Category Archives: User Behavior

The Meeting of the Mind and Marketing: 11 Books to Read

First published October 15, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

It’s official! With this column, I break David Berkowitz’s Search Insider column count record, with 225 of my own. And to commemorate the occasion, I wanted to follow up on a request that came in response to my column two weeks ago. I had warned any would-be students of human nature that this wasn’t a quest to be taken lightly. A few readers responded by asking for a recommended reading list.

So this week, I went through my bookshelf at home and jotted down a list of titles that I found particularly insightful or interesting in understanding the human condition. Today, I offer them as suggestions for some fall or winter reading. I came up with 22 titles, so I’ve broken them into two groups. This week, all the titles are specifically for those who want to explore the intersection between marketing and the way our minds work.“How Customers Think” — Gerald Zaltman. Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman has carved out a nice little career by exploring the psychology of consumerism. The foundation of Zaltman’s approach is his metaphor elicitation technique. Metaphors are linguistic keys to some of the darker workings of our mind, and Zaltman shows how these can be used as a Rosetta stone to unlock consumers’ true feelings towards brands and products. A fascinating approach suffers a little from Zaltman’s dry and overly academic writing style, but it’s a very worthy candidate for the list.

“The Culture Code” — Clotaire Rapaille. If Zaltman is a little stodgy and academic, Rapaille is an unabashed French nouveau-riche pop psychologist who has used his decidedly qualitative approach to dig down to the cultural common denominators behind our brand relationships. This book looks for those labels cultures apply to some of the best-known brands in the world. Being French, Rapaille brings an occasionally charming European cultural arrogance to his subject (i.e. in France, the culture code for cheese is “alive”, but in the U.S. it’s “dead”). This is  an easy and interesting read; while you might have some quibbles with Rapaille’s findings, he has plenty of willing customers among the Fortune 500.

“Buy-ology” — Martin Lindstrom. Lindstrom’s ego is almost matched by the insight he brings in his latest book. Lindstrom is the self-styled guru of brand perception and has written before on how our senses interpret brands. In “Buy-ology,” he goes one step further and launches an extensive brain scanning research project to see exactly what happens in our brains when we think about brands. For example, do the warning labels on a pack of cigarettes have any impact on our desire for a smoke? Does product placement really work? (The answer, in both cases, is no, according to Lindstrom) Don’t worry about getting caught in academic jargon here. Lindstrom keeps it light and readable.

“Why Choose This Book?” — Read Montague. Baylor University neurologist Montague was behind the original Pepsi Challenge fMRI test — and in this book, he takes on no less a challenge than explaining how we make decisions. The writing style’s a little uneven, as Montague tries to balance his academic background with a style overly determined to appeal to a wider audience. That said, Montague knows his stuff and the insights here are solid, supported by both his own and others’ research.

“Predictably Irrational” — Dan Ariely.  Ariely follows in the footsteps of behavioral economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky by looking at some of the common irrational biases of humans. For example, why does a 50-cent aspirin eliminate a headache better than a 5-cent generic brand, even though the pills are identical? And why would offering your mother-in-law $300 for a fabulous meal be an unforgivable social transgression, yet be expected in a restaurant? The territory has been covered before, but Ariely deals with a highly interesting topic with a nice, light touch.

“The Mind of the Market” — Michael Shermer. Last but not least, Michael Shermer delivers what I consider to be a tour-de-force on this topic. Shermer’s approach is well-grounded in evolutionary psychology (he labels it evolutionary economics), so he and I share a common approach to understanding consumer behavior. He strikes the right balance in his writing, delivering solid information without worrying too much about how it might play for a wider audience. This is probably my favorite on this list.

If these six titles whet your appetite, here are some other titles you might consider:

“Driven” by Paul Lawrence and Nitin Nohria

“Why We Buy” by Paco Underhill

“The Paradox of Choice” by Barry Schwartz

“The Advertised Mind” by Erik Du Plessis

“Brain Rules’ by John Medina

Next week I’ll share another 11 books, as well as some reader suggestions. Feel free to keep the suggestions coming!

The Prerequisites for Being a Student of Human Nature

First published October 1, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week I asked for input on the upcoming Search Insider Summit. Of the seven possible topic areas I presented, the highest level of interest was in the role of human behavior in digital marketing. You, the Search Insider faithful, have made me very happy. But being an avid student of human nature, I feel it’s only fair to warn you what to expect as you continue down this path.  Some years ago, I too was intrigued by human behavior and thought it would be interesting to “learn a little bit more.” But learning about human nature is pretty much an all-or-nothing proposition. Think of it as having a baby. The first few minutes of the process might be fun, but soon you learn you’ve just signed on for a lifetime commitment. You’d better make sure you’re ready.

The True Meaning of Customer-Centricity

I’ve been criticized in the past for using the term “customer-centric” (the practical application of studying human nature), but I suspect it’s because the term has lost its original meaning as it’s been adopted into the lexicon of “Dilbert-speak.” Customer-centric is one of those terms bandied about in board meetings and corporate retreats, along with “synergistic” and “holistic.”

But customer-centricity represents much more than a quick paragraph in the annual report. It’s the core you build a company around. It’s a commitment that lays the foundation for everything an organization does: the people it hires, the way it develops products, the way it formulates business processes, the way it markets and even the way who sits beside whom in the office gets decided. Customer-centricity is a religion, not a corporate fad.

There Aren’t Any Shortcuts

As I found out, if you are going to commit to learning more about human behavior in the goal of becoming a better marketer, don’t be surprised when you discover that this commitment can’t be met in a one-hour session or by reading a book. Humans are a lot more complex than that. There’s a lot of weird and wonderfully quirky machinery jammed in our skulls.

