Neurocognitive Informatics Manifesto.

Informatics studies all aspects of the structure of natural and artificial information systems. Theoretical and abstract approaches to information have made great advances, but human information processing is still unmatched in many areas, including information management, representation and understanding. Neurocognitive informatics is a new, emerging field that should help to improve the matching of artificial and natural systems, and inspire better computational algorithms to solve problems that are still beyond the reach of machines. In this position paper examples of neurocognitive inspirations and promising directions in this area are given

The influence of psychological resilience on the relation between automatic stimulus evaluation and attentional breadth for surprised faces

The broaden-and-build theory relates positive emotions to resilience and cognitive broadening. The theory proposes that the broadening effects underly the relation between positive emotions and resilience, suggesting that resilient people can benefit more from positive emotions at the level of cognitive functioning. Research has investigated the influence of positive emotions on attentional broadening, but the stimulus in the target of attention may also influence attentional breadth, depending on affective stimulus evaluation. Surprised faces are particularly interesting as they are valence ambiguous, therefore, we investigated the relation between affective evaluation-using an affective priming task-and attentional breadth for surprised faces, and how this relation is influenced by resilience. Results show that more positive evaluations are related to more attentional broadening at high levels of resilience, while this relation is reversed at low levels. This indicates that resilient individuals can benefit more from attending to positively evaluated stimuli at the level of attentional broadening

From “Oh, OK” to “Ah, yes” to “Aha!”: Hyper-systemizing and the rewards of insight\ud

Hyper-systemizers are individuals displaying an unusually strong bias toward systemizing, i.e. toward explaining events and solving problems by appeal to mechanisms that do not involve intentions or agency. Hyper-systemizing in combination with deficit mentalizing ability typically presents clinically as an autistic spectrum disorder; however, the development of hyper-systemizing in combination with normal-range mentalizing ability is not well characterized. Based on a review and synthesis of clinical, observational, experimental, and neurofunctional studies, it is hypothesized that repeated episodes of insightful problem solving by systemizing result in attentional and motivational sensitization toward further systemizing via progressive and chronic deactivation of the default network. This hypothesis is distinguished from alternatives, and its correlational and causal implications are discussed. Predictions of the default-deactivation model accessible to survey-based instruments, standard cognitive measures and neurofunctional methods are outlined, and evidence pertaining to them considered

Happy software developers solve problems better: psychological measurements in empirical software engineering

For more than 30 years, it has been claimed that a way to improve software developers' productivity and software quality is to focus on people and to provide incentives to make developers satisfied and happy. This claim has rarely been verified in software engineering research, which faces an additional challenge in comparison to more traditional engineering fields: software development is an intellectual activity and is dominated by often-neglected human aspects. Among the skills required for software development, developers must possess high analytical problem-solving skills and creativity for the software construction process. According to psychology research, affects-emotions and moods-deeply influence the cognitive processing abilities and performance of workers, including creativity and analytical problem solving. Nonetheless, little research has investigated the correlation between the affective states, creativity, and analytical problem-solving performance of programmers. This article echoes the call to employ psychological measurements in software engineering research. We report a study with 42 participants to investigate the relationship between the affective states, creativity, and analytical problem-solving skills of software developers. The results offer support for the claim that happy developers are indeed better problem solvers in terms of their analytical abilities. The following contributions are made by this study: (1) providing a better understanding of the impact of affective states on the creativity and analytical problem-solving capacities of developers, (2) introducing and validating psychological measurements, theories, and concepts of affective states, creativity, and analytical-problem-solving skills in empirical software engineering, and (3) raising the need for studying the human factors of software engineering by employing a multidisciplinary viewpoint.Comment: 33 pages, 11 figures, published at Peer

Emotion and Creativity: Hacking into Cognitive Appraisal Processes to Augment Creative Ideation

Creativity thrives when people experience positive emotions. How to design an interactive system that can effectively make use of this potential is, however, still an unanswered question. In this paper, we propose one approach to this problem that relies on hacking into the cognitive appraisal processes that form part of positive emotions. To demonstrate our approach we have conceived, made, and evaluated a novel interactive system that influences an individual’s appraisals of their own idea generation processes by providing real-time and believable feedback about the originality of their ideas. The system can be used to manipulate this feedback to make the user’s ideas appear more or less original. This has enabled us to test experimentally the hypothesis that providing more positive feedback, rather than neutral, or more negative feedback than the user is expecting, causes more positive emotion, which in turn causes more creativity during idea generation. The findings demonstrate that an interactive system can be designed to use the function of cognitive appraisal processes in positive emotion to help people to get more out of their own creative capabilities

