When people were given any information beyond the basics, their ability to reason was severely restricted.
Solving the most fascinating quirk of vision: what you see is partly a memory.
Challenge the stereotype before it becomes internalised.
The obsession with more is built into our language.
Temporal wrinkles stretch time perception slightly when the time between heartbeats is longer and compress time when they are shorter.
Some people literally see the speech that they hear — like subtitles or an old-fashioned tickertape.
How to reap the rewards of both rational and emotional thinking.
Cognitive psychology reveals, for example, insights into how we think, reason, learn, remember, produce language and even how illogical our brains are.
Cognitive psychology reveals, for example, insights into how we think, reason, learn, remember, produce language and even how illogical our brains are.
Fifty years ago there was a revolution in cognitive psychology which changed the way we think about the mind.
The ‘cognitive revolution’ inspired cognitive psychologists to start thinking of the mind as a kind of organic computer, rather than as an impenetrable black box which would never be understood.
This metaphor has motivated cognitive psychology to investigate the software central to our everyday functioning, opening the way to insights into how we think, reason, learn, remember and produce language.
Here are 10 classic examples of cognitive psychology studies that have helped reveal how thinking works.
Without experts the human race would be sunk.
But what is it about how experts think which lets them achieve breakthroughs which we can all enjoy?
The answer is in how experts think about problems, compared with novices, cognitive psychology reveals.
That’s what Chi et al. (1981) found when they compared how experts and novices represented physics problems.
Novices tended to get stuck thinking about the surface details of the problem whereas experts saw the underlying principles that were operating.
It was partly this deeper, abstract way of approaching problems that made the experts more successful.
Short-term memory is a lot shorter than many think, cognitive psychologists find.
In fact it lasts about 15-30 seconds.
We know that because of a classic cognitive psychology study carried out by Lloyd and Margaret Peterson (Peterson & Peterson, 1959).
Participants had to try and remember and recall three-letter strings, like FZX.
When tested, after 3 seconds they could recall 80 percent of them, after 18 seconds, though, they could only remember 10 percent.
That’s how short-term short-term memory is.
People find formal logic extremely difficult to cope with–that’s normal, cognitive psychology finds.
Here’s a quick test for you, and don’t be surprised if your brain overheats:
“You are shown a set of four cards placed on a table, each of which has a number on one side and a coloured patch on the other side.
The visible faces of the cards show 3, 8, red and brown.
Which card(s) must you turn over in order to test the truth of the proposition that if a card shows an even number on one face, then its opposite face is red?”
The answer is you have to turn over the ‘8’ and the brown card (for an explanation search for “Wason selection task” — even after hearing it, many people still can’t believe this is the correct answer).
If you got it right, then you’re in the minority (or you’ve seen the test before!).
When Wason conducted this classic experiment, less than 10 percent of people got it right (Wason, 1968).
Cognitive psychology finds that our brains are not set up for this kind of formal logic.
The way you frame a problem, argument or statement can have huge effects on how people perceive it.
For example, think about risk for a moment and the fact that people don’t like to take chances.
They dislike taking chances so much that even the whiff of negativity is enough to send people running for the hills.
That’s what cognitive psychologists Kahneman and Tversky (1981) demonstrated when they asked participants to imagine 600 people were affected by a deadly disease.
There was, they were told, a treatment, but it is risky.
If you decided to use the treatment, here are the odds:
“A 33% chance of saving all 600 people, 66% possibility of saving no one.”
When told this, 72 percent of people thought it was a good bet.
But, when presented the problem this way:
“A 33% chance that no people will die, 66% probability that all 600 will die.”
…the number choosing it dropped to 22 percent.
The beauty of the study is that the outcomes are identical, it’s just the framing that’s different.
Cognitive psychology shows that the way we think is heavily influenced by the terms in which issues are expressed.
We actually have two sets of eyes — one set real and one virtual, cognitive psychology finds.
