Questions tagged [cognitive-psychology]
For questions focusing on the interaction of many internal mental processes. If your question involves only one of memory, attention, language, decision-making, or perception then use the associated specialized tag instead of cognitive-psychology.
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What makes people easily subscribe to pseudoscientific theories?
There are many theories/disciplines that have been categorized as pseudoscience in the scientific community.
The list includes many things that are regularly even quoted in media like graphology, ...
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Does writing something down help memorize it?
This is a question inspired by this recent question on the Chinese Language & Usage website.
Someone asked why they needed to learn how to write Chinese characters, since today we mostly use ...
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By learning to read and write upside down, what did I do to myself?
If you've ever read Encyclopedia Brown books, you'll be familiar with the backwards writing in the back of the book that explains the solution to the case.
When I was in my mid-late teens (I don't ...
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Does evidence support Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs?
Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs (shown below) is a popular concept and is often taught in basic psychology courses, and often less objectively taught in Business and Marketing courses.
A common problem ...
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What is the current "accepted" science behind dream interpretation?
I'm doing some casual reading about dream interpretation (meaning I'm reading the wikipedia entry) and the article mentions that there are several ways of thinking about dreams from a psychological ...
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Is multitasking a myth?
Often, the term 'multitasking' is applied to very busy and 'wired' people. There is an adage that women multitask better than men.
My question is, do we actually multitask? If so, what are the ...
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How valid is Lumosity's Brain Performance Index and what normative information is available?
Background
There is a test called Lumosity's Brain Performance Index.
A sample profile of scores might be:
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Why do you sometimes write down one word while actually intending to write another?
I've caught myself writing (typing) "possible" instead of "possibly" a few times over the past few days, while I do intend to write "possibly". Only upon rereading the sentence I notice my mistake.
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Is there psychoactive music?
Listen to this music for X minutes to observe Y result. Is there something like that that has been demonstrated to work for general public?
The only example of an experiment that is similar that ...
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Is it possible to think in a second language?
Those who have learned a second language are guaranteed to consciously think of words and their corresponding meaning in your native language or vice versa.
This is common with more "complex" ...
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Is extreme empathy and compassion considered a disorder?
Can extreme empathy and compassion get to a point where it is considered a disorder?
For example, if someone is so empathetic, when feeling someones pain it negatively affects their life to the same ...
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What, if anything, sets humans apart from other species?
As I grew up, I was taught that the difference between humans and animals was that human beings have free will and animals do not. The basis is that animals will act accordingly to the nature of their ...
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Why are people inclined to praise or fear the unknown?
Human beings are inclined to "praise" the unknown, and are often afraid of the unknown. This inclination has led to the creation of mythology and many gods. To this date we are still carrying this ...
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Is the mathematician's activity psychologically healthy?
I am a professional mathematician, and I regularly meet other mathematicians.
I have come to wonder if there is something like a slight neurosis, specific to this activity.
To be more precise, let ...
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How well can a human-generated "random number" be predicted?
For example, if i ask an individual to write a 20-number-long sequence of random numbers from 0 to 10. How well can I predict the 20th number from the initial 19?
More generally,
How well can ...
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Effect of words highlighting on reading comprehension
I'm interested if there are studies dealing with text understanding and POS (part of speech) coloring, or coloring syntactic/semantic information. The studies should solve the questions like:
Which ...
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What is the primary source of the "mount stupid" graphic?
Online descriptions of the Dunning-Kruger effect are often accompanied by a "mount stupid" graphic similar to the below - from a Psychology Today article:
However, the research paper does not contain ...
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Is it possible to run multiple thought processes concurrently?
For example, let's say I have a friend sprinting a 50m distance and that friend wants me to time the race, but I don't have a stopwatch so I have to count "manually". Can I count while simultaneously ...
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Kahneman's add one / three exercise
In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman describes a mental exercise which he calls Add One:
To start, make up several strings of 4 digits, all different, and write each string on an ...
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Why do people fear statistically unlikely things?
Over 10 times more people die in circulatory diseases than accidents (source). Nevertheless people (in general) fear accidents more than circulatory disease. There are statistically even more ...
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Thinking, Fast and Slow vs. Mindfulness vs. Flow
I've been wondering how dual-process theory, which is described in Daniel Kahneman's book "Thinking, Fast and Slow", relates to mindfulness and the state of being in the present moment and the flow ...
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Does any evidence show that Smartphone users have poorer memory?
An ages old complaint is that new technology harms memory. Why remember something when you can look it up?
In a course on Human Memory I distinctly recall an interesting discussion on phones and ...
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How is a young child able to learn language so easily?
It's a well known fact that the earlier children are exposed to languages the better, as young children have a better ability to learn new languages than adults.
Why is this?
At what age does a ...
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Is "brain training" effective?
We've had quite a few questions about "brain training" on this site (see questions tagged brain-training). And the effectiveness of "brain training" has been touched on in several questions (this ...
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Do cultures differ in the perception of emotions from body expression?
In their classic study, Ekman and Friesen (1971) identified seven facial expressions recognised by people universally across all cultures as depicting certain emotions: happiness, sadness, surprise, ...
