It’s a great illustrated read about the scientific history of the ideas behind ‘persuasive technology’, and ends with a plea that perhaps we can hijack our weakness for variable reward schedules for better ends:
What is we set up a variable reward system to reward ourselves for the time spent away fro our phones & physically connecting with others? Even time spend meditating or reading without technological distractions is a heroic endeavor worthy of a prize
Which isn’t a bad idea, but the pattern of the reward schedule is only one factor in what makes an activity habit forming. The timing of a reward is more important than the reliability – it’s easier to train in habits with immediate than delayed rewards. The timing is so crucial that in the animal learning literature even a delay of 2 seconds between a lever press and the delivery of a food pellet impairs learning in rats. In experiments we did with humans a delay of 150ms we enough to hinder our participants connecting their own actions with a training signal.
So the dilemma for persuasive technology, and anyone who wants to free themselves from its hold, is not just how phones/emails/social media structure our rewards, but also the fact that they allow gratification at almost any moment. There are always new notifications, new news, and so phones let us have zero delay for the reward of checking our phones. If you want to focus on other things, like being a successful parent, friend or human the delays on the rewards of these are far larger (not to mention more nebulous).
The way I like to think about it is the conflict between the impatient, narrow, smaller self – the self that likes sweets and gossip and all things immediate gratification – and the wider, wiser self – the self than invests in the future and carers about the bigger picture. That self can win out, does win out as we make our stumbling journey into adulthood, but my hunch is we’re going to need a different framework from the one of reinforcement learning to do it
George Ainslie’s book Breakdown of Will is what happens if you go so deep into the reinforcement learning paradigm you explode its reductionism and reinvent the notion of the self. Mind-alteringly good.
Putting a student at the centre of their own learning seems like fundamental pedagogy. The Constructivist approach to education emphasises the need for knowledge to reassembled in the mind of the learner, and the related impossibility of its direct transmission from the mind of the teacher. Believe this, and student input into how they learn must follow.
At the same time, we know there is a deep neurobiological connection between the machinery of reward in our brain, and that of learning. Both functions seem to be entangled in the subcortical circuitry of a network known as the basal ganglia. It’s perhaps not surprising that curiosity, which we all know personally to be a powerful motivator of learning, activates the same subcortical circuitry involved in the pleasurable anticipation of reward. Further, curiosity enhances memory, even for things you learn while your curiosity is aroused about something else.
This neurobiological alignment of enjoyment and learning isn’t mere coincidence. When building learning algorithms for embedding in learning robots, the basic rules of learning from experience have to be augmented with a drive to explore – curiosity! – so that they don’t become stuck repeating suboptimal habits. Whether it is motivated by curiosity or other factors, exploration seems to support enhanced learning in a range of domains from simple skills to more complex ideas.
Obviously we learn best when motivated, and when learning is fun, and allowing us to explore our curiosity is a way to allow both. However, putting the trajectory of their experience into students’ hands can go awry.
False beliefs impede learning
One reason is false beliefs about how much we know, or how we learn best. Psychologists studying memory have long documented such metacognitive errors, which include overconfidence, and a mistaken reliance on our familiarity with a thing as a guide to how well we understand it, or how well we’ll be able to recall it when tested (recognition and recall are in fact different cognitive processes). Sure enough, when tested in experiments people will over-rely on ineffective study strategies (like rereading, or reviewing the answers to questions, rather than testing their ability to generate the answers from the questions). Cramming is another ineffective study strategy, with experiment after experiment showing the benefit of spreading out your study rather than massing it all together. Obviously this requires being more organised, but my belief is that a metacognitive error supports students’ over-reliance on cramming – cramming feels good, because, for a moment, you feel familiar with all the information. The problem is that this feel-good familiarity isn’t the kind of memory that will support recall in an exam, but immature learners often don’t realise the extent of that.
In agreement with these findings from psychologists, education scholars have reacted against pure student-led or discovery learning, with one review summarising the findings from multiple distinct research programmes taking place over three decades: “In each case, guided discovery was more effective than pure discovery in helping students learn and transfer”.
