Applied Cognitive Science Group
Concentric Health Experience
Colleen Carter, Chief Experience Officer
ccarter@concentrichx.com
What can someone with a PhD in the molecular basis of traumatic memory encoding contribute to the design of a campaign to make it more memorable? Concentric Health Experience’s Applied Cognitive Science (ACS) division personifies the answer. They assemble rare people with deep domain knowledge and task them with unconventional, translational applications of this knowledge.
Several members of the ACS team have strong technical backgrounds in brain imaging and experimental psychology/neuroscience. Now they are developing translational applications of these sciences to benefit public health and healthcare brands. They are also helping clients become more educated consumers of neuroscience-based ideas, techniques, and products.
With the science of decision making at the heart of their innovations, the ACS team upends traditional market research with novel approaches to acquiring unbiased data. By applying psychometrics—the scientific study of mental processes and how to measure them most accurately—ACS delivers complementary methods, rigorous quality control, and tests of validity. By doing so, they have shifted the discourse from the merely subjective to the objective, from non-representative samples of convenience to representative samples powered to address the difficult questions. And debiased market research is just one example of innovation.
ACS has also assembled disciplinary experts in the functional neurocircuitry of emotion and motivation, vision neuroscience, measurement techniques in neuromarketing (EEG, SST), decision science, neuroscience of reward and valuation, quantitative neuroscience, and clinical psychology—all to apply the science of decision making to support health experiences. This strategy requires continued investment in areas as diverse as cognitive linguistics, behavioral indices of associative memory, statistics/psychometrics, and cognitive behavioral therapy.
So far, the team’s techniques have been especially successful with the agency’s clients in translational neuroscience and psychiatry, but also in disease states with strong behavioral components, such as obesity.
