Cognitive training and brain games

There has been a lot of controversy lately about the impact of cognitive training on tangible improvements in performance.  Specifically, I am referring to Gareth Cook’srecent piece in the New Yorker, Scott Kaufman’s article in Scientific American, and many heated debates in social media communities that cover this area. 

On one hand, there is a lot of evidence that many “brain games” are just marketing hype that sell electronic toys to parents for their kids in the hopes of developing the next Einstein and sell games to the typical consumer hoping to get a leg up in the workplace by improving their abilities.  Many of these games don’t really improve anything except the vendor’s bottom line.

On another hand, Scott Kaufman’s article cites many thorough, peer-reviewed studies that show specific benefits of cognitive training on performance.  Targeted training in working memory capacity really does improve working memory capacity.  So does this lead to tangible improvement in the real world?  Only for activities that rely on working memory.  But it turns out that high level reasoning does use working memory.  It takes good working memory to keep several hypotheses in mind, which is a key component of effective high level reasoning.  It is not a panacea to all cognitive activities but who would expect it to be?  Training your bicep muscle will make you stronger at some things, but is not going to improve your long distance running skills. 

Clearly, this is a rich area for future research and more work is necessary.  It demonstrates what we all should already know – that there are no shortcuts.  Getting better at something requires work.  Getting better at something that is multi-dimensional takes multi-dimensional (and thus a lot more) work. 

It also demonstrates something else we should all know.  When a company wants to sell you something, it may not work as well as advertised.  But that doesn’t mean the approach is fundamentally flawed.  Just because the brain games currently on the market don’t work all that well doesn’t mean that cognitive training is a failure across the board. 

So in the future, let’s take an honest approach to evaluating domains such as cognitive training and cognitive ability.  Don’t fall for the hype, but don’t disregard the positive results just because the hype is wrong. 

Posts on Ergonomics in Design

Sorry I haven't been posting much here, but it is because some of my latest have gone up at Ergonomics in Design - the applied journal published by the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.  Here are links to that last few:

User Experience of Prosthetics:  http://ergonomicsindesign.hfes.org:8080/wordpress/user-experience-of-prosthetics.

Self Identity Resonance and Apologizing: http://ergonomicsindesign.hfes.org:8080/wordpress/self-identity-resonance-and-apologizing

Virtual Entitlement - License to Indulge:  http://ergonomicsindesign.hfes.org:8080/wordpress/virtue-entitlement-license-to-indulge.

In group out group biases

·         Babies (presocialization) have it with food preferences. Funny study – puppets that preferred the same food they liked (compared to another food) got helped or harmed by second puppet.  They liked the helper, not the harmer.  But the opposite happened when the first puppet preferred the other food better. They liked the harmer.  Studies show they notice/prefer same language to other language.  They notice gender but no research on prefer.  They don’t even notice race (yeah!).

·         Adults have it for race, gender, age, obesity – all the stereotypes.

·         Add UX Tribal Sides paper

There is an unconscious bias that can significantly impact how people interact with other people and how they interact with even modestly anthropomorphized UIs.  It is the in-group/out-group bias. 

·         When the other person/UI shares some attribute with us, we have a natural, unconscious affinity for them. 

·         When the other person/UI differs from us on this attribute, we have a natural, unconscious bias against them.  At the extremes this leads to racism, sexism, and other explicit, conscious, and even institutionalized and systemic prejudice, but that isn’t what I am talking about here.  I am talking about these subtle influences that we don’t even realize is impacting our thinking, but can impact our decisions and our behavior under the radar. 

At the most basic level, the in-group/out-group bias is adaptive because when we share attributes with someone, we are more likely to share basic values and preferences with them and will be better able to predict their behavior and interact with them more effectively.  So it makes evolutionary sense for us to gravitate towards entities who resemble us in ways that are somehow related to values, preferences, and behaviors.   And if they don’t share our values or preferences, watch out! But since we don’t really know what attributes about a person are relevant, this becomes a more general phenomenon – applying to any attribute that is salient.  You like the same music that I do – you must be OK. 

Then if you go out another degree of freedom, do you care how that person is treated?  If they are similar to you, and you instinctively like them, maybe you will also like a third or fourth person who treats that similar person nicely.  And perhaps you would instinctively like someone who treats the similar person poorly – maybe schadenfreude and maybe “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”   Or a combination.

