Sense of Control Warps Pattern Perception
Research findings from University of Texas at Austin reported in Science Magazine, suggest that feeling in control (or not) strongly influences how effective we are at a wide range of pattern recognition tasks.
“Participants who lacked control were more likely to perceive a variety of illusory patterns, including seeing images in noise, forming illusory correlations in stock market information, perceiving conspiracies, and developing superstitions.”
The perception of illusory patterns can lead to poor judgements and decisions making. So this finding has implications for designers working on a wide range of cognitive applications from management decision-making and consumer choice to learning and perhaps even the design of new magic tricks!
When feeling insecure we see patterns where there are none to create order and restore confidence. This is a strong cognitive bias with both an upside and downside.
Understanding how much control people require to feel secure is an important part of building a complete psychographic profile (list of cognitive needs and tendencies) to support good design.
To get to the entire article you need to buy it or have a subscription to Science. You can find a free copy on Scribd.com. Search for “Lacking Control Increasing Illusory Pattern Perception.” For further commentary check out the blog entry on Not Exactly Rocket Science.
July 27th, 2009 at 8:22 pm
Your post Cognitive Design » Blog Archive » Sense of Control Warps Pattern Perception was very interesting when I found it over google on Tuesday by my search for perception. I have your blog now in my bookmarks and I visit your blog again, soon. Take care.