Innovation Science

Cognition Boom

In August I spoke at the major hearing aid conference of the year, the International Symposium on Auditory and Audiological Research. What struck me at this year’s meeting was the preponderance of talks on cognitive issues. Two years ago, there were less than a handful of people presenting at these conferences on cognition and hearing loss or hearing aids. Now, it’s starting to become a dominant topic at conferences, and I’m more often hearing from PhD students who are basing their dissertations in this broad area.

I’ve posted before on the emergence of cognition as a major theme in many areas. Earlier this month, I was at a conference on Aging and Speech Communication, where the focus was on how how changes to cognition and hearing from aging affect communication ability. Several research presentations made clear that older subjects are more distracted by irrelevant information and were less able to ignore this information than younger people. When conducting tasks on a computer screen, the older subjects were less able to do the task when there were many items on the screen, and benefited more than younger subjects did by a clean and simple graphical user interface. Similar findings occurred with other modes of information.

This kind of research has huge implications for companies producing products for the older crowd, targeting the aging population of America. Several social networks targeted at the aging population have sprung up (Boomj, where customers must be too old to be worried about the “bj” favicon; Eons, which has the trademarked search engine cRANKy), and Facebook has been invaded by the post-college crowd who probably find the interface a little busy. A company that develops an understanding of how different age groups process information will provide an advantage over competitors that think the only change that needs to be made to such networks is content: Taking a social network designed for younger people and adding an obituaries section and a place to post photos of grandkids isn’t going to cut it. Tools that measure visual clutter or screen complexity could likely identify sites doomed for failure among the older crowd.

Certainly, an understanding of the unique cognitive demands and capabilities of the older population will be necessary for businesses targeting that market. In any business with targeted customers types, I expect that companies will begin to hire cognitive scientists as consultants and employees as they seek to understand their customers better. While User Experience Designer is a hot role in companies today, we could see User Cognition Researcher as the hot position of the future.

Thinking About Sound

A complementary article on the research that our research center is doing on cognition and hearing was recently published at HealthyHearing. Part of the research is being conducted by Tassos Sarampalis and Erv Hafter at UC Berkeley—I wish the reporters had interviewed them as well.

Here are some passages from the article:

Engineering has taken hearing aid technology to its current high standards. However, even though 91% of all hearing devices are digital, offering improved sound quality, Edwards is quick to point out that hearing impairments still lead to slowed speech communication, diminished access to the environment and others, limited hearing and interpretation of non-speech sounds, the loss of spatial hearing and selective attention issues that impact cognitive development.

Thus, there is a need for hearing science to take a more active role in the development of the next generation of hearing aids – devices that not only improve hearing, but also better facilitate the cognitive processes once sound input is delivered to the brain.

Indeed, hearing aid technology has made major strides in the past decade and we can anticipate that improvements to existing devices will continue to be made. We can also look forward to technological advancements that improve cognitive activities in hearing impaired individuals.

I'm Back...

Well, I guess my prediction of little blogging activity in August was accurate. You may recall that I stated four reasons why my posts would be infrequent in August:

1. Writing a paper. I was asked to write a paper on the future of digital hearing aids that was due three weeks ago. Here’s a copy of the draft that I submitted. The journal is targetted to both clinicians and researchers, so this paper is written for a broad audience. The final version will be modified from this after it goes through a peer-review system.
2. Family reunion. Lots of fun, drinking, eating. Good to see all of my relatives. Spent evenings on a farm and heard coyotes howling at night—sounded like escaped lunatics laughing maniacally.
3. Co-chairing a conference. The most significant conference in my field takes place every two years at Lake Tahoe. A beautiful location for inspired discussions (the photo here is of Eagle Lake, a short hike up from Lake Tahoe). I was pleased to see several presentations on cognition, a relatively new topic to this field. I’ve posted before on the growing prominence of cognitive science in a variety of fields, and it’s certainly starting to be the case in my field. I even spend a significant part the paper I recently wrote talking about how cognitive science will impact hearing aid technology (starting on page 15 of the paper linked above).
4. Corporate strategic retreat. Obviously, I can’t say much about this, but I can note that being a vegetarian in northern Minnesota is a test of mental and physical endurance (not for me, for my colleague). I can also state that it’s good to be tall when playing beach volleyball.
5. Buying a house. After signing our names two thousand times, my wife and I are near to closing on a house in SF. Phew. Now what do I do with all of my college furniture?

