Articles About cognitive science
The Von Restorff Effect: Distinctive Items Survive, Similar Ones Blur
The story everyone tells puts a spotlight on the odd item. The woman whose name is on the effect argued something closer to the opposite about the crowd.
0
33
9 Sep
The Serial Position Effect: The Middle of a List Disappears First
The curve is real and replicates in list after list. But the textbook account of half of it has been disputed since 1974, and the leftover is the good part.
0
35
8 Sep
The Mere Exposure Effect: Familiarity Quietly Becomes Preference
Repetition really does make you like things more. What almost nobody reports is the list of conditions under which it stops working, or quietly runs backwards.
0
35
6 Sep
Productive Failure: Why Solving It Wrong First Makes the Lesson Stick
The best experiment against this method tested ten-year-olds. The meta-analysis for it says the effect reverses at that age. Neither side cites the other on it.
0
35
23 Aug
Latent Learning: The Rats That Learned a Maze Without Any Reward
The man who ran the first experiment and named the effect was not Tolman. There were four groups, not three. And the finding never did break behaviourism.
0
34
23 Aug
Impostor Syndrome: The Achievers Who Believe They Fooled Everyone
Every confident number you have read about impostor syndrome is an artefact of which questionnaire somebody used and where they drew the line.
0
51
22 Aug
Conformity: The Experiment Where People Denied What Their Own Eyes Saw
Asch called it a study of independence. Most of his participants stayed independent under pressure, and the textbooks quietly dropped that half.
0
47
22 Aug
Delayed Gratification: What the Marshmallow Test Measured Besides Willpower
The most quoted result in the story rests on thirty-five children in one of four conditions. In the other three conditions the correlation ran the wrong way.
0
48
22 Aug
Procrastination: The Mood Repair Strategy That Costs You Tomorrow
Putting something off is not a failure of discipline. It is a fast way to stop feeling bad, and the bill goes to a version of you that does not exist yet.
1
53
21 Aug