The solution: balancing guided and discovery learning
This leaves us at a classic “middle way”, where pure student-led or teacher-led learning is ruled out. Some kind of guided exploration, structured study, or student choice in learning is obviously a necessity, but we’re not sure how much.
There’s an exciting future for research which informs us what the right blend of guided and discovery learning is, and which students and topics suit which exact blend. One strand of this is to take the cognitive psychology experiments which demonstrate a benefit of active choice learning over passive instruction and to tweak them so that we can see when passive instruction can be used to jump-start or augment active choice learning. One experiment from Kyle MacDonald and Michael Frank of Stanford University used a highly abstract concept learning task in which participants use trial and error to figure out a categorisation of different shapes. Previous research had shown that people learned faster if they were allowed to choose their own examples to receive feedback on, but this latest iteration of the experiment from MacDonald and Frank showed that an initial session of passive learning, where the examples were chosen for the learner boosted performance even further. Presumably this effect is due to the scaffolding in the structure of the concept-space that the passive learning gives the learner. This, and myriad experiments, are possible to show when and how active learning and instructor-led learning can be blended.
Education is about more than students learning the material on the syllabus. There is a meta-goal of producing students who are better able to learn for themselves. The same cognitive machinery in all of us might push us towards less effective strategies. The simple fact of being located within our own selfish consciousness means that even the best performers in the world need a coach to help them learn. But as we mature we can learn to better avoid pitfalls in our learning and evolve into better self-determining students. Ultimately the best education needs to keep its focus on that need to help each of us take on more and more responsibility for how we learn, whether that means submitting to others’ choices or exploring things for ourselves – or, often, a bit of both.
The Hidden Persuaders project has interviewed neuropsychologist Tim Shallice about his opposition to the British government’s use of ‘enhanced interrogation’ in the Northern Ireland conflict of the 1970s – a practice eventually abandoned as torture.
Shallice is little known to the wider public but is one of the most important and influential neuropsychologists of his generation, having pioneered the systematic study of neurological problems as a window on typical cognitive function.
One of his first papers was not on brain injury, however, it was an article titled ‘Ulster depth interrogation techniques and their relation to sensory deprivation research’ where he set out a cognitive basis for why the ‘five techniques’ – wall-standing, hooding, white noise, sleep deprivation, and deprivation of food and drink – amounted to torture.
Shallice traces a link between the use of these techniques and research on sensory deprivation – which was investigated both by regular scientists for reasons of scientific curiosity, and as we learned later, by intelligence services while trying to understand ‘brain washing’.
The use of these techniques in Northern Ireland was subject to an official investigation and Shallice and other researchers testified to the Parker Committee which led Prime Minister Edward Heath to ban the practice.
If those techniques sound eerily familiar, it is because they formed the basis of interrogation practices at Guantanamo Bay and other notorious sites in the ‘war on terror’.
The Hidden Persuaders is a research project at Birkbeck, University of London, which is investigating the history of ‘brainwashing’. It traces the practice to its use by the British during the colonisation of Yemen, who seemed to have borrowed it off the KGB.
And if you want to read about the modern day effects of the abusive techniques, The New York Times has just published a disturbing feature article about the long-term consequences of being tortured in Guantanamo and other ‘black sites’ by following up many of the people subject to the brutal techniques.
Link to Hidden Persuaders interview with Tim Shallice. Link to NYT on long-term legacy of war on terror torture.
You’ve probably heard of “brain training exercises” – puzzles, tasks and drills which claim to keep you mentally agile. Maybe, especially if you’re an older person, you’ve even bought the book, or the app, in the hope of staving off mental decline. The idea of brain training has widespread currency, but is that due to science, or empty marketing?
Now a major new review, published in Psychology in the Public Interest, sets out to systematically examine the evidence for brain training. The results should give you pause before spending any of your time and money on brain training, but they also highlight what happens when research and commerce become entangled.
