Hot answers tagged cognitive-psychology
31
Yes, writing increases the modality and attention given to a piece of information. Increasing the effort and the ways that you have experienced a bit of information helps you encode that information better; this is Elaborative Encoding. Increas
More generally the more deeply you process a thing the more likely you are to properly encode the memory for ...
25
Negative Transfer
A common scientific term to describe what you are talking about is called negative transfer. I.e., where learning one skill actually results in lower performance on another skill. This is contrasted with positive transfer, when learning one skill facilitates performance on another skill. In general (although I don't have refs on hands) ...
23
There are two great TED talks that together help shed some light on your question:
David Deutsch (2005) "A new way to explain explanation", and
Richard Dawkins (2009) "Why the universe seems so strange"
At a fundamental level, science is about explanation (and sometimes using that explanation to make predictions). Thus, to most people, science is useless ...
15
It's theorized that there is a Critical Period of language development in children below the age of five (roughly, as age ranges always are in Developmental Psychology).
Probably the most significant and readily verifiable finding is that a critical period exists for the learning of Phonemes. Research has suggested children readily differentiate phonemes ...
15
General thoughts on brain training:
Lumosity is a commercial tool that aims to improve brain functioning. In general, I am sceptical of the potential for "brain training programs" to improve cognitive functioning in a generalised way (e.g., see this Nature discussion). Practice is powerful, but tends to be domain specific. So if you want to become skilled ...
14
As far as I know, there is no accepted science to dream interpretation. In fact, there's no science to it at all. Evidence has shown that indeed, dreaming draws material from people, places, and things in our lives, but there's absolutely no scientific data out there (that I'm familiar with) that links dreams to anything meaningful in our actual daily lives.
...
12
I'm going to disagree with Ben here. My colleague Adam Putnam has spent several years researching whether it's best for memory to speak, write, or even think particular responses out loud. His research has continued to turn up no differences between these different modalities, despite what we know about transfer-appropriate processing and elaborative ...
11
Analgesia is the term used for inability to feel pain.
Hypoalgesia is the term for low sensitivity to pain.
Hereditary sensory neuropathy and Congenital insensitivity to pain are two known syndromes that contain these deficits as their symptoms.
11
The Directory of Open Access Journals is a great place to start when searching for Open Access Journals in any field.
You can browse through journals for the specific subject areas like Psychology or Neurology, or you can search for journals or articles containing certain keywords.
The DOAJ lists articles in multiple languages as well, not just English ...
11
One relevant study by Sparrow et al. (2011) that came out last year in Science was on the "Google effect": When subjects expected that they'd be able to have later access to information, their memory was poorer for it. We can extrapolate to smartphones -- if individuals know they have information at their fingertips, they don't need to worry so much about ...
10
Mahmoud A. Wahba, Lawrence G. Bridwell, Maslow reconsidered: A review of research on the need hierarchy theory (1976), or a free pdf scan here
Its abstract says:
The uncritical acceptance of Maslow's need hierarchy theory despite the lack of empirical evidence is discussed and the need for a review of recent empirical evidence is emphasized. A review ...
10
I think cognitive scientists would say that these views are compatible, insofar as cogsci admits results from behaviorism as valid results to be explained by understanding the cognitive constructs underlying them. Obviously (they would say) we have minds, our minds arise from physical processes in our brains, and as such have internal states that sometimes ...
10
One theory that may explain this is is Kahneman and Tversky's anchoring heuristic.
If you ask how much fuel the space shuttle needs, most people don't have the proper background knowledge to answer this accurately. Instead, they'll rely on a piece of information they do know--e.g., how much fuel a car needs--and adjust from there. Responses will be biased ...
10
I can speak to this question somewhat from a cognitive psychology standpoint. We memory researchers would think of text highlighting like this in terms of distinctiveness. (An article by McDaniel and Bugg (2008) may shed some light.) Simply put, highlighting a word in a different color than the rest of the text draws what we call item-specific processing ...