I was humbled to learn that people devote their entire lives to exploring just one tiny part of why we humans do what we do. Joseph LeDoux, one of the world’s foremost neuroscientists, has spent years exploring how fear is triggered in rats. Ann Graybiel  at MIT has made a similar commitment to exploring the role of the basal ganglia in how habits form and play out.  Antonio Damasio’s  extensive work with patients with pre-frontal cortical lesions led to his somatic marker theory, foundational insight into the area of human behavior Malcolm Gladwell explored and popularized in his book “Blink.” These are all tiny little pieces in the overall puzzle that is human behavior, yet each of these is integral in understanding how we respond to marketing messages.

Beyond the Cocktail Party Quip

Today, several years after I started down this road, I hope people find my insights on human behavior interesting. There’s that brief light bulb moment that happens when “what” is matched with a plausible “why” — when a psychological or neurological trigger for a puzzling human trait is identified.  “Hmm – that’s really interesting,” is the common response, and then it’s on to the next thing (possibly mumbling something about me being a “pedantic bore”). Yes, it is really interesting, but it wasn’t a quick or easy path to get here.

Sometime ago I decided a quick primer in human behavior would be interesting. I started with the more accessible books (such as Gladwell’s) and was instantly hooked. I next moved to books by academics doing the actual research that provided the fodder for Gladwell and other’s popularizations: LeDoux, Damasio, Edelman, Rose, Pinker, Chomsky and others.  Before I knew it, I was wading through academic papers. Today, the bookshelf in my home office is packed with fairly hefty tomes on everything from evolutionary psychology to the social patterns of the 20th Century. My wife and kids can’t remember the last time I read a book that didn’t have a brain on the cover.

I share this as a warning. I discovered developing even a basic understanding of human behavior is at least a multiyear commitment. I’ve never regretted it, but I also know that this is not everyone’s cup of tea. But here’s what I also discovered along the way. Even a basic understanding will give you a whole new perspective on pretty much everything, including marketing. The one common denominator in all marketing is that it’s aimed at people. If you’re ready to start the journey, I’m sure you won’t regret it.

Summer Stories: How I Became a Researcher

First published August 13, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

About six years ago, I had one of those life-changing moments that set me on a new path. I’ve always been curious. I’ve always had questions, and up to that point in my life, I was usually able to find an answer, with enough perseverance. But in 2003, I had a question that no one seemed able to answer.  It didn’t seem to be an especially difficult question, and I knew someone had the answer. They just weren’t sharing it.

The Unanswerable Question

The question was this: what percentage of searchers click on the organic results and what percentage click on the sponsored ads? Today, that’s not even a question; it’s common knowledge for search marketers. But in 2003, that wasn’t the case. Sponsored search ads were still in their infancy (Overture had just been acquired by Yahoo, and Google’s AdWords was only a couple years old) and no one at either engine was sharing the clickthrough breakdowns between organic and paid.

I reached out to everyone I knew in the industry, but either they didn’t know, or they weren’t willing to go public with the info. My connections into Google and Yahoo were nonexistent at the time. No one, it seemed, had the answer. My curiosity was stymied. And that’s when my revelation happened. If no one had the answer, perhaps I could provide it.

At the time, research was not something Enquiro did. When we wanted to find out an answer, we combed through the forums, just like everyone else. But there seemed to be a noticeable gap in available information. There was plenty of discussion about technical SEO tactics, but no one seemed to be interested in how people actually used search engines.

To me, this was an unforgiveable oversight. If we were using search as a marketing channel, shouldn’t we have some understanding of how our prospects used search?  Off the top of my head, I jotted down a list of several questions I had about how people actually search; questions that appeared to have no readily available answers. It was at that point that I officially became a researcher.

Discovering “Why”

Our first research project proved to set the path we would go down for much of the follow-up: we just looked at how people used search to do things. Our methodology has become much tighter and we now have added eye-tracking and even neuro-scanning to our arsenal, but from the beginning, our research was more focused on “why” than “what.” The first paper was called “Inside the Mind of the Searcher” and it’s still referenced on a regular basis. Frankly, we were surprised with how quickly it was picked up in the industry. Suddenly, we became the experts on search user behavior, a crown I was uncomfortable with at the beginning. Yes, we were exploring new ground, but I always worried about how representative this was to the real world. Did people really do what we said they did, or was it just a research-created anomaly?

Defining the Golden Triangle

For us, the groundbreaking study was our first eye tracking study, done through Eyetools in San Francisco. I had read the Poynter study about how people interacted with online publications and was fascinated. “What if,” I wondered, “we did this with a search engine?” I found a similarly curious cohort in Kevin Lee from DidIt and together with Eyetools we launched the first study, which discovered the now-famous “Golden Triangle.” I remember sitting with Kevin in a speaker prep room at a show whose name escapes me, looking at the very first results of the data. The pattern jumped off the page:

“Look at that!” I said, “It’s a triangle!”

Kevin, always the search optimizer, said, “We need something catchy to call it, something that we can optimize for. The Magic Triangle?”

Because the heat map tends to indicate the most popular areas in a reddish yellow color, the answer was right in front of us. I can’t remember whether it was Kevin or I that first said it, but as soon as we said it, we knew the name would stick: “It’s a gold color… The Golden Triangle?”

Is It Real?

Even with the release of the study and the quick acceptance, I still questioned whether this represented real behavior. It was later that year when I got the confirmation I needed. I had just presented the results during a session at an industry show and was stepping down from the stage. Someone was quietly standing in the corner and came over as I started to head out of the room.

“Hi. I just wanted to let you know. I work with Yahoo on user experience and your heat map looks identical to our internal ones. I actually thought you had somehow got your hands on ours.” The validation was a few years in coming, but very welcome when it finally arrived.

