Applying theory and research from Psychology and Behavioral Economics to HCI practice on the distinction between experiencing and remembering self.
Presented at the IXDA Interact14 conference in Amsterdam.
3. Experience and its retrospection
Real-time
Discomfort Ratings
D. Kahneman et al (1993)
60 s 60 s 90 s
Time Time
• Hands in Cold Water
Overall Retrospective
Assessment of the Long-trial
was rated as being
less discomforting and
cold.
(and subjects chose to repeat it
over the short-trial.)
Short-Trial Long -Trial
4. Experience and its retrospection
Real-time
Discomfort Ratings
D. Kahneman et al (1993)
Short-Trial Long -Trial
60 s 60 s 90 s
Time Time
• Hands in Cold Water
Overall Retrospective
Assessment of the Long-trial
was rated as being
less discomforting and
cold.
(and subjects chose to repeat it
over the short-trial.)
Real-Time
Pain Intensity
Time
10
m
20
m
• Outpatient Surgical Procedure
Time
10
m
20
m
D.A. Redelmeier & D. Kahneman (1996)
Example: Patient 1 Example: Patient 2
5. Experience and its retrospection
Real-time
Discomfort Ratings
D. Kahneman et al (1993)
60 s 60 s 90 s
Time Time
• Hands in Cold Water
Overall Retrospective
Assessment of the Long-trial
was rated as being
less discomforting and
cold.
(and subjects chose to repeat it
over the short-trial.)
Real-Time
Pain Intensity
Time
10
m
20
m
• Outpatient Surgical Procedure
Time
10
m
20
m
D.A. Redelmeier & D. Kahneman (1996)
Example: Patient 1 Example: Patient 2
Correlation with
Retrospective
Assessment of
Pain
1
0
End Pain
Peak
Pain
Duration
Peak and End pain were the
best predictors of retrospectives
assessments of pain
(both within an hour and a month after
the procedure)
Short-Trial Long -Trial
6. Real-time
Discomfort Ratings
Short-Trial Long -Trial
60 s 60 s 90 s
Time Time
• Hands in Cold Water
Overall Retrospective
Assessment of the Long-trial
was rated as being
less discomforting and
cold.
(and subjects chose to repeat it
over the short-trial.)
Real-Time
Pain Intensity
Time
10
m
20
m
• Outpatient Surgical Procedure
Time
10
m
20
m
D.A. Redelmeier & D. Kahneman (1996)
Example: Patient 1 Example: Patient 2
Correlation with
Retrospective
Assessment of
Pain
1
0
End Pain
Peak Pain
Duration
Duration Neglect:
Retrospective assessments
are insensitive to duration.
Experience and its retrospection
D. Kahneman et al (1993)
7. Remembering negative experiences
Factors in the retrospective assessment of a negative experience:
1. Peak-end effect:
• Peak intensity of the experience
• State in the final moments
8. Remembering negative experiences
Factors in the retrospective assessment of a negative experience:
2. Experience contour:
• Worsening Intensity lead to more negative assessment of the whole
experience. Improving trends are preferred over deteriorating ones,
particularly at the latter part of the experience
• The faster the change, the worse the retrospective assessment.
9. Remembering negative experiences
Factors in the retrospective assessment of a negative
experience:
3. Duration has little impact when intensity remains constant
• When More Pain is Preferred to Less: Adding a Better End. Daniel Kahneman et Al. (1993)
• Memories of colonoscopy: A randomized trial. Redelmeier et al. (2003)
10. … and positive ones
Factors in the retrospective assessment of a positive
experience:
• Remembered pleasure with musical experiences Peak and End
effects, as well as duration neglect.
• Duration Neglect found in memory of meals: Doubling the amount
of a favored food doe not affect the remembered pleasure.
• Handbook of Behavior, Food, and Nutrition. Watson and Martin (2011)
• How Happy Was I, Anyway? A retrospective Impact Bias. Gilbert et al, 2003
12. Experiencing User
• Plows through episodes moment-by-moment, as it happens
• Encodes memory of experience according to available cognitive resources (attentional
Time
10
m
20
m
demands, elaboration)
• Builds associations to other episodes, present and past
• Constructs the utility of the experience as needed
• Keeps a prototyping, running average representation of the utility experienced
13. Remembering User
• Retrieves selective memories
• Peak
• End
• Constructs the story
• Makes assessment
• Context
• Emotional state
• Reconsolidates memories
15. Time
Experience
Behavior Now
Experience Remembered
Future Behavior
Affect
Assessment Assessment
Affect
Experience, remembered
Experiencing User Remembering User
16. Anticipating User Experiencing User Remembering User
Experience
Assessment Assessmen
Behavior Now
Experience Remembered
Affect
t
Affect
Future Behavior
Experience Anticipated
Affect
Behavior Past
Time
“What is pleasant is the activity of the present, the hope of the future, and the memory of the past”
(Aristotle Nichomachean Ethics, Book 9, chapt 7)
Temporal Adjustments in the Evaluation of Events: The Rosy View. M. Thomson et al. (1997)
19. Hedons & Dolors
• What is the utility of an experience?
