Toxicology has its own adaptive response. Biomedicine has preconditioning. A recent article by Calabrese points out that these dose-response phenomena, although known by a multitude of names, share common characteristics. All are biphasic, and the quantitative features are very similar. But they have never really been linked together….

There are probably many more cases like this one. The same phenomenon is discovered independently in different fields of study and because these different fields don’t talk to each other (and they can’t because they use such different terminology) the whole picture is never seen. Multidisciplinarians, or interdisciplinarians cannot solve this, I think we need more true multispecialists.

Air traffic controllers have been found to give themselves more challenging tasks when air traffic is slow, i.e. optimizing routes for particular kinds of planes while all they have to do is keep them withing certain limits. Senior drivers get into fewer car accidents than one would expect regarding their performance on cognitive tests. They turn off the radio when driving in an unfamiliar environment, and mostly drive in areas they are familiar with and during daytime.

At my temporary job in a coffeehouse, I noticed I am balancing my cognitive load the whole day through (even there!): taking multiple orders from multiple customers or waiting until one is served, using the cash register calculator or doing it by heart, making different espresso-based drinks and keeping wait times as low as possible, etc. Periods of cognitive stress are thus followed by cognitive rest, while it never gets dull.

What does this mean for user interface design? In fact it’s pretty straight-forward. Allow for both easy and cognitively challenging use and let your users do the rest. Sometimes this means allowing different strategies for the same task. Sometimes it means facilitating switching between demanding and less demanding tasks.