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Mary Chant
Certified Usability Analyst		  
                              

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Copyright 2006-2009

  

research: psychology
Communication/Media
We are, by nature, "cognitive misers," meaning that we seek shortcuts for understanding the massive amounts of information in the media
Link
Show/Hide Date & Source
Key Phrase: packaging complex information with "frames"
  • Date: October 18, 2006
  • Source: AAAS, American Association for the Advancement of Science

Communication/Media
Beyond Blogs
While only a small slice of the population wants to blog, a far larger swath of humanity is eager to make friends and contacts, to exchange pictures and music, to share activities and ideas.
Link
Show/Hide Date & Source
Key Phrase: blogging and the future
  • Date: May 22, 2008
  • Source: Business Week


Communication/Perception
“By simply counting the number of future oriented sentences in annual reports we can predict future innovation by the firm.”
Link

Show/Hide Date & Source
Key Phrase: predicting corporate innovation
  • Date: August 14, 2007
  • Source: University of Minnesota, Carlson School of Management

Communication/Perception
Dangers of Distraction
But multitasking is most often about "task-switching," hopping back and forth among several tasks in quick succession, never giving deep, full attention to any of them. It's characterized by frequent interruption, and that makes it highly inefficient.
Link
Show/Hide Date & Source
Key Phrase: distractions and multi-tasking
  • Date: January 19, 2009
  • Source: Harvard Business

Communication/Perception
In a situation where the visual information provided is ambiguous — whether we are looking at Escher's art or looking at, say, a forest — how do our brains settle on just one interpretation?
Link
Show/Hide Date & Source
Key Phrase: making sense of what we see
  • Date: November 19, 2007
  • Source: Johns Hopkins

Communication/Perception
Monkeys seem to learn the same way humans do . . . “The advantage of active learning appears to be a fundamental property of memory in humans and nonhumans alike.”
Link
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Key Phrase: active learning and memory
  • Date: August 1, 2007
  • Source: UCLA, University of California, Los Angeles

Communication/Perception
"As society moves more and more into the virtual world of technology, we need to understand how profoundly we are influenced by small details, how much we rely on sensory experience to guide our mental decisions. Our senses are not simply input devices to our big brains. Our bodies and brains are in continual dialogue, one shaping the other, in often subtle ways."
Link
Show/Hide Date & Source
Key Phrase: embodied cognition
  • Date: August 3, 2007
  • Source: University of Iowa
Communication/Perception
The verb forms the heart of a sentence. Although a lot of research has been done into the role that verbs play during the transfer of information, less is known about exactly how and when the listener or reader uses this information. Dutch researcher Dieuwke de Goede delved into this subject and investigated how the functioning of the verb is expressed when sentences are listened to.
Link
Show/Hide Date & Source
Key Phrase: verb forms the heart of a sentence
  • Date: January 29, 2007
  • Source: Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research

Communication/Perception
The term truthiness, coined by Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert, means “truth that comes from the gut, not books. . . Colbert’s “truth from the gut” is inimical to good critical thinking. Surprisingly, however, it is very hard to get most of us to think beyond our gut feelings.
Link
Show/Hide Date & Source
Key Phrase: fighting truthiness with critical thinking
  • Date: February, 2007
  • Source: Association for Psychological Science

Communication/Perception
A new study by vision scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, finds that the human visual system is better able to discriminate the movements of a single person when his or her actions are coordinated in a meaningful way with a second individual. "Things are always changing before our eyes, and our brain is constantly making best guesses about what it's seeing."
Link
*context, context, context
Show/Hide Date & Source
Key Phrase: visual processing
  • Date: September 7, 2006
  • Source: UC Berkeley

Communication/Perception
Students who read essays on a computer screen found the text harder to understand, less interesting and less persuasive than students who read the same essay on paper
Link
*maybe that's why I still print out so many articles?
Show/Hide Date & Source
Key Phrase: effects of reading text on screen vs. in print
  • Date: 2000
  • Source: Ohio State

