Cognitive Design

Research into what makes us happy and why has exploded over the last 10 year.  Books, conferences and even dedicated journals on happiness have been cranked out in ever increasing numbers.  It can be a little confusing. What do we really know about happiness? I have been careful on this blog to discuss only those results that have clear implications for design and are rooted in evidence.  After all, happiness is a major challenge for the cognitive designer.

PsychCentral recently reported on 5 Reliable Finding From Happiness Research. Although we have touch on them in other posts, it is an excellent summary highlighting:

1. Experience not things makes us happy

2. Relationships are the key to happiness

3. Once you reach a certain income level more money does not mean more happiness

4. Windfalls such as winning a lottery do NOT create lasting happiness

5. Half the factors that determine happiness are under your control.

Points 1 and 5  justify taking a cognitive design approach to happiness.  Points 2, 3 and 4 give general but important guidance to creating specific designs for happiness.

Many of the posts on this blog have to do with designing better solutions for healthcare. After all,  the delivery and consumption of healthcare is primarily a cognitive and behavior-change issue.   I was very happy to see the latest study from the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions. It is a survey of the activities, beliefs and needs of healthcare consumers from around the world, including the US. Although many of the results are contextual from a design standpoint, some do get to specific functional needs. For example, the summary of the 2009 study found:

* 7 in 10 say they would participate in a wellness program if they were given financial incentives, such as a reduced insurance premium or monetary reward

* 13 percent of consumers have visited a retail clinic this year and 30 percent said they would do so if it cost 50 percent or less than seeing a doctor in a doctor’s office

* 42 percent want access to an online personal health record connected to their doctor’s office

* 65 percent of consumers are interested in home monitoring devices that enable them to check their condition and send the results to their doctor

The study supports the conclusion that healthcare costs do change behaviors and consumers are willing to embrace innovations in self-care that meet their cognitive needs – personalization, control and convenience.

A major goal of cognitive design is to create artifacts that reliably cause a specific “think and feel” or mental state in the people that interact with them. The UK’s Design Council has taken on just such a task in trying to redesign the hospital environment to improve a patient’s sense of dignity. The program is bearing fruit including new designs for reclining day chairs, room screens, beds, gowns, washroom pods and other components.

My hope is to push behind these designs to understand if and how they modeled the cognition of dignity. In the meantime, you can follow the link above to videos on each of the results or just look at the photos on the next page.

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I recently found the Journal of Judgment and Decision Making.  Access to full content is free.  It covers many practical aspects of decision-making and provides designable insights. For example, in the new article, You Don’t Want to Know What You are Missing, the authors clearly demonstrate that when making a decision the more information we have about near-term benefits the less like we are to chose an alternative with the greatest long-term benefits. They put a sharper point to it:

“The present study reveals that, under the circumstances observed here, withholding information about local rewards from decision-makers can actually facilitate long-term optimal choice. “

Withholding information of course is just one option and might not be the best. Delaying it until longer-term options have been examined is an alternative.  No matter, this is just the type of insights cognitive designers seek and the journal appears to be full of them!

The cognitive science behind how and why consumers make the decisions they do has received a great deal of attention over the last 10 years.   Best selling book and several new fields such as neuromarketing and behavioral economics have emerged all of which hold important insights for cognitive designers.  If you have not folded these into your toolkit it is well worth the effort. I have found them useful not only to guide design for consumer decision-making but all manner of decision-making involving value.

For a quick introduction to some of the designable insights from behavioral economics, check out, A Marketer’s Guide to Behavioral Economics, written by Ned Welch in the McKinsey Quarterly.  Here are some of the key ideas:

 * Remove the viscerally pain in parting with money.The emotional pain caused by the thought of giving up something we value now, for some benefit in the future, even if it is a big benefit, is something we are not wired to do.  Ways to mitigate the pain of parting with money today include providng the option of delaying payment, categorize the payment in a more pleasant mental account (spare change, tax rebate or anything windfall-related) and use web/mobile phone based ways to make payment instant. 

* Use the power of default options to have the status quo bias work for you. Having employees opt-out rather than opt-in to a 401k plan or offering a base model with several premium features are typical examples. We tend to keep things as they are especially if it takes a lot of mental work to change them. 

* Avoid choice or other cognitive overloading. Too many decisions, too much to learn, too many open issues all mean I won’t decide to buy. 

* Make the choice to buy meaningful by properly positioning the product. If I can quickly and easily see the relative value of the article then buying it makes meaning for me.

In general, you want to be sure that the mental energy generated by making the decision is much greater than the mental work the consumer has to do to make it. Given a reasonable price and some need or want, tipping the balance of mental energy will make the sale every time!

