Chris Atherton Head of Design Dept for Business, Innovation & Skills

@finiteattention

Cognitive psychology and content design

All of this was true when I started writing this talk …

1. attention 2. vision 3. working memory 4. cognitive load 5. words 6. stress 7. questions?

1. attention

two attentional systems:

a) getting your attention quick, free, effortless

Checking out some rusty old farm machinery in a park in Stockholm, as you do …

O HAI, TWITTER LOGO

Must … not … press … most obvious button … NNGGGGGGHHHH

b) keeping your attention tends towards impossible

(content) design = attention management

2. vision

Quinlan & Wilton, 1999

Visual perception seems to happen in a particular order:

Quinlan & Wilton, 1999

first

Grouping by spatial layout (things that are near each other ‘belong’ together)

Quinlan & Wilton, 1999

second

Then we start looking at more qualitative features, like colour …

third?

… or features and local shape

Visual object recognition progresses (broadly) from global to local

So when we’re seeing a page on GOV.UK …

It starts as a grey-scale layout of shapes

… then colour and smaller features resolve

… before text and (eventually) meaning

(I say ‘eventually’ — less than half a second)

blocks of words are objects first

my point:

visual weight on the page acts like a magnet for attention long before meaning is involved

3. working memory

Long term memory

rehearsal

or meaning

Short term/ working memory

working memory is a very leaky bucket

recall of words from a list presented sequentially

"Serial position" by Obli (talk) (Uploads) - Obli (talk) (Uploads). Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Serial_position.png#/media/File:Serial_position.png

Rehearsed and/or lacks interference

Still in the leaky

bucket

7 ± 2

Miller, 1956Miller, 1956

the leaky bucket can hold

this relates to new, unrelated words/digits/etc

4 ± ?

Cowan, 2001Cowan, 2001

the leaky bucket can hold

much more recent evidence suggests …

your screen

sidebar: it’s messed up that we mostly read in landscape but design documents for portrait.

fuzzy OK OKgreat

we should never ask people to hold stuff

in the leaky bucket

4. cognitive load

Cognitive load as a thing is kind of unfalsifiable, but it’s a useful framework?

intrinsic cognitive load

~ number of moving parts

a task can have …

extraneous cognitive load

extra moving parts added by the delivery medium

…and …

working memory has very limited capacity

intrinsic

load

extraneous

load

transfer to LTM

low intrinsic load and extraneous load = more resources left for absorbing info

extraneous

load

transfer to

LTM

intrinsic

load

a complex piece of information leaves you fewer resources for storing the information

intrinsic

load

extraneous

load

transfer to

LTM

likewise, an overly burdensome way of presenting information makes it hard to grasp

your mission: reduce extraneous

cognitive load

reducing policy complexity (intrinsic load)

is the long game

we can reduce extrinsic load right now

with better (content) design

5. words

Psycholinguistic determinants of question difficulty http://www.suristat.eu/document/documentArticle/Faass_et_al.pdf

Effects of survey question comprehensibility on response quality http://www.timolenzner.de/resources/Lenzner+2012.pdf

These are really interesting papers.

infrequently-used words

— context vs. word dominance

The authors talk about …

imprecise terminology

— vague pronouns (e.g. ‘it’)

The authors talk about …

imprecise terminology

— ambiguous word parts

The authors talk about …

complex syntax

— ‘garden path’ sentences

The authors talk about …

complex syntax

— burying the lede

The authors talk about …

many logical operators

— e.g. ’or’

The authors talk about …

passive voice

The authors talk about …

Nice.

nominalisations

— ‘enforce a restriction’ vs. ‘restrict’

The authors talk about …

bridging inferences

The authors talk about …

(making people do the hard work themselves rather than spelling it out is, well, mean.)

how do we convince people of the value

of plain language?

go play on scholar.google.com

as content designers, you are well equipped to make sense of this wordy stuff :)

your primary evidence is always data

from user research

… your context matters, though. See the current psychology replicability crisis.

6. stress

disclaimer: way out of my wheelhouse. See my former colleague @Drsurvival :)

this is the ‘dunker’, where oil rig workers have to train to ditch out of a flying helicopter (!)

Survival — Mind and Brain https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-24/edition-1/survival-%E2%80%93-mind-and-brain

super-accessible paper on the effects of acute stress on cognition. One to ponder.

design for limited working memory

When we do this, we improve GOV.UK for everyone, not just those under great stress.

don’t make people rely on the leaky bucket

6. questions

Susan Weinschenk: 100 things every designer needs to know about people https://www.amazon.co.uk/Things-Every-Designer-Needs-People/dp/0321767535

people always ask me what they can read. This is great:

Thank you :)

@finiteattention