reasoning
dmunger | July 25, 2007Imagine you're taking a test--just for fun--to see how fast you can add numbers and alphabetize letters. Would it help you complete the test faster if you had a warning before each item indicating whether you'd be adding or alphabetizing?
Now imagine you're taking the same test--only this time the test will be used to determine whether you qualify for a promotion at work. In this, more stressful situation, do you think the warnings would help? Would you change your strategy on the test?
There is considerable evidence that cognitive performance changes when we are under stress. For example,…
dmunger | July 19, 2007[originally posted January 26, 2006]
Kids in America grow up in a society that overwhelmingly believes in life after death. At the same time, these same kids grow up learning more and more about the nature of living organisms, and what makes something living or dead. At some point, these two belief systems inevitably collide: pure religious faith suggests that the soul lives on after death, but pure science suggests that consciousness can only exist in a living brain.
Assuming these kids don't read Pharyngula (in which case all hope of an eternal soul would likely be quickly and rudely…
dmunger | April 12, 2007Cognitive decline as we age is all over the news lately. "Brain fitness" products are available for cell phones, Game Boys, and Xboxes, all designed to prevent the natural decline in cognitive ability as we age. There's even a significant body of work suggesting that this sort of product really can work.
But some of the brain games can be dull, repetitive work: memory tasks, number games, and optical illusions, while endlessly fascinating to cognitive scientists, might be less appealing to the general population.
Researchers Helga and Tony Noice believe that training in the theater arts has…
dmunger | March 29, 2007Earlier today I posted a poll challenging Cognitive Daily readers to show me that they understand error bars -- those little I-shaped indicators of statistical power you sometimes see on graphs. I was quite confident that they wouldn't succeed. Why was I so sure? Because in 2005, a team led by Sarah Belia conducted a study of hundreds of researchers who had published articles in top psychology, neuroscience, and medical journals. Only a small portion of them could demonstrate accurate knowledge of how error bars relate to significance. If published researchers can't do it, should we expect…
dmunger | December 21, 2006Take a look at these two images. Do they belong in the same category or different categories?
You say the same? Wrong -- they're different! The one on the right is a little blurrier.
What about these two?
These are in the same category. Sure, the one on the right is still blurrier, but now it's rotated a bit, so that puts the two objects back in the same category. My rule for categorizing is complex, involving both blurriness and rotation (I'll explain how it works later on).
How do you think you would do if you were tested on these categories? Do you think you'd do better or worse if…
dmunger | December 13, 2006Keith Payne's work on racial stereotyping brings up an intriguing possibility. During the weapons identification task, viewers are more likely to erroneously identify a harmless object as a weapon if it was preceded by a black face compared to a white face. They are also more accurate identifying weapons after seeing black faces compared with white faces.
It's possible that both of these results are due to the same underlying mental process, but Payne's research also invites another possible assessment: that separate processes are responsible for the two different behaviors. One behavior:…
dmunger | December 7, 2006Very few of us can avoid stereotyping others. When we're actively trying to avoid racial stereotyping, we often end up looking ridiculous. But the very fact that we can try to avoid it suggests that there's something more to racial stereotypes than a "stereotype center" in the brain. If stereotyping was completely automatic, we'd be no more able to resist stereotypes than we are able to stop seeing.
So if we can try to resist stereotyping, why doesn't resisting always work? The article I just linked points to a study showing that people -- even police officers -- are more likely to mistakenly…
dmunger | October 31, 2006
Any grown-up would be surprised to see SpongeBob Squarepants show up in a Batman movie. Clearly, these characters inhabit two different fantasy worlds: one lives in a fabulous mansion near bustling Gotham City, while the other inhabits an underwater pineapple. Grown-ups divide fantasy worlds into non-intersecting sets: If Batman has even heard of SpongeBob, he would believe him to be a fictional character.
But what about children? Do they have the same understanding of the distinction between separate fictional worlds? Kids do understand the difference between reality and make-believe…
dmunger | October 16, 2006The developmental psychologist Jean Piaget developed several tasks to show how very young children were different from older kids. One of the most surprising is the "conservation" task: a 5-year-old, who talks clearly and appears quite bright, will watch water being poured from a short, wide glass into a tall, slender one. She will say that the tall glass has "more" water. A 7-year-old won't make the same mistake.
Surely, then, adults are aware that short, fat glasses have deceptively large volumes, right? Not according to a recent article in BMJ. Brian Wansink and Koert van Ittersum asked…