Hot answers tagged performance
19
I've also observed this behaviour in friends, and was curious to see what research has been done on the topic. Here's what I found (summary at the end).
Sechrest and Flores (1971) study of leg-jiggling
Sechrest and Flores (1971) performed an observational study of the prevalence of leg-jiggling
leg jiggling was defined as a vertical, rhythmic ...
16
I think you have to be careful with the proposition that "rewards do not increase performance on non-rudimentary tasks". The experiments that Dan Pink cites involve experiments where participants are in a room and are supervised by an experimenter while they complete a task. This social pressure by the experimenter may well be enough for participants to be ...
13
The answer to this question will depend on how you construe 'cognitive abilities.' For instance, for certain formulations the answer is trivially yes: an economist who learns psychology may come away with psychological knowledge that could help his economics, like how to space out his studying to maximally improve retention; or how to deal with the ...
10
I don't know of a study that tries to answer your specific question but you might want to have a look at illusory superiority, "a cognitive bias that causes people to overestimate their positive qualities and abilities and to underestimate their negative qualities, relative to others" (wikipedia).
I can especially recommend the paper by Dunning and Kruger ...
10
That was an interesting TED Talk, I enjoyed it. Motivation is a very complex, but fascinating thing to think of. You're asking if those three things he listed are the most important aspects to motivation, but I'm not sure the answer can be straightforward. So let's talk about what motivation is first, before talking about how those three things relate to ...
10
It basically depends on how the particular musical performance is perceived by the listener. Cognitive process of listening seems to be comprise several layers, which follows a bottom-up direction.
First step is to decode relevant signal(s), among a complex package of sound. This is where the irrelevant noise is eliminated. Can music be eliminated in this ...
10
There is a fundamental concept in motivation illustrating this effect- a bunch of studies have been done which I don't have the time of digging up citations for now, but the central findings are as follows:
If the incentive (external reward) for a non-trivial task becomes too salient, the individual is driven to complete the task for that reward and will ...
6
The results are mixed.
It's well known that in general people will consider themselves above average in most areas, and driving is no exception Do expert drivers have a reduced illusion of superiority?
Expert police drivers rated themselves as superior to equally qualified drivers, to the same degree as novices, Cohen’s d = .03 ns. Despite their ...
6
There are two types of learning - knowledge and skills. Knowledge can be used in many different contexts, but skills are extremely narrow and precise. For example, subjects trained in memorizing numbers do not have any better ability at memorizing lists of words than untrained individuals.
We tend to think that practicing mental tasks must also have some ...
5
One thing to think about is what's meant by "performance." In basic cognitive tasks (e.g., memory experiments), changing the payoff matrix (and thus motivational factors) often influences bias but not discrimination -- in other words, upping the ante, so to speak, makes individuals more conservative (or careful) but doesn't much change their overall ...
5
In general, I'd hypothesise that "memory-training" programs will not lead to domain-general increases in fluid intelligence nor working memory.
As general background, you might want to check out the literature on expert memory.
Practice is very effective at improving performance on the practised task. Transfer is real and does exist, but it is often small ...
5
General thoughts on factors influencing test-retest correlations
From a theoretical perspective, it makes sense that groups that experience temporary states that lower state intelligence or lead to a poorer test taking orientation would have lower test-retest cognitive test correlations. By lower state intelligence, I'm referring to states of being such as ...
5
High incentives (especially related to time needed to finish a task) makes one very concentrated but at the same time leaves little opportunity to look outsid the box (i.e. to develop a creative approach, sometimes needed to complete a non-rudimentary task).
For a popular science/economics talk, see also:
...
5
Probably the most striking evidence of "happiness homeostasis" is a now classic study by Brickman, Coates and Bulman (1978) which compared the self-reported happiness of lottery winners and accident victims with a control group. The following quote describes the part of the outcome you'd be interested in succinctly:
Lottery winners and controls were not ...
5
Depending on your exact definition of what you call a "context switch" there is some research available. There is plenty of research on a more high-level (multi-tasking) definition of context switches. Usually when I read about context switches they refer to this higher level concept, unlike the study you linked to which compares the cost of switching ...
4
Summary of Kluemper et al 2012
I had a read through the article by Kluemper et al (2012) mentioned in the answer by John Pick. The following summarises some key points.
