Things That Make Us Smart

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Things That Make Us Smart

• Course Notes
• Kathryn Summers
• 2005

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Technology

• Cognitive artifacts can extend human cognitive
• Reduce memory load
• Increase access to information
• Facilitate collaboration/communication
• Cognition??cognitive artifacts

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Technology disadvantages

• Can make us LESS smart
• Can reinforce power disparities, economic
  disparities, even informational disparities (the
  digital divide)
• Can force us to behave like machines (science
  finds, industry applies, man conforms)

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Normans law

• Technology should complement human abilities
• Compensate for weaknesses
• Enhance strengths
• Technology should not expect humans to behave
  like machines
• Humans are distractible, emotional, and prone to
  error

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Two kinds of cognition

• Experiential
• We perceive events and react efficiently and
  effortlessly
• The mode of expert behavior and flow
• Typically involves active participation
• Reflective
• We compare, analyze, and make decisions.
• The mode of new ideas and novel responses

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Learning and cognition

• Learninga relatively permanent change in
  behavior potential due to practice or experience
• Cognitionthe processes by which sensory input is
  transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored,
  recovered, used (Ulric Neisser, 1967)

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Observational learning

• Attentionidentify relevant info, pay attention
• Encodingprocessing the info
• Retentionstorage and retrieval
• Emissiondoing the behavior yourself

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Multimedia and learning

• Norman worries that multimedia environments lean
  naturally towards experiential cognition,
  interfering with reflection.
• Multimedia environments are likely to involve
  event-driven processing or pattern-driven
  processing (recognition rather than analysis)

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Experiential learning

• Effective experiential learning or work shares
  many characteristics with successful gamesthey
  involve built in
• Constant goals
• Constant feedback (including rewards)
• Rules and a continual feeling of challenges (not
  too hard, not too easy)
• An environment that facilitates the activity and
  minimizes distractions
• These things encourage you to become involved, to
  concentratethey foster flow

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Cognitive Processes in Learning

• Accretionaccumulation of facts
• Tuningpractice
• (5000 hrs, 2 full-time yrs to become an expert)
• Restructuringreflectively forming the right
  conceptual structure, changing how you understand
  the activity
• Flowabsolute absorption in the activity (can be
  disrupted by the tool)

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Experiential vs. Reflective tools

• Experiential cognitive toolsallow us to
  experience and act on the world (telescopes)
• Should provide lots of sensory stimulation
• Should NOT require reflection, analysis, or
  problem-solving to use
• Reflective cognitive toolsallow us to modify and
  act on representations
• Should support comparison, exploration,
  problem-solving
• Should not overwhelm the attention or restrict
  attention to a tiny piece of the information

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• Informal learning
• Unstructured
• Group activity
• Goal is motivated
• Fun
• No interruptions
• Frequent flow experiences
• Self-pacing
• Topics, time, place are freely chosen
• Participants can be any age

• School learning
• Structured
• Individual activity
• Goal not motivated
• Fun not relevant
• Interruptions
• No flow experiences
• Pacing is fixed, forced
• Topics, time, place fixed
• Participants between ages of 6-20

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Representation

• Abstraction/ representation enable cognition by
  removing perceptions/experiences from some of
  their details and allowing them to be manipulated
• A good representation captures essential elements
  and leaves out the rest a misleading
  representation can lead to faulty thinking,
  faulty conclusions
• Which features are relevant depends on the task
  and the goal.
• We value what we can represent. Things not
  represented get forgotten or diminished.
• Solving a problem can mean representing it so
  that the solution is obvious. A good
  representation may turn a (hard) reflective task
  into an (easy) experiential taske.g., tic-tac-toe

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Representational system

• Represented worldwhat is represented
• Representing worldthe set of symbols used to
  represent things

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Information display

• Find the relevant information
• Process info to generate the desired conclusion
• Information display solutions need to support
  the needs of all interested parties (e.g.,
  prescriptionsdoctors, nurses, pharmacists,
  patients see matrix solution on pg 65)

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Additive or substitutive

• Additive representations (tally marks, intensity)
• Substitutive representations (arabic numerals,
  hue)
• Examplebudgeting program for LD users

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Learning how to use artifacts

• In the past, pieces of artifacts were generally
  physically visible smart folks could figure it
  out by lookingsurface artifacts
• Now the relationships between controls,
  indicators, and system state are arbitrary and
  can be invisible (ergo, good design makes things
  visible)internal artifacts, in need of an
  interface
• (for examplepeople are internal artifacts)

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Normans Principles

• Naturalness principleexperiential cognition
  benefits when properties of the representation
  match the properties of the thing being
  represented
• Good mappingsthe relationship between the format
  of the representation and the thing being
  represented is clear to users
• Perceptual principleperceptual/spatial
  representations are more natural and are easier
  to process than non-perceptual/non-spatial
  representations (but only if the mapping is
  natural)

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Cognitive artifacts--Changing the task

• Personal point of viewchanges the task
• Writing changes task from memory to
  writing/keeping track of/reading
• System point of viewpersonartifact is smarter
  than either one alone

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External cognition

• Reduce memory load
• Reduce computation
• Increase access to information
• Mark changes (annotation)
• Reorganize things
• Facilitate collaboration

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Cognitive artifactslides for presentation

• Shared workspacewe can all see/analyze the
  points at the same time, we are all free to add
  new insights (communication, collaboration)
• External memoryincreasing memory permanence and
  memory quantity
• Spatial layout of slidesallows perceptual
  processing, helps point out relationships between
  ideas
• Multiple delivery modesallows people to focus on
  what they see OR on what they hear (may support
  individual learning styles)

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Cognition through stories

• We use stories to explain things to ourselves and
  others
• Stories include information, context, and emotion
• Stories organize information and play a crucial
  role in memory

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Misc. points

• We interpret artifacts based on their
  affordances, mappings, and constraints
• We remember stories we invent stories
• We see patterns/connections and attribute causes
• We cooperate and communicate
• Grudins lawtechnology will fail or be subverted
  when those who benefit are not those who do the
  work