Peer review is a widely accepted instrument for raising the quality of science. Peer review limits the enormous unstructured influx of information and the sheer amount of dubious data, which in its absence would plunge science into chaos. In particular, peer review offers the benefit of eliminating papers that suffer from poor craftsmanship or methodological shortcomings, especially in the experimental sciences. However, we believe that peer review is not always appropriate for the evaluation of controversial hypothetical science. We argue that the process of peer review can be prone to bias towards ideas that affirm the prior convictions of reviewers and against innovation and radical new ideas. Innovative hypotheses are thus highly vulnerable to being "filtered out" or made to accord with conventional wisdom by the peer review process. Consequently, having introduced peer review, the Elsevier journal Medical Hypotheses may be unable to continue its tradition as a radical journal allowing discussion of improbable or unconventional ideas. Hence we conclude by asking the publisher to consider re-introducing the system of editorial review to Medical Hypotheses.

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Understanding consumer cognitive and affective needs is a complex and tricky challenge for consumer studies. Creating and defining product attributes that meet the consumers' personal wishes and needs in different contexts is a challenge that demands new perspectives because there are mismatches between the objective of companies and the consumer's objective, which indicates the need for products to become increasingly consumer-oriented. Product design approaches aim to bring the product and consumer closer together. The objective of this study is to investigate the application of the cognitive and affective needs of the consumer in product design through a systematic review of the literature of publications carried out in the last 20 years. This article selects research carried out in the specific area of cognitive and affective product design and defines the state of the art of the main areas, challenges, and trends. The conclusion that was reached is that cognitive approaches have been updated, are more associated with technology, and so are focused and oriented toward the ease and friendliness of the product. In contrast, affective approaches are older and focus on the quality of life, satisfaction, pleasure, and friendliness of the product. This review indicates that the emotional focus of change for cognitive complexity is due to an understanding of the affective and emotional subjectivity of the consumers and how they can translate these requirements into product attributes. These approaches seem to lose their strength or preference in the areas of design and engineering for more rational and logical cognitive applications, and therefore are more statistically verifiable. Advances in neuroscience are focused on applications in marketing and consumer psychology and some cognitive and affective product designs.

The cognitive and affective design aims to attract consumers with products and new products that provide innovative experiences with the intense functional and “cognitive” impact such as ease of use, in addition to “affective” impact as the pleasure of consuming. However, it is difficult to anticipate the consumer's preferences and intentionality, because what happens inside his mind, brain, or subjective experience (wishes, needs, and preferences) is not accessible. This study's objective was to propose an ontological and multidisciplinary approach to the cognitive and affective product experience through an explanation framework and a conceptual model. The model was tested, and the preliminary results indicate that the proposal contributes positively to the advance of the explanation, evaluation and translation of the product experience.

A experiência de interação entre consumidor e produto é essencialmente subjetiva e de difícil avaliação e tradução. Nela, há fatores cognitivos e afetivos que são estimulados por atributos de produtos incorporadas ao design que podem ser funcionais e hedônicos. O objetivo do design cognitivo e afetivo é conquistar o consumidor com produtos que proporcionam experiências inovadoras com intenso impacto funcional e “cognitivo” como facilidades de uso, além do impacto “afetivo” como o prazer de consumir. Contudo, modelos é métodos de engenharia e design tem dificuldades de avaliação e tradução das informações, pois é difícil antecipar a intenção e preferência do consumidor. Os fenômenos ocorrem dentro da mente, cérebro, e fazem parte da experiência subjetiva e não são, portanto, acessíveis ao observador externo. O objetivo deste artigo é propor um modelo de avaliação e tradução da experiência cognitiva e afetiva de produto, por meio de uma abordagem multidisciplinar de paradigma cognitivista. Como resultado, é proposto três indicadores que contribuem para o avanço nos estudos sobre a subjetividade do consumidor.