The gist of the talk is right, but there are a lot of underlying errors. Kids today know that 'floppy disk' means save because... floppy disk has 'always' been the ideograph for save. They're not functionally mapping it to the physical device. It's a bit like people know that 'a' means the first letter of the English alphabet because... it's an ideograph that means that by convention - even though in handwriting it's written differently. People have been trained to understand what that shape means.
There's lots of these errors of understanding throughout the talk, but the biggest one is the rolodex card icon. It looks like an ID card more than a rolodex card, since the latter do not have portraits on them. Check it out on a google image search; some companies make cards for you with their logo on it, but most cards are blank for your writing, and there is no portraiture. Presented with that icon, photo-on-the-left, text-on-the-right looks like a pretty default ID card. The underlying point is right - that the teenagers recognise the meaning of the icon - the but rationalisation for why is incorrect.
So why do teenagers understand that floppy means save? Because 'convention'. Not because "they're smart, and backward-map old technology". If we had a different icon for 'save', and one company just today started using the floppy, then no-one would understand it.
I think you're adding unnecessary complexity into the analysis. Whether we call it a floppy disk or refoofoofah, clicking on that icon saved your document. Thus, we would expect this behavior to generalize given a similar icon in a slightly different environment/app (stimulus generalization).
Using the word "meaning" here is problematic because it comes with some intellectual baggage (e.g, connotation). What does anything "mean" really? The most straight forward answer to me is it "means" what it does. That is, function is meaning, especially in UX.
I'm a bit waffle-ey by nature, but really I mean two points: first, that the icon means save because we're trained to see it as the icon for save (if we want to talk unnecessary complexity, you've transformed my 'trained' into 'stimulus generalisation' :D); and second, kids know that the icon is related to floppy disks because everyone asks at some point "wtf does this have to do with 'save'", and gets a history lesson. Two separate but related events.
The unnecessarily complexity is what's in the video: the user sees the icon, recognises it as a floppy disk, understands that the floppy disk is storage from some prior experience (ha![1]), and then reverse-engineers the question "why does this icon look like a floppy disk" into "something to do with storage - probably saving the document to it". It's a very convoluted and unnecessary cognitive path.
[1] Does anyone really believe that the youth of today learned what floppy disks were before they learned about saving documents?
Hahaha I don't think putting stimulus generalization in parentheses makes my explanation any more complex. I explained the phenomenon in 2-3 simple sentences and then I used two words that could substitute for those 2-3 sentences--stimulus generalization.
If you compare our two analyses some of the claims you make cannot be tested via experimentation, such as "convoluted unnecessary cognitive path." I'm not sure what that means, how we would determine if the user has gone down that route, or how we would measure the convolution of a "cognitive path."
Nonetheless, I like this discussion. I think UX is really cool and represents a great application for applied behavior analysis.
That 'convoluted cognitive path' is a qualitative assessment of what the presenter is describing in the seminar. You don't need some measure of convolutedness to see it touches a number of different cognitive aspects.
But if it's robust testing you're after, then you should be railing against the seminar altogether. A self-selected, self-reported study done on the internet, with zero way to identify demographic accuracy? An assumption that puerility like 'anus@anus.anus' are only done by teenagers? An assumption that "it's really easy to tell when someone's messing with you", which just means you can't detect the subtler trolls? This isn't experimentation, it's a survey, and it's been interpreted with a lot of cognitive bias, with the researcher projecting a lot of assumed meaning. It's certainly better than nothing, but it's not robust at all.
I imagine because during their training of what the icon means, they will have been told about the reference. It's like how we all know the Rutherford model of the atom and what it represents, despite no human every actually seeing one in person... and it not being quite correct. Show someone an icon made from the Rutherford model and ask what it represents, and they'll say "an atom".
It's about training. Look at this picture[1]. If you made an icon from this simple structure, do you think people would understand what it meant? It's a pretty unknown bit of technology, but what it does has a clear analogue to a common function on websites. If only one site used it, it would be confusing. But if it were used by almost everyone, all through your growing up, you'd both understand the icon, and that it was shaped that way because it's meant to look like this object.
OK, I looked up what that thing is, and while it's pretty neat (and probably much less popular now so many people drink coffee) I'm not seeing the "clear analogue to a common function on websites". Can you tell me what website function you're thinking of?
Perhaps I should have said software rather than websites specifically, since websites tend to conflate both 'search' and 'filter' into the one function. They are pretty similar.
Regarding the hamburger icon, I suspect most people have seen it many places and recognize that it can be clicked/tapped, but they interpret it as "here be dragons" which is why it always scores so low on A/B testing. Even knowing what it's just an innocuous menu, I rarely sneak a peek at what might be lurking there unless the function I'm seeking isn't to be found anywhere else.
TBH, I wouldn't be so surprised that teenagers know that a floppy icon means save, because they use text processors to do their homework, and at least the most popular software (Microsoft Word) emphasises so much that particular icon.
Although being honest, I got impressed by the "tape" icon used for voicemail.
Nothing wrong with the Floppy Disk icon. It's unique, which is all that matters. It no longer represents a physical thing that people use routinely, not a big deal. Now, if we could only figure out how to have search and zoom use different icons...
There's lots of these errors of understanding throughout the talk, but the biggest one is the rolodex card icon. It looks like an ID card more than a rolodex card, since the latter do not have portraits on them. Check it out on a google image search; some companies make cards for you with their logo on it, but most cards are blank for your writing, and there is no portraiture. Presented with that icon, photo-on-the-left, text-on-the-right looks like a pretty default ID card. The underlying point is right - that the teenagers recognise the meaning of the icon - the but rationalisation for why is incorrect.
So why do teenagers understand that floppy means save? Because 'convention'. Not because "they're smart, and backward-map old technology". If we had a different icon for 'save', and one company just today started using the floppy, then no-one would understand it.