The Curse of the Attending Class

Whenever I lecture on the interaction between cognition and hearing, I often talk about the phenomenon of inattentional blindness, where one doesn't notice something obvious because their attention is focused on something else. As wikipedia concisely says:

humans have a limited capacity for attention which thus limits the amount of information processed at any particular time.

I lecture about this phenomenon because hearing loss may cause more attention to be applied to understanding speech, diminishing the supply of attention available for other tasks. On the other hand, hearing aids may reduce attentional load and free attentional resources for other tasks.

An amazing experiment by Daniel Simons and Chris Chabris demonstrates inattentional blindness with a video of people tossing a ball around and a gorilla-suited interloper. Subjects are asked to count how many times a  team of people wearing white pass a ball. in the middle of the movie, someone in a gorilla suit walks across the scene, yet less than half of the subjects notice this odd event. The movie can be seen here along with other demos found on the University of Illinois Visual Cognition Lab's demo page.

The reason that I am mentioning this is because Seema Clifasefi at the University of Washington recently repeated the experiment with intoxicated subjects, as noted in Science Daily. 46 percent of sober subjects said that they saw the gorilla while only 18 percent of the intoxicated subjects said that they saw the gorilla. The intoxicated subjects were given enough alcohol to place their blood alcohol level at 0.04, half the legal definition of being drunk in most states. According to this site, a 200 pound male who drinks four beers in two hours has a blood alcohol level just over 0.04.

(BTW, I don't use the gorilla video in my lectures so as not to violate its copyright.)

So, a legal level of intoxication cuts the number of concentrating subjects who were able to notice the unexpected by almost two-thirds. There are obvious conclusions to be drawn between these results and attentional ability while driving after a few drinks. Counting ball passes becomes paying attention to the road, the gorilla becomes unexpected pedestrians. Add in an act of looking at your on-board GPS or fiddling with your iPod, and attentional ability becomes decimated very quickly. It's no wonder that Apple is developing new technology for iPod/iTunes such that the iPod will speak track names to you so that you don't have to look at its screen while driving. However, this will still have an impact on attention and possibly increase the attentional blindness effect.

Because the blogosphere has been focused on attentional issues, it's also interesting to think about how alcohol might affect such issues as attention overload and continuous partial attention. In an attention economy, is have a drink equivalent to reducing your economic power? Is alcohol accelerating the looming attention crisis? One could probably equate a glass of wine with a Blackberry when estimating impact on attention deficit trait. If attention has value, as stated by Attention Trust, and marketers can bargain for your attention, perhaps companies would like a breathalyzer attached to your PC to decide how much attention you really have to offer. Web designers, who should already be considering such issues as inattentional blindness when creating advertisements, might produce different ads for post-bar surfers. Certainly, a drink or two should be considered a continuous partial attention neutralizer.

Some of these suggestions are a little insincere, but attention has been a hot topic in marketing and in internet technology for quite a while. I have little doubt that attention will have a significant impact in many fields in the future, which is one reason that I am lecturing on the topic to those interested in hearing aids and hearing ability. Cognitive science studies like the ones cited above will be scrutinized by companies to provide guidance for future product designs and as metrics of product impact.

Updates on Cognitive Training and University Innovation

Here are some news items that relate to a couple of recent posts of mine:

Not long ago I posted on the burgeoning use of games to improve one’s mental capabilities. Science Daily reports that Drs. Jimison and Pavel at the Oregon Health and Science University have correlated FreeCell playing ability with cognitive ability. They found that they could predict whether an aging individual has a cognitive impairment by comparing their FreeCell playing performance to the computer’s optimally-defined moves. The poorer the subject played, the more likely that they had developed memory problems that could lead to Alzheimers.

