CogBlog – A Cognitive Psychology Blog

www.dailymail.co.uk

On April 19 of 1995, 168 people lost their lives in one of the most devastating cases of domestic terrorism on US soil. Although many remember Timothy McVeigh as the primary culprit of this attack, in the days shortly after the attack, a nationwide hunt for an accomplice was underway, based on the recollections of an employee at the garage where McVeigh had rented the van used in the attack. A mug shot of the suspect was widely circulated and rumors about accomplices abounded. However, after an extensive investigation, no such suspect was identified and McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who provided material support, were the only two people held responsible for the bombing. To this date, many a conspiracy theory still suggest a second bomber was involved, even if the authorities declared the case to be closed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_bombing_conspiracy_theories). Although many cases of mistaken eyewitness testimony occur (Zaragoza & Lane, 1994), with many innocent people sentenced to jail (https://www.innocenceproject.org/) it is less common for a witness to remember a suspect who never existed. So, where did John Doe 2 come from? And how was he implicated in – and later cleared of – any wrong-doing?

Read more…

By Maggie, Meg, Tara, and Raymond

After studying for a long time, do you feel brain-dead, or unable to focus anymore? This fatigue occurs when your attention, or more specifically, directed attention, is depleted. Directed attention is controlled, effortful attention that helps one inhibit irrelevant information in the environment and select important information. Thus, prolonged use of directed attention usually results in mental fatigue, which in turn decreases performance on affective and cognitive measures (Bratman, Hamilton, & Daily, 2012). Exposure to nature can help one recover from this fatigue. Attention Restoration Theory (ART; Kaplan, 1995) states that natural settings are restorative because they are often extensive, allow us to be detached from our everyday thoughts and worries, fit our needs for relaxation, and, most importantly, capture our attention automatically and effortlessly. These properties are collectively referred to as soft fascination, in contrast to the hard fascination produced by urban environments. That is, unlike urban environments, nature has very few stimuli that may require our directed attention. For instance, in a forest there is no traffic for us to worry about, nor there is any car honk by our ears.

Previous studies (e.g., Atchley, Strayer, & Atchley, 2012; Berman, Jonides, & Kaplan, 2008) have found that after exposure to nature, people tend to perform better on cognitive tasks. For example, in one study, participants completed the Remote Associates Task (RAT; Mednick, 1962) either before going on a hike into the wilderness or on the fourth day of the hike (Atchley et al., 2012). The RAT is a creativity task in which participants have to come up with a word that connects three words that are presented on each trial and that appear to be unrelated (Mednick, 1962). For example, if the three presented words are “swiss,” “cottage,” and “cake,” the correct answer will be “cheese.” The RAT is thought to tax attention and higher-order cognition. The results revealed a 50% boost in performance for participants who completed the task while on the hike (Atchley et al., 2012). Thus, it seems that nature starts to show its positive impact on cognition after three days of exposure. Read more…

By Erin, Michaela, & McKayla

Having a hard time paying attention? Can’t remember all the definitions? Finals at Colby are no walk in the park. Exam week requires a lot of focused attention in order to study, write 15 page papers, and sit down for three-hour examinations. We all have gotten to that point where we feel like we can’t focus or direct our attention anymore. Research has shown that this happens when we overuse the brain’s inhibitory attention mechanisms and can no longer inhibit distractions (Kaplan, 1995). The person walking into the library, the pen tapping on the desk, the music coming from down the hall, all prevent us from maintaining focus on the task at hand. We have all suffered from directed attention fatigue. But what if a walk in the park could actually restore this fatigue and give you an edge academically? Read more…

By Leah, Lynna, Aiya, & Hannah

It’s room draw time.

What dorm do I want to be in? Do I want a double? Or a suite? Do I want to be close to the library? The dining hall? Where are my friends living?

