DESIGNING FOR THE SUBCONSCIOUS: A NEUROIS STUDY OF PRIMING AND IDEA GENERATION IN ELECTRONIC BRAINSTORMING

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Indiana University, Business, 2014There has been extensive research on electronic brainstorming (EBS) over the past two decades, yet little is known about how best to design technology to enhance overall team performance. This dissertation seeks to open a new door in EBS design: designing a system for the individual's subconscious. Before effective design interventions can be developed, the cognitive underpinnings of individual-level EBS interactions must be elucidated. These studies provide insight into the core of this issue by examining the neurophysiological correlates of the ideation process, specifically using electroencephalography (EEG), electromyography (EMG), and skin conductance to examine priming-induced changes in cognition and emotion during an EBS session. Furthermore, it extends prior research on the use of priming to enhance EBS performance, creating new design guidelines for EBS systems that are designed for the user's subconscious. The findings show that achievement priming changes cognition in areas of the brain related to creativity which correspond with increases in idea fluency and creativity. While the implications of this study will be directly applicable to design of EBS technology, future studies can examine the use of priming in other collaboration tools. There may also be implications for the design of other forms of technology. The use of NeuroIS to more fully understand information processing in teams can also enhance the collaboration literature, in that it can illuminate individual cognition limitations in team interactions and enhance our understanding of which aspects of team interactions have the biggest "bang for their buck" from a cognitive standpoint. These findings provide several avenues for future research

Play for Performance: Using Computer Games to Improve Motivation and Test-Taking Performance

The importance of testing, especially certification and high-stakes testing, has increased substantially over the past decade. Building on the “serious gaming” literature and the psychology “priming” literature, we developed a computer game designed to improve test-taking performance using psychological priming. The game primed the concept of achievement to increase an individual’s expectation of success and motivation. Our results show that individuals who took a test immediately after playing the game significantly outperformed those who played a placebo computer game designed to have no effect. The effect size was medium (0.63). We believe that these results have important implications for information system education, including improving individual test-taking performance, identifying ways to develop information systems topic-specific games, and the need for more research to better understand how and why such games influence performance

The Influence of Psychographic Beliefs on Website Usability Requirements

Designing websites that are responsive to customer needs is a critical prerequisite for the success of online services. To date, much research has focused on understanding which design requirements can be successfully applied to a website’s design. However, there has been limited research examining why some requirements may have more or less importance to customers. In addition to demographic characteristics, we propose that psychographic characteristics influence usability-related requirements. To develop our research model and hypotheses, we draw from usability literature and research in consumer behavior concerned with customers’ prevailing beliefs about technology. Conceptualizing customer beliefs should not only help distinguish between positive and negative processes but also help further investigate their consequences. To explore the relationship between customer characteristics (i.e., gender and technology beliefs) and usability requirements, we use a usability procedure based on the Microsoft Usability Guidelines (MUG). MUG identifies multiple design requirements that are expected to increase the usability of sites. We present the results of our study involving 215 participants. Overall, our results suggest that negative beliefs may play a larger role in influencing usability requirements than positive beliefs. And, the results suggest that prior Web experience moderates the relationship between beliefs and requirements

Mapping the Corporate Blogosphere: Linking Audience, Content, and Management to Blog Visibility

Blogs have been a common part of the Web for many years. Individuals create most blogs for their own purposes, but corporations have also begun to develop corporate blogs as a means for communicating with their stakeholders (e.g., customers, partners, investors). In this paper, we extend theory by generating what Gregor (2006) would call a type I theory. Specifically, we develop a theoretical framework for classifying and analyzing corporate blogs that examines blogs’ target audience, their content (focus and function), and how one should manage them. We use this framework to analyze the impact of these characteristics on the visibility of blogs operated by a sample of Fortune 500 companies. Our results show that a blog’s target audience and how its content and management fit with this audience can have significant impacts on blog visibility. We believe this framework provides a useful foundation for studying corporate blogs in the future

HICSS Panel Report on Cognitive Foreshadowing: Next Steps in Applying Neuroscience and Cognitive Science to Information Systems Research

The use of neurophysiological tools in the information systems domain has received increased attention over the last decade. The Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences has helped provide a home for rigorously exploring such work through related minitracks and symposia. This paper reports on a panel presented at the 49th HICSS conference held in 2016 during a symposium organized to help orient interested researchers to the usefulness of cognitive neuroscience in IS research. This paper first introduces the rise in the IS discipline for integrating the methodologies and tools of cognitive neuroscience. It then presents individual viewpoints from the varying panel members at the symposium as they addressed questions of longevity, applicability, and next steps for the neuroIS subdiscipline. The four panel members included Alan Dennis, Angelika Dimoka, Allen Lee, and Ofir Turel

Understanding Psychophysiological Correlates of User Experience using Electroencephalogram (EEG)

The objective of this research is to understand psychophysiological correlates of user experience using electroencephalogram (EEG). We will conduct an experimental study to assess the psychophysiological differences across three states of user experience -- flow, boredom, and anxiety -- and compare them with the neutral state as a baseline. EEG measurement provides a plethora of data that can be decomposed using different analytical procedures. We will utilize one type of analysis, time-frequency decomposition, to examine changes in frequency (e.g., alpha/beta/theta band) over time. These frequency bands correlate with different cognitive states. In this study, we will use Event Related Spectral Perturbation (ERSP), a type of time-frequency decomposition, for its ability to model both time and frequency changes occurring in a frequency band. We expect the findings to not only contribute to a better understanding of psychophysiological means of assessing user experience, but also provide implications for future research in brain-computer interface

Security on Autopilot: Why Current Security Theories Hijack our Thinking and Lead Us Astray

Most current information systems security theories assume a rational actor making deliberate decisions, yet recent research in psychology suggests that such deliberate thinking is not as common as we would expect. Much of human behavior is controlled by nonconscious automatic cognition (called System 1 cognition). The deliberate rational cognition of System 2 is triggered when System 1 detects something that is not normal; otherwise we often operate on autopilot. When we do engage System 2 cognition, it is influenced by the System 1 cognition that preceded it. In this paper we present an alternative theoretical approach to information security that is based on the nonconscious automatic cognition of System 1. In a System 1 world, cognition is a sub-second process of pattern-matching a stimulus to an existing person-context heuristic. These person-context heuristics are influenced by personality characteristics and a lifetime of experiences in the context. Thus System 1 theories are closely tied to individuals and the specific security context of interest. Methods to improve security compliance take on a very new form; the traditional approaches to security education and training that provide guidelines and ways to think about security have no effect when behavior is controlled by System 1, because System 1 cognition is instant pattern matching not deliberative. Thus in a System 1 world, we improve security by changing the heuristics used by System 1's pattern matching and/or by changing what System 1 sees as "normal" so that it triggers the deliberate cognition of System 2. In this article, we examine System 1 and System 2 cognition, while calling for increased research to develop theories of System 1 cognition in the cybersecurity literature

Fake News on Social Media: People Believe What They Want to Believe When it Makes No Sense At All

Fake news (i.e., misinformation) on social media has sharply increased in the past few years. We conducted a behavioral experiment with EEG data from 83 social media users to understand whether they could detect fake news on social media, and whether the presence of a fake news flag affected their cognition and judgment. We found that the presence of a fake news flag triggered increased cognitive activity and users spent more time considering the headline. However, the flag had no effect on judgments about truth; flagging headlines as false did not influence users’ beliefs. A post hoc analysis shows that confirmation bias is pervasive, with users more likely to believe news headlines that align with their political opinions. Headlines that challenge their opinions receive little cognitive attention (i.e., they are ignored) and users are less likely to believe them