Pavel believes that as the elderly population increases…such home monitoring technology will become a health care standard. “In the near future, technology for unobtrusive monitoring, assessment and coaching will become a part of our everyday life…”

Part of the novelty of their approach was to alter the game so that it maintained the game’s difficulty at a constant level, keeping the game challenging regardless of the ability of the subject. The study only included nine subjects, so the conclusions are tentative to say the least. No mention was made about whether repeated playing of FreeCell could improve memory ability.

In an article related to my recent posts (here, here and here) on the relationship between universities and commercial innovations, this article by Peter Day from the BBC suggests that innovation does not come from universities except in the rare cases (those presumably including Stanford and MIT). British entrepreneur Stephen Allot is cited as saying that universities aren’t good at generating innovative ideas that can be commercialized into successful startups, and that the university’s role is to produce talented students who will create new ideas once they are exposed to market needs and commercial pressures.

Allot points to the fact that there is a large number of successful startups around Cambridge University yet the university has not benefited much from these successes, i.e., they have not been a direct part of their innovation. Cambridge University’s role in the creation of these companies has been to draw exceptionally talented students to Cambridge and to give them the skills to succeed once they graduate.

[Allot] calls this "people centred" innovation, linking PhD students with companies hungry for their insights with a network of involved corporate supporters of university labs….universities should not try to spot winners, but concentrate on what they are good at: attracting and improving really bright people who will go on to change the world with their innovations.

Brain Games

Playing games to improve one’s mental capabilities is becoming an increasingly popular pastime. Research has shown that doing crossword puzzles regularly can help counteract Alzheimer’s. I suspect that part of the popularity of Sudoku is the assumption that daily mental exercises is probably a good thing.

Nintendo games that are intended to exercise gray matter have become popular among adults in Japan. Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training game for the Nintendo DS handheld platform has sold nearly 2 million copies in Japan over the past year and has received attention by the BBC and the most recent podcast of CNet’s This Week in Technology (TWiT). Apparently the game has just been released in the US, so don’t be surprised if you start seeing adults playing with Nintendos on your next flight instead of watching Big Momma’s House II—the commentators on TWiT say that the Brain Training is fairly addictive. One of the tasks in the game is a classic cognitive task: identify the color of a word when the word spells a competing color, e.g., the word “green” appears on screen in the color orange and you have to answer "orange" and not "green". The person playing has to speak the color of the letters (not what is spelled) into the Nintendo microphone for scoring.

This idea of of intelligence-preserving software exercises has made headway outside of the game world. NeuroTone, a startup in the Bay Area founded by the people who started the dot-com-era digital audio company Liquid Audio, has developed a similar type of “brain training” system for new users of hearing aids. Most hearing aid wearers are older and have been listening for years to deteriorated speech through their impaired auditory system. They haven’t heard sounds normally for a long time and their neural plasticity has probably readjusted to respond to distorted sounds. When a hearing aid is first worn, the brain likely needs some training to readjust to the reception of normal sounds again.

Neurotone’s software, LACE, contains speech understanding tasks and cognitive tasks that help with such functions as memory. It runs on the person’s own PC and connects to their audiologist through the internet so that their audiologist can monitor their progress. LACE also adapts to the ability of the hearing aid wearer: as the person does better, the tasks become harder so that the person is always challenged. Given the interest in keeping one’s mental ability “fit”, I wouldn’t be surprised if LACE becomes popular with normally-hearing people as adults look for ways to develop their own “brain training” regimen.

One interesting aspect of LACE from a hearing aid company’s perspective is that not only is LACE innovative as a product in itself, but it proposes an innovative business model for companies that integrate LACE with their products. The software training program provides a connection between the audiologist or hearing aid company with the hearing aid wearer long after the time of purchase. It makes wearers excited about using their aids—actually looking forward each day to the “brain training” exercises that help them better use their aids.

Imagine if other products could create that kind of connection and dedication from their users. People don’t read manuals, and if they do they have usually become an annoyed customer. Imagine if you could teach your customers how to optimally use your product with an interactive game. Or turn a moderately satisfied customer into a passionate user. Creating that kind of dedication towards one’s product is something that most companies don’t even try to imagine, but here’s a system that allows users to get excited about becoming better users of a product, and obtaining improved benefit from the product as well.