• Felicitous Calculus
• Maximizing utility : Maximum happiness, minimum pain
• Utilitarism and Liberalism
To Do or to Have? That is the question. L. Van Boven & T. Gilovich (2003).
20. Hedons & Dolors
• What is the utility of an experience?
• Felicitous Calculus
Intensity
Duration
Certainty
Propinquity
Fecundity
Purity
Extent
• Maximizing utility : Maximum happiness, minimum pain
• Utilitarism and Liberalism
To Do or to Have? That is the question. L. Van Boven & T. Gilovich (2003).
23. Hedonometer
Measuring the experience
Conceived by Francis Edgeworth (l1880s) as “A psychophysical
machine continuously registering the height of pleasure
experienced by an individual to measure happiness”
25. Measuring the experience - mindful
Gallop World Poll
Asking individuals to track emotions experienced during the previous day
26. Measuring the experience - mindless
Physiological measures:
Skin Conductivity
Heart rate
• Physiological Responses to Different Webpage Designs. Ward & Marsen (2003)
27. Measuring the experience - mindless
Body Measures of affect :
• Facial,
• Posture (seat and back pressure, forward/sideways leaning)
• Gesture activity (mouse gripping), vocal expression
Measuring the User Experience. Tullis and Albert (2013)
28. Measuring the experience - mindless
Neural activity in the medial frontal orbital lobe as the locus of value
(subjective desirability) at the time of decision
Neural computations associated with goal-directed choice. A. Rangel, T. Hare (2010)
30. Process of encoding, storing, and retrieving
information
Memory
Short-term / Long-term
Procedural / Declarative
Semantic / Episodic
Recognition / Recall
• Beyond money: Toward an economy of well being. E. Diener & M Seligman (2004)
• How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. T. Gilovich (1991).
31. Episodes
• Episodic memory: Flow of events in time and place, personal and unique events
• Episodic memories establish a unique network of relationships among the objects,
the times and places in which they were encountered
32. a b
a b
Hebb’s rule
Neurons firing together increase the synaptic strength between them.
33. Plasticity
• Brain’s capability to change with experience.
• Long-term memories involve the growing of new synaptic
terminals, which requires the synthesis of new proteins.
34. Memory consolidation
• Memories are not recorded immediately, they take time to
consolidate.
• Forgetting is caused by new memories being formed that interfere
with memories still undergoing consolidation
35.
36. Memory’s scaffolding
Hippocampal circuits retain and retrieve the various contextual
autobiographical aspects that make the experience unique
37. Experience retrieved, experience rebuilt
• Memory retrieval is a reconstructive process.
• Retrieving a memory returns it to a transient state. It has to be re-scaffolded
(reconsolidated) because it’s returned to a transient state by being
remembered.
38. And rebuilt creatively
• That remembered memory is a variant memory that needs to be re-cataloged
and, consequently, exposed to distortion.
• Reactivation opens the door to new information (unique to the time of
remembering) being incorporated into the original memory.
• Retrieving a memory exposes to distortion, but also makes more stable.
39. Memory elastic
• The stories we tell truly becomes better with time (if sourced from a good
memory) or worse (from a bad one), while the rest fade away.
Better Worse
• In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind. E. Kandel (2007)
• The dynamics of memory: Context-dependent updating. A. Hupbach (2008)
• The Medial Temporal Lobe. L. Squire , C. Clark & R. Clark (204)
Many
Few
Better Worse
Many
Few
40. False memories
20-25%
Of choices in police
line-ups are incorrect
75%
Of people exonerated from crimes
were imprisoned because inaccurate
eyewitness identification
• False memories are influenced by prior knowledge, prior visualization and
imagining, misinformation, current emotions, autobiographical referencing.
• It is caused more by memory addition than by memory loss.
The Formation of False Memories. K. Wade et al (2002). E. Loftus & J. Pickrell (1995)
41. Memories Implanted
40%
Of people who can be made to recall
experiences that never happened
• Implanted events need to be plausible to be “remembered”.
