Instinctive Decisions Most Reliable
Under some circumstances following your gut is your best bet, shows research from University College London psychologists. Participants in their study, published in today's issue of Current Biology, were given between zero and 1.5 seconds identify on which side of the screen a rotated symbol on a screen of 650 otherwise identical symbols was located. Surprisingly, subjects showed 95 percent accuracy when given just a fraction of a second to decide--and just 70 percent accuracy when given a full second to take in the image.Dr Li Zhaoping, of the UCL Department of Psychology, said: "This finding seems counter-intuitive. You would expect people to make more accurate decisions when given the time to look properly. Instead they performed better when given almost no time to think. The conscious or top-level function of the brain, when active, vetoes our initial subconscious decision -- even when it is correct -- leaving us unaware or distrustful of our instincts and at an immediate disadvantage. Falling back on our inbuilt, involuntary subconscious processes for certain tasks is actually more effective than using our higher-level cognitive functions."Read more: Trusting your instincts leads you to the right answer ABSTRACT: Interference with Bottom-Up Feature Detection by Higher-Level Object Recognition SHARE:
Posted In: Cognitive Psychology | Tags: Brain | Consciousness | Decisions | Posted by FindCounseling.com Staff on January 09, 2007 at 04:04 AM | Permalink |
AboutThis page contains a single entry from Psychology Briefs, the FindCounseling.com Blog. The previous post was How Teens Use Social Networking Sites. The next post is Migraine-Depression Link Reported. Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the Psychology Research Archives. Subscribe              ATOM RSS |
