Experience and design: Bringing in the brain

The IBSEN model of Imagination in Brain Systems for Episodes and Navigation explores how the architect’s experience is brought to bear in the design of architecture by building on the VISIONS model of understanding a visual scene and the TAM-WGM model of navigation. IBSEN develops the idea that a building provides both views from various viewpoints and places where particular experiences can be felt, and actions can be performed. For this, the design must support a variety of scripts for both practical and contemplative action and the cognitive maps that relate places for them. Nodes from different maps may be combined as scripts are harmonized with respect to a specific embedding of places in three-dimensional space. The chapter examines the role of the hippocampus in episodic memory and imagination, and observes that memory and imagination, episodic or not, are construction processes. During design, long-term working memory links internal and external memory systems, providing priority access to (but not only to) memory fragments that have proved relevant to the current design process. The designer in some sense “inverts” imagined experiences and behaviors of users of the forthcoming building. As the book ends, the author notes that we are only at the beginning of new collaborative studies that take cog/neuroscience out of the lab and into the building and the street.

Compressed Life Review: Extreme Manifestation of Autobiographical Memory in Eye-Tracker

The compressed life review (CLR) is a mnemonic illusion of having “your entire life flashing before your eyes”. This research was guided by concerns over the retrospective methodology used in CLR studies. To depart from this methodology, I considered the long-term working memory (WM), “concentric”, and “activation-based” models of memory. A novel theoretically rooted laboratory-based experimental technique aimed to elicit the CLR-like experience with no risk to healthy participants was developed. It consists of listening to superimposed audio recordings of previously trained verbal cues to an individually composed set of self-defining memories (SDMs). The technique evoked a self-reported CLR-like experience in 10 out of 20 participants. A significant similarity in eye movement patterns between a single SDM condition and a choir of SDM conditions in self-reported CLR experiencers was confirmed. In both conditions, stimuli caused relative visual immobilization, in contrast to listening to a single neutral phrase, and a choir of neutral phrases that led to active visual exploration. The data suggest that CLR-like phenomenology may be successfully induced by triggering short-term access to the verbally cued SDMs and may be associated with specific patterns of visual activity that are not reportedly involved with deliberate autobiographical retrieval.

The Classic Expertise Approach and Its Evolution

This chapter reviews the “classic expertise approach,” which is defined as the research line starting with Simon and Chase’s (1973) chunking theory, culminating in the early 1980s, and dominating expertise research until the 1990s. After briefly reviewing early research (e.g., Binet, 1894b; De Groot, 1946), an overview of the key experimental and theoretical results obtained with this approach is provided. The chapter also discusses influential theories stemming from the classic approach, such as long-term working memory (Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995), EPAM-IV (Richman, Staszewski, & Simon, 1995) and template theory (Gobet & Simon, 1996). The discussion highlights the defining research methods and theoretical assumptions of this approach. Directions of research for the future are discussed, based on the characteristics that made the classic approach highly successful.

Cross-modal music integration in expert memory: Evidence from eye movements

The study investigated the cross-modal integration hypothesis for expert musicians using eye tracking. Twenty randomized excerpts of classical music were presented in two modes (auditory and visual), at the same time (simultaneously) or successively (sequentially). Musicians (N = 53, 26 experts and 27 non-experts) were asked to detect a note modified between the auditory and visual versions, either in the same major/minor key or violating the key. Experts carried out the task faster and with greater accuracy than non-experts. Sequential presentation was more difficult than simultaneous (longer fixations and higher error rates) and the modified notes were more easily detected when violating the key (fewer errors), but with longer fixations (speed/accuracy trade-off strategy). Experts detected the modified note faster, especially in the simultaneous condition in which cross-modal integration may be applied. These results support the hypothesis that the main difference between experts and non-experts derives from the difference in knowledge structures in memory built over time with practice. They also suggest that these high-level knowledge structures in memory contain harmony and tonal rules, arguing in favour of cross-modal integration capacities for experts, which are related to and can be explained by the long-term working memory (LTWM) model of expert memory (e.g. Drai-Zerbib & Baccino, 2014; Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995).