Conceptual design is a creative process. Designers create functions to satisfy customer needs and behaviors and forms to fulfill their functions. Although cognitive processes are at the center in developing new ideas, they are rarely taken into account in research and development of design support methods and systems. It is conceivable that if one understands how cognitive processes are stimulated to generate design ideas, then more effective methods and tools can be developed to support conceptual design. In this article, a cognitive model of conceptual design is developed to capture the relationships among design entities, design operations, and cognitive processes. A protocol analysis is performed to evaluate the model, and a cognitive experiment carried out to study the creative patterns and stimulating relationships. The results show that designers exhibit patterns of creative design behavior, and that these patterns can be captured and instilled into the design process to promote creativity.

Différentes heuristiques ont été avancées par les psychologues et les économistes afin de rendre compte des comportements sur les marchés financiers. Elles soulignent les biais cognitifs qui affectent les croyances individuelles, et s'efforcent d'expliquer dans une certaine mesure les anomalies constatées sur les marchés financiers. L'expérimentation menée vise à tester les heuristiques de conservatisme, de représentativité et d'ancrage-ajustement dans un contexte dynamique de quinze périodes : les sujets reçoivent, à chaque période, une information financière et révisent individuellement leurs croyances quant à la qualité d'une entreprise. Les croyances observées s'avèrent incompatibles avec l'hypothèse de révision bayésienne: les sujets ont tendance à surévaluer les petites probabilités et à sous-évaluer les fortes probabilités. L'heuristique de représentativité est, de la même manière, invalidée : le traitement économétrique montre que les sujets sous-pondèrent les signaux les plus intenses, preuve qu'ils ne tirent pas parti de leurs intensités informationnelles. Les hypothèses de conservatisme et d'ancrage-ajustement sont au contraire conjointement validées : les sujets sous-pondèrent l'information nouvelle quand ils révisent leurs croyances mais ce comportement de révision est pleinement conditionné au fait que les sujets s'écartent ou se rapprochent d'une valeur d'ancrage.

This study considered the role of schema-level cognitive processes in alcohol and opiate abuse. It examined the hypothesis that alcohol abuse will be associated with the use of “blocking” behaviours to reduce the experience of emotions (secondary avoidance of affect), while opiate abuse will be associated with a tendency to avoid emotions being activated in the first place (primary avoidance of affect). The sample consisted of 30 patients who abused alcohol, and 30 who abused opiates. Each completed the Young Compensatory Inventory (YCI) and the Young-Rygh Avoidance Inventory (YRAI). There were no differences between the groups in their absolute levels of schema processes (YCI and YRAI scores). However, they differed in the way in which the severity of use was associated with the level of YRAI behavioural-somatic avoidance. Among alcohol abusers only, severity of use was greater in those who were more likely to avoid affective arousal in this way. This association with severity was not found among opiate abusers. Implications are discussed for existing treatments and for the use of schema-level cognitive behavioural interventions with substance-using populations.

The aim of this study was to explore multitasking skills in a Chinese sample of 22 children with attention deficit–hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) compared with 22 healthy controls matched by gender, age, and IQ. All of the participants completed the children's version of the Six Elements Test (C-SET) and neuropsychological tests that captured specific domains of attention, memory, and executive function. Children with ADHD performed significantly worse than the healthy controls in all domains except the number of rules broken in the C-SET. The majority of the C-SET domain scores correlated significantly with measures of executive function. The ADHD group also demonstrated deficits in various neurocognitive test performances compared with the healthy group. This preliminary study suggests that the C-SET is sensitive to multitasking behavior in Chinese children with ADHD. The main impairments of multitasking behavior in this clinical group involve the inhibition of goal-directed planning, flexible strategy generation, and self-monitoring. (JINS, 2006, 12, 575–579.)