A user authentication system answers the question, ‘Are you who you claim to be?’ by comparing a user’s claimed identity with their biometric data. Typical evaluation metrics measure how often the system verifies a genuine user as being who they say they are.
Cognitive psychology research has demonstrated that memory cues effectively aid memory retrieval, and this work should be leveraged in future graphical user authentication designs.
Metacognitive Feedback
Metacognition is the ability to reflect on and regulate one’s learning and thinking processes. It consists of three self-assessment skills: planning, monitoring, and evaluation. Metacognitive prompts, like the cognitive science in artificial intelligence, are instructional help formats encouraging learners to engage in these self-assessment strategies.
These prompts provide feedback that helps people monitor their progress and make adjustments, e.g., when they realize they have gone off course in a lesson or are struggling with an assignment. They can improve performance in any task, but they are handy for complex tasks such as computer programming and scientific analysis.
A study by Bannert and Mengelkamp investigated how a metacognitive prompt (in the form of on-demand task-related visual analytics) improved learners’ effortful behavior in an online learning environment. They tracked learners’ interactions with a task over 8 weeks to measure their effortful behavior at four different points in time:
- Before providing the metacognitive prompt.
- While the metacognitive prompt was available.
- After the metacognitive prompt was removed.
- When the option to receive the metacognitive prompt was reinstated.
Research in metacognition has primarily focused on two tracks: meta-knowledge and meta-control. The former explores the neural substrates for introspective judgments about one’s cognition, while the latter studies the desire to offload cognitive burdens by implementing experiments involving cognitive offloading34. However, critics have questioned the ecological validity of these neuroscientific operationalizations.
Biometrics
The field of biometrics involves the study of the body’s unique physical characteristics for capturing and analyzing data. This data is used for identification and verification purposes, including user authentication. Biometrics has several benefits for enterprises, including increased security, convenience, and speed. However, it is essential to note that the technology could be more foolproof and can be compromised by several factors. These include racial and age differences, lighting conditions, posture, and even how data is entered into the system.
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific investigation of human thinking and intelligence. It interfaces multiple disciplines, such as neuroscience, computer science, psychology, artificial intelligence (AI), anthropology, and philosophy. The underlying methods used in cognitive science are based on developing representative structures of the mind, similar to computer data structures, and analyzing computational procedures that run on these structures. These processes are associated with critical mental faculties such as perception, memory, emotional experience, learning, problem-solving and decision-making, and language use.
Empirical theories of the mind find application in several domains, including education or pedagogy; operations research and human-factors engineering, which involve developing devices and systems that can be used effectively without overtaxing people’s mental capacities; and law and medicine, where the understanding of medical reasoning—the processes involved in determining whether to diagnose or treat illness—is crucial. Additionally, cognitive science is central to the study of a range of mental disorders, including depression and schizophrenia, which can be explained and treated by a thorough understanding of the cognitive and neural processes that underlie healthy minds.
Social Networking
Social networking is a form of online social interaction that provides users with a way to share news and information, conduct discussion forums, or teach others how to perform specific tasks and projects. These networks often focus on a particular topic or industry and can include communities.
Several website and app providers are leveraging social login as a method for user authentication. While this allows for improved ease of use, it can present challenges. For example, a user’s privacy policy at a given platform may change, potentially compromising the accuracy of social login data.
Multi-factor Authentication
Authentication factors can verify a user’s identity, such as a password or PIN, an ID number, or a physical token or device. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is a type of security measure that requires more than one authentication factor to verify a user’s identity. MFA can be used to strengthen security and protect data from breaches, which is why more organizations are adopting it.
Cognitive science is a broad field that explores the intelligence and behavior of creatures. It applies existing disciplines such as psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and linguistics to understand how the human brain thinks. It is a multidisciplinary research effort that can benefit industries like education, operations research, human resources management, and engineering.
To better grasp how the mind works, cognitive scientists use psychological experiments and computational models to develop empirical theories of thinking. The fundamental hypothesis is that thought can be understood regarding representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that run on those structures. These structures are analogous to computer data structures, while the computational methods are similar to computing algorithms. These ideas are now being extended by connectionist theories, which model thinking using artificial neural networks.
Cognitive science has also been applied to medicine, legal reasoning, and medical diagnosis. For example, mental illnesses such as depression and schizophrenia can be diagnosed and treated by understanding the cognitive and neural processes that occur in a healthy mind.
