Psychological Science

Study finds autistic adults are more consistent with their choices

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People with autism are less likely to be influenced by marketing ploys when choosing between consumer products.

Autism
People with autism are thought to focus more on detail and less on the bigger picture.

A new research has revealed that adults with autism disorder may show more consistent choices in high-level decision-making tasks and are less likely to show a cognitive bias because they are not influenced by the way choices are presented. The findings indicate that individuals with autism are less susceptible to the effects of decoy options when evaluating and choosing the “best” product among several options relative to individuals without autism.

“People with autism are indeed more consistent in their choices than the neurotypical population. From an economic perspective, this suggests that people with autism are more rational and less likely to be influenced by the way choices are presented,” said George Farmer, psychology researcher at the University of Cambridge. People with autism are thought to focus more on detail and less on the bigger picture. Thus, in the study, researchers wanted to know if this tendency would apply to higher-level decision-making tasks.

For the study, published in Psychological Science, the team recruited 90 adults with autism and 212 neurotypical adults to participate in an online decision-making study. The data revealed that, compared with neurotypical participants, participants with autism made more consistent choices and made fewer switches in their selections. The results showed that individuals with autism are less likely to show a cognitive bias that often affects their neurotypical peers. “These findings suggest that people with autism might be less susceptible to having their choices biased by the way information is presented to them – for instance via marketing tricks when choosing between consumer products,” Farmer said.

Mind Over Matter: Why Your Imagination Is More Important Than Practice

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mindfulness

A new study shows that imagining something instead of practicing it leads to more success. mindfulness .

New research published in Psychological Science shows your imagination may be more important than practice. In fact, for the study, those who imagined a target before having to actually pick out the target from a group of items were quicker at finding it. Everybody who follows sports remembers the famous free-throws that Michael Jordan took with his eyes closed. He was a person who practiced imagery, or visualization. Maybe he had it right.

Visualization is something constantly used in sports. Sports uniquely have to do with muscle memory and hand-eye coordination. But what this research shows is that it is an attribute of success for people of all stripes. This is because visualization is not meant to just improve motor performance, which might be used in an athletic endeavor, but it is also used to promote focus and visual processing.

The participants in the study were asked to look at a computer screen while their brain activity was recorded. As they sat, they were asked to look at images containing a bunch of letter Cs. The order and arrangements varied and were meant to trick. Then, the participants were asked to, as quickly and accurately as they could, determine whether a target was on the screen or not (the target being a red or green C).

“We ended up running a fairly large number of experiments because it was so surprising that imagery beat actual practice,” Geoffrey Woodman, study author and psychological scientist from Vanderbilt University, said in a press release.

The conclusion of these experiments showed that the distracting stimuli left traces in memory that interfered with performance. Thus, the performance suffered as a result. When the subject imagined the search, then performance was much better. The efficiency that the data showed was also confirmed by the EEG data, which was recording the subject’s brain activity. This study indicates that the success one gets due to visualization was due to “how well our sensory systems process inputs,” Woodman said.

This means that success begins in the brain, with all its processing and imaginings, before it actually manifests itself in performance. One can be successful by repetition and other material ways, but ultimate success (that is, success that is faster and more accurate) begins when a person imagines the act first, according to the study.

In a culture where pragmatism rules the day, this can be hard advice to heed. But the results of this experiment show that imagination is what is superior to practice because there isn’t as much visual interference.

Source: Woodman GF, Reinhart RMG, McClenahan LJ. Visualizing Trumps Vision in Training Attention. Psychological Science. 2015.

Does taking photographs ruin your memory?

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A scientist wanted to find out whether photographing objects affects what’s remembered about them. She found that the impact was huge but there might be more to it
  • A man photographs a statue entitled Pentateuque
Is the man more likely to remembe the elephant on his back without the photo? Is the elephant less likely to remember the man under his feet? Photograph: Wong Maye-E/AP

On a guided tour of an art museum early this year, 28 university students were told to simply observe 15 objects and to photograph 15 others. Dr Linda Henkel was studying the students all the while to measure whether taking photographs affected their memory.

The next day, the students were asked to remember the objects and their details. The results demonstrate what Dr Henkel calls a “photo-taking-impairment effect“.

If participants took a photo of each object as a whole, they remembered fewer objects and remembered fewer details about the objects and the objects’ locations in the museum than if they instead only observed the objects and did not photograph them.

Zoom to remember

There’s a lot more to it though. The study found that if the students changed their behaviour even slightly, the effect on memory was entirely different; zooming in to photograph part of an object actually improved memory. What’s more, students who focused the lens on a specific area could even recall parts that weren’t zoomed in on.