THE ROLE OF EMOTION IN VISUALIZATION

The popular notion that emotion and reason are incompatible is no longer defensi- ble. Recent research in psychology and cognitive science has established emotion as a key element in numerous aspects of perception and cognition, including attention, memory, decision-making, risk perception, and creativity. This dissertation centers around the observation that emotion influences many aspects of perception and cog- nition that are crucial for effective visualization. First, I demonstrate that emotion influences accuracy in fundamental visualiza- tion tasks by combining a classic graphical perception experiment (from Cleveland and McGill) with emotion induction procedures from psychology (chapter 3). Next, I expand on the experiments in the first chapter to explore additional techniques for studying emotion and visualization, resulting in an experiment that shows that performance differences between primed individuals persist even as task difficulty in- creases (chapter 4). In a separate experiment, I show how certain emotional states (i.e. frustration and engagement) can be inferred from visualization interaction logs using machine learning (chapter 5). I then discuss a model for individual cognitive dif- ferences in visualization, which situates emotion into existing individual differences research in visualization (chapter 6). Finally, I propose an preliminary model for emotion in visualization (chapter 7)

Worker Retention, Response Quality, and Diversity in Microtask Crowdsourcing: An Experimental Investigation of the Potential for Priming Effects to Promote Project Goals

Online microtask crowdsourcing platforms act as efficient resources for delegating small units of work, gathering data, generating ideas, and more. Members of research and business communities have incorporated crowdsourcing into problem-solving processes. When human workers contribute to a crowdsourcing task, they are subject to various stimuli as a result of task design. Inter-task priming effects - through which work is nonconsciously, yet significantly, influenced by exposure to certain stimuli - have been shown to affect microtask crowdsourcing responses in a variety of ways. Instead of simply being wary of the potential for priming effects to skew results, task administrators can utilize proven priming procedures in order to promote project goals. In a series of three experiments conducted on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, we investigated the effects of proposed priming treatments on worker retention, response quality, and response diversity. In our first two experiments, we studied the effect of initial response freedom on sustained worker participation and response quality. We expected that workers who were granted greater levels of freedom in an initial response would be stimulated to complete more work and deliver higher quality work than workers originally constrained in their initial response possibilities. We found no significant relationship between the initial response freedom granted to workers and the amount of optional work they completed. The degree of initial response freedom also did not have a significant impact on subsequent response quality. However, the influence of inter-task effects were evident based on response tendencies for different question types. We found evidence that consistency in task structure may play a stronger role in promoting response quality than proposed priming procedures. In our final experiment, we studied the influence of a group-level priming treatment on response diversity. Instead of varying task structure for different workers, we varied the degree of overlap in question content distributed to different workers in a group. We expected groups of workers that were exposed to more diverse preliminary question sets to offer greater diversity in response to a subsequent question. Although differences in response diversity were revealed, no consistent trend between question content overlap and response diversity prevailed. Nevertheless, combining consistent task structure with crowd-level priming procedures - to encourage diversity in inter-task effects across the crowd - offers an exciting path for future study

Computational Creativity

In: Encyclopedia of Systems Biology, W. Dubitzky, O. Wolkenhauer, K-H Cho, H. Yokota (Eds.), Springer 2011Understanding brain processes behind creativity and modeling them using computational means is one of the grand challenges for systems biology. Computational creativity is a new field, inspired by cognitive psychology and neuroscience. In many respects human-level intelligence is far beyond what artificial intelligence can provide now, especially in regard to the high-level functions, involving thinking, reasoning, planning and the use of language. Intuition, insight, imagery and creativity are important aspects of all these functions

Message framing, non-conscious perception and effectiveness in non-profit advertising. Contribution by neuromarketing research

Advertising for non-profit organizations through television commercials is a valuable means of communication to raise awareness and receive donations. When it comes to social aspects, personal attitudes such as empathy are significant for reinforcing the intention to donate; and the study of eliciting emotions has critical attention in the literature, especially some types of emotion, such as guilt which mediates empathy. Different methodologies have been used to measure consumer emotions when faced with TV ads stimuli: mainly traditional techniques such as interviews or questionnaires after the ads viewing. In the last ten years, there has also been a great interest in new neuroscience techniques applied to measure emotional and cognitive reactions by physiological signals, frame by frame. Our research has applied neuromarketing technologies during the observation of a UNHCR commercial promoting legacy calls. The objective was to study cognitive and emotional reactions in order to increase the effectiveness whilst having the possibility to verify the results by measuring the benefits in terms of calls from contributors. The purpose of this research is to empirically prove the impact in calls thanks to changes in the message framing strategy in non-profit advertising suggested and measured by neuromarketing techniques. Particularly we measured the cerebral activity through an electroencephalogram to obtain an Approach-Withdrawal Index (AW); the heart rate and galvanic skin response through different sensors in the palm of one hand, to obtain an Emotional Index (EI), and finally, eye fixations through an eye tracker device to obtain the visual attention on key visual areas of the ads. After these indicators' recordings on a sample of subjects, some suggestions to modify the advertising were made to create a more effective campaign. The results compared, those elicited by the first version of the spot (LVE) and those by the second version (HVE), confirmed that (1) the number of sellable and legacy calls increased with the message framing strategy modified in the second spot (HVE), (2) a lower cognitive and emotional reactions have been obtained in the final section of HVE, (3) the visual attention on the key information of the phone number to call, in the final call to action frames(CTA), was higher in HVE than in the first version of the spot (LVE), (4) the cognitive approach increased during the same CTA frames in HVE