With LACE, some audiologists are actually setting up PCs in their lobby so that patients who don’t have PCs at home can come in every day and obtain their mental exercises. In the consumer product field, who wouldn’t want to give their customers a reason to return to the point of purchase? Of course, audiologists are providing LACE as a part of a best-practices approach to providing benefit to their patient. In other product areas, however, the LACE business model is an example of how to  better engage with one's customers. People should be searching for similar ways to get their customers excited about learning and becoming better users of their products.

How can the “brain training” model work for your customers and inspire them to improve the benefit they receive from your product?

(Full disclosure: I’m friends with the founders of Neurotone and the renowned audiologist who developed the tests. My company gives away licenses to LACE with every one of our high-end hearing aids. These do not alter the fact that this approach to customer satisfaction is an innovation that can be adapted to other industries.)

Burning in Your Presentation

Creating Passionate Users has multiple bloggers who post on innovative business approaches in a whimsical yet thoughtful way. A recent post by Kathy Sierra provides a checklist to help determine if your product, presentation or other creation will be memorable to your consumer.

Kathy analyzes this issue from a cognitive perspective and nicely summarizes neural mechanisms that determine what gets sent to long-term memory and what doesn’t make it through the gate. Since we can’t exactly mix CREB-2 inhibitors into our audience’s coffee, following Kathy’s advice on how to “burn in” something into memory is a reasonable step to enhance the memorableness of a presentation, and her ideas are consistent with the cognitive approach and visual style prescribed by Cliff Atkinson. She even describes how the brain “tags” information for retrieval—I knew it, Web 2.0 is a metaphor for the brain!

Here are a few items from her checklist of characteristics that will make your presentation memorable:

• Surprise, novelty, the unexpected
• Counterintuitive failures or mistakes
• Varying visuals

Tufte's Seminar of Data Display, PowerPoint and Cognition

I saw Edwards Tufte’s seminar yesterday. I am not going to summarize his more well known ideas since his seminars have been well documented elsewhere. You can find one here and another here. Tufte’s work and thoughts on information display and Powerpoint are excellent, and I’m glad that I went. I’m going to add a few general comments that are perhaps different from the hundreds of seminar summaries published elsewhere, and I'll also talk about some areas where I disagree with Tufte.

Tufte’s Style

Firstly, Tufte practices what he preaches...partly. For most of the presentation, the projector was off and he only used it to show full-sized images or videos. Other than that, it was just him talking and no PowerPoint Phluff.  Not even the usual title slide when you walk in. I suppose we already know the speaker and topic, so a title slide would have been superfluous—makes me think about which presentations of mine don’t need a title slide.

Strangely, Tufte offered little evidence to support many of the design claims that he was making. His theories and ideas seemed sound, but there was no data presented that gave scientific weight to his advice on proper data design. In his seminar, he advocates that you view a presenter skeptically, making sure that they are a "detective" without bias rather than an "advocate" of their ideas. Tufte certainly sounds like an advocate in much of what he preaches.

Ancient Texts

Tufte brought several first edition books that were hundreds of years old to demonstrate data layout by the world’s geniuses. He talks about these examples in his books, but it’s amazing to see original books by Newton and Galileo in person. I felt sorry for the person wearing archival gloves who had to slowly and delicately carry the books around, pausing at each row so the audience could see the book up close.

 PowerPoint

Accommodation of presentation design to cognitive styles is a theme of Tufte’s, which I found interesting given the current discussion of this in the blogsphere and in my own blog. Tufte argues that eliminating bullet points from presentations accommodates a diversity of cognitive styles. While it’s true that many people expect to see bulletpoint summaries of what the speaker is saying, and a few probably assimilate information best in that style, the bullet point mode is not optimal for the cognitive styles of most people. By avoiding bullet points, more people in the audience are better served. 

The PowerPoint structure entices people to reduce their syntactic discipline and causal structure in our thoughts and arguments, so in a way it affects the cognitive process of the presenter as well as the audience. Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint should be read for detailed thought on this topic. My final thought on this is that there must be a way to effectively use PowerPoint that eliminates Tufte’s complaints, but Tufte doesn’t offer such a solution--he recommends that a Word report be distributed at a meeting instead. To that end, Cliff Atkinson is being more realistic in his work and advice on trying to work within the PowerPoint paradigm, and Garr Reynolds at PresentationZen gives practical advice on improving PowerPoint presentations consistent with Tufte's theories.