So this brings me to a recent study by Kiley Hamlin and colleagues.  She looked at infants (9-month and 14-month) so the in-group/out-group biases that they show would have emerged before culture and socialization had a chance to influence what they found salient and considered relevant.  She wanted to see what bias we were born with.  She figured they would like similar and dislike dissimilar people, or in this case rabbit-looking puppets.  But what would they think of some dog-looking puppets that either stole a ball the rabbit puppet was playing with (the mean dog puppet), or helped them retrieve it and gave it back (the nice dog puppet). 

She started the study by determining which of two foods the infant preferred.  About half preferred a cracker and half preferred a green bean.  She then showed them a rabbit -looking puppet.   In one condition, the rabbit -looking puppet preferred the same food as the infant.  In the second condition, the rabbit -looking puppet preferred the other food.  This is not a huge difference, and certainly not something that should drive an instinctive in-group/out-group bias.  But what else do infants know about?

The dog puppet was then either nice to the rabbit puppet (giving the ball back) or mean (running away with the ball).    When the rabbit puppet had preferred the same food as the infant, the infant liked the nice dog puppet more than they liked the mean dog puppet, even though the nice or mean behavior was towards the rabbit - puppet, not them.  

But the results were reversed when the rabbit puppet preferred the other food.  In this case, the infant liked the mean dog puppet better.  If you take away the food preference part of the study, you would imagine that babies would like nice dog puppets and dislike or at least like less the mean dog puppets.  But for this “out-group” rabbit puppet (what a loser – he prefers THAT food !!), they already show a prejudice – liking it when a dog puppet steals hill ball. 

The effect was larger for the 14-month old infants, so it is something that culture teaches us.  But if it is ALL cultural, then somehow it starts earlier than 9-months old.  

Visibility

Visibility is often an important criterion for users to effectively interact with products and systems.  There are several categories:

Architecture: At the most basic level, architecture tells the user what the system can do and where to find different kinds of functionality and content.  It is important that the architecture is visible both literally (it can be seen) and semantically (the meanings of words, graphics, and images are straightforward).

Controls: Controls are how the user interacts with the system functionality.  As with architecture, controls need both kinds of visibility.


Content: There are many subcategories of content, but basically content is the information that users need to do effectively use functions, make decisions, and otherwise satisfy their objectives for using the system.

Today I just want to focus on the content.  With the proliferation of mobile devices we now have access to many more kinds of information in many more locations, often where traditional user interfaces are not appropriate.  And because our eyes are much bigger than our brains (figuratively), we always want more, potentially overwhelming our capability to process it.

But on the positive side, sometimes this access opens up new sources of value.  In the medical domain, InTouch Health is launching its RP Vita telepresence robot for use in hospitals.  The robot travels around the hospital and transmits information about patients to the controlling doctor.  In emergency response, the Kopin Golden-i Wireless Headset leverages the same kind of technology used in Google Glasses to give police, firefighters, and paramedics access to information in the field without disturbing their primary life-saving activities. 

But my favorites are the low tech products being developed for the general consumer.  I am drawn to this domain because doctors and emergency responders are willing to sit through training and exert some effort to use tech if it gives them useful functions.  Maybe not too much, but at least some.

But consumers are ruthless.  There is usually another option available if their first choice proves difficult.  Or they can just save their money.  So designers need to figure out exactly what information their target user will find useful and deliver it in a way that facilitates seamless decision making, ease of use, and user experience.

Many of you may know I am a diehard foodie.  Watching food network, inventing new concoctions, cooking, and eating.  One of my biggest grievances when I go out to eat is that the meal I get never resembles what the menu describes.  I have heard others with this same complaint.  Even if the food is good, when it doesn't meet expectations it is a disappointment.  If there is a photo on the menu, it is artistically "enhanced."  So I was particularly delighted to see the new Livmenu tablet application that allows users to see live versions of the food before ordering.  In theory, the app could be expanded to allow the diner to watch their meal being prepared.  This would help set expectations a little closer to what they are going to receive.

Thinking, concluding, and the magical diplomat.

It amazes me how often debaters think they are arguing about fundamental differences of opinion or values but really they are using different thought processes.  If they understood better the mechanisms behind their thinking, they might be better able at agreeing or coming to consensus rather than agreeing to disagree or even staying in constant conflict.  Lately, I see this in the debate between science and religion, climate change, the federal budget, gun control, and on and on.