Today, ironically, things have come full circle. I have talked to sales and engineering teams at all the major engines and much of the research they refer to about user behavior comes from Enquiro.

And the answer to my original question has held remarkably consistent in the past 6 years: What percentage of users click on paid ads vs. organic listings? For commercial searches, it’s about 70% organic, 30% paid. Just in case you were curious.

Grandma Via YouTube

First published June 25, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

This week we had a Webinar on Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives. We featured brain scanning images, survey results and the work of Marc Prensky, Gary Small and other researchers, showing how technology has created a generational divide between our kids and us. For me, though, it all came into sharper focus when I walked past our computer at home and saw my youngest daughter, Lauren, sitting there with crochet hooks in hand.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Learning to crochet.”

“On the computer?”

“Yes, there’s a video showing how on YouTube.”

“Really?”

“Yes, Dad, YouTube has now replaced Grandma.” (Smart mouth on that kid — not sure where she gets it from.)

Adapting With Our Plastic Brains

Prensky and Small have written extensively on how exposure to technology can literally change the way our brains are wired. Our brains are remarkably malleable in nature, continually changing to adapt to our environment. The impressive label for it is “neuroplasticity” — but we know it better simply as “learning.”  We now know that our brains continually adapt throughout our lives.  But there are two phases where the brain literally reforms itself in a massive restructuring: right around two years of age and again as teenagers. During these two periods, billions of new synaptic connections are formed, and billions are also “pruned” out of the way. All this happens as a direct response to our environments, helping us develop the capabilities to deal with the world.

These two spurts of neuroplasticity are essential development stages, but what happens when there are rapid and dramatic shifts in our environment from one generation to the next? What happens when our children’s brains develop to handle something we never had to deal with as children? Quite literally, their brains function differently than ours. This becomes particularly significant when the rate of adoption is very rapid, making a technology ubiquitous in a generation or less. The other factor is how much the technology becomes part of our daily lives. The more important it is, the more significant the generational divide.

Our Lives: As Seen on TV

The last adoption that met both conditions was the advent of television. There, 1960 to 1965 marked the divide where the first generation to be raised on television started to come of age. And the result was a massive social shift. In his book “Bowling Alone,”   Robert Putnam shows example after example of how our society took a U-turn in the ’60s, reversing a trend in building social capital.  We became more aware and ideologically tolerant, but we also spent less time with each other. This trend played out in everything from volunteering and voting to having dinner parties and joining bowling leagues. The single biggest cause identified by Putnam? Television. We are only now beginning to assess the impact of this technology on our society, a half-century after its introduction. It took that long for the ripples to be felt through the generations.

You Ain’t Seen Nuthin Yet.

That’s a sobering thought when we consider what’s happening today. The adoption rate of the Internet has been similar to that of television, but the impact on our daily lives is even more significant. Everything we touch now is different than it was when we were growing up.  If TV caused a seismic shift of such proportions that it took us 50 years to catalog the fall-out, what will happen 50 years from now?

Who will be teaching my great grandchildren how to crochet?

Live from Captiva: The Digital Divide

First published May 7, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Gian Fulgoni has a better view of the online landscape than most of us. As the chairman of comScore, he has access to a massive database that captures every click of online activity from over 2,000,000 panel members. So when it comes to spotting trends, Gian’s got a pretty good vantage point.

Online Branding for CPG

As you’re reading this, Gian’s probably giving the opening keynote at the Search Insider Summit  on Captiva Island in Florida. I’m not sure what Gian will be covering, but he did share a few slides with me and I’m sure they’ll make their way into his keynote.  They’re the results of a study that showed the relative effectiveness of online and television advertising in driving purchases of consumer packaged goods ranging from cookie mixes and pizza to toothpaste and deodorant.

Eighty-two percent of the online campaigns showed positive sales or unit lift, with an average lift of 18%. Further, short-term online campaigns matched the effective lift of long-term TV campaigns (9% lift with online, 8% with TV).

Consumers Don’t Differentiate, So Why Do Marketers?

What is interesting about the study to me is the artificial line we still tend to draw between online and offline marketing.  And when I say “we,”  I mean “we” the marketers, not “we” the people. The chasm between online and offline is slightly narrower than it was before, but I find true integrated marketing only exists in the sales hyperbole of agencies, with little evidence of it in the real world.  With the advertisers I’m familiar with, the online marketing department barely talks with the offline Marcom folks, let alone sits down with them to plan out an integrated strategy.

Consumers don’t do this. If a consumer is considering a purchase, she pursues the most effective means necessary to research the purchase. Offline awareness leads to online consideration. Online consideration leads to offline visits to a retail location. Offline visits can lead to online price checking. We as consumers jump back and forth across the digital divide with ease, yet for marketers, the chasm seems unbridgeable. Why is this?

Part of it is attitude. Traditional marketers ignored online until it was too late. Their tardiness left us digital folks free reign to set up shop, thinking it would be, at best, an incremental channel that would never threaten the main event. But now, just a few short years later, you’ve got studies like Gian’s coming out saying that online might just be as effective as TV in driving sales of potato chips and pop. Hard to fathom, but true.

Branding: One Search at a Time

Even more startling, lowly search seems to have some brand-building chops of its own, at least when measured at one critical consumer intersection, active consideration of a purchase. My company has done a number of studies for Google, in seven different product categories and markets from Australia to North America showing the brand lift of search. Guess what? Lowly search, described by some as the ValPak of online, consistently delivered brand lift numbers averaging in the double digits. And that was before consumers even got to where the real brand building happens, the manufacturer’s Web site. Just a search ad alone lifted brand awareness, brand affinity and likelihood to purchase. Not bad for a handful of words showing up somewhere on a results page.

