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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How modern GPS technology affects our navigational neurons and mental maps.
The mind has a tendency to search for illusory correlations everywhere, whether they mean anything or not.
The mind has a tendency to search for illusory correlations everywhere, whether they mean anything or not.
Correlations in statistics are when there appears to be a relationship between two variables.
As one thing changes, so does the other.
For example, as children age their shoe size gets larger, or the more I practice the better I get at tennis.
We say there is a correlation between age and foot size and a correlation between practice and prowess at tennis.
However, there are also many things that just happen to change together, but are not really related.
For example, when you turn the light on and there’s a power-cut, or when you stamp your foot and there’s a simultaneous clap of thunder.
For a single moment, you feel like you’ve got super-powers, but then you notice it is just an illusory correlation.
It demonstrates a common phrase in statistics: “correlation does not imply causation”.
However, our minds have a tendency to search out these types of correlations, not always with the best result.
To see how easily the mind jumps to the wrong conclusions, try virtually taking part in a little experiment.
Imagine that you are presented with information about two groups of people about which you know nothing.
Let’s call them the Azaleans and the Begonians.
For each group you are given a list of positive and negative behaviours.
A good one might be: an Azalean was seen helping an old lady across the road.
A bad one might be: a Begonian urinated in the street.
So, you read this list of good and bad behaviours about the Azaleans and Begonians and afterwards you make some judgements about them.
How often do they perform good and bad behaviours and what are they?
What you notice is that it’s the Begonians that seem dodgy.
They are the ones more often to be found shoving burgers into mailboxes and ringing doorbells and running away.
The Azaleans, in contrast, are a sounder bunch; certainly not blameless, but overall better people.
While you’re happy with the judgement, you’re in for a shock.
What’s revealed to you afterwards is that actually the ratio of good to bad behaviours listed for both the Azaleans and Begonians was exactly the same.
For the Azaleans, 18 positive behaviours were listed along with 8 negative.
For the Begonians it was 9 positive and 4 negative.
In reality, you just had less information about the Begonians.
What happened was that you built up illusory correlations between more frequent bad behaviours and the Begonians; they weren’t more frequent, however, they just seemed that way.
When the experiment is over you find out that most other people had done exactly the same thing, concluding that the Begonians were worse people than the Azaleans.
This experimental method is actually from a classic study by Hamilton and Gifford (1976), which is all about how we perceive other people’s positive and negative traits.
In the experiment, people had different perceptions of the two groups, good for the majority and bad for the minority, purely because they had more information about the majority.
It’s not hard to see why this sort of process might contribute to the formation of prejudice in society at large.
Now, psychologists have not agreed how to explain this and other types of illusory correlations.
One explanation is that people over-estimate the diagnostic power of infrequent events.
In other words: if there is only one Martian who lives in your street and he/she/it listens to skiffle music, then you tend to think that all Martians must like skiffle.
On the other hand if half the street is filled with law-abiding Martians, only a few of whom like skiffle, you’ll guess that it’s only a minority interest.
Others say that illusory correlations are down to how memory or learning works or just a function of incomplete information.
Whatever the explanation, we do see these illusory correlations everywhere.
Here’s an example of a much less subtle type of illusory correlation from the world of CEOs.
When you are deciding what to pay a CEO, what factors do you take into account?
I’m sure you can list a few but what about golfing ability?
Would you pay a CEO more because they were better at golf?
No?
One analysis has looked at the correlation between golfing ability and American CEO pay (Hogarth & Kolev, 2010).
It found that as golfing ability improved, their pay went up.
Non-golfers were, on average, the lowest paid of all.
And here’s the kicker: the better the CEOs were at golf, the worse their stocks performed.
So, in people’s minds being good at golf was associated with more pay, but in reality it was associated with worse performance!
The assumption is that there’s an illusory correlation going on here.
Somehow it’s assumed that because someone is good at golf, they must also be good at other stuff, like running a multinational corporation, and so they get paid more.
Sticking with the business theme, all sorts of illusory correlations exist in equity markets.
One sign that traders sometimes use to predict price movements is the ‘head-and-shoulders’ chart.
It’s when the stock’s price movement looks like a person’s head and shoulders: in other words, two smaller peaks with one big peak in between.
Although it’s considered a reliable signal, and is associated with increased trading, the head-and-shoulders shape on the chart doesn’t profitably predict price fluctuations (Bender & Simon, 2012).
It’s just another illusory correlation: what our meaning-hungry minds are seeing everywhere.
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Decision-making skills and processes can be hard, but psychological research can help us combat our mind’s inherent flaws.
Decision-making skills and processes can be hard, but psychological research can help us combat our mind’s inherent flaws.
Accurate decision-making — about investments, business, relationships and the rest — is very difficult.
Our minds are wonderful and fabulously complex, but not without flaws.
In many ways, while the mind is amazing, it is also a clumsy, cobbled together contraption with many predictable foibles.
One of the biggest challenges to decision-making is that fact that we effectively each have two people inside us.
One is a party animal.
He wants to get as much pleasure as he can right now, to eat, drink and be merry.
The other is the boring guy.
The kind who saves for a rainy day, eats healthily, never drinks too much and does the ‘right thing’.
We’ll call the first guy ‘Want’ and the second guy ‘Should’.
The mental battle between Want and Should has been going on since most of us can remember.
Here some tips drawn from psychological research on the best ways to improve your decision-making skills in the face of these two sides of yourself.
One of the best ways to fox the Want guy is to carry out decision-making in advance.