So I am going to blog today about what these mechanisms are and hopefully help others (although probably not Congress) improve their debating and arguing skills. 

First, let’s talk about the three kinds of analysis.  These are orthogonal, which means they are fundamentally different.  If two people are using different analytical mechanisms, they might legitimately and correctly come to completely different answers to the same question.   

Empirical thinking:  This is the scientific method.  You start with a hypothesis, test it (using valid, reliable and sensitive research methods – which is a topic for another post), and your conclusions depend on a statistical analysis of the results.  You need to start out by operationalizing your variables; the nature of your test limits how generalizable your results are; and you are never 100% sure of anything.  The purpose of empirical thinking is usually to try to disprove your hypothesis rather than to prove them.  If you repeatedly fail to disprove it, you can have some confidence that it is true.

Logical thinking: This is what philosophers and mathematicians often use, but so do we all.  “If X then Y” is the starting point.  You start out with a premise or set of premises that you assume to be true.  Then based on those, and a series of logical operators like AND, OR, NOT, etc, you expand and extend the premises into conclusions.  If the premises are true and the logic is sound, the conclusions are necessarily true.  But if not, then the conclusions are not either.

Faith thinking:  This is where religion comes in, but also where a lot of logical premises and scientific generalizations start out as well.    Mathematicians and scientists often pooh pooh it as an equal mechanism to the others, but I have also read some pretty good exegesis that convinced me that it is.  Essentially, faith thinking is developing a conclusion based on something you KNOW is true deep down.  This is how logicians generate their premises and how scientists generate their hypotheses.  The difference is that faith thinking does this with the conclusions.  But since a logical argument fails when its premises are false and a scientific method fails when its hypothesis is false, a faith-based belief fails when it is false.  Why is that any different? 

OK, so if different analytical mechanisms can validly come to different conclusions, how do we resolve these differences?  There are two ways of combining conclusions.

Integrative Thinking:  Is there a way we can combine the two conclusions so that the sum is true?  Logic tells me that the more calories I eat, the more I will weigh.  But the latest endocrinology scientific findings say that it is much more complicated than this.  If we put them together, we can conclude that all other things being equal, eating more equals weighing more.  But if you eat more protein and monounsaturated fat and a little less processes sugar, you can lose weight because of chemical processes in the liver.  A really cold winter would logically tell me that climate change is not occurring yet, but longitudinal science tells me that it is.  If we put them together, we can conclude that the average temperature of any given winter goes up and down up to 5 degrees in any given year/location, so if the worldwide temperature is on a 0.5 degree per year increasing trend, it would be masked by the variance.

Dialectic Thinking:  Sometimes we can’t, or don’t want to, integrate two conflicting conclusions.  Faith tells me that there is an omniscient, omnipotent deity but science and logic tell me that there is not.  Personally, integrating the two would devalue them both.  What makes my personal belief in G-d meaningful is exactly the fact that I can’t prove it.  It is the faithful belief that makes it valuable.  So instead, I can believe in G-d when I need motivation, faith, and inspiration.  And when I am in the secular environs, I can believe that everything that happens in the world has a scientific explanation based on basic physics, chemistry, and the occasional social science phenomenon.   Because these are incompatible, I can’t apply them at the same time to the same situation I find myself dealing with.  But why should I be forced to do that?

Perhaps I can believe fundamentally that people have the right to bear arms.  But I can also believe that the world would be a safer place if we pass scientifically-tested limits on gun ownership.  I can suspend my faith based belief to produce a better society, while still believing that it is fundamentally true.  This is dialectic.

I can have plenty of scientific and logical evidence that a certain tax and spending formulation would lead to faster economic growth and eventually lift all boats.  But I can also believe that in the short term, we can’t let people starve while they are waiting for their tide to come in.  So I am willing to sacrifice some growth now to prevent these consequences, accepting that society will be worse off as a whole thirty years from now.  This is integrative.

Just for fun, next time you hear a talking heads debate in the news or around your dinner table where the debaters (combatants) can’t come to any agreement – see if you can use this framework to figure out why and play the role of miraculous diplomat who magically figures out an answer that makes everyone happy.    

And post them in the comments.

