Understanding what people instinctively feel

The problem

Consumer-facing organisations need to know what people instinctively feel about their brands, values, and policies. Existing methods do not reliably deliver this.

Problem 1
Survey bias

Traditional surveys ask people to declare their opinions. People answer as they wish to be seen, not as they instinctively feel. This is known as social desirability bias. No amount of questionnaire design eliminates it — it is structural.

Problem 2
Implicit tests don't scale

Implicit Association Tests partially address this by measuring reaction time as a proxy for instinctive association. But IATs are designed for binary comparisons, require laboratory conditions, and cannot be deployed at population scale.

Problem 3
Data protection liability

Every existing system that collects individual-level human behavioural data operates within UK GDPR personal data scope. This creates consent requirements, data governance overhead, and liability that many enterprise clients are unwilling or unable to absorb.

The solution

Cognitif Group Limited has developed Semantic Bathymetry™: a system that captures latent associative orientation at population scale, without recording personally-identifiable data.

Features
  • Petalyx™ presents users with rapid word-association tasks. For each prompt word, users choose from five response candidates arranged radially, or select ‘None of the Above’.
  • Both the chosen response and all non-chosen options are treated as structurally informative.
  • Raw response times are normalised against sources of noise — individual motor speed, within-session fatigue, time-of-day variation, and demographic baseline.
  • All individual session data is destroyed on the user's device before any transmission. Only aggregate coordinate scores are transmitted and stored.
Benefits
  • Measures genuine instinctive orientation, not declared or curated opinion.
  • Captures both positive affect and systematic aversion.
  • Deployable at population scale without laboratory conditions, special equipment, or trained administrators.
  • Signal-to-noise ratio designed to outperform raw reaction-time data and self-report instruments.
  • The stored dataset is designed to contain no personal data within the meaning of UK GDPR Recital 26, with no individual-level record transmitted or retained.