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."

ABSTRACT: Interference with Bottom-Up Feature Detection by Higher-Level Object Recognition