Step Back to Improve Cognitive Performance
One view on cognition holds that our perceptions, thoughts, feelings and other mental functions are strongly shaped by how our bodies interact with the world. Examples of embodied cognition include talking/thinking with your hands, working things out (solving a problem) by taking a walk, smiling to lift your mood, remembering something by rubbing your head and so on.
These effects are not trivial and are likely fundamental to the nature of mind. This means as cognitive designers we must always be on the look out for scientific insights into how we can synchronize mental processes and body movements to improved cognitive performance.
For example, a new study from the Netherlands, Body Locomotion as a Regulatory Process, suggests that physically taking a step back from a difficult situation may in fact trigger higher-order cognitive control functions. The control functions help us direct our behaviors and attentional processes to more effectively deal with the situation. So just as the distraction task of counting to 10 helps us self-regulate our emotions, physically stepping back from a problematical situations will help us self-regulate cognitive resources (e.g. refocus and attend to new information).
Although not mentioned in the article, it is interesting that “stepping back” is sometime used as a problem solving metaphor to help draw attention to underlying assumptions or prerequisite concepts that must be worked through to solve the problem. This is a mental stepping back to the start of a chain of reasoning in the hopes of re-framing, clarifying or building consensus. The teacher says to the student, “Let’s step back a bit and …”.
If you don’t want to read the entire article, Developing Intelligence covers it well in a blog post HERE.