9
I'm not familiar with the paper Ofri cites, but will agree with the OP that recognition is generally considered to be an easier task than recollection, and successful recognition considered weaker evidence for any particular memory phenomenon. One common explanation is that recognition can manifest psychologically simply as a result of the increased ...
9
It is not. At least not always: In this famous experiment Tulving and Thomson show that under certain circumstances recall can be better than recognition.
It seems that the reason why recognition is usually more accurate than recall, is the context. Usually, the context in the recognition test is very similar to the conditions in the learning phase - the ...
9
As Schroedinger's Cat pointed out, there's no clear dividing line between "brainwashing" and the normal processes of growing up in or assimilating into a culture or social group. Even in the case of deliberate, forced procedures, it can be unclear -- for example, the US military has recruits do drills and engage in synchronized practices that we know to ...
9
Particulalry short wavelengths (such a UV light) have been shown to suppress melatonin[1], a hormone that regulates sleep. The authors also show that:
All subjects had an elevated cortisol level in the 90 minutes prior to
onset of light exposure compared with the corresponding clock time on
the previous day
So there's a kind daily memory in the ...
8
The speech error taxonomy on Wikipedia that Jeromy Anglim links to in his answer is pretty comprehensive. If you're interested in learning more, I would suggest reading some articles by Gary Dell (e.g., Dell, 1986). He is, in my opinion, the expert in this domain. He has used neural networks to explain speech errors of different types.
When mentally ...
8
This is referred to as The Forer Effect after Bertram Forer.
Wikipedia describes it accurately:
The Forer effect (also called the Barnum Effect after P.T. Barnum's observation that "we've got something for everyone") is the observation that individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored ...
8
A good place to start for a high level understanding of all perception and action is Jaoquin Fuster's perception-action cycle. As he says, it's a "cybernetic cycle linking the organism to its environment". He describes two moieties of the brain, posterior sensation moiety, and the anterior behavioral moiety. Information cycles between perception, ...
8
The term seems to come from David C. Geary's 1995 article. Here's the abstract with full-text link below:
An evolution-based framework for understanding biological and cultural
influences on children's cognitive and academic development is
presented. The utility of this framework is illustrated within the
mathematical domain and serves as a ...
8
No, these are not examples of intuition, but examples of procedural memory (or automaticity). Procedural memory is the ability to perform certain tasks without conscious awareness.
8
Using the English language, given two sentences that say the same thing, what makes one more readable than the other? Usually terseness while retaining clarity and removing ambiguity.
The exact same things make code more readable. Remove everything that doesn't add anything, but don't remove things that do add information. And avoid ambiguity.
In code, we ...
8
I would go with Physics.
Physicists study the world using mathematics, while mathematicians study mathematics itself which is a construct that does not necessarily exist in the real world (Albert Einstein once said: "as far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."). ...
7
Confirmation bias (Wikipedia) also seems relevant:
Confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias, myside bias or verification bias) is a tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect ...
7
In the book "Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief", Wolpert (2007) discusses the evolutionary origins of belief.
Although I haven't read it yet, abc news reviewed the book.
Wolpert argues that our wide range of beliefs, some of which are
clearly false, grew out of a uniquely human trait. Alone in the animal
...
7
To take your concrete examples, there are several broad distinctions relevant to comparing a task like chess and a task like playing Pac Man.
Cognitive versus psychomotor skill
Research on learning and task performance is divided into various domains of tasks. Two such domains are cognitive, of which chess would be an example, and psychomotor, of which ...
7
The Wikipedia article no longer makes reference to the phenomenon that you quote (to my inspection), so I'm not entirely sure if that assertion was edited out as an inaccuracy on someone's part. I did find some information on visual perception and high frequency flicker that might point to some of the significance of the 60 Hz refresh rate of a monitor.
At ...
7
As Josh Gitlin said, imagining something activates more or less the same parts of the brain as actually experiencing it. Behrmann (2000) is a good introduction to this in the visual domain, though that article is a bit outdated now. There is also a lot of evidence that representations of meanings (semantic memory) involve a distributed network of perceptual ...
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