Anti-fragility

There was a great interview of Nassim Taleb on the BBC Daily Business broadcast that very succinctly summarizes his concept of anti-fragility.  As an industrial engineer, I have always promoted system robustness so seeing a fundamental flaw in it is a great piece of learning.  I find this rewarding for two reasons.  Most importantly, I am a better engineer and consultant as a result.  But also, experts have a notoriously hard time giving up ideas that have been a core part of their world-view so it is great to know I can. 

So what is anti-fragility?  Contrasting it with robustness is the best way to explain.  Systems are made up of many components.  Fragile systems are those where the failure of one of these components causes a failure of the whole system.  So robustness is an approach where you try to make each component resistant to failure.  If you prevent these small failures, you don't get the system-wide failure.  But this is where you get Taleb's Black Swan.  When you get a problem big enough to fail one of your robust components, the whole system fails so completely that it becomes a disaster.  The 2007 banking crisis is the example that made Taleb famous.  We also see it in modern forest fire prevention.  The more we prevent small fires from breaking out, the more disastrous the eventual state-wide wildfires we get.

So anti-fragility takes the opposite approach.  Let's design the system components so that they fail easily, but so that the system as a whole gets better as a result.  Small and frequent forest fires made the whole forest safer.  The more companies that go bankrupt in a country, the less risk there is that the whole economy will crash. 

Here is an example I have been considering in my personal life.  Many new parents are trying to prevent their infants from getting sick in any way.  Don't let them anywhere near a peanut, piece of dirt, germ . . .   But what seems to be happening is that the kids grow up to be more fragile rather than less.  They are more likely to have allergies, asthma, and other immune-system related diseases.  I like the old way better.  Let our kids grow up playing in mud, eating dirt and 15-second rule Cheerios.  I read somewhere that the Chinese have such a low incidence of peanut allergies because their kids start eating boiled peanuts at such a young age they haven't had a chance to develop an allergy yet. Plus, this seems like a less stressful way to live. 

Where else should we anti-fragile rather than robust?

The solution to climate change - rapid evolution

If a species becomes threatened with extinction due to rapid changes in its ecosystem, is it possible for evolution (natural selection) to speed up?  In the past, researchers have used microbes and yeasts because they can test many generations in a small period of time.  They hoped to apply what they learned to things like islands after tsunamis, forests after fires, the earth after the meteor impact that killed the dinosaurs, and that kind of thing. 

It is now getting personal because of the impending climate change.  Will humanity be able to evolve through the changes that are looking more and more inevitable?  A special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society summarized the findings on what researchers have termed “rapid evolution” (RE).  This is not my area of expertise, but I think I can adequately summarize the basics. 

Here are the factors the help a species evolve rapidly:

·         Starting with a large population.  I think seven billion is pretty large!!

·         Genetic diversity.  I think we have that too,  There are some real bizaros out there.

·         Rapid intrinsic mutation rate. Thanks to all the crap we now put into our bodies, I think we got that too.

·         Strong natural fitness.  Definitely not all of us, but there are some incredible specimens out there.

·         Space in the ecosystem.  Since we are killing off the other species in advance, I think we have done this for ourselves.

·         Some luck.

Hmmm.  Maybe there is hope for us.  Well, some evolved version of us.  I wonder what that humanity would look like . . . .

Cognitive Resonance in a funny comic strip

I have blogged before about the phenomenon of cognitive resonance.  This is when we explain something we have done so that it makes rational sense, even when the real reason might not have been all that rational.  This is not a conscious thing (well, at least it doesn’t have to be).  It is just a natural way our brain works.

This makes sense from a long term adaptability perspective because we often make decisions or behave in ways that are based on emotion, instant gratification, and other suboptimal reasons but it is better not to think of ourselves as irrational.  For our brains to naturally do this and not even let our ego know about it works pretty well.

The most famous (at least among us behavioral science geeks) example is a study where people were asked to do a really boring task, either for free or for $20.  Then they asked them about the experience.  Which ones do you think thought it was most boring?  Their hypothesis was that the $20 people would because of the reward.  But the opposite happened.  The $20 people knew that they did it just for the money so it was OK for it to be boring.  But the people who got nothing had no justification. So their unconscious cognitive resonance retroactively convinced them that the task was not so boring, allowing them to feel better about having done it.

As a behavioral engineer, my job is to figure out how to use research results like this to design better systems, jobs, consumer products, or whatever.  And as usual, a comic strip says it better than I ever could.