Although all of these questions are valid, an important element of room selection often fails to be considered. You may or may not think about it that much, but the view from your window has important effects on you, particularly if you’re a mentally drained and stressed-out college student. You have to look through it every day, and know which direction it faces relative to the sun. You want to have the best view without worrying about strangers peering in. But besides these concerns, the specifics of your window should be at the top of your dorm priority list. Research shows that a view of nature from your window has immense benefits, including improved mood, replenished attention and cognitive functioning, and reduced stress.

One of the dominant theories explaining nature’s positive cognitive benefits is Attention Restoration Theory (ART; Kaplan, 1995). Sustained effortful attention reduces your ability to pay attention. Imagine, for example, the cognitive resources it takes to proofread a long essay, and how exhausted you feel afterwards. You might make more mistakes as time goes on and be in a more negative mood. ART suggests that these cognitive resources can be replenished by engaging with nature (Kaplan, 1995). Proofreading an essay requires effortful sustained focus. Nature is less demanding because it easily draws attention and allows resources for effortful attention to replenish. Read more…

http://mercercognitivepsychology.pbworks.com/w/page/32859313/Tip-of-the-Tongue%20Phenomenon

Do you ever think of a word or phrase and you know you know it, you just can’t seem to find it? You’re frustrated and want so badly to be able to say the word, one might even say it’s at the tip of your tongue. This feeling is called a tip-of-the-tongue state, or the TOT phenomenon. It’s likely that on top on this frustrating experience, you are flailing your hands around trying to gesture the word at the tip of your tongue. This TOT phenomenon is when information is available in your memory it is just not accessible. When in a TOT state, a person is experiencing blocking, where they are not able to retrieve information that is known. The information is being blocked. Although you may look strange doing so, gesturing may actually be the thing that helps you retrieve that word you so desperately want to access. Don’t worry, you don’t just look like a crazy person for no rhyme or reason! You’re trying to find that nagging word!
Gestures, which are body or limb movements, can be characterized as an element of a word’s meaning in a person’s mental representation. A person’s mental representation is a bank of everything they know; it is what our cognitive procsses are operating on and it is a topic in our mind that represents something in our reality. Humans often pair certain gestures with different words based on possible functions or shapes of a word that is an inanimate object, or actions of a word that is an animate object.

Read more…

Have you ever wondered if when one sensory module is impaired, other sensory systems learn to develop other means to counteract that deficiency? Past studies have shown that deaf individuals have a larger capability to focus on simple visual stimuli in the parafovea. The parafovea is a region in the eye that surrounds your fovea, the central pit of the eye that is responsible for sharp, central vision. Large rates of illiteracy in the deaf population have caused people to question whether deaf individuals wide range of focus in the parafovea, causes reduced processing in the fovea. A recent study done at the University of California San Diego has shown that deaf people’s parafoveal vision does not cause reduced vision on the fovea and they actually have a wider range of sharp vision which researchers found and can actually aid them in complex visual tasks such as reading (Bélanger et al. 2012).

Read more…

As the legend goes, an angry father confronts his son about the damage to a cherry tree. “I cannot tell a lie,” young George Washington proudly asserts, “I did cut it with my hatchet.” Washington Senior proceeds to forgive his son, because George’s honesty was more valuable than a thousand trees. This legend has been retold over and over to extol the virtues of honesty and morality. But what if the young George cannot tell a lie because he is a bad liar with a poor working memory?

Read more…

What comes to mind when you hear the word “gamer”? For non-gamers this term is often accompanied with a negative stigma. For some people, you might envision an average person, someone who studies hard in school or works a nine to five job while enjoying video games in their down time. But for others, many will associate this word with someone who lives in their parent’s basement, lacks social skills, has a diet consisting of Doritos and coke, and hardly sees the light of day. Some people may even think back to the time they saw that YouTube video of a “gamer” freaking out and breaking their TV or keyboard via a rage infused “gronk” spike. If you don’t know what a gronk spike is, click here.

