EMOTION AND COGNITION

Emotion And Cognition

Emotion And Cognition

INTRODUCTION

"You have to begin to loose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing." - Luis Buñue, spanish film maker

This quote summarizes very well how important our memory is. However, our memory is not enough when we need to take decisions related to where we should go or what we should do because what really drives human beings is not reason, but emotion, (Filliozat, 1998; Damasio, 1994). The phrase of Descartes "I think therefore I am" suggests that only think and have conscience about our thinking defines ourselves. But, Damasio shows that absence of emotion and feeling can destruct rationality. Why?

The emotion plays a very important role in the cognitive and "rational" decision processes related to information that arrives at our external senses as vision, hearing, sense of smell, taste, touch (pain, pressure, temperature), and by the internal ones, as hunger, thirsty, time, balance and synesthesia.

Aspects of emotion and memory relationship targeted to experience design

Emotion, cognition, human senses, memory, experiences, marketing, advertising, promotion, interactive presentations, learning environments, branding.

The emotional component of the brain plays a very important role in cognitive and decision processes related to information that arrives at our external senses as vision, hearing, sense of smell, taste, touch (pain, pressure, temperature) and by internal ones, as hunger, thirsty, time, balance and synesthesia. These senses can influence our emotions by several ways and to know how to drive them has become an important skill to designers, who need to drive emotional responses using visual signs. As we know, emotions are intimately connected to the memory, and consequently to the cognitive processes involved in the acquisition, transformation and storage of information. Knowing this, if designers could target themselves to a positive construction of experiences, emotionally driven, they could get reinforcement for the learning of concepts, principles and even meanings connected to brands. The focus of this article is to analyze the impact of emotion and memory relations in designers work. Besides, it shows the use of those concepts in the design of experiences that stimulate our emotions positively through interactive presentations, ludic learning environments, Internet websites and even other experiences emotionally connected to the public.

EMOTION

Emotion is a very complex subject that has been discussed and researched for over 100 years. There are several definitions of emotion based upon the various theories that have developed over the course of that time period. However, a working definition of emotion that can be used is that emotions are the cognitive aspect of feeling or the value judgment placed on a particular experience.

Emotions have a physiological basis as was studied by Cannon who gave the first descriptions of bodily changes during simpler emotions and found that the thalamus is the center of emotion. The adrenal gland and adrenaline, acting along with the autonomic nervous system, produce the physiological changes within ...