We have the real eyes moving around in their sockets, but we also have ‘virtual eyes’ looking around our field of vision, choosing what we pay attention to.
People are using their virtual eyes all the time: for example, when they watch each other using their peripheral vision.
You don’t need to look directly at an attractive stranger to eye them up, you can look ‘out of the corner of your eye’.
Cognitive psychologists have called this the ‘spotlight of attention’ and studies have actually measured its movement.
It means we can notice things in the fraction of a second before our eyes have a chance to reorient.
→ Read on: The Attentional Spotlight
It’s not just vision which has a kind of spotlight, our hearing is also finely tuned, cognitive psychologists have discovered.
It’s like when you’re at a cocktail party and you can tune out all the voices, except the person you’re talking to.
Or, you can tune out the person you’re talking to and eavesdrop on a more interesting conversation behind.
A beautiful cognitive psychology demonstration of this was carried out in the 1950s by Cherry (1953).
He found that people could even distinguish the same voice reading two different messages at the same time.
→ Read on: The Cocktail Party Effect
If you take a toy duck and show it to a 12-month-old infant, then put your hand under a cushion, leave the duck there and bring your hand out, the child will only look in your hand, almost never under the cushion.
At this age, children behave as though things they can’t see don’t even exist.
As the famous child psychologist Jean Piaget noted:
“The child’s universe is still only a totality of pictures emerging from nothingness at the moment of action, to return to nothingness at the moment when the action is finished.”
And yet, just six months later, a child will typically look under the cushion, studies in cognitive psychology have found.
It has learnt that things that are hidden from view can continue to exist — this is known as object permanence.
This is just one miracle amongst many in developmental psychology and cognitive psychology.
The brain is integrating information from all our senses to produce our experience, cognitive psychology shows.
This is brilliantly revealed by the McGurk effect (McGurk & MacDonald, 1976).
Watch the following clip from a BBC documentary to see the effect in full.
You won’t believe it until you see and hear it yourself.
The sensation is quite odd:
People sometimes think of their memories as being laid down, then later either recalled or forgotten, with little change in the memories themselves between the two.
In fact, cognitive psychology shows that the reality is much more complex and, in some cases, alarming.
One of the most dramatic examples of these studies demonstrated that memories can be changed, or even implanted later, was carried out by Elizabeth Loftus.
In her study, a childhood memory of being lost in a mall was successfully implanted in some people’s mind, despite their families confirming nothing like it had ever happened to them.
Later research in cognitive psychology have found that 50 percent of participants could have a false memory successfully implanted.
→ Read on: Implanting False Memories
There all kinds of cognitive biases operating in the mind, cognitive psychology has found.
The Dunning-Kruger effect, though, is a favourite because it explains why incompetent people don’t know they’re incompetent.
David Dunning and Justin Kruger found in their studies that people who are the most incompetent are the least aware of their own incompetence.
At the other end of the scale, the most competent are most aware of their own shortcomings.
→ Explore more: Cognitive Biases: Why We Make Irrational Decisions
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Brains work quicker at 18, but some mental powers peak surprisingly late.
Examples and types of mind wandering, the symptoms, benefits and potential treatments for a drifting mind.
Examples and types of mind wandering, the symptoms, benefits and potential treatments for a drifting mind.
Up to half of our daily thoughts involve mind wandering or a drifting mind.
Unfortunately, when left to its own devices the mind almost always wanders to negative thoughts and brings us down.
Mind wandering in general is often associated with increased stress and a lack of academic success.
But daydreaming can be seen as a sign of being more creative and having higher intelligence, research finds.
Those who report more daydreaming have higher intellectual abilities and their brains work more efficiently.
Here are more examples of mind wandering from the research, including symptoms, benefits and potential treatments.
Part of the function of mind wandering is to allow the brain to work on our memories, research suggests.
Mind wandering — which may make up 50 percent of our daily thinking time — is experienced as a kind of zoning out from what is going on around us.
During this time, researchers have found, many areas of the brain quiet themselves to focus on output from the hippocampus.