Sparklines

Tufte spent considerable time talking about sparklines, his concept for tiny graphics inline with text that will be a significant part of his next book to be published, Beautiful Evidence. You can find some discussion of sparrklines at Agile Testing and Anil Dash.

While the concept is innovative, Tufte over-values the amount of information that these can provide. As an example, he considers the plotting of a mutual funds price embedded inline with text (the chart is the height of an uppercase letter and the length around five letters). He argues that this tiny chart consists of over 250 data points with a resolution of at least two significant digits (or, say, over 7 bits of resolution). Therefore, there are 1750 bits of information in the space taken up by four letters. This seems like a reach, since certainly the reader isn’t assimilating that many bits of information. People do a considerable amount of data reduction in their perceptual space, and the amount of bits of information obtained from such a small graph is considerably smaller than the actual resolution of the graph (think of principal components).

The fact that people can discriminate two charts/sparklines that differ in one data point doesn’t mean that they will interpret the two charts any differently—the information to the reader is the same in both. This is the classic difference between discrimination and identification: two images might be discriminable but not differently identified. In my field of hearing, a one-second vowel sampled at 44.1 khHz with 16 bit resolution doesn’t mean that there is over 705,000 bits of information in that one-second sound sample. A vowel with a formants at 710 Hz and 1100 Hz will be identified as an /a/, as will a vowel with formants at 850 Hz and 1300 Hz even though the two data points are considerable different. The two vowels can be discriminated but are not differentially identified. I believe that the analytical value of sparklines is not nearly as large as Tufte calculates.

 Tufte the Artist

Tufte spent a small amount of time showing us pictures of giant sculptures in his garden. While interesting, I’m not sure what the point of this was.

Cognitive Approach to Font Design

The use of cognitive science on the design of Microsoft fonts is intriguingly mentioned by Scobleizer in his post on a visit to MS's Cleartype team (and supports my post on the application of cognitive science to product R&D).

When talking about the team's cognitive scientist, Kevin Larson, Scoble says:

He sticks people inside an MRI machine and asks them to read two pages of text. One with fonts that are ugly and poorly designed. One with beautifully designed fonts and aesthetically laid out.

He says they can’t see much difference in reading speed, but there’s a massive difference in the part of the brain used on each kind of page. Also, they measure the various facial muscles used when reading text. Turns out people frown more when reading the poorly-laid-out text.

The comments on this post mention a fascinating blog by the Cleartype team which discusses the arcane science of font design. I not only learned a lot about the problems and solutions associated with fonts, but why people have a tendancy to (improperly) use two spaces after a period-ending sentence.

I wonder if any of this can be applied to selecting the optimal fonts for Powerpoint presentations that use the Wabi-Sabi philosophy.

HBR: Executive Intelligence

Since I've been posting on cognitive science lately, I just wanted to note that the latest Harvard Business Review discusses the use of cognitive measures as a means of evaluating candidates for executives positions.  In these tests, the candidate is given a business scenario and asked how they would handle it, where there is no correct answer and a good response depends on clear thinking rather than learned knowledge. Research suggests cognitive measures formulated as problem-solving business scenarios can account for 23-30% of the variance in executive performance measures.

The standard approach that is typically used when interviewing job candidates is the "Past Behavioral Interview" and can explain about 25% of the person's performance as an exec. This is where the interviewee is asked about their past experiences (such as "describe a time when you had a difficult employee and what you did to resolve the issue").

The authors state the Past Behavioral Interview prediction of performance is independent of the prediction from cognitive measures, meaning that the combination of the two techniques could predict the candidate's performance with 55-60% accuracy. How valid this statement of independence is not clear from the article, however; it may be based on the authors' assumptions on independence of qualities being measured by the two tests. Sixty percent predictive factor is an extremely high number for a two-hour test to predict human behavior and ability, which is why I question the ability to simply sum the predictive power of the two tests.