clair073

Our lives our filled with making choices. Sometimes we make reasoned choices and sometimes we make irrational choices. The drivers of irrational choices were examined in a series of studies by Daniel Kahnemann and Amos Tversky, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for their work. Their experiments showed that humans will make irrational choices when the cost-benefit relations are manipulated in certain ways. They established two generic modes of cognitive function: an intuitive mode in which judgments and decisions are made automatically and rapidly, and a controlled mode, which is deliberate and slower. Cost-benefit parameters need not involve money, but they often do, such as "should I wait for the new cars go on sale" to "how much am I willing to save for retirement." I had the good fortune back in the early 1970s when these Nobel Prize discoveries were being made to be part of a team at Texas A&M that documented and elucidated the founding "behavioral e...

When you encounter new information and want to remember it, the formation of a memory is enormously affected by what happens immediately afterwards. The most common problem is that you think of something else, and that something else erases what you just learned from your working memory “scratchpad” before it has time to set up in long-term memory. The way to avoid this problem is to do something with the new learning right away. Memory scientists often call this a “production” effect. That is, if you produce something from the new learning right away, it not only reduces interfering distractions but also strengthens the encoding and speeds up memory formation into lasting form. Common production activities might include using the new information in a new way, to apply it in some kind of activity, such as solving a problem. This option is not always available, but there are other approaches, such as hearing the same information at the same time you read or see it. The most common produ...