Dr Henkel concluded that additional “cognitive processes” (i.e. thinking and paying attention) “can eliminate the photo-taking-impairment effect”.

What did the scientist forget?

There are a few other caveats that it’s worth adding:

1. Plenty of photos aren’t about capturing the detail on a terracotta vase or the brush strokes on a painting – they’re about registering an emotion. Many people still recall the feelings of something (a wedding, a birth, a summer) in great detail, even if they can’t remember the caterers or the flowers.

2. Interest matters. If asked to open 20 new windows in your browser of 20 different articles and take screenshots of some of them, it’s likely that the ones you remember are the ones you were likely to read – the ones with the titles or pictures that seem interesting to you. The students’ memory was probably affected by how much they were interested in the objects in the first place. In short, the results might have been very different if the students had chosen what they could photograph.

3. Memory isn’t just about images – it’s about words too. The students were asked to write down the names of the objects they remembered. Presumably, a painting called hippocampus is easier to recall than one called sepultusque est in pulvere hydria.

4. Memory recall isn’t as simple as a ‘do or don’t’. Maybe the students with cameras remembered more details about the objects (albeit more inaccurately) than those without. Is it better to remember 50 facts slightly imprecisely than to remember 1? Would you rather bump into someone that you’d met once and accidentally call them Anna rather than Anne and ask about their 3 children rather than 4 or just bump into them and remember that they fell over the last time you’d met?

5. The study used 28 undergraduate students and 30 objects in the first museum tour then used 46 students and 27 objects in the second study to test the effect of zooming. Changing the students and the objects means that these findings, published in the Journal of Psychological Science, probably aren’t a sufficient reason to stop taking photos.

Have we missed any other caveats? Do you think the research is persuading? Let us know in the comments below

 

Your Brain ‘Sees’ Things Even When You Don’t.

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The brain processes visual input to the level of understanding its meaning even if we never consciously perceive that input, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

The research, led by Jay Sanguinetti of the University of Arizona, challenges currently accepted models about how the brain processes visual information.

Sanguinetti, a doctoral candidate in the UA’s department of psychology in the College of Science, showed study participants a series of black silhouettes, some of which contained recognizable, real-world objects hidden in the white spaces on the outsides.

Working with John Allen, Distinguished Professor of psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience at the University of Arizona, Sanguinetti monitored subjects’ brainwaves with an electroencephalogram, or EEG, while they viewed the objects.

“There’s a brain signature for meaningful processing,” Sanguinetti said. Participants’ EEG data showed the signature, a peak in the oscillating brainwaves that occurs about 400 milliseconds after the image was shown, called N400.

“The participants in our experiments don’t see those shapes on the outside; nonetheless, the brain signature tells us that they have processed the meaning of those shapes,” said Mary Peterson, a professor in the UA department of psychology and Sanguinetti’s advisor. “But the brain rejects them as interpretations, and if it rejects the shapes from conscious perception, then you won’t have any awareness of them.”

Importantly, the N400 waveform did not appear on the EEG of subjects when they were seeing truly novel silhouettes, without images of any real-world objects.

These findings lead to the question of why the brain would process the meaning of a shape when a person is ultimately not going to perceive it, Sanguinetti noted.

“Many, many theorists assume that because it takes a lot of energy for brain processing, that the brain is only going to spend time processing what you’re ultimately going to perceive,” added Peterson. “But in fact the brain is deciding what you’re going to perceive, and it’s processing all of the information and then it’s determining what’s the best interpretation.”

“This is a window into what the brain is doing all the time,” Peterson said. “It’s always sifting through a variety of possibilities and finding the best interpretation for what’s out there. And the best interpretation may vary with the situation.”

Our brains may have evolved to sift through the barrage of visual input in our eyes and identify those things that are most important for us to consciously perceive, such as a threat or resources such as food, Peterson suggested.

“There are a lot of complex processes that happen in the brain to help us interpret all this complexity that hits our eyeballs,” Sanguinetti said. “The brain is able to process and interpret this information very quickly.”

Sanguinetti’s study indicates that ultimately, when we walk down a street, our eyes perceive and our brains recognize meaningful objects, even though we may never be consciously aware of them.

In the future, Peterson and Sanguinetti plan to look for the specific regions in the brain where the processing of meaning occurs. “We’re trying to look at exactly what brain regions are involved,” said Peterson. “The EEG tells us this processing is happening and it tells us when it’s happening, but it doesn’t tell us where it’s occurring in the brain.”