I have no idea what the “buzz” of Captiva will be, but I suspect we’ll spend at least some time talking about this ridiculous divorce between online and offline. Ironically, it seems like the recession is finally bringing the two sides a little closer together. I don’t understand why we marketers are taking so long to get it. Buyers seemed to figure it out a long time ago.

The Confluences of Spring Break

First published March 26, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

It’s funny. Given three disparate ideas and enough time out of the office, I can somehow manage to tie it all together into a Search Insider theme. The ingredients for this column? The two books I chose to pack to read on my Spring Break vacation, and a bit of history from Southern Portugal, where I’ve spent the past week.

Odd Man Out

The first book was Malcolm Gladwell’s latest, “Outliers” (chosen primarily because reading Gladwell doesn’t seem like work at all, a key criteria for vacation reading). In typical Gladwellian fashion, he takes a central idea — the outliers that fall beyond the bell curve aren’t there solely because they’re on the thin edge of pure statistical probability — and explores it with a mix of story telling, research and undeniably compelling writing.  If one can excuse Gladwell for his “Just So” tendencies, putting his ideas across from his single perspective, with a rather fast and loose selection of supporting arguments, it made for a painless and fascinating read.

In “Outliers,” Gladwell looked at statistical oddballs as diverse as Bill Gates (in terms of success), The Beatles (again, success),  Chris Langan (a genius with an IQ of 195 who never made it through university), Korean Airlines (for the frequency of crashes in the ’80s and early ’90s), a small town called Roseto in Pennsylvania (where everybody lives longer than they’re supposed to, statistically speaking) and the hockey players that make it to the WHL (Western Hockey League) and eventually, the NHL (like me, Gladwell also grew up in Canada).

Luck is What You Make It

Gladwell’s point, which he makes persuasively, is that these things are not simply a matter of odds or blind luck. There are distinct patterns of influence that tend to create outliers. They include your socioeconomic status, your culture, your upbringing and even your birthday. Here is a smattering of Gladwell’s reasonings:

·     NHL hockey players make the big leagues because they’re born early in the year, physically dominating their age groupings in minor hockey, advancing to rep teams, thereby getting more coaching and ice time.

·     Bill Gates, through a series of lucky occurrences, managed to amass 10,000 hours of programming experience as a child and teen at a time where access to computers was very hard to come by.

·     The Beatles jumped ahead of their contemporary competition because the 8-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week performing schedule in Hamburg ground down their rough edges and smoothed out their act.

·     Korean Airlines had an abysmal safety record because Korean culture made it taboo to question the wisdom of the pilot, even if he had the plane heading directly into a mountain

·     Chris Langan was born with one of the highest measured IQs in America, but was also born poor and disadvantaged, leaving him without the social skills required to successfully navigate through university and on to adult success.

Gladwell’s conclusion Luck, either good or bad, isn’t simply left to chance.  And even inherent gifts, like Langan’s IQ, aren’t a guarantee of success. Luck can be manufactured. The conditions for success can be consciously put in place in a system where the desired outcomes are known. So, what are those outcomes? That brings me to the second book I brought on vacation.

Welcome to Kurzweil’s Singularity

Ray Kurzweil is definitely out there. This is a man who takes 250 nutritional supplements every day and gets seven blood transfusions every week so he can re-engineer his body to live longer. He believes humans and computers will merge in the next few decades, vastly pushing back the known limits of human intelligence, an event he calls the Singularity.

My other book was Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near” — a book chosen primarily for its heft of over 600 pages. I knew it would keep my busy through to the end of my two- week vacation. A quick summary of Kurzweil’s predictions from the book might lead one to question his mental stability:

–       Physical bodies will become essentially meaningless in the next century, as we will live in a virtual world with physical representations of our own design.

–       Table top “nanofactories” will create everything we’ll need, atom by atom, from a lump of raw materials.

–       We will upload our personalities to a computer, thereby living forever.

–       Technological evolution has taken over from biological evolution, giving humans the freedom to design our future.

–       Aging and disease are a few decades away from being conquered forever.

–       Nanobots will allow us to control every element of our environment,  eliminating pollution.

Kurzweil is manically optimistic about our future, and that future is not hundreds of years away. Most of Kurzweil’s seminal events happen before 2050. As the title of the book says, the merging of biology and technology is near (starting in 2030).

Just Crazy Enough to be Right

But Kurzweil is far from a quack. The reason for the imminent horizon is the rapid, exponential increase in the rate of technological advancement. Kurzweil is meticulous in pulling together the current state of affairs in areas including nanotechnology, robotics, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering and neuroscience to build a rock-solid foundation for his predictions.

Kurzweil’s view of the future is positively blinding in its enthusiastic brilliance. He is adamant that there is no problem that can’t be overcome with enough intelligence, a resource that will explode in abundance thanks to the Singularity.  And his track record is sound. Kurzweil’s predictions have been remarkably accurate in the past. It’s hard not to get caught up in his optimism. Even if it all doesn’t come to pass, Kurzweil paints a picture of a future worth striving for.

So, those are the first two ideas that converged over my Spring Break. Luck doesn’t just happen. We’re not held prisoner by some probabilistic crapshoot. And for the first time in memory, I saw a vision of the future that wasn’t predominantly pessimistic. I’ll leave it there for now. Next week, I’ll tell you the story of Portugal’s Henry the Navigator.

Your Brain on Google: Interview with Dr. Teena Moody

This is the full transcript from my interview with Dr. Teena Moody from UCLA’s Semel Institute about the Your Brain on Google Study. Today’s Just Behave column on Search Engine Land has more commentary and analysis of the findings.