Communication/Perception
The ease of pronouncing the name of a company and its stock ticker symbol influences how well that stock performs in the days immediately after its initial public offering
Link
*That explains Google's success. . .
Show/Hide Date & Source
Key Phrase: stock performance and company name
  • Date: May 29, 2006
  • Source: Princeton University

Communication/Perception
With a pair of rhesus monkeys and a simple computer game, researchers at Columbia appear to have exploded long-standing ideas about what thinking is and whether humans alone are capable of it.
Link
Show/Hide Date & Source
Key Phrase: evidence that animals can think
  • Date: October 30, 1998
  • Source: Columbia University

Communication/Perception
Sekuler, an expert on the neural and cognitive terrain of visual memory, says that breaking down a behavioral sequence into chunks can aid imitation learning, just as chunking can help us memorize a string of seemingly unrelated digits or other material.
Link
*already a fan of "chunking"? use the link above for support
Show/Hide Date & Source
Key Phrase: learning a complex task
  • Date: March 20, 2007
  • Source: Brandeis University

Communication/Perception
The human brain's ability to process information declines with age, but knowledge about the world through experiences tends to rise over time. So how do these shifts affect a person's ability to make sound decisions?
Link
Show/Hide Date & Source
Key Phrase: decision making and the elderly
  • Date: April 26, 2007
  • Source: University of Oregon

Communication/Perception
The study also found that computerized interaction alerts and telephone, Internet, and fax systems—which are intended to decrease pharmacist workload and increase the efficiency of prescription receipt and filling—also were associated with an increase in the number of prescriptions dispensed for medications that could interact.
Link
Show/Hide Date & Source
Key Phrase: distractions in the workplace
  • Date: April 24, 2007
  • Source: University of Arizona, College of Pharmacy

Communication/Perception
At four months, babies can tell whether a speaker has switched to a different language from visual cues alone, according to a University of British Columbia study.
Link
Show/Hide Date & Source
Key Phrase: visual cues and language
  • Date: May 24, 2007
  • Source: University of British Columbia

Communication/Speech
a 306,652-word repository of how people in central Ohio speak. Now scientists from around the world, and in a variety of disciplines, can use the collection – called the Buckeye Speech Corpus – to advance their research. . . Computer scientists could use the corpus to help improve speech recognition software. Communication researchers will find it useful to study conversational dynamics. Psychologists will be interested in what listeners are faced with in terms of the physical and acoustic properties of speech.
Link
Show/Hide Date & Source
Key Phrase: The Buckeye Speech Corpus
  • Date: NA
  • Source: Ohio State

Communication/Speech
Adults may feel silly when they talk to babies, but those babies will learn to speak sooner if adults talk to them like infants instead of like other adults,
Link
Show/Hide Date & Source
Key Phrase: infant directed speech
  • Date: March 15, 2005
  • Source: Carnegie Mellon

Communication/Speech
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) may be on the verge of a revolutionary development in speech and video algorithmic technology. Their test subject: a 9 month-old baby boy, who is the center of a project called "The Human Speechome Project."
Link
Show/Hide Date & Source
Key Phrase: Human Speechome Project, cognitive machines
  • Date: NA
  • Source: MIT Media Lab

Communication/Teamwork
although the healthcare professionals had acted with patients’ wellbeing at the forefront of their minds, they had failed to communicate adequately with each other
Link
*high stakes involved
Show/Hide Date & Source
Key Phrase: communication and health care
  • Date: NA
  • Source: University of Southampton

Communication/Telepathy
Scientists at The University of Manchester have created a virtual computer world designed to test telepathic ability.
Link
Show/Hide Date & Source
Key Phrase: virtual reality and telepathy
  • Date: July 18, 2006
  • Source: University of Manchester

Key Phrase: active learning and memory
  • Date: August 1, 2007
  • Source: UCLA, University of California, Los Angeles
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