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Is there an accurate online IQ test for measuring 160+ IQs?
Is there some (preferably free) online and accurate IQ test?
One which does not give me an genius IQ and then tries to sell me a diploma.
I need one which measures upto 160 sd15 (or higher). Such a ...
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Is psychology a science?
I've read some books from behavioral economy to emotional intelligence, and it kind of makes sense, but when it comes to psychology it feels to me a bit like astrology, where there are some things ...
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Why do people suddenly look back if you look at them for a while?
You possibly are familiar with the following situation, I do not know if this is a researched phenomena or not however.
You look straight at somebody for some time and suddenly, even though he or she ...
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Why do some days feel fast and others feel slow?
As per the title, why is it some days it just feels like a day can go so fast, yet other days can feel slow? Every day has the same amount of hours, minutes and seconds after all. What is the actual ...
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Is Behaviorism incompatible with Cognitive Psychology?
Both disciplines have historically been at each other's throats, and Radical Behaviorists like B.F. Skinner often completely reject cognitive psychology at a philosophical level.
It seems that today ...
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Body Language: Why do we give each other the grumpy/frowning fake smile?
I've recently become aware of this - I kinda knew I was always doing it, but just now it got me self conscious and thinking about it:
When crossing paths with a stranger, you are supposed to be ...
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How does the brain calculate velocity?
How does the human brain calculate velocities? For example, when crossing a road and seeing a car coming towards you, how does the brain actually compute the rough velocity of the vehicle and your own ...
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What does cognitive science say about whether to learn mathematics top-down from research papers?
There is currently a popular question on math.SE on whether it is effective to learn math top-down.
By top-down I mean finding a paper that interests you which is
obviously way over your head, ...
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Is the theory of Information Metabolism a reasonable scientific theory?
Background
I have been checking out various personality typing assessments lately when I came across a Personality typing system known as Socionics which aims at explaining relationships between ...
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Why are most people not persuaded by rational arguments?
The sentence could look as a provocation for many people, but the thoughts are not always rational and linear. But why this happens? Is it possible to give a short answer?
"Counter to what you might ...
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Why does repeating one word over and over again sound weird to us after some time?
This effect seems to be observed with almost any word. I would say this phenomenon 'works' for longer and complex words better.
When we repeat a word over and over again, it starts to sound very ...
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What factors improve mood and increase cognitive functioning when people wake up?
I'm a software engineer doing some research in order to figure out if developing some applications are worth the effort. This work is applied to computational devices including mobile devices and even ...
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Is there a reasonable scientific backing for Carl Jung's type theories?
I have read a lot on how most psychologists reject the Myers Briggs Type Indicator for its lack of scientific backing, but I have yet to find much information on the acceptance of Carl Jung's theories,...
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Does chess enhance cognitive abilities?
Some texts advise playing chess with children and mature people. Should I take them seriously, and why should chess boost intellect?
For instance, I would like to be able to read and understand ...
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What is the effect of mindfulness practice on cognition?
The following article by ScienceDaily reported on a paper in Psychological Science (Mrazek et al., 2013), claiming that mindfulness training led to improved working memory and GRE scores. These ...
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What are biological primary mathematical skills?
In doing a bit of background reading for this question I came across a section in the book Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind on page 602 stating:
There are no sex-related differences ...
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Motivation vs Goal Oriented Behavior
What's the difference between these two terms when used in the context of cognitive psychology? To the best of my knowledge, research on 'Goal Oriented Behavior' refers to the subset of motivation ...
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Has there been any serious research on subliminal messaging?
I certainly don't question the existence of subliminal perception which has been demonstrated many times in priming studies like those of Daniel Schacter and many others, nor do I reject the notion of ...
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What is the maximum number of objects an average human being can recognize at once?
I'm wondering, how many objects can the average human being can recognize?
For example, most of us can't look at this and say how many boxes there are without counting them:
But I think we can all ...
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Is the depletion effect of self-control reliable?
Although a lot of research (Muraven, 1998) has indicated the ego depletion of self-control, a recent paper (Xu, 2014) claims that they fail to replicate the depletion effect: impaired performance in ...
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What's the relationship between priming and anchoring?
I've recently been dabbling in the behavioral literature, reading about cognitive biases such an anchoring, when one of my friends asked me how this phenomenon differed from the classical cognitive ...
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Do people "subvocalize" during thinking or "internal monologue"?
I've recently became aware of the concept of subvocalization, where people make tiny motions with their vocal cords when reading. I'm looking for a clarification on the subject:
Does subvocalization ...
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What is the effect of studying logic or mathematics on general thinking skills?
I frequently hear comments from people to the effect that "Studies have shown that students who take (intro) logic courses don't show any signs of improvement in logical/rational/critical thinking." ...
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Why is recognition easier than recall?
The main ways of memory retrieval are recognition and recall.
Why has it been found that recognition is "easier" to perform, meaning it is usually faster or is more likely to yield an accurate ...
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What is the relationship between rejection sensitive dysphoria and ADHD?
I discovered something called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD). If you google it, the first page will show pages that talk about it in relation to ADHD.
What is it about ADHD that causes "nearly ...
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