Tag Archives: cognitive science

The Social Shirt: Memory on Your Sleeve

We have all experienced it: we go to introduce ourselves to someone new, only to learn that the person remembers us quite distinctly! How embarrassing! Or its milder cousin: we recognize someone but fail to recall their name, occupation, or the context in which we originally met them. Do we go re-introduce ourselves? How do [...]

Social interactions promote cognitive functions

Social relationships are a large, important, and natural part of life. Not only do we live and work among other people, social relations form the core of our culture and, some might argue, are essential to our survival. In fact, it has been suggested that our brains evolved to manage social complexity in our environments [...]

Methods for cognitive task analysis

Peter Pirolli and I are designing a study where we want to do a cognitive task analysis of people’s sensemaking processes. Verbal protocol analysis (most commonly introspective, retrospective, and think-aloud) may help us understand the process people engage in while they find, synthesize, and assimilate new information as part of a broader sensemaking task.
Modeling cognitive [...]