• The more likely the event, the more likely its successful implantation
• Imagining the event makes it more implantable
A Picture is Worth a Thousand Lies: Using false Photographs to Create False Childhood Memories. K. Wade et al (2002)
42. Depth of processing
The more deeply new information is
encoded, the more retrievable it is.
43. Attention
10 secs
How long most web
pages are viewed
19-27 secs
Average time users
spend on a page
• Attention to an object enhances its memorability.
• Attention demands cognitive resources. Whatever cognitive resources are
being required elsewhere will disorient away from that object.
44. Attention
• Multi-taskers are more easily distracted by irrelevant stimuli and have
able to concentrate on anyone task.
• Focusing illusion (another version of time neglect)
The Laptop and the Lecture: The Effects of Multitasking in Learning Environments. H. Embroke & Gay (2003)
45. Context
• Evidence that value is constructed in context.
• Matching between the conditions under which the experience
took place and those under which it is remembered.
• Context affects or decisions:
Reference points
Endowment effect
Range effect
Decoy effect
Compromise effect
46. Repetition
Exposure effect: We tend to treat the the familiar as more…
Mere Exposure: A Gateway to the Subliminal. R.B. Zajonc (2001)
• Believable
• Favorable
• Important
Repetition Familiarity Cognitive Ease Positive Mood Less
Analytical
More Creative
48. Mood
Negative moods…
- Direct attention and promote analytical thinking
- Foster memory of details
Don’t worry, be sad! On the cognitive, motivational and interpersonal benefits of negative mood. J Forgas (2013)
49. Emotion
Somatic markers : brain representations of the body states in response to
past emotions, and uses those states to mark upcoming experiences.
Impact bias: People overestimate the impact of their emotional reactions
(happiness) to past and future events.
• Does Emotion Directly Tune the Scope of Attention? J. Huntsinger (2013).
• Looking for Spinoza: Joy, sorrow, and the feeling brain. Antonio Damasio (2003)
50. Elaboration
The more information is elaborated and discussed, the deeper is
processed, the more robust its encoding (elaborate rehearsal).
51. Socialization
Socializing a memory rebuilds it as a new memory, interpreting the
original and making it more open to reinterpretation, but also more robust.
54. Retrospective assessment: Life satisfaction
Sensitive to the instrument use to assess it: Terminology, scale, and context
1. Scale effects:
• Choice of words (e.g., choice of adjectives in scales (e.g., “occasionally” turns out to
be interpreted very differently from “seldom”, and closer to “sometimes”).
• Respondents are reluctant to use extreme anchors (e.g., “superior” vs “very good”).
• Scale values ( 0 to 10 not the same results as -5 to 5).
• Order effects: The first/left end of a rating scale used more often (either for negative
or positive extremes).
Subsequent Questions May Influence Answers to Preceding Questions in Mail Surveys. N Schwarz, H. Hippler (1995)
55. Retrospective assessment: Life satisfaction
2. Context effects in surveys and rating scales:
• Direction of comparison: “Do you prefer A to B?” leads to different responses than “Do
you prefer B to A”?
• Priming: If you answer questions about “fraud” or “waste”, you are more likely to
oppose welfare. Answering a question about marital happiness will affect the weight of
marriage in a subsequent question about overall happiness
Subsequent Questions May Influence Answers to Preceding Questions in Mail Surveys. N Schwarz, H. Hippler (1995)
56. Retrospective assessment: Life satisfaction
Scale of Positive and Negative Experience (SPANE)
Positive /Negative Good / Bad Pleasant / Unpleasant
Happy / Sad Joyful Afraid Contended / Angry
1 2 3 4 5
Very Rarely Very Often
• Positive Score
• Negative Score
• Affect Balance Score
New measures of well-being: Flourishing and positive and negative feelings. Diener et al. (2009)
60. Design tips
• People’s memory of the experience you design will be as good (or bad) as
its best (or worse).
• If the experience you design was good, your users will remember it as
being even better than it was.
• Remembering a good experience inflates it (the gift that keeps on giving)
• If your design provides a venue for users to talk about their experience to
others, it will make it more memorable for them.
• Design elements requiring focused attention (i.e., w/o attentional demands
from competing sources) will be more memorable.
61. More design tips
• Ensure that the experience ends in a positive note, or at least with an
improving trend. Never end it badly.
• Cover the worse-case scenarios so that they’re followed by either recovery or
graceful reorienting (i.e., disrupt the consolidation of bad experiences into long-term
memories).
• When asking users to assess past experiences with a rating scale, the
first/left end of the scale will be used more often
• When asking users to assess past experiences, choose words carefully.
Words can easily bias their responses through priming.
