Criticisms towards electronic toys

This week, the WSJ has a critical paper about electronic toys that I found interesting. It starts by reporting the enthusiasm geared towards those devices: the “fusion of technology and personality” of robots, the “Vtech V. Smile Baby Infant Development System claims to go beyond passive developmental videos”… and then criticizes the underlying arguments behind them, questioning their “educational” potential:

two recent studies suggest that the oft-touted educational benefits of such toys are illusory, and child development experts caution that kiddie electronics, even those bought purely for fun, can have negative side effects such as inhibiting creativity and promoting short attention spans.
(…)
A two-year, government-funded study by researchers at the University of Stirling in Scotland found that electronic toys marketed for their supposed educational benefits, such as the LeapFrog LeapPad, an interactive learning activity toy, and the Vtech V provided no obvious benefits to children. “In terms of basic literacy and number skills I don’t think they are more efficient than the more traditional approaches,” researcher Lydia Plowman told the Guardian. Although no Luddite (Ms. Plowman makes the rather perverse recommendation that parents give children their old cellphones so that they can learn to “model” adult behavior with technology)
(…)
At a Boston University conference on language development in November, researchers from Temple University’s Infant Laboratory and the Erikson Institute in Chicago described the results of their research on electronic books. The Fisher-Price toy company, which contributed funding for the study, was not pleased. “Parents who are talking about the content [of stories] with their child while reading traditional books are encouraging early literacy,” says researcher Julia Parish-Morris, “whereas parents and children reading electronic books together are having a severely truncated experience.” Electronic books encouraged a “slightly coercive parent-child interaction,” the study found, and were not as effective in promoting early literacy skills as traditional books.

I also liked this comment:

“A lot of these toys direct the play activity of our children by talking to them, singing to them, asking them to press buttons and levers,” notes Kathy Hirsch-Pasek, co-director of the Temple University Infant Lab, in a recent research summary. “I look for a toy that doesn’t command the child, but lets the child command it.”

Why do I blog this? well those critics are harsh and it certainly reflects one part of the reality. It’s interesting though and they should no be dismissed. However, I am sure there are some relevance like how this tool can encourage new types of behaviors like new forms of “sociality” based on them: for instance the presence of a robot lead to a discussion between kids or the family about its behavior (see “The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit — Twentieth Anniversary Edition” (Sherry Turkle)for that matter). Moreover, the possibility to hack/program some of those toys can be of interest too.

Memory modulates color appearance

According to this article in Nature (by Thorsten Hansen, Maria Olkkonen, Sebastian Walter & Karl R Gegenfurtner), low-level perceptual mechanisms can be affected by high-level cognitive processes. They showed how memory modulates color appearance: natural fruit objects tend to be perceived in their typical color.

We asked human observers to adjust the color of natural fruit objects until they appeared achromatic. The objects were generally perceived to be gray when their color was shifted away from the observers’ gray point in a direction opposite to the typical color of the fruit. These results show that color sensations are not determined by the incoming sensory data alone, but are significantly modulated by high-level visual memory.

Why do I blog this? first because it is a strange cognitive phenomenon, second because I am always intrigued by the intricacies of cognitive processes (especially when a high level process modulates a low level one). And third, because it’s curious to think about the consequences of such result in design.

Pareidolia and design

Some definitions on the concept of pareidolia (a cousin of apophenia):

“Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (usually an image) being mistakenly perceived as recognizable” (Explore Dictionary of Psychology)

“Pareidolia is a type of illusion or misperception involving a vague or obscure stimulus being perceived as something clear and distinct” (Skeptic’s Dictionary)

The most recurrent example of pareidolia is certainly the jesus’ face on grilled cheese, shrouds, ultrasound scan of a baby in the womb or even trees in LA.

Why do I blog this? I guess I am mesmerized by this concept, and its underlying cognitive basis: how human beings see pattern in objects (at some point it can be worse: Mistaking a House for a Face: Neural Correlates of Misperception in Healthy Humans.

Personally, I prefer when it’s in technology that people are thinking about human’s face (examples from here):

Does such a design make people more confortable using the artifact? What’s the role of pareidolia in design?

