Applied cognitive science
attitudes
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Very basic introduction: definition, how are attitudes organized, IAT, balance theory of attitude change, considerations for design.
decision making
Expertise in decision making, satisficing, traps (meta-cognition, planning fallacy, overconfidence, illusion of objectivity, confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, misinformation), nudging (defaults, self-nudging, choice architecture), rational decision making (expected value, expected utility), information processing theories (query theory, endowment effect), improving decision making through design.
emotion and motivation
Emotional design, definitions (emotion, mood, feeling, affect), appraisal, misattribution of arousal, categorical and dimensional models of emotion, role of emotion in thinking and making decisions, utilitarian and hedonic value, valence and micro-valences, mere exposure effect, hedonic adaptation, hedonic treadmill, motivation, motivated cognition, affect detection and modeling, affective computing and interfaces.
reading companion to Don Norman’s the Design of Everyday Things
Explains basic terms from the book: affordances, signifiers, discoverability, understanding, mapping, feedback, conceptual and mental models, system image, gulfs of execution and evaluation, stages of action and processing, knowledge in the world and in the head, and error classification. Detours into Gibson’s perception-action cycle, Clark&Chalmers’ extended mind argument, Gawande’s checklist manifesto, and Asch’s obedience experiments.
reading companion to Tversky and Kahneman’s Judgment under uncertainty: heuristics and biases (1974, Science)
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Overview and critique of Tversky and Kahneman’s contribution, heuristics: representativeness, availability, anchoring & adjustment.