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Cognition provides understanding: emotion provides value judgments. A human without a working emotional system has difficulty making choices. A human without a cognitive system is dysfunctional.
a useful approximate model of human cognition and emotion is to consider three levels of processing: visceral, behavioral, and reflective.
The most basic level of processing is called visceral. This is sometimes referred to as “the lizard brain.”
the visceral level responds to the immediate present and produces an affective state, relatively unaffected by context or history. It simply assesses the situation: no cause is assigned, no blame, and no credit.
THE BEHAVIORAL LEVEL The behavioral level is the home of learned skills, triggered by situations that match the appropriate patterns. Actions and analyses at this level are largely subconscious.
For designers, the most critical aspect of the behavioral level is that every action is associated with an expectation. Expect a positive outcome and the result is a positive affective response (a “positive valence,” in the scientific literature). Expect a negative outcome and the result is a negative affective response (a negative valence): dread and hope, anxiety and anticipation. The information in the feedback loop of evaluation confirms or disconfirms the expectations, resulting in satisfaction or relief, disappointment or frustration.
Behavioral states are learned. They give rise to a feeling of control when there is good understanding and knowledge of results, and frustration and anger when things do not go as planned, and especially when neither the reason nor the possible remedies are known.
Feedback provides reassurance, even when it indicates a negative result. A lack of feedback creates a feeling of lack of control, which can be unsettling. Feedback is critical to managing expectations, and good design provides this. Feedback—knowledge of results—is how expectations are r...
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The reflective level is the home of conscious cognition. As a consequence, this is where deep understanding develops, where reasoning and conscious decision-making take place.
The visceral and behavioral levels are subconscious and, as a result, they respond rapidly, but without much analysis. Reflection is cognitive, deep, and slow.
Visceral - fight or flight, behavioral - muscle memory, reflective - intentional cognition
DESIGN MUST TAKE PLACE AT ALL LEVELS: VISCERAL, BEHAVIORAL, AND REFLECTIVE
Advertisers hope that the strong reflective value associated with a well-known, highly prestigious brand might overwhelm our judgment, despite a frustrating experience in using the product.
All three levels of processing work together to determine a person’s cognitive and emotional state. High-level reflective cognition can trigger lower-level emotions. Lower-level emotions can trigger higher-level reflective cognition.
Flow requires that the activity be neither too easy nor too difficult relative to our level of skill.
Conceptual models are a form of story, resulting from our predisposition to find explanations.
The real point of these examples is not that some people have erroneous beliefs; it is that everyone forms stories (conceptual models) to explain what they have observed.
It seems natural for people to blame their own misfortunes on the environment. It seems equally natural to blame other people’s misfortunes on their personalities. Just the opposite attribution, by the way, is made when things go well. When things go right, people credit their own abilities and intelligence. The onlookers do the reverse. When they see things go well for someone else, they sometimes credit the environment, or luck.
Do not blame people when they fail to use your products properly. • Take people’s difficulties as signifiers of where the product can be improved. • Eliminate all error messages from electronic or computer systems. Instead, provide help and guidance. • Make it possible to correct problems directly from help and guidance messages. Allow people to continue with their task: Don’t impede progress—help make it smooth and continuous. Never make people start over. • Assume that what people have done is partially correct, so if it is inappropriate, provide the guidance
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It is easy to design devices that work well when everything goes as planned. The hard and necessary part of design is to make things work well even when things do not go as planned.
1. What do I want to accomplish? 2. What are the alternative action sequences? 3. What action can I do now? 4. How do I do it? 5. What happened? 6. What does it mean? 7. Is this okay? Have I accomplished my goal?
The information that helps answer questions of execution (doing) is feedforward. The information that aids in understanding what has happened is feedback. Everyone knows what feedback is. It helps you know what happened. But how do you know what you can do? That’s the role of feedforward, a term borrowed from control theory.
The insights from the seven stages of action lead us to seven fundamental principles of design: 1. Discoverability. It is possible to determine what actions are possible and the current state of the device. 2. Feedback. There is full and continuous information about the results of actions and the current state of the product or service. After an action has been executed, it is easy to determine the new state. 3. Conceptual model. The design projects all the information needed to create a good conceptual model of the system, leading to understanding and a feeling of
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precise behavior
People function through their use of two kinds of knowledge: knowledge of and knowledge how. Knowledge of—what psychologists call declarative knowledge—includes the knowledge of facts and rules.