Gord:

Why don’t we start with the study where you were comparing activation of the brain using Google versus reading text? What was your original hypothesis going into that study?

Dr. Moody:

Well, we were very interested in two ideas. One was how do the patterns of brain activity differ when you’re doing an internet search versus reading, since computers are such a big part of our lives these days? And then we also wanted to look at different groups of people, people who were internet-savvy and had lots of computer exposure and experience, and compared that to naive subjects – with “naive” we mean people who don’t use computers or the internet very often.

Now there are some difficulties in recruiting for this group because so many people have access to computers these days and that was part of our rationale for choosing an older group of participants here, because you find very few 30-year-olds who don’t have computer experience.

Gord:

So for the purpose of this study, what was the definition of “internet-naive”?

Dr. Moody:

A naive person, we were ideally getting someone who had no internet experience, although they could have computer experience. And it turned out we had a self-rating for them – their frequency of computer use, their frequency of internet use, and then a self-rating of their expertise. And it turns out that the net-naive people use the computer usually once or twice a month, and the internet-savvy people several times a day. In terms of the internet, some of them had never actually been on the internet and some maybe used it once a week or once a month for the naives. Again, the savvy people use the internet multiple times a day.

Gord:

Okay.

Dr. Moody:

So we were able to get a very good spread there between the two groups.

Gord:

So what is an fMRI machine? If I was looking at one, what would I be seeing?

Dr. Moody:

Well, it isn’t the same as an MRI machine. It uses, rather than having ionizing energy, you’re using a magnetic field and radio frequency to generate a pattern, and we can look at what’s called the BOLD signal, and that’s the blood oxygenation level dependent signal in the brain, and it is correlated with brain activity. So we’re interested in an fMRI, which is functional MRI, and looking at a pattern of brain activity. And that’s what we were looking at in this study, differences in the pattern of brain activity between savvy subjects and naive subjects, and comparing that when they’re doing internet searches and doing reading…just to see the pattern of activity… if we see different parts of the brain being activated.

Gord:

Okay. So you’re getting them to do different tasks, you’re getting them to read, you’re getting them to actually do online activities. How were the stimuli presented to them, because in an MRI machine, you’re basically in a tube – right? – and you can’t move your head…

Dr. Moody:

Yes. Keeping your head still is very important in an MRI machine. It’s just like if you moved your camera when you’re taking a photo, it will be blurry. So the participants do have to lie in a tube, essentially – they can’t be claustrophobic – and they wear goggles. It’s very much a virtual reality experience. They wear goggles and they have headphones so that we can speak to them and they can speak to us, we hear each other. And before the actual experiment starts, we usually start with a movie to let them become relaxed in the environment and also they’re aware that they are seeing through the goggles. They watch a movie and we take structural images of their brains so that we have references to overlay their functional activity. So usually there are 5 or 10 minutes of structural images where we’re getting detailed information about the structure of each individual’s brain.

Then after that we follow up with the experiment, and it’s very much like playing a videogame. In this case we had a button box where they could press buttons 1, 2, or 3 to indicate their choices for selecting either a book chapter or an internet site. So rather than having a mouse for this first study – we did not have an MRI-compatible mouse – we used a button box for choice of the selection. But it’s very much a virtual reality experience. It would be like playing a videogame, and I use the analogy of, for the button pressing, changing channels on your TV with your remote control. Most of the participants were very comfortable with the situation.

Gord:

Let’s get on to what you found actually in the study. First, I want to start by asking why did you use reading text as the baseline for neural activity in the study as your comparison point?

Dr. Moody:

Well, actually, both for the reading and for the internet and Google searching, we used a different baseline. We had a button-pressing baseline where white bars appeared on the screen and they just pressed the button when a white bar appeared for the location on the screen. And we compared the pattern of activity when they were reading and making… selecting different chapters or when they were selecting Google, from the Google search screen and reading off the internet to that pattern of activity. So our control was more of a low-level control baseline.

Then, in a higher-level analysis, we compared the pattern of activity while they were reading to the pattern of activity while they were doing the internet search. So both tasks had a lower-level baseline control.

Gord:

Okay. So let’s just cover off what you did find. So when you compared the parts of the brain… And we’ll deal first with the internet-naive. When you compared the parts of the brain activated with text reading versus web searching, what did you find?

Dr. Moody:

Well, we found that the pattern of activity was almost identical, and that really frankly surprised me at first because I thought that the internet even for the naive participants would require additional areas, because when you’re searching the internet you are engaging in decision-making, you have to suppress extraneous information, so there’s inhibition required. So I was surprised to find that it looks like in both the internet task and the reading task the subjects are just engaging their language areas, their visual areas, there’s some sensory integration areas as well, but it looks like they’re reading in both cases. And not surprising at all about the areas recruited, because they’re language areas, memory areas, and visual attention areas.

googlebrains

Gord:

But you found something different when you were looking at the internet-savvy group.

Dr. Moody:

That’s correct. And for the internet-savvy group, their reading areas were virtually identical to the reading areas that were activated for the internet-naive participants, but the very interesting part was the savvy group did recruit additional areas and these were frontal areas that had to do with decision-making, cingulate areas that have to do with conflict resolution. It’s not surprising, it’s what we expected, that these additional areas for decision-making would be required and higher-level cognitive function would be required, and that’s what we found in the internet-savvy group.

Gord:

To explore that a little bit, we’re seeing that people are actually cognitively engaging with the results – they have to make decisions, they’re comparing them. What happens there? With the internet-naive, obviously they weren’t engaging with the content nearly at the same level, but the internet-savvy… Is there a certain level of fluency with search where you elevate it to a higher level and you’re using that input to make decisions?

