100 More Things #151: DEVICES WITH ALERTS LOWER COGNITIVE PERFORMANCE

There’s a lot of research about how talking or texting on a cell phone is distracting and leads to lower performance on cognitive (thinking) tasks, but research by Bill Thornton (2014) shows that people don’t even have to be using the cell phone for it to have an effect. Just having the cell phone nearby can lower performance on cognitive tasks. It’s likely that the mere presence of the cell phone distracts people enough that they don’t concentrate as well.

Pavlovian Conditioned Responses

In the early 1900s, Ivan Pavlov was studying digestion in dogs. He fed them meat and measured the amount of saliva they produced. He was surprised to discover that the dogs started salivating as soon as they saw the meat, and before they started eating it. But the bigger surprise was that, before too long, the dogs would salivate when they heard the boots of the caretaker coming to feed them, or when they heard the sound of a bell over the door when the caretaker walked into the building. Pavlov posited that the dogs had learned a conditioned response (salivating) to the stimulus of the footsteps or bell.

People also easily learn conditioned responses—their response to buzzing, blinking, chirping, flashing, and now, with wearables, nudging, is to look at or reach for the device. Part of the human brain is always on “alert” for the stimulus, which likely takes just enough brain power away from other tasks for performance to suffer, even if only a little bit.

People easily develop automatic, conditioned responses to auditory and visual cues, especially if those cues are short and unpredictable. And smartphones provide endless unpredictable, short, auditory and visual cues. You don’t know when you’ll get a text or call, so it’s unpredictable. When you do get a text or a call or your phone rings, chirps, or buzzes, or a message shows on the screen, there’s an auditory and visual cue. And the messages are short—all features that prompt a conditioned and automatic response.

Takeaways

• When you want your target audience to feel connected to your brand or product, point out anything that you share in common with them.
• When you’re designing in a team, make sure to point out things that the team members have in common, even if they seem small and superficial.
• When you’re designing in a team, monitor your language. Use words that imply that people are working together (“we”, “team”, “together”).