caitlin gannon

I just discovered Creating Passionate Users, a blog/website that explores topics similar to my own interests (cognitive science & usability) but in a much more focused & professional way.

We are all passionate about the brain and metacognition, most especially–how the brain works and how to exploit it for better learning and memory. Oh yeah, and how to recognize when someone else (including one of us) is applying brain-based techniques to get you to do something.

“Hacking the legacy brain” is one of their core concepts:

A big part of the learning theory we use in the Head First books is figuring out how to “trick” your brain into thinking that learning Java is as important as watching for tigers. We pay a great deal of attention to what your brain cares about, especially when the concerns (tigers-but-not-java) are in direct conflict with what your mind cares about (java-but-not-tigers).

I’m going to run out and get one of their Head First books–not because I care about learning Java but because I’d really like to see the cognitive science aspect incorporated into a software guide. Now, back to the tigers…

When it comes to self-deception, we humans are experts. We are quite able of convincing ourselves, for example, that we know something when in fact we really don’t. One of my favorite cogsci blogs, Mixing Memory, describes this phenomenon — called the illusion of explanatory depth — in some detail:

The idea behind the illusion of explanatory depth is simply that there are many cases in which we think we know what’s going on, but we don’t.

There are many great examples in cognitive psychology (e.g., psychological essentialism, in which we believe that our concepts have definitions, but when pressed, learn that either they do not have definitions, or we don’t have conscious access to those definitions), but you don’t have to look to scientific research to find them. If you ask 100 people on the street if they know how a toilet’s flushing mechanism works, many, if not most will tell you “Of course I do!” But if you then ask them to explain it, you will quickly find that they really have no idea how a toilet’s flushing mechanism works. This is the illusion of explanatory depth. They know that when they push down on the flusher, the water leaves the bowl, and then fills back up, but they don’t know how this happens, they only think they do.

The researchers cited in this post found that a person’s overconfidence is highest when explaining how things work (such as toilet flushers) as opposed to citing knowledge of facts or stories. The subjects’ overconfidence was also higher for devices with more visible parts than for those with hidden parts.

The author’s ultimate point is that the illusion of explanatory depth can lead us to deal with information overload by relying on the expertise of others; we think we have knowledge but really we just know about the knowledge.

So how might this phenomenon apply to user experience?

• Do users assume they have more knowledge than they do? (Sure, I know how to use Amazon. Hmm…wait a minute…how do I change my default shipping address?)

• How does the user interface impact the force of the illusion? Which kind of interface is likely to seem easier, one with more buttons (more visible parts) — or a bare-boned interface like Google (less visible parts)?

I don’t have any conclusions to offer (I won’t succumb to the illusion, I won’t). I’ll just keep an eye open for other experts out there on the web who can explain it to me, so I can then convince myself that I knew the answer all along.

Scientists are in a mad rush to locate specific emotional and mental states in the brain: schadenfreude, empathy, even anomie (well, almost). Articles are published every day about scientists “mapping new regions of the brain” and are often accompanied with now familiar images of brains lit up by MRI technology (and PhotoShop).

A recent article in the NYT takes issue with this popular image of the “lit up” brain:

[This] may leave out the bigger issues of interconnections, the impossibly complex network of impulses and interactions that underlie our thoughts and actions.

So there’s more to the story than a bunch of blinking neurons.

The same day I read this article, I received a note from The Edge about Marco Iacoboni (famed researcher of mirror neurons) and his instant science experiment involving the Superbowl ads and MRI. This, apparently, is your brain on advertisements:

(from the Edge article)

Iacoboni is interested in the difference between what people say and what their brains reveal. Apparently there is a difference between the ads that people say they liked vs. the ads that elicited the strongest emotional response in the brain.

What is quite surprising, is the strong disconnect that can be seen between what people say and what their brain activity seem to suggest. In some cases, people singled out ads that elicited very little brain responses in emotional, reward-related, and empathy-related areas.

It’s interesting that he seems to conflate emotional response with liking something. I can watch a Kodak commercial and register an emotional response to the heartstrings-pulling, but that doesn’t mean that I like it or that I’m going to go out and buy a Kodak camera.

Back to the NYT article: when we look at pretty pictures of the brain produced by the latest in imaging technologies (superbowl ads = ventral mirror neurons), we should also remember that the brain is infinitely more complex than we can even imagine. The images are just one view, not the whole picture.

The subtle biology that integrates and coordinates disparate areas of the brain, like the visual, the verbal and the emotional — the interlocking symphonies of activity that make us individuals, that help determine what we do when jealous or inspired by a work of art — are absent, despite all the color-coding and exotic names for areas of the brain.

In other words, there’s still an individual self in there - even if my mirror neurons predictably light up when I see the Clydesdale horses.

“Information overload” has been in our vocabulary for decades–we can all relate to the frustration of receiving 100+ emails a day and not having enough time to process all the information that comes at us. We joke about it.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett offers a disturbing new view on this problem: we are being overrun by memes (self-replicating ideas such as common knowledge, song melodies, beliefs) — and the outlook is grim.

Dennett writes in the Edge Annual Question 2006:

The human population is still growing, but at nowhere near the rate that the population of memes is growing. There is competition for the limited space in human brains for memes, and something has to give.

Thanks to our incessant and often technically brilliant efforts, and our apparently insatiable appetites for novelty, we have created an explosively growing flood of information, in all media, on all topics, in every genre. Now either (1) we will drown in this flood of information, or (2) we won’t drown in it. Both alternatives are deeply disturbing.

What do I mean by drowning? I mean that we will become psychologically overwhelmed, unable to cope, victimized by the glut and unable to make life-enhancing decisions in the face of an unimaginable surfeit. […]

If we don’t drown, how will we cope? […] What will happen to common knowledge in the future? I do think our ancestors had it easy: aside from all the juicy bits of unshared gossip and some proprietary trade secrets and the like, people all knew pretty much the same things, and knew that they knew the same things. There just wasn’t that much to know. Won’t people be able to create and exploit illusions of common knowledge in the future, virtual worlds in which people only think they are in touch with their cyber-neighbors?

Imagine a world in which the aspects of culture that tie us together–music, traditions, art, philosophy, science–have become so tremendously diluted that we lose that common thread. It would be like “culture shock,” but for everyone in the culture.

On a more applied (and less depressing) note, the role of information designers/information architects/whatever they are called is likely to grow as our constant flow of information grows. People will become more dependent on tools that filter information (witness the dominance of Google and Yahoo!) rather than tools that collect data–and a clean, usable interface will of course still be critical to any data filtering program.