The output from the hippocampus is very weak, which the researchers charmingly describe as whispering.
So, the rest of the brain has to be particularly quiet to listen and further encode these memories for long-term storage.
There are two types of mind wandering — each with a different experience.
Mind wandering tends to be seen in a negative way, but zoning out on purpose can help creative thinking and problems solving.
Research has identified a vital difference between intentional and unintentional mind wandering.
It reveals how intentional mind wandering feels different from accidental mind wandering.
The study’s authors explain:
“We suspect that when people are completing an easy task, they may be inclined to deliberately disengage from the task and engage in mind wandering.
This might be the case because easy tasks tend to be rather boring, or because people realize that they can get away with mind wandering without sacrificing performance.
Conversely, when completing a difficult task, people really need to focus on the task in order to perform well, so if they do mind-wander, their mind wandering should be more likely to occur unintentionally.”
Some types of mind wandering may be highly beneficial to our brains, and our futures.
Intentional daydreaming is linked to a thicker cortex (a good thing) in certain key areas of the brain, research finds.
Directing the mind to wander is a cognitive skill that can be beneficial in some contexts.
For example, it can allow us to mentally rehearse upcoming events, or solve problems we might encounter.
In other words, it allows the brain to work out possible futures for us.
So, mind wandering is not always a failure of self-control that is inevitably linked to mistakes.
The key is whether it is intentional or not.
The incubation effect: this is simply that taking a break from a problem often brings an insight later on.
We know it from experience and psychological research has proven it.
About 50 different studies have been carried out on the incubation effect and three-quarters of them find an effect.
Mind wandering probably plays an important role in the process of creative problem-solving.
A study has found that a moderately engaging activity like showering or walking produces more creative ideas.
They appear to work because they engage the mind somewhat, but also allow it freedom to wander.
Mind wandering is often seen in a negative way, though, and with good reason.
The minds of people with depressive tendencies wander in characteristic ways, research finds.
Depressive people find their thoughts automatically narrowing to negative past events.
Instead of naturally jumping to other more positive topics, as other people’s do, their thoughts focus on the negative.
This style of thinking is called rumination, and is strongly linked to depression.
Mind wandering towards depressive thoughts is a key sign of depressive tendencies, but is not the usual pattern for people.
When a person starts to blink more rapidly, it suggests their mind is wandering, research finds.
Blinking sets up a tiny barrier against the outside world, allowing the brain to focus on something different.
The researchers were inspired by neuroscientific findings that parts of the brain are less active when the mind wanders.
Dr Daniel Smilek, the study’s first author, said:
“And we thought, OK, if that’s the case, maybe we’d see that the body would start to do things to prevent the brain from receiving external information.
The simplest thing that might happen is you might close your eyes more.”
They were right — the results showed people blinked more when they had switched off from the text and were thinking of something else.
Paying attention to what you are reading can be hard — especially in this age of endless distraction.
Practising meditation, though, can help improve your focus while reading, a study finds.
Maintaining attention when reading can be difficult, as the study’s authors write:
“It is challenging for individuals to maintain their attention on ongoing cognitive tasks without being distracted by task-unrelated thought.
The wandering mind is thus a considerable obstacle when attention must be maintained over time.
Mental training through meditation has been proposed as an effective method of attenuating the ebb and flow of attention to thoughts and feelings that distract from one’s foremost present goals.”
A lack of concentration can be combated using a short form of mindfulness training, a study of undergraduates finds.
Just ten minutes of mindfulness each day is also an effective treatment against repetitive anxious thoughts, research reveals.
People in the study who meditated for only a short period found it easier to focus on their present-moment external experience rather than their internal thoughts.
Mr Mengran Xu, the study’s first author, said:
“Our results indicate that mindfulness training may have protective effects on mind wandering for anxious individuals.
We also found that meditation practice appears to help anxious people to shift their attention from their own internal worries to the present-moment external world, which enables better focus on a task at hand.”
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