Arthur B. Markman - US grants

The mutual influence of categorization and choice

Abstract

People form preferences for objects and events in the world. The present research explores how people come to learn about categories of objects and events in the world when forming preferences about them, and how what is learned about these objects and events affects what people prefer. The studies focus on the role of analogies in decision making about highly unfamiliar objects. In addition, they examine how people's background knowledge and motivation affect choices and learning about new members of known categories. This work has implications for many real-world situations in which people learn about the options in the process of forming preferences such as voting and selection of consumer products.

This award will support international travel of younger US cognitive scientists to enable them to participate in the full scientific program of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, taking place August 1-4, 2001 in Edinburgh, Scotland, the first such meeting outside of North America. The participation of these younger (Ph.D. within the last six years) scientists, all of whose research is on topics within the purview of NSF, will allow them to forge connections with researchers in the international community. Thus, not only will collaborations be born that could not start in other fashions, but also the international visibility of these young US scientists will be enhanced.

DESCRIPTION (provided by investigator): This application focuses on principles of goal activation and the relationship between motivation and cognition. At the core of this work is an unexpected finding from my recent research that a strongly active goal appears to inhibit competing goals and thus to decrease people's preferences for objects that are not related to the strongly active goal. What makes this finding relevant to research on addiction is that it has been obtained not only with "cognitive" goals like paying bills, but also with need for a drug (nicotine) and with a need for food. The proposed research follows up on my preliminary findings in three ways. 1) To better understand the mechanisms of goal activation. This work will explore two competing theories of how goals are activated and inhibited. One posits a fixed amount of motivational capacity, and the second posits a motivational mechanism in which the goals most strongly inhibited are those that compete directly with the currently active goal. 2) To better understand the organization of goal structures. The basic goal excitation and inhibition mechanisms being explored may provide insight into the level of abstractness of the desired end-states of the goal. 3) To better understand the relationship between approach and avoidance goals. In particular, there is evidence in both neuroscience and psychology that suggests approach and avoidance are mediated by different motivational systems. The proposed studies explore the influence of motivational focus (i.e., the tendency to be affected by approach and avoidance concerns) on the activation of approach and avoidance goals. This work will also examine the relationship between consciously experienced cravings and conflicts between approach and avoidance goals.

This project seeks to investigate, develop, test, and deploy innovative design methods for generating concepts through analogies. Design-by-analogy is the area of idea generation in which proven solutions from a given domain provide visual, aesthetic, geometric, or functional similarity for use in another problem domain. The existence of this area is noted throughout recorded history. The first steam locomotives, for example, were based on analogies to the horse-drawn stagecoach. While the existence of analogies as inspiration for creative design is well known, the cognitive processes used in design-by-analogy, especially for complex problems such as in engineering, is far from understood. This gap in the research provides a unique opportunity to form a collaboration between two disciplines, engineering and psychology. Through this collaboration, the work on design-by-analogy will develop fundamental experimental data, principles, and techniques for enhancing both designer's and industry's ability to create and innovate.

The research involves a series of experiments in design-by-analogy using subjects with an engineering background. In the first phase, three parallel experiments will be executed. These experiments will determine the appropriate representations for potential base domains for analogies (such as physical products, diagrams, and/or word descriptions), preferred depictions of analogies, such as functions for identifying possible analogies, and concept generation media, such as manipulatives for expressing design-by-analogy ideas. The results of these experiments, in the form of principles, will be integrated into a systematic design method to enhance the quality of the designs. Experiments with this method will explore its efficacy both with individuals and teams. Learning modules for concept generation will be created and assessed at a number of U.S. Universities. Assessments will be performed across ethnic, gender, and economic boundaries. Results will be distributed for general academic use and will be shared with industry to interject tested approaches for improving timely innovation.

Innovation and creativity have been the focus of intensive study across a variety of scientific disciplines, including Psychology, Engineering, Computer Science, and Business. This work has revealed a number of key aspects about the way people formulate a problem, search for potential analogies, and evaluate possible. The knowledge gained by this research is potentially useful because most people in the workforce do not know enough about their own thought processes to spur themselves to be creative. Research on innovation and creativity may lead to methods and techniques that promote repeatable innovation in the the lab and the workplace.

The National Science Foundation is supporting a multidisciplinary workshop hosted by the IC2 Institute at the University of Texas to explore the development of tools for innovation. This workshop will bring together cognitive scientists, engineers, computer scientists, business researchers, and members of the business community to propose specific tools that could be used in innovation settings. These proposals are intended not only as workable methods of supporting the processes of innovation in the lab and the workplace, but also as the basis of discussion for new research questions that will extend our knowledge of the creative process. Support of this workshop will enable students and junior investigators to participate in the earliest stages of new collaborations among researchers from different disciplines who share a common interest in innovation and creativity.

COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: Extreme Experience Design for Breaking Barriers to Innovation (0825461/0825713)
Katja Hölttä-Otto (PI, UMass-Dartmouth), Carolyn Conner Seepersad (PI, UT Austin), Art Markman (Co-PI, UT Austin)

The research objective of this award is to establish a structured conceptual design methodology, called Extreme Experience Design (EED), that stimulates innovation of breakthrough products by engaging designers in extreme experiences as part of concept generation. Extreme experiences expose the designer(s) to modified physical usage environments (e.g., moisture or noise) or altered means of interacting with the product physically, cognitively, or sensorially (e.g., limited dexterity via gloves or limited hearing via earplugs). These experiences are designed to help designers empathize with customers under a variety of conditions, and thereby design for the types of context-related latent needs that lead to breakthrough products. A series of experiments is planned to design and refine the EED methodology, to investigate its effectiveness, and to better understand how a designer's pre-ideation experiences affect the results of conceptual design. A two-phased Design of Experiments approach will be used to test the effectiveness of the EED methodology. The first phase will be designed to investigate the impact of extreme experiences and designer-prototype interaction, together and separately, on the outcomes of the conceptual design process. The second phase will be designed to investigate more closely whether different types of extreme experiences lead to different types of innovation.

If successful, the results of this research will provide fundamental knowledge of the effects of extreme experiences and designer-prototype interaction on design fixation and a designer's ability to innovate. The knowledge will be incorporated in a new conceptual design approach, EED, that has the potential to enhance designers' abilities to generative innovative concepts by engaging them in pre-ideation, extreme experiences. Also, the proposed research is expected to have significant broader impacts. Research will be transferred from the laboratories to K-12 students, university students, industry, and the general public by means of online resources, outreach programs, industry interaction, and improved capabilities for universal design that improves quality of life.