Scientific American Mind has an article online about Stereotype