The review team, led by Dan Simons of the University of Illinois, set out to inspect all the literature which brain training companies cited in their promotional material – in effect, taking them at their word, with the rationale that the best evidence in support of brain training exercises would be that cited by the companies promoting them.
The chairman says it works
A major finding of the review is the poverty of the supporting evidence for these supposedly scientific exercises. Simons’ team found that half of the brain training companies that promoted their products as being scientifically validated didn’t cite any peer-reviewed journal articles, relying instead on things like testimonials from scientists (including the company founders). Of the companies which did cite evidence for brain training, many cited general research on neuroplasticity, but nothing directly relevant to the effectiveness of what they promote.
The key issue for claims around brain training is that practising these exercises will help you in general, or on unrelated tasks. Nobody doubts that practising a crossword will help you get better at crosswords, but will it improve your memory, your IQ or your ability to skim read email? Such effects are called transfer effects, and so called “far transfer” (transfer to a very different task than that trained) is the ultimate goal of brain training studies. What we know about transfer effect is reviewed in Simons’ paper.
As well as trawling the company websites, the reviewers inspected a list provided by an industry group (Cognitive Training Data of some 132 scientific papers claiming to support the efficacy of brain training. Of these, 106 reported new data (rather than being reviews themselves). Of those 106, 71 used a proper control group, so that the effects of the brain training could be isolated. Of those 71, only 49 had so called “active control” group, in which the control participants actually did something rather than being ignored by the the researchers. (An active control is important if you want to distinguish the benefit of your treatment from the benefits of expectation or responding to researchers’ attentions.) Of these 49, about half of the results came from just six studies.
Overall, the reviewers conclude, no study which is cited in support of brain training products meets the gold standard for best research practises, and few even approached the standard of a good randomised control trial (although note their cut off for considering papers missed this paper from late last year).
A bit premature
The implications, they argue, are that claims for general benefits of brain training are premature. There’s excellent evidence for benefits of training specific to the task trained on, they conclude, less evidence for enhancement on closely related tasks and little evidence that brain training enhances performance on distantly related tasks or everyday cognitive performance.
The flaws in the studies supporting the benefits of brain training aren’t unique to the study of brain training. Good research is hard and all studies have flaws. Assembling convincing evidence for a treatment takes years, with evidence required from multiple studies and from different types of studies. Indeed, it may yet be that some kind of cognitive training can be shown to have the general benefits that are hoped for from existing brain training exercises. What this review shows is not that brain training can’t work, merely that promotion of brain training exercises is – at the very least – premature based on the current scientific evidence.
Yet in a 2014 survey of US adults, over 50% had heard of brain training exercises and showed some credence to their performance enhancing powers. Even the name “brain training”, the authors of the review admit, is a concession to marketing – this is how people know these exercises, despite their development having little to do with the brain directly.
The widespread currency of brain training isn’t because of overwhelming evidence of benefits from neuroscience and psychological science, as the review shows, but it does rely on the appearance of being scientifically supported. The billion-dollar market in brain training is parasitic on the credibility of neuroscience and psychology. It also taps into our lazy desire to address complex problems with simple, purchasable, solutions (something written about at length by Ben Goldacre in his book Bad Science).
The Simons review ends with recommendations for researchers into brain training, and for journalists reporting on the topic. My favourite was their emphasis that any treatment needs to be considered for its costs, as well as its benefits. By this standard there is no commercial brain training product which has been shown to have greater benefits than something you can do for free. Also important is the opportunity cost: what could you be doing in the time you invest in brain training? The reviewers deliberately decided to focus on brain training, so they didn’t cover the proven and widespread benefits of exercise for mental function, but I’m happy to tell you now that a brisk walk round the park with a friend is not only free, and not only more fun, but has better scientific support for its cognitive-enhancing powers than all the brain training products which are commercially available.
Nautilus has a piece by David Perezcassar on how technology takes advantage of our animal instinct for variable reward schedules (Unreliable rewards trap us into addictive cell phone use, but they can also get us out).
The Hidden Persuaders project has 
Mind Hacks 