clair073

“Too much of a good thing” and “it’s all relative” now take on new meaning. A new research report of seven studies suggests an explanation for the paradox that humans misjudge the extent of a changing situation. This report, published in the June 29 th issue of the premier journal, Science , demonstrated that people often respond to diminished prevalence of a stimulus by expanding their perception of its prevalence. For example, when looking at a matrix panel of blue and purple dots, if the experimenter reduces the percentage of blue dots, the subjects began to see purple dots as blue. Or when shown panels of threatening faces mixed with neutral faces in which the percentage of angry faces became rarer, they began to see neutral faces as threatening. Or when unethical requests of the subjects were made rarer, subjects began to regard innocuous requests as unethical. In other words, reduced prevalence of a certain stimulus created a bias for finding more of that stimulus than actually ...

When students study, they may monitor their progress during a study session by periodically forming judgments on how well they are remembering the material. Such judgments guide how much further study is deemed necessary. Researchers have studied this matter in the case of paired associate learning (where you learn lists of word pairs like dogs-cats, newspaper-book, etc.).  In particular, researchers looked for correlations between later memory recall either immediately after learning or after a short delay in which judgments about learning are based on a covert attempt to recall. Results indicate that making judgments about how well something will be remembered can be just as efficient as taking an actual test. In delayed judgments, the student typically makes an initial covert recall effort and then, based on that, judges how well the material was learned. Future recall tends to correlate with predictions on recall on a future test. That is not so surprising, other than the fact ...