding and interest in the basics of cognitive design. Specifically, the concept of “cognitive fluency” may resonate much better than “cognitive load” or worse yet “cognitive ergonomics”. The New York Times has picked it up as an Idea of the Day.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 12:47 pm and is filed under Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.