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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Rejecting a belief in free will is dangerous for society as it is linked to all sorts of antisocial behaviours, psychologists find.
Rejecting a belief in free will is dangerous for society as it is linked to all sorts of antisocial behaviours, psychologists find.
Having free will in psychology means having the capacity to choose between different possible courses of action.
Chances are you believe that people have free will – I do too.
To me it seems that one moment I want cereal and soon I have it.
Next, I want to ride my bicycle and soon I am.
Later I have an itchy nose, and, in no time at all, it is scratched.
But, say some scientists and philosophers, this sense of agency is an illusion: you were hungry and that’s why you ‘wanted’ cereal; you were bored and fed up of being inside so you ‘decided’ to get some exercise; and as for itchy noses, well there is a biological cause for that as well.
From a determinist viewpoint each of these actions, and their causes, as well as their causes and their causes can be traced right back to my birth, then back through my parents’ lives, then right back, like clockwork, to the beginning of the universe.
The strong determinist view – that we’re locked in an unchanging web of cause and effect going right back to the big bang – is repulsive to many.
And quite naturally so, as free will forms the backbone of so many of society’s structures.
The criminal justice system is built on the idea that people can choose whether to obey the law or not, therefore people who don’t obey should be punished.
Similarly many religious and/or philosophical systems of thought have the notion of free will at their heart.
Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre emphasised the connection between freedom and responsibility.
He thought we must take responsibility for our choices, and that taking responsibility was at the heart of a life well lived.
This debate about free will is so interesting – and knotted – that philosophers can’t keep away from it; but psychologists, on the other hand, perhaps sensing no end to the argument, can’t help their minds wandering away to more practical points.
They have focused more on how beliefs in free will might affect our behaviour and whether, more generally, there might be some reason why we seem predisposed to think we have it.
Baumeister, Masicampo and DeWall (2009) theorise that a belief in free will may be partly what oils the wheels of society, what encourages us to treat each other respectfully.
They explore this theory with three psychology studies, two on helping behaviours and one on aggression.
In the first psychology experiment, Baumeister and colleagues wanted to see how a belief in free will affected how much people were willing to help others.
To manipulate their belief in free will, participants read statements that either supported free will, supported determinism or had no bearing on the debate.
A separate psychology study confirmed that this really was enough to shift people’s thoughts towards determinism or towards free will.
Participants then read scenarios in which helping behaviours were explored, for example by asking about giving money to a homeless person.
They were asked to rate how much help they would provide to the people in these scenarios.
The results showed that, as Baumeister and colleagues predicted, people whose thoughts had been pushed more towards free will were more likely to be helpful than those whose thoughts were pushed towards determinism.
So, it seems that people really are more helpful when they think they are free to choose as compared to when they believe their actions are pre-determined.
Baumeister and colleagues argue that the belief that behaviour is pre-determined encourages people to behave automatically, and often automatic behaviour is selfish.
Interestingly, there was no difference seen between the free will condition and the neutral condition.
What this suggests is that most people do already believe in free and don’t require extra encouragement.
Of course we each differ in the amount we believe in free will and this may well affect how much help we are prepared to offer others.
A second psychology study by Baumeister and colleagues examined individual differences looking for an association between believing in free will and helping behaviours.
Consistent with the previous experiment they found that people who had a ‘chronic disbelief’ in free will were less likely to be helpful to others.
The final psychology experiment flipped the question around: instead of looking at prosocial behaviours they looked at antisocial behaviours.
If a disbelief in free will makes people less helpful, perhaps it also makes them more likely to behave aggressively.
As before participant’s thoughts were experimentally shifted towards free will or determinism and then their aggressive tendencies were measured.
Instead of having people beating each other up in the lab, they chose a more indirect expression of aggression: putting spicy sauce on another person’s food.
Participants were introduced to a study about food preferences which, with some complicated manoeuvring, they were encouraged to think had nothing to do with previous statements they read out about free will or determinism.
Then they were told to prepare a plate of food for someone else to taste.
One of the ingredients they could choose was a hot salsa sauce.
The experimenters were interested in whether a belief in free will affected the amount of sauce participants put on the plate.
When the participants left, the experimenters measured how much hot sauce they put on the plate.
Those who had been primed to think more deterministically had spiced up the food, on average, twice as much as those who were primed to think in terms of free will.
This seemed to have nothing to do with being more generous as they didn’t add more of other non-spicy foods, like cheese, to the plate.
These experiments aren’t the first to examine how a belief in free will (or otherwise) affects our behaviour.
In a study Vohs and Schooler (2008) also found that a belief in free will seems to have a positive effect on people’s behaviour.
In that experiment participants whose disbelief in free will was encouraged were more likely to cheat on a test.
These studies, then, point out the positive effect of free will on a variety of behaviours that most people would consider beneficial.
Indeed, it seems that most of us already have a firm belief in free will and so we’re already benefiting.
Practically, the danger is that our thoughts take a more deterministic turn and we move towards more aggression and cheating and away from helping behaviours.
This leaves us with a serious problem.
If we think scientifically about the world then we have to accept that one thing really does lead to another; the reason I ‘decide’ to eat cereal is that I’m hungry, so in some sense the determinist is right.
But, a disbelief in free will is not only repugnant, it’s also dangerous for society.
If we don’t have free will, a perverse kind of anarchism emerges, one which seems to encourage us to act any way we choose.
After all, if we don’t have free will, then we’re not to blame for anything we do.
One way some philosophers have tried to resolve this conflict is by pointing out that determinism and free will are not necessarily incompatible.
Using everyday notions of free will philosophers have put forward a viewpoint that tries to integrate the two (see philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett’s book ‘Freedom Evolves’ for a cognitive perspective).
Classical compatibilists argue that we have free will if we have the power and ability to do things that we want to do.
For example, say I want to go and buy a pint of milk for my cereal, and the shop is open, and I can get there, and I have money.
For a compatibilist I have free will if I can choose to go, or, alternatively, not go.
The fact that I do actually go (mainly because I’m hungry and want to eat cereal) doesn’t necessarily mean that I didn’t have the choice not to go.
Compatibilists emphasise this idea that we have free will because we could have chosen to do otherwise, even if we didn’t.
This idea that we ‘could have done otherwise’ is a powerful one, and one that appeals to our everyday experience.
It doesn’t solve the dilemma of determinism but at least it provides a stick with which to fend it off.
So when one person chooses not to help another, or chooses to behave aggressively, there must be reasons for that behaviour, many of which might appear to deny their responsibility.
Ultimately, though, the proponent of free will has to argue this person could always have chosen to do otherwise.
We have to cling to this belief, don’t we?
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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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