Neuroergonomic workshop

As a weak signal about the growing importance of neuropsychology in human-computer interaction, design and ergonomics, there is a workshop called “From Neuropsychology to Neuroergonomics: the Cognitive Continuum” (part of the 2nd Meeting of the European Societies of Neuropsychology), in Toulouse, France, October 19th, 2006 – 2.30 PM – 7.00 PM.

Neuropsychology and Neuroergonomics share:
- The same core, the uncovering of the neural substratum of cognitive and/or sensorimotor performance and the investigation of the cerebral mechanisms underlying the performance, and
- The same goal, the design of better cognitive rehabilitation protocols or training strategies, and/or better human-machine interfaces through the integration of knowledge on cerebral mechanisms.

Neuropsychology is an approach for more “cerebrally inspired” design and HMI. Looking beyond a discrete view of Neuropsychology and Neuroergonomics, the workshop’s goal is to highlight the convergence and cross-fertilization of the two disciplines,

Large displays and spatial cognition

Larges displays and how they are perceived, experienced and used by people is an interesting topic, especially when it comes to the gaming experience. A paper I ran across lately about this issue:

Tan, D.S., Gergle, D., Scupelli, P., Pausch, R. (2006): Physically Large Displays Improve Performance on Spatial Tasks, In ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 13 (1), 71 – 99 .

The paper describes a series of experiments comparing the performance of users working on a large projected wall display to that of users working on a standard desktop monitor. Results suggest that physically large displays, even at identical visual angles as small displays, increase performance on spatial tasks such as 3D navigation as well as mental map formation and memory.

Why do I blog this? it’s interesting to see how display features can impact cognitive processes for the users.

How architects imagine the way people move in buildings that do not yet exist

In his paper “Imagination as Joint Activity: The Case of Architectural Interaction“, Keith M. Murphy examines how “imagining can emerge from a group of
interactants who use many semiotic media,including talk, gestures, and drawings, to imagine something together”. He actually shows how architects imagine the way people move in buildings that do not yet exist. He explains, for that matter, the role of imagination is constituted as a social and face-to-face interaction. An excerpt that I found interesting:

What we have then is all three architects visualizing and enacting the space as if it were a“ real” loading dock to clarify its use and orient the other architects to their understanding of the design.

This has a utilitarian purpose in that when designing large buildings it is extremely important that everyone on the team is on the same page interms of where the design is at any given moment and where it is heading. But it also has more cognitive implications. For the architects, designing a building often requires taking on the perspective of a future user experiencing the building to work out potential design kinks. By talking about a design in groups, an empathetic viewpoint is constructed through the interactive give-and-take flow of the conversation. Talk, gestures, and the drawing under discussion all in combination serve to structure the kinds of things the group can imagine as if they were the users, and this group imagining facilitates getting the job of being an architect done.

Why do I blog this? because it’s another pertinent example of the socio-cognitive processes at stake during a group activity showing that imagination can be more than a solely individualistic cognitive activity.

Murphy, K.M. (2004). Imagination as Joint Activity: The Case of Architectural Interaction, Mind, Culture, and Activity, 11 (4), 267-278.

Email and blood pressure

For those who’re wondering about email and potential physiological consequences…

TAYLOR Howard, FIELDMAN George et LAHLOU Saadi, “The impact of a threatening e-mail reprimand on the recipient’s blood pressure”, Journal of Managerial Psychology, January 2005, vol. 20, n°. 1, p. 43-50.

Purpose – This article aims to describe the effects of the communication style of the message sender (threatening or neutral), status of the sender (equal to or higher than the recipient) and the power relationship between sender and recipient (from the same department or not) on the blood pressure of the recipient of an e-mail message

Design/methodology/approach – The study was conducted under controlled laboratory conditions. The experiment was a mixed design, using both within and between subjects variables. The independent variable for the within subjects factor was the task that participants performed. There were three tasks: answering a questionnaire, reading a non-threateningly worded e-mail reprimand, and reading a threateningly worded e-mail reprimand. Although the study used students as participants, the messages they received were from real people in a University College. Discusses the implications in the area of occupational health.

