Cognitive terms

Good recent discussions with Jason Grant and Adam Silver about cognitive challenges that face many users, and terms for defining these, led me to give this topic some deeper thought.

Can you be temporarily or situationally cognitively impaired?

I believe you can. Your thought processes, and ability to think, can be affected by illness and health conditions (cancer, long covid, ME, MS), shock, emotions (grief, euphoria), loneliness, hunger – all sorts of things. Many of those experiences can be temporary or situational – your cognitive ability improves again in time.

But perhaps the word ‘impairment’ is wrong, for several reasons.

Should we use a clearer word than ‘cognitive’, for example in the phrase ‘cognitive overload’?

I’m not sure. ‘Too much mental effort’ has been somewhat co-opted by teens wielded to their smartphones, and so doesn’t really give enough gravitas to the concept.

User groups sometimes talk about it in terms of ‘brain fog’ and ‘spoons’ – this led to my reading up on spoon theory on MEpedia.org, and understanding how spoon theory can be applied to executive functioning and focus from psychologist Dr Neff’s article on Spoon Theory For Autism and ADHD: The Neurodivergent Spoon Drawer.

Maybe ‘thought processing overload’… or as Steve Krug put it so well, just don’t make any users have to think. Design so that informed choices are not difficult to make.

Book recommendation

Don’t Make Me Think Revisited, by Steve Krug – available via Steve’s website, Sensible.com. You can also get the original Don’t Make Me Think book secondhand from World of Books.