Dr Moody:

Yes, that is certainly one interpretation, and one interpretation that we have for the data – that it does require additional areas and as you practice it, you do become more fluent and more expert at it.

Now there are two different schools of thought on this. One is that when you first learn a task, you require greater activity and more attention, and that one could expect higher levels of activity if you were new at something. People with expertise can actually show decreases in their functional MRI pattern of activity. But what it seems here is that while engaging in internet searching, you are still very actively engaging these decision-making areas and it might be that the naive people are overwhelmed by the situation and are just treating it like a book – you’re still not trying to integrate the information, they’re reading it as though they were reading a book.

There’s one other interpretation as well, and that is that internet-naive people just have a different pattern of wiring in their brains from those who are internet-savvy – people who prefer using the internet and enjoy that mode of reading are wired differently from the internet-naive people. And we can’t distinguish that in this study, but that is also a possibility.

Gord:

Which is interesting. You say they’re wired differently. Would that be the typical, neural  “fire together, wire together” wiring that happens when we learn anything, or is this something more fundamental in the pruning that happens during the formative years?

Dr. Moody:

Well, certainly in development, you know, we have good evidence that things do wire differently depending upon environmental influences, and definitely there’s evidence now against the old theory that adult’s brains don’t change, but definitely after brain injury there’s been evidence of re-wiring or re-mapping brain regions to overcome deficits. We don’t know what’s happening here. This is a very preliminary study, but one interpretation could be that there was a re-wiring, as people practice on the internet that these areas become more active. But all we can really say is that the pattern of activity is different.

Gord:

So one of the things I’ve suspected, when we’ve looked at behaviours in interacting with search, is as you become more used to using search, more comfortable with the interface, you don’t have to worry so much about navigating through the interface, that becomes more like a conditioned, habitual behaviour. Which means your prefrontal cortex is free to kick in to do those cognitive assessments, to say, “Okay, here’s what Option A offers me versus Option B,” so it’s almost kicking it up to a higher level of processing. Does that seem to make sense? It’s like I said, Google has become a habit and at some point the basal ganglia takes over and runs it as a habit which frees up the prefrontal cortex to do more heavy lifting.

Dr Moody:

Well, our data’s definitely consistent with that interpretation, and I think that that’s what part of our interest is, is how can we enrich our lives as we age, how can we improve our cognitive function or slow cognitive decline? And so yes, that’s an interpretation we would like to have because we would like to say, “Oh, we can do something to make our brains better as we age,” so that’s very exciting and interesting, and it is consistent, however we can’t conclude that. We don’t have any causality here at all.

Gord:

One of the really interesting questions, in reading the maps that came out of the study and looking at the areas that seemed to be lighting up, it looked like as memories were being retrieved or concepts were being retrieved, different cortical areas were being activated. Are you seeing that as people are reading text, there’s corresponding visual activation or auditory activation from those cortical areas that are mentally building the images that correspond to what they’re reading in the search results?

Teena:

Well, we definitely see a huge amount of occipital and visual area activation, and that’s just as we expect because for reading and for the internet you’re looking at visual input. And so that was not unexpected at all, that’s exactly what we would expect.

We don’t have… With fMRI, you don’t have very good temporal resolution, so we can’t… And this was a block study as opposed an event-related study, so we can’t really get into what’s happening second to second in the brain here because we average across these big blocks of 20 to 30 seconds. So we can’t say much about the time course and of what’s happening during the reading and internet searching. I’m sure future studies could do that. So we have good information about what happened in these comparisons, but not in the time domain.

Gord:

But there was a note in the study saying that although the visual stimuli were identical, with internet searching there seemed to be enhanced activity in the visual cortex area. Any ideas what might have caused that?

Dr. Moody:

Well, I think the most parsimonious explanation is that they were attending to it more.

Gord:

Right.

Dr. Moody:

So we’ll probably have to go along with that. But it could be that different areas were recruited and additionally were required, but certainly other studies have shown with attention you do recruit these additional areas.

Gord:

Now one of the things that we’ve seen is when people are looking… And it’s hard because in looking at your study, the layout of the results wasn’t a typical Google result, it was kind of pared down and I think there were only three results shown, right?

Dr. Moody:

Yes. I did some pilot testing and I really had to slim it down for a couple of reasons. One is I just looked into the literature to see how many words a person in a certain age group could read in 30 seconds, so I did have to reduce the amount of information on the screen for that reason. Also, presentation of the information in the goggles in the scanner, we wanted to make sure that everyone could actually read the words on the screen. So when you’re looking in the goggles and you’re looking essentially at something… a very, very small computer screen, we had to limit the number of words. So I did pare down what, you know, would normally be on an internet site. Also, in an early pilot version, I included pop-ups like you would get when you’re actually searching the internet, and that was so distracting for people we, you know, immediately took out the pop-ups. The pop-ups were way too distracting for us to be able to make a legitimate comparison of information presentation, comparing a book format versus the internet format.

Gord:

One of the things that might be interesting, when we’ve seen people scanning search results through eye tracking, it’s very obvious when we look at the saccades and the eye movement that they’re scanning, they’re not reading, and we suspect more of a pattern-matching activity. And that would be interesting to see if they’re scanning it visually to look for matches with the query they just used as opposed to actually reading text and engaging those language centres and the translation of that?

Dr Moody:

Yes, but eye tracking would be a great addition to this type of a study. And also once… You know, now there are MRI-compatible mice so that one could actually do more of a click-around within the internet page itself rather than just making a selection of which site to go to. Those would be great additions for the future.

