cognition [,käg’ . ni . sh . ən] noun - the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.
Cognition and its underlying principles are powerful tools to use in understanding and interacting with the world, and Cognitive Lens is my attempt to bring related but often isolated fields together through a cognitive perspective.
It is sometimes difficult to keep up with what actually qualifies as design – what used to be a strictly professional pursuit has become the domain of anyone with a mild creative streak and a few spare moments on a computer. More and more people are being offered a way in, from amateur photographers eagerly […]
I just received notification from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program that I have been accorded an Honorable Mention! I do actually feel honored by this honorable mention, although clearly the fellowship itself was the original aim of my application.
To those of you who are not aware, the NSF GRFP is one of […]
So this gives Cognitive Lens three primary audiences: engineers, designers, and psychologists (particularly of the cognitive persuasion). A group I also hope to connect with more generally are those undertaking research degrees of all sorts - including undergraduates considering grad school, Masters students working their way through deeper coursework, and Doctorate students engaging in research at the deepest levels.
If there is one take-home lesson from perception research, it is that humans wildly distort and simplify sensory input when attending to the world around them. In the past few years, research into change blindness has shown some stunning failures of our ability to identify changes in our surroundings - the principle of perceptual constancy, […]
Reading today’s New York Times report about the increasing selectivity of America’s top colleges and universities, I was struck by the fact that not only was the author a Harvard alumnus, but so were the authors of the three books used as references in the article. It was a perspective from the selective group critiquing […]
The media regularly assert that the “younger generation” will comprise technical savants, fluidly emailing while watching YouTube while chatting with friends (on the phone and through IM, which increasingly overlap) while designing flying cars and nanobots. The claim boils down to the simple conclusion that new technologies are by the young and for the young, and only the young can understand it - cue the clichéd joke parents make about needing their four-year-old to program the VCR (that is so 80’s). Sure technology is rarely self-explanatory (’PC LOAD LETTER‘…). But that doesn’t mean it can’t be explained.