Cognitive Technology: Essays on the Transformation of Thought and Society (review)

Technology can both aid and distract a learner attempting to complete a mental task. These "technologies that directly or indirectly affect learning, retention, remembering, reasoning, and problem solving" (p.1) are the subject of Cognitive Technology: Essays on the Transformation of Thought and Society. The essays emerged from a 2003 conference on cognitive technology at Winston-Salem State University. Written by cognitive and experimental psychologists and their students, each chapter presents either a brief report on original research or a literature review on a subject in the field.

Douglass J. Herrmann's opening chapter is a welcome introduction for the newcomer. Herrmann includes both a pithy history of cognitive technology as a field for research and a framework for understanding the different categories of cognitive technology. The experiment-based chapters that follow explore with moderate success various aspects of cognitive technology—including college student use of technology, devices that steal attention from users, and social dynamics in an online world. These reports provide a useful view into cognitive technology for those unfamiliar with the field. Unfortunately, the literature review essays that follow drift further and further from the topic at hand and lack the academic rigor one would expect from a scholarly monograph. The concluding chapter brings the book back on topic, making a well-argued case for cognitive psychologists' involvement in the design of "human-technical systems."

Academic librarians can find several useful studies in the work, depending on their particular interests or responsibilities. For those with responsibility for training clients about technology or other tools, the chapter by W. Richard Walker and Reggie Y. Andrews may provide important insight. They found that the amount of student training with a new technology, such as personal digital assistants, was a far less accurate predictor of future use than the quality of the first experience with the device. The lesson here is to pay close attention to those lesson plans when introducing something new.

The chapter on "intrusive technology" will be of interest to designers of digital learning objects and Web pages. Experimenters asked students to complete online word puzzles. The interface presented both the puzzles and one or two static or dynamic Web ads. The ads generally "stole" some attention from the subjects, inhibiting their ability to solve the puzzles and leaving a less favorable view of the item advertised. However, a single, static ad improved one measure of performance (decreasing the number of puzzles skipped). The researchers hypothesize that the slight distraction created by the ad may have helped the student overcome a mental block and thereby find the solution. Academic librarians working in an assessment-oriented culture should be interested in the approach taken in this research. The experiment moves beyond typical usability studies to measuring learning—what the students remembered and how persuaded they were by the ads they saw.

Other chapters that present original research are interesting (especially a chapter on "inattention blindness" that occurs when drivers use a cell phone). The concluding chapter presents a case for including cognitive psychologists in the technology design process. How many academic libraries have consulted with cognitive psychologists or read literature in the field when designing library Web sites? It seems that experts in human abilities and limitations could provide useful guidance. A good cognitive psychology textbook, however, would be a better choice than Cognitive Technology for the academic librarian's bookshelf.