The Mouse And The Rectangle

http://www.dustincurtis.com/2.html

by arjunlall • 18 years ago

62 23 18 years ago

dustincurtis.com

Shamiq2• 18 years ago

Does anyone have thoughts on the applicability of this article in terms of UI and UX?

dcurtis• 18 years ago

Ha, what a coincidence (or not): I wrote the article, and I'm a UI designer.

I've been trying to figure out a way to use peak shift in UI design for a while. Mainly, I have been wondering if the same principle occurs not only to things someone favors in a pavlovian sense (as has been proven), but also to things someone expects or wants.

If it does work this way, then it might be possible to hack it into an interface and get people to do things subconsciously by exaggerating certain triggers.

So far, I haven't found the perfect way to do this yet.

izaidi• 18 years ago

I think the tricky part is that peak shift relies on generalizations (like "rectangleness") being made about a whole set of objects or experiences, so you first need some kind of foundation (like Pavlovian training) from which a generalization can be constructed.

When I'm designing an interface I try to make sure it has a visual vocabulary that's pervasive and consistent enough for the user to learn it from very little experience. So for example, the opacity of visual elements can be used to represent their importance; important stuff is brighter and clearer while unimportant stuff fades into the background. Once the user picks up on that, they can use it to make decisions about the importance of what they see: they'll focus extra attention on the text that's 100% opaque and ignore the text that's half-transparent.

Simple rules like this have existed in design for hundreds of years -- it's why newspapers give 72-point headlines to "big" stories. What's interesting now is that interfaces are becoming increasingly dynamic, and the tools we're using are letting us broaden the design vocabulary beyond just size and placement and typography.

randomwalker3• 18 years ago

The Ramachandran referred to in the article is a brilliant neurologist/neuroscientist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilayanur_Ramachandran). You should watch his TED talk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl2LwnaUA-k), it's pretty amazing.

manny• 18 years ago

wow. That was amazing.

randomwalker3• 18 years ago

I was fortunate enough to hear him speak at my college graduation. We are both from the same town in India :-)

gnomic_conic• 18 years ago

He wrote a book titled "Phantoms in the Brain." It is fantastic and I highly recommend it to anyone here who is curious about a little bit of psychology.

ChaitanyaSai• 18 years ago

This article is sort of a teaser/trailer for this one: http://www.imprint.co.uk/rama/art.pdf [V S Ramachandran & William Hirstein: The Science of Art]

gruseom4• 18 years ago

I always found Pavlov's experiment thoroughly boring. I could never understand why it was such a big deal - it just seems obvious. But this rectangle thing is really subtle and interesting.

randomwalker3• 18 years ago

The year was 1890. Only 15 years ago did Koch prove for the first time that diseases were caused by germs. Most of the world still believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The scientific consensus was that "ether" pervaded all of space. Men of stature made confident pronouncements that nothing man-made would ever fly.

Almost everything is obvious in retrospect. And being boring is not a strike against a scientific hypothesis.

gruseom4• 18 years ago

Your list seems to me to affirm my point. None of the things you mention strike me as boring and obvious, and I have a lot of respect for 1890. Lectures in scientific piety, not so much.

But as long as we're butting heads about this, perhaps you can clear up something I was wondering. The article says:

[Pavlov] showed that a physical connection can be created between a stimulus (the bell sound) and the following behavior (the dog's salivation) with no cognitive interaction.

My question: is that last bit - "with no cognitive interaction" - the received interpretation of Pavlov's result, or was it just added by the author?

mattmaroon5• 18 years ago

How do they know the mouse didn't just associate the square with the lack of reward?

gruseom4• 18 years ago

Presumably because avoiding the square alone wouldn't explain the preference for the third option over the second.

mattmaroon5• 18 years ago

Could that be just curiosity? The article didn't say how much they preferred them or for how long. Maybe mice are just gamblers by nature.

whacked_new2• 18 years ago

Reward-driven behaviors are modulated by a reward center, i.e. the dopamine circuit, which gives you the happy chemicals when you get something good.

While there is a pain evasion mechanism, there isn't an analogous lack-of-reward-center.

mattmaroon5• 18 years ago

The dopamine is triggered by the cheese it gets right? At the time when the mouse is making the decision, it knows it'll get the cheese and dopamine from the old rectangle, yet it doesn't go there.

So what does this have to do with anything? Why is the mouse preferring something new and unknown over a known cheese/dopamine event?

My statement is that the mouse may be gambling, not that it's afraid. It knows the square is no cheese, the rectangle is one piece, and thinks maybe an unknown object of any shape is 10.

jumper• 18 years ago

I think the idea of "impossible ideals" is very important tool. For example, when you decide you'll crack down and never have another bug again, on the one hand you're obviously doomed to fail, perfection is unobtainable, but on the other it can direct you towards the bug free end of the spectrum. The idea of reaching for ever more "rectangular" shapes seems to fit that mind set, as you approach the "most rectangular" shape.

truebosko• 18 years ago

Great article, and to be honest I have nothing to add that wasn't said but can I say -- The site design is very neat! Love how you switch themes on each article.

The Mouse And The Rectangle

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