After discussing the broader context of using social networks to measure personality, Kluemper et al (2012) cited the findings of a couple of existing studies:
Karl, Peluchette, and ...
4
I've been interested in this issue from another direction, namely, in how to model the acquisition of hierarchically decomposeable behaviors of the type you describe; and how these behaviors, once acquired, can be used as 'high order primitives' to bootstrap other learning. This is an important issue for artificial intelligence and machine learning, in ...
4
Benefits of touch typing on task performance:
I assume that when comparing skilled individuals, two handed touch typing on a traditional keyboard is faster, more reliable, and more automatic, than the other methods of text input that you mention (e.g., phone or tablet keyboards). These advantages are discussed here.
Faster input means that ideas can be ...
4
Yes, brain power is eroded via a lack of practice. This occurs through the processes called synaptic pruning and brain plasticity.
I will leave you with a very basic answer as I am unsure of your level of understanding of cognitive processes. First, you must understand neurons. Then, you can begin to understand synaptic pruning and brain plasticity. ...
3
A theory which I believe explains this is the ground-breaking work that Carol Dweck has done on mindsets and how they relate to performance.
To recap, People can have either a fixed mindset where they view abilities as fixed, are more driven by performance goals and use helpless strategies when confronted with tasks beyond their capabilities. If given a ...
3
The first thing that comes to mind when reading this is diffusion of responsibility. Because responsibility has not been explicitly assigned, as it would be in a one-on-one meeting, people tend to feel like they do not need to do anything.
3
Based on the Anderson cite, I'm assuming you've looked a bit more at the ACT-R literature-- task analysis is a common prerequisite for creating ACT-R models and you'll find lots of tasks modeled as a series of sub-tasks in a goal hierarchy. Offhand, though, I don't know any ACT-R articles that look specifically at your question of interest...
On a different ...
3
Fortin and Masse (2000) explored the effect of expecting an interruption on the ability to accurately produce a timing interval (e.g., producing a 2000 millisecond timing interval):
From the abstract:
The interference from nontemporal processing on concurrent time
estimation is usually attributed to disruption in timing caused by
artentional ...
3
There's one condition that is linked to negative cognitive effects after masturbation in a small subset of population, it is called Post Orgasmic Illness Syndrome (POIS):
The sufferer experiences mental symptoms, physical symptoms, or both.
Common mental symptoms include cognitive dysfunction, intense
discomfort, irritability, anxiety, craving for ...
3
Not using your brain might well be deleterious, but it's impossible not to use your brain unless you're in a coma or something. There are some cool studies on plasticity (see Shayna's answer above) in amputees, where the parts of the brain that control the amputated limb go unused but are taken up by other functions instead.
However, "perpetual brain ...
2
CHCH mentions in the comments that Attentional Blink has been shown to correlate with operation span, a component of working memory. (Colzato et al., 2007)
It has also been demonstrated that working memory correlates highly with general intelligence. (Colom et al., 2004)
So yes, performance on an attentional blink task correlates with intelligence scores.
...
2
Bacon and Bean (2006) discuss the issue of the reliability and validity of GPA.
They report the results of two studies that looked at the reliability of GPA in samples of business students at the same university.
Average intercourse grade correlations were typically between $\bar{r} =.18$ and $\bar{r} =.38$.
Estimates of reliability for GPA ranged from .67 ...
2
Disclaimer: As you have noted yourself, there aren't very many scientific researches on the topic. The only main points that I can derive are generally of blogs or sketchy speculations. As such, you are supposed to take this answer with a grain of salt.
Interesting Thing of the Day notes that polyphasic sleep may make the person awake and alert but have ...
2
The distinction between maximum and typical performance was originally established by Sackett et al. (1988), and since then, how to predict either and their relation to one another seems to have been a very active area of research. In fact, there is a prohibitively large literature on the matter for a full review.
Fortunately, your questions were recently ...
2
The paper referred to in the OP's media link is free online. It reviews the literature and presents its own new studies as well:
KLUEMPER, D. H., ROSEN, P. A. and MOSSHOLDER, K. W. (2012), Social Networking Websites, Personality Ratings, and the Organizational Context: More Than Meets the Eye?. Journal of Applied Social Psychology. doi: ...
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