In the modern age, because of how large of an influence technology plays in our daily lives, this negative stigma seems to be fading as more and more people are playing video games. However, spending hours a day playing is still often viewed as unproductive and wasted time. But what if I were to tell you that playing video games, specifically first person shooter games (FPS), could increase a person’s attentional capacity- the amount of information that a person can attend to at any given moment, the processing of peripheral information, and ability to multitask? To start, I’d bet there would be a lot of kids rushing to their parents defending their hours of play video games in hopes of being allowed to spend more time playing. I can envision the conversation now: Read more…

The world of sports is a dangerous place for athletes.  The speed and power of athletes can sometimes result in collisions and injuries that can leave athletes sidelined anywhere  from a few minutes to an entire season… or worse.  But, only the injuries that we can see on the outside are easy to diagnose and treat.  Injuries, with equal severity (if not more), happen frequently and can go unnoticed.  An athlete’s brain is at constant risk of injury during sports.  Even a small bumping of heads with another athlete can result in concussion.  These brain injuries can leave people with a loss of memory, dizziness, blurred vision, and sometimes completely knocked-out.  Diagnosing concussions can be tricky because athletes often do not show immediate or significant symptoms. According to Tracey Covassin, Bryan Crutcher, & Jessica Wallace (2013), the way athletic trainers and doctors assess whether or not an athlete is concussed or cleared for activity requires increasing concussive symptoms. So is there another way, or is the injured athlete’s depressing reality just a pro-longed road to recovery? 

Read more…

Have you ever been so angry and frustrated at something that you begin having irrational thoughts or actions? Say you stub your toe and begin screaming profanities at the bureau that you stubbed it on. In your normal state of mind, you would know that it’s ridiculous to be screaming at inanimate objects when the cause of your frustration is entirely on you. So why do these irrational thoughts or actions happen in the first place, and why does our self-control seem to disappear in these instances? Self-control depletion, or losing the ability to control oneself has been recently looked at in greater detail, and real world implications of self control depletion are being discovered. An area that self-control depletion can have a large effect is in sports competition. Anyone who has played competitive sports knows the feeling of being so frustrated with an aspect of the game that they no longer act as themselves, and rather act on frustration and anger. Whether it comes from a ref blowing an obvious call or an opposing player performing a blatant foul on you or one of your teammates, a normally rational and unaggressive player can lose their self-control quickly. A study in 2014 by Englert and Bertrams looked at self–control depletion, focusing their study on the effects that self-control depletion has in sports. Being able to have self-control is a very important part of most competitive sports. From flipping over a chess table because you are frustrated by your lack of strategy, to hitting an opposing football player with the truck-stick because they badmouthed your teammate on the previous play, self-control comes into play more often than not in competitive play. Understanding the effects of self-control depletion in sports may just give you the competitive edge.

Self-control can be defined as the process of voluntarily controlling an impulse or habitual action, such as choosing to eat an apple instead of a piece of cake when you are on a diet. Much like how attention is a limited resource, self-control is also limited in its capacity. In sports, attention is spread to many different things, and since it is a limited resource, it is difficult to pay attention to self-control while attending to so many other distractions. Attention has often been described as a “spotlight”, and you must move the spotlight around to focus your attention on different things. In sports, that spotlight is constantly moving around, trying to focus on the most important aspect of the game. Since you are trying to focus on so many different things, you are spending much less time focusing on your self-control, and allowing it to get out of hand when presented with situations requiring utmost self-control.

After a first act of self-control, the resource is depleted for a certain amount of time, and it is not replenished instantly (Baumeister et al., 1998). This time period where the resource has been depleted is called “ego depletion”, and further acts of self-control are temporarily impaired during this period. This study also aimed to look at how certain aspects of sporting competitions can actually deplete self-control strength. In order to do this, the experimenters relied on the effect of vicarious depletion. Vicarious depletion can be described as mentally reliving the actions of a person who had to exert self-control and having your own self-control depleted as well.

Read more…