How Cognitive Principles Can Inform Better Technological Design

Okay.

Okay.

Now, I gave a stab at defining cognitive psychology.

You're the expert with the PhD, and I think you could probably do a better job.

What is cognitive psychology? And my understanding is that cognitive psychology has changed over time.

Can you give us a brief history of cognitive psychology and what we know about it today?

yeah yeah i think you're selling yourself short it was a great description but i think when most people kind of think about psychology they really kind of picture emotions or introspection uh perhaps a couch and a notepad and somebody asking how that makes you feel but um you know cognitive psychology however you know takes more of a technical term so uh investigating how we process information and use that to make our way through the world You know, for really over 70 years now, cognitive psychologists have worked to unravel those mysteries of kind of the black box, as we call it, between your ears.

So the processes that transform inputs from the world that we see and hear and smell into outputs of thoughts and behaviors.

And so we've done this using scientific methods.

So as your listeners know, the scientific method starts with an observation of some phenomenon in the world.

For example, you may, and this happened to me recently, walk into a busy room at a conference looking for a colleague and they could be right in front of you waving their hand at you and you completely miss them and walk right by.

As scientists, we may pose a testable question here called the hypothesis about that.

Was the color of the friend's shirt Blending in with the background, did the noise in the room drown them out? Or was it that distracting vendor blimp that was flying around inside the room that drew your eyes away? Well, we'd have to design an experiment that looks at this thing called attention and strip away each of these elements in the environment to see how each of them did contribute to this mistake of walking right by your poor friend.

So this phenomenon in particular is called inattentional blindness.

And although the example I gave is relatively harmless, you can imagine the safety concerns of doing this on the highway, right? When you're kind of focusing your attention on cars on the road, it's actually more difficult to notice motorcycles because we're scanning for things that look like cars in the size, shape, motion, driving patterns of these large four-wheeled vehicles.

So this is one major reason why motorcycle accidents happen more frequently percentage-wise than car-on-car accidents at base rates considered.

So these mental processes and errors that cognitive psychologists call constructs are really persistent across tasks, activities, domains, and they've been observed long before modern technology such as smartphones have existed.

Okay.

Yeah.

I want to talk later about some of the different psychological tests and how people are going to respond to them differently than artificial intelligence.

I find that just fascinating.