The simple act of moving marbles up or down facilitates the recall and valence of emotional memories  or so claims a new paper, Motor Action and Emotional Memory in the journal Cognition. You can find a good overview of the work in this press release from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Test subjects were asked to push glass marbles up or down while recounting an autobiographical memory that was either positive (tell me about the last time your felt proud of yourself) or negative (describe when you last felt ashamed). Here is what they report:

  “When prompted to tell positive memories, participants began recounting their experiences faster during upward movements, but when prompted to tell negative memories, they responded faster during downward movements. Memory retrieval was most efficient when participants’ motions matched the spatial directions that metaphors in language associate with positive and negative emotions. “

The metaphors play a key role:

‘These data suggest that spatial metaphors for emotion aren’t just in language’, Casasanto says, ’linguistic metaphors correspond to mental metaphors, and activating the mental metaphor ‘good is up’ can cause us to think happier thoughts.’

It is not clear how strong these effects are, or if they will be reproduced by other experiments. No matter, small behaviors that may trigger big mental events are always of interest to cognitive designers.

The cognition behind completing other people’s sentences is decisively explored in the article, Predicting Syntax  published in the March Issue of the Journal Language. The article argues our ability to predict what others are going to say comes from knowledge of linguistic probabilities that in turn are developed through day-to-day experience with language. We have knowledge of most probable phrases in a wide variety of contexts and use that knowledge to do many things including completing other peoples sentences.

Discovering the “probable phrases” at work in a given context should provide important insights for guiding all sorts of cognitive design efforts.  A few are mentioned in a press release by the Linguistic Society of America:

“This intrinsic ability to predict based on probability has implications for language comprehension. Educators engaged in foreign language instruction might effectively focus their initial efforts on the most probable sentence constructions. Entrepreneurs engaged in marketing their products or services might use the most probable phrases in preparing their advertising messages. These research findings on linguistic probability may also be helpful in making computerized language more natural. Another practical application would be in the refinement of tools used in profiling and diagnosing those with language disorders. As noted by the authors in an interview, “Linguistic patterns are important in predicting comprehension. If we can make better use of these patterns to enhance comprehension, then we can improve people’s ability to understand one another.” 

Interested to hear from readers that have suggestions for how we can discover probable phrases during the design process.

YourNextBrain! provides daily tips and tools for enhancing cognitive performance and building a more resilient and longer-lasting brain.

Why a new blog? My current blog, Cognitive Design, is a little over two years old. It has accumulated 435 posts, 165 comments and several thousand regular readers (as far as I can tell).  I get a steady stream of emails with insights, questions and requests which I appreciate very much. The number one request by far is for tips on designing ways to improve cognitive performance and boost brain functions. It seems readers want to know how to design programs to make themselves and others smarter in a broad sense. I cover that a bit under the categories of cognitive training, behavior change and augmented cognition but just scratched the surface.

What can we do to consciously improve our cognitive abilities and brain function? How can we train our minds for peak performance and lifelong fitness just as we train our bodies?

In researching these questions I was surprised by the number of options and the growing body of scientific research around what works.   One very interesting finding was that our concept of cognitive aging — or how the brains of middle agers and older adults work — is undergoing a paradigm shift.  There are distinct areas where cognitive performance improves with age and there may be several stages of neural/cognitive development that have gone unnoticed.

All of this has enormous cognitive design implications so I decided to launch a new blog. It is dedicated to ideas and tools for designing and building YourNextBrain! The  blog’s theme is a bit forward looking but each post will provide information you can use today and will  have a design focus. It will cover the gambit of options from those with hard scientific evidence to the more speculative applications. The Next Brain blog is new, only 38 posts so far but give it a try. I look forward to your comments and invite your participation.

The Cognitive Design Blog will continue as is so please visit regularly and share your ideas and experiences.

As we age the performance of working memory changes.  A big change that researchers have recently uncovered is that we lose the capacity to filter out irrelevant information when we try and form memories.   The inability to ignore distractions leads to hyper-binding or encoding irrelevant bits of information. I covered this earlier in Hyper-Binding and Memory in Elderly.

But what is a cognitive designer to do? How can we adjust our designs to overcome this change in the performance of working memory?   One approach involves making older adults aware of potential distraction before they occur. In principle this could help them focus or use metacognition to compensate.  A new study just reported in Cortex, an international journal focused on cognition and the nervous system, dashes any hopes of that working.

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If you see a problem in your neighborhood, or anywhere for that matter, and want to take low-hassle but decisive action, the new site  SeeClickFix might be for you. The site is  a distributed sensing and community problem solving application.  It is a great platform not only for citizens that want to report and track issues (and watch areas) but governments, community agencies or other groups that want to mobilize and involve their constituents.