Findings – Diastolic blood pressure was significantly higher when recipients were reading the threateningly worded reprimand compared to reading a non-threateningly worded reprimand. The effect of status on blood pressure was significant but only for recipients in the same department as the message sender. Originality/value

The results add to the evidence that communication style and status can have a direct impact on the recipient’s physiological response.

Navigating numerically in London

(Via Le Courrier International) In this New Statesman article, journalist Dollan Cannell explains how chinese immigrants manage to navigate through london without knowing how to speak english (and hence being unable to memorize english street/landmark names):

here is a new class of Londoners, however, who navigate numerically. They live at 419 and work at 36. They meet friends at the end of 2, or lovers by 77. London’s unofficial new geography derives from its buses. (…) Chinese immigrants brought to London by people smugglers, and they all use this method to find their way around.
(…)
Buses are their northern star: they need only identify which Mandarin characters correspond to 0 to 9 and the message displayed above the bus driver begins to make sense. When a new arrival is first taken by a contact to the flat he will share with a dozen others he is told the number of the nearest bus route. One thing he must be careful about is the direction a bus is travelling in, and for this his best guide can be trial and error. If he travels for a long time without seeing things he knows, he must alight and try the other direction. In this way most new immigrants build up a repertoire of routes.

When they talked to us, many identified locations that could easily be given names using a bus map and an A-Z.

Why do I blog this? because of my interest towards spatiality and cognition (my research), this story is a relevant anecdote about how human beings use tricks to navigate in space.

Role played by artifacts in cognition

How social is the social? Rethinking the role of artifacts in cognitive science is a paper by Ana Viseu that I came across while sorting my “to read” txt file. It’s basically a good account of the role played by artifacts in cognition. It describes them from the perspectives of 3 different schools of thought:

• Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory: the notion of mediation through artifacts.
• Marshall McLuhan’s view of artifacts as extensions of Man
• Actor-Network Theory (ANT), in which humans and non-humans are each considered to be actors, their agency depending on their relationships

I particularly like the 2 tables she’s using to summarize these issues: the first one is about the nature and role of artifacts and the second is about the character of cognition:

I also like the final word:

The solution may lie in the combination of these different perspectives, a multi-disciplinary approach to cognition. But it will also lie, as Lucy Suchman puts it so well, in finding a new language to talk about cognition, for both persons and artifacts. We have to shift from a language that focuses on separation, disembodiment and isolation to one that focuses on relatedness and relationships (Suchman, 1997).

Why do I blog this? these theories of cognition quite fit into my research perspective and are totally different from what is still taught sometimes in cognitive science degrees (in which the paradigm are much more limited to the individual’s mind).

From Artifical Intelligence to Cognitive Computing

There is now a language shift from the previsouly so-called “Artifical Intelligence” to “Cognitive Computing” as attested by the news in Red Herring (an interview of Dharmendra Modha, chair of the Almaden Institute at IBM’s San Jose and IBM’s leader for cognitive computing).

Q: Why use the term “cognitive computing” rather than the better-known “artificial intelligence”?

A: The rough idea is to use the brain as a metaphor for the computer. The mind is a collection of cognitive processes—perception, language, memory, and eventually intelligence and consciousness. The mind arises from the brain. The brain is a machine—it’s biological hardware.

Cognitive computing is less about engineering the mind than it is the reverse engineering of the brain. We’d like to get close to the algorithm that the human brain [itself has]. If a program is not biologically feasible, it’s not consistent with the brain.

The emphasis is then less in the “artifical” but in the information treatment processes (cognitive) that should be re-designed through reverse engineering. What is also very intriguing is this:

Q: Can even the simplest artificial “mind” have practical applications?

A: That’s my goal, to take the simplest form and put it into a system so a customer can use it. We hope to appeal to what business can do with it.

OK, it’s IBM, it’s a company research lab, and even though there are still very high-level, there is this mention to “the customer can use it”, which is very curious in terms of what (of course I have ideas about it but it’s not explicated in this interview) and with regards to the “consuming process” (let’s consume this cognitive computing device).

Why do I blog this? it’s interesting to see language shift in the domain of technology, it’s always meaningful.