Imagine you sampled two jams, chose your favourite, and were then offered another taste of it before being asked to explain your preference. Would you notice that you'd been offered the wrong one, that you were actually tasting the jam you'd turned down? A new study conducted at a market stall by Lars Hall and colleagues found that even for tastes as dramatically different as spicy Cinnamon-Apple
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September 21, 2010
August 3, 2010
Do you know what you like?
Do you know what you like? (Don't) think again. The phenomenon of choice blindness shows the split between our intuitive preferences and our explanations of them. A new paper by Hall & Johansson extend the phenomenon to food preferences.... Johansson P, Hall L, Sikström S, & Olsson A. (2005) Failure to detect mismatches between intention and outcome in a simple decision task. Scie
13 Vote(s)
13 Vote(s)
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July 6, 2010
Focalism: What are you missing?
What makes us neglect obvious information that could help us make better predictions about our future happiness?... Simons, D., & Chabris, C. (1999) Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. Perception, 28(9), 1059-1074. DOI: 10.1068/p2952 Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events Chugh, D.,
10 Vote(s)
10 Vote(s)
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November 19, 2009
Blindness causes structural brain changes, implying brain can re-organize itself to adapt
Scientists have confirmed that blindness causes structural changes in the brain, implying that the brain may re-organize itself functionally in order to adapt to a loss in sensory inputs.
14 Vote(s)
14 Vote(s)
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October 20, 2009
Distracted By A Cell Phone? Some Cell Phone Users Fail To See Unicycling Clown Passing Them
Everyone tends to float off into space once in a while and fail to see what is sitting there right in front of them. Recently researchers decided to put the theory of "inattentional blindness" to the test: the unicycling clown test. They documented real-world examples of people who were so distracted by their cell phone use that they failed to see the bizarre occurrence of a unicycling clown pass
6 Vote(s)
6 Vote(s)
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September 22, 2009
Lifetime blindness prevents schizophrenia?
Rather mysteriously, no one can find anyone who has been blind from birth and has later been diagnosed with schizophrenia. I found this interesting snippet from a short article from Behavioral and Brain Sciences:Five independent searches, varying considerably in scope, methods, and population, failed to identify even one well-defined co-occurrence of total blindness and schizophrenia (Abely & Car
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8 Vote(s)
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