Gord:

I think what I want to talk about a little bit now.. I think this is going a little beyond the scope of this study, but it ties in with some of Dr. Small’s work. I think you’ve worked with him on some of these ideas of the digital native and the digital immigrant. Moving beyond the group you recruited and looking at the young who have been exposed to technology during those formative neural pruning years and what the differences in brain activity might be. What happens when you’re young and you’re exposed to technology at an early age, as opposed to someone like myself who’s 47? The technology I grew up with was basically two channels of television.

Dr. Moody:

Well, I can only comment on this just from personal experience with my children. I haven’t done research on how children interact with the internet. I’ve read some of the papers but I’ve not done any research on that. But it does seem that, you know, they interact more readily and more fluidly. It’s amazing how quickly your kids can navigate across something on the internet compared to how I do. Of course, I’m pretty computer-savvy, I use the computer hours a day. So I think there is a difference between young people and old people.

Recruiting for this study, there were some people… finding people who were internet-naive, we could find them but they really had no interest in learning how to use the computer either. You know, it was very difficult to find naive people who really wanted a chance to participate in a study about the internet. So young people, I think they’ve grown up with it, they accept, you know, MP3 players, cell phones, visual impact touch screens – all that is so natural to them and some of us are still trying to figure out how to program our DVD players.

Gord:

Right. But I guess there’s speculation too that as they become more comfortable with technology and it becomes more of a natural extension of how they communicate, there’s potentially a trade-off there. I mean, the whole concept of pruning is that you get better at what you do all the time and you gradually lose capabilities in the things you don’t do very often. And so might this mean, for instance, that the young are losing the ability for face-to-face communication or more kind of focussed reasoning over a longer period of time.

Dr Moody:

You know, I think that’s a very real concern, and I know that people are looking at some of those issues, attention in particular. The studies that I’ve actually looked at have used computer gaming to enhance visual attention. So we know that you can actually enhance attention using internet gaming practice. But it might be, as you say, that you also have a negative impact for longer periods of attention, like being able to read an entire article versus clicking around and having this immediate visual gratification of changing very quickly. So I’m not aware of the studies that have looked at the negative impact on attention. I’ve actually been looking more on the positive end of how attention has been enhanced and how people are developing computer packages to help children with ADD for instance be able to focus for longer periods of time. But certainly, just it seems that young people have shorter attention spans. I’m not aware of the research, however.

Gord:

So let’s step back within the scope of the study that we were talking about. I’ve got a couple more questions. One is we’ve also seen fairly significant differences in men versus women when they’re doing information foraging basically, when they’re going out and looking for information. Did you notice any differences in this study?

Dr Moody:

You know, unfortunately we had fewer males in this study. Every study you have limitations in terms of funding and timeframe, etc. And so we did try to recruit more males. Some of the males were the ones unfortunately that had head motion during the scan and we weren’t able to keep them in the final results. So we didn’t have enough male participants to make any kind of comparison male-female. And anecdotally, I can’t really say anything different about the two groups.

Gord:

All right. There was actually a post I ran into after I did a preliminary article on this by a cognitive psychologist by the name of Bill Ives and the point he made in this study was that because we saw that as you become more comfortable or learn tasks that you activate more parts of the brain, he said really what the study shows is that once you know what you’re doing, it increases brain function, you generally engage with the content at a greater level. You’re doing this research to find ways to possibly improve cognitive function. What is it that’s most exciting about internet activity as opposed to learning to do any kind of other complex puzzle-solving or mental activity?

Dr. Moody:

Well, I think that because we have a situation where almost everyone has access to a computer, it can make this almost universal. Especially as we age, we’re not getting out there as much to walk around and some people don’t have the ability to go to senior centres and interact with other people, but that you could do something in your own home without requiring great mobility is very exciting. Also, there would be so much choice, there’s so much variety on the internet, it can be individually tailored to your personal preferences. So in this study I tried to pick topics that might be interesting to older adults – you know, walking for exercise, Tai Chi, health aspects of eating different types of food. I think that if it’s enjoyable for someone and if you don’t consider it to be a job to get out there and stimulate your brain, that people will do it more frequently. So that’s part of what’s exciting about it, is that it should be easily accessible to people once they know how to turn on the computer and activate the internet.

Gord:

Okay. So this is an easier path potentially to mental exercise?

Dr. Moody:

I think that it can be, yes.

Gord:

For the purpose of this interview, I’ll wrap up by asking you what’s next? What are the questions you’d like to explore further?

Dr. Moody:

Well, we would like to see what the impact of internet training might be on people who have no internet experience or very little internet experience. So that’s our next direct path. We’d also like to look at interventions for specific groups. If people have memory issues, is there something we could do to improve that? I think Dr. Small, Dr. Brookheimer, and myself are very interested in improving memory and improving people’s lives as we age, so that part of it would be a great bonus if we can discover techniques that might improve memory or enhance cognitive function. So the next step will be to look at training, and then we could look at patient groups, and I personally have interest in developmental learning too and we’ll probably look in young people as well.

Gord:

Okay. Well, fascinating topics to explore. Thank you, Teena, so much for the interview. It was fascinating to walk through it with you.