Declarative knowledge is easy to write and to teach.
Knowledge how—what psychologists call procedural knowledge—is the knowledge that enables a person to be a skilled musician, to return a serve in tennis, or to move the tongue properly when saying the phrase “frightening witches.”
Psychological research suggests that people maintain only partial descriptions of the things to be remembered.
Psychologists distinguish between two major classes of memory: short-term or working memory, and long-term memory.
Short-term or working memory (STM) retains the most recent experiences or material that is currently being thought about.
time and the number of items. The number of items is more important than time, with each new item decreasing the likelihood of remembering all of the preceding items.
STM holds something akin to a pointer to an already encoded item in long-term memory, which means the memory capacity is the number of pointers it can keep.
The limits on our short-term memory systems caused by interfering tasks can be mitigated by several techniques. One is through the use of multiple sensory modalities.
To maximize efficiency of working memory it is best to present different information over different modalities: sight, sound, touch (haptics), hearing, spatial location, and gestures.
Long-term memory (LTM) is memory for the past. As a rule, it takes time for information to get into LTM and time and effort to get it out again.
we do not remember our experiences as an exact recording; rather, as bits and pieces that are reconstructed and interpreted each time we recover the memories, which means they are subject to all the distortions and changes that the human explanatory mechanism imposes upon life.
This is an example of procedural memory, a memory for how we do things, as opposed to declarative memory, the memory for factual information.
1. Memory for arbitrary things. The items to be retained seem arbitrary, with no meaning and no particular relationship to one another or to things already known. 2. Memory for meaningful things. The items to be retained form meaningful relationships with themselves or with other things already known.
The most effective way of helping people remember is to make it unnecessary.
Knowledge in the world, external knowledge, is a valuable tool for remembering, but only if it is available at the right place, at the right time, in the appropriate situation.
The phrases prospective memory or memory for the future might sound counterintuitive, or perhaps like the title of a science-fiction novel, but to memory researchers, the first phrase simply denotes the task of remembering to do some activity at a future time. The second phrase denotes planning abilities, the ability to imagine future scenarios.
There are two different aspects to a reminder: the signal and the message. Just as in doing an action we can distinguish between knowing what can be done and knowing how to do it, in reminding we must distinguish between the signal—knowing that something is to be remembered, and the message—remembering the information itself.
the point is that each adds their bit of knowledge, slowly constraining the choices, recalling something that no single one of them could have done alone. Daniel Wegner, a Harvard professor of psychology, has called this “transactive memory.”
Here are three levels of mapping, arranged in decreasing effectiveness as memory aids: • Best mapping: Controls are mounted directly on the item to be controlled. • Second-best mapping: Controls are as close as possible to the object to be controlled. • Third-best mapping: Controls are arranged in the same spatial configuration as the objects to be controlled.
But why couldn’t the past be in front of us and the future behind?
People whose native language is Arabic or Hebrew prefer time to flow from right to left (the future being toward the left),
pilot’s attitude indicator,
Should it show a left-tilting airplane against a fixed horizon, or a fixed airplane against a right-tilting horizon? The first is correct from the viewpoint of someone watching the airplane from behind, where the horizon is always horizontal: this type of display is called outside-in. The second is correct from the viewpoint of the pilot, where the airplane is always stable and fixed in position, so that when the airplane banks, the horizon tilts: this type of display is called inside-out.
Knowledge in the head includes conceptual models; cultural, semantic, and logical constraints on behavior; and analogies between the current situation and previous experiences with other situations.
The cylinders and holes characteristic of Lego suggested the major construction rule. The sizes and shapes of the parts suggested their operation. Physical constraints limited what parts would fit together. Cultural and semantic constraints provided strong restrictions on what would make sense for all but one of the remaining pieces, and with just one piece left and only one place it could possibly go, simple logic dictated the placement. These four classes of constraints—physical, cultural, semantic, and logical—seem to be universal, appearing in a wide variety of situations.