When we make decisions in advance it’s Should that’s in charge.
Whatever area of life, whether it’s financial, dietary, work or any other, if you make the decision in advance, you’re likely to cut down on detrimental outcomes.
Studies find that when people choose things without comparing the options their Want guy easily gets out of control.
Without comparisons, it’s easier for the Want guy to justify the bad decision.
By comparing options, though, research finds that people are better able to make the choice that is in their long-term interests.
Remember that our brains are not good at evaluating evidence dispassionately.
Force yourself to generate alternatives.
Research has demonstrated the value of counter-factual thinking: thinking about the opposite helps us make better decisions.
Weight up costs and benefits is common decision-making advice, but actually quite tricky to do.
Research shows that our minds prefer to consider either costs or benefits; taking both into account takes considerable effort.
One factor we often forget is the ‘opportunity cost’: when we do one thing, we can’t be doing something else.
When I watch TV the benefit might be relaxation and enjoyment but the cost is that I can’t be reading that mind-improving book that’s being lying around for weeks.
Our memories are highly contextual so the background to any issue we consider has a huge impact on how we view it.
Politicians, advertisers and other influencers use framing extensively to persuade us of their point of view.
You can fight back by reframing the decision — think about the problem your own way, not the way others want you to.
When evaluating evidence for decision-making, remember that correlation does not equal causation.
To explain: there’s a clear correlation between foot size and being richer, owning your own house and having a better education.
On the other hand people with smaller feet are often still struggling with potty training.
Guessed it yet?
People with small feet are usually children, so of course they have less money, don’t own their own houses and, haven’t been to school yet.
Correlation doesn’t equal causation.
The best of decision-making intentions often break down in the face of vicious temptation.
People find it difficult to predict just how far off course their emotions can pull them (e.g. the projection bias).
Use any method you can to counter your impulsivity: cancel the credit card, join a Christmas Club, avoid the confectionary store.
It’s all about planning ahead.
One way of improving decision-making in the face of impulsivity is by using commitment devices.
We can stop ourselves acting on impulse by committing ourselves to a course of action that is in our long-term interests.
Commitment devices allow us to take the choice away from the Want guy.
Here are some methods people use to pre-commit to long-term interests:
Commitment devices are best when they are tailored to your own psychological preferences and circumstances.
For example, if you’re well-off then a year’s gym membership might not be enough commitment to make you exercise.
Or, if you don’t care about eating six small packets of a ‘bad’ food, one after the other, then this technique won’t work either.
You’ll have to discover what type of commitment device works for your own personal decision-making skills.
When decision-making, focus on concrete plans and goals.
Humans are better at concrete goals; abstract goals like ‘read more’ or ‘lose weight’ get lost in the mix.
Substitute these with: ‘read this book by next Tuesday’ and ‘don’t buy any junk food on the weekly shop’.
It is clearly better to carry out decision-making when relaxed and rested.
That is because feeling stressed changes the way people balance risk against reward, psychologists have found (Mather & Lighthall, 2012).
Surprisingly, being under stress makes people focus on the positive more than they would otherwise.
Professor Mara Mather, who co-authored the research, said:
“Stress seems to help people learn from positive feedback and impairs their learning from negative feedback.”
For example, imagine a person deciding whether to take a new job.
When under stress, they might give more weight to benefits of a higher salary while ignoring the longer commute.
When not under stress, though, the negative aspects of the choice would matter more.
When we think someone will check up on us we make more cognitive effort, leading to better decision-making.
Even if no-one is checking up on you, imagine their reaction if they did: would you be proud of your decision?
All sorts of weird things start happening when we imagine the choice we are making right now as one in a series.
Often not good things.
We tell ourselves things like: “I’ll have that cake now, then I’ll eat healthily for the rest of the week”.
No.
No ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ and no tortuous logic to get what we want.
Shut the Want guy down by making one-shot decisions.
Am I going to be good or bad, right here, right now?
When making decisions we are influenced by whatever thoughts and emotions are swirling around in our heads at that moment.
Help distance yourself by thinking about how this decision will affect you in the future.
Big decisions are always better made after a night’s sleep.
Again, it’s common advice but it can be surprisingly difficult to distance yourself.
It’s so easy for us to be swayed by vivid or personal stories when decision-making.
Remember that our minds are naturally fascinated and influenced by the sensational at the cost of quotidian.
Look carefully at the information source – are you being manipulated?
Some decisions are more important than others.
Not all decisions warrant effortful deliberation: sometimes it’s better just to choose and be done with it.
The trick is knowing which is which – experience should provide strong clues.
The best time to make decisions is when you are not hungry.
Being hungry makes people think more short-term — not just about food, but across many areas, including money (Skrynka & Vincent, 2019).
Hungry people are willing to settle for smaller rewards that they can get sooner, ignoring the chance to make more money by waiting.
Hunger ruins people’s self-control, making them grasp for rewards they would otherwise be prepared to wait for.
Dr Benjamin Vincent, study co-author, said:
“People generally know that when they are hungry they shouldn’t really go food shopping because they are more likely to make choices that are either unhealthy or indulgent.
Our research suggests this could have an impact on other kinds of decisions as well.
Say you were going to speak with a pensions or mortgage advisor – doing so while hungry might make you care a bit more about immediate gratification at the expense of a potentially more rosy future.”
This sounds a little vacuous, but research does suggest that just reminding ourselves to think rationally could help us make better decisions.
Consciously trying to think rationally will also help activate all the other techniques described here.
Our memories being what they are, this is no bad thing.
This article is based on two sources:
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