Search a Real Downer

The latest numbers from comScore show how the mood of the nation has shifted, and how it’s being reflected in what we search for. This is a topic I’ve talked about numerous times, so rather than spout it all again, I’ll just provide a few links to past posts. But I think one of the tables from the comScore release paints a pretty sobering picture:

Growth in Search Terms Related to Economic Downturn
December 2008 vs. December 2007
Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations
Source: comScore Marketer
Search Term 
Total Searches (000)
Dec-2007
Dec-2008
% Change
“Coupons”
7,637
19,921
161%
“Unemployment”
2,688
8,214
206%
“Discount”
6,271
7,928
26%
“Mortgage”
4,518
7,756
72%
“Bankruptcy”
1,012
2,589
156%
“Foreclosure”
824
1,373
67%
“Unemployment Benefits”
215
748
247%
“Online behavior has come to reflect the interests or concerns of Americans, and we are certainly seeing this manifest itself with respect to the economic downturn,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. “Search volume using terms relating to the economy has ballooned over the past year as Americans have become increasingly concerned over their economic wellbeing.”
Gian and I talked about this almost a year ago at the Search Insider Summit in Florida. That lead to a column in Search Engine Land talking about how whatever is top of mind for us translates into search activity – Battelle’s Database of Intentions. Ironically, this same tendency is one of the reasons why I think Search will do particularly well in the current economic meltdown – the subject of another Just Behave column.

Hyperlinking Reality

First published January 29, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Fellow Search Insider David Berkowitz (David, it’s been too long since we riffed on each other’s columns!) allowed his curiosity to wander down some fascinating potential directions search may evolve in a couple of recent columns, first looking at Ford’s plans for integrating GPS-enabled voice search  in all its  vehicles, and then speculating how one search could be launched in 17 different ways, both today and in the future. One of his speculations is what I wanted to explore further today:

“Instead of entering a query, Penny may be able to put on a special set of glasses and scan her surroundings for store names and reviews. The headsets and eyewear from Vuzix now link up to other portable devices such as iPods and camcorders, but they keep including more functionality within the gadgets themselves.”

Picture This…

Sound far-fetched? Not according to the MOBVIS (Mobile Attentive Interfaces in Urban Scenarios)  project in Europe. In a nutshell, the MOBVIS technology allows you to take a picture of your surroundings with your camera-equipped mobile device, then MOBVIS recognizes aspects of your environment and places hyperlinks on the items where it has relevant information. So, if you take a picture of a bus stop, MOBVIS can retrieve what buses stop there and what the schedule is. Assuming city buses are equipped with GPS and telemetric units, it could also tell you how long you have to wait for the next bus.

Currently, the MOBVIS project is visually mapping and testing in three European cities; Graz, Austria; Ljubljana, Slovenia; and Darmstadt, Germany). Geo-referenced imagery tied to streetscapes from these three centers is online and available to the scientific community. One has to imagine that Google would be paying particular attention to this, as it’s a natural tie-in with its Street View project.

Say Cheese and Search…

So, let’s imagine what MOBVIS could do. First of all, it could be an incredible interactive guide, bringing mountains of information about your surroundings to just one click away on your mobile device. Dining reviews, items on sale in local stores, entertainment schedules and reviews, transit schedules, self-guided tours, could all live on the other side of the MOBVIS linking icon. Now, all that is theoretically available through GPS positioning, but in urban pedestrian applications, GPS has some functional limitations. It’s difficult to get an accurate enough fix to narrow your location to even a half block radius, especially in the downtown “urban valley” core. MOBVIS allows you to restrict your information quest to exactly what you want to include in your viewfinder, making it a much more specific query tool. Also, MOBVIS could be tremendously useful for the visually impaired, allowing them to scan their surroundings and retrieve information.

Making Reality More Useful

What MOBVIS does, along with all the other search permutations mentioned by David, is point the way of search’s future. I’ve always said that search is not about the destination, whether it’s Google, Yahoo or Live. It’s about the functional engine that sits behind the portal. It’s about the ability to link people with relevant information and, more importantly, timely functionality. Search is about letting people do what they have to do. MOBVIS is just one more way to establish the link. It’s a pretty amazing way that opens up some intriguing possibilities, but what makes MOBVIS exciting is its potential for helping us navigate our current reality. David’s 17 ways to search, Aaron Goldman’s past speculations about ambient findability, and my ongoing exploration of search as an expression of us reaching for our goals all share a common theme: search enhances our ability to do things.

In a recent post, Silicon Valley writer Sarah Lacy speculated that Google might be nearing the end of its reign as online’s Golden Child. She used some dubious logic about usage and traffic to posit that the mantle is ready to be passed to Twitter or Facebook. What she missed is the central premise of Google’s mission. It’s not about driving traffic to Google.com. It’s about connecting us with what we’re looking for. What Google has been doing through Google Maps, Street View, Universal Search, personalization, Google Mobile and yes, even the lowly but ubiquitous Google Toolbar, is weaving together the functionality needed to deliver on that mission. It remains to be seen whether Google will be successful in doing so, but it’s certainly well in the lead. And that’s the power of Google’s potential. It’s about providing the infrastructure to connect all the dots, both online and in the real world. It’s not about being one of the dots.

Your Brain on Google Update

I had a chance to read through the fMRI study from UCLA, Your Brain on Google, on a plane ride down to visit with..you guessed it..Google. Pretty interesting stuff…here are a few quick highlights:

  • In the Internet Naive group..there was little difference in brain activity between searching on Google and reading text. The reason, I suspect, was that the group was just reading the search results.
  • But in the Internet Savvy group..a totally different story. Suddenly, many more parts of the brain started lighting up, including the parts governing decision making and the visual cortex. What this shows is that these users were using the results to help make decisions. They were fluent in search.
  • One other interesting note. The increased activation in the visual cortex may indicate that searchers see the information differently. The information presented was exactly the same, with the same stimuli, but in the search savvy group, when they were scanning the visual stimuli as search results, they seemed to be more visually rich. I suspect that as we get more savvy with results, we scan more and read less, treating the results more like a picture.

Just a few tidbits for now. I’m setting up an interview with researcher Teena Moody to dive deeper, which will probably become a Just Behave column. Also, don’t be surprised if it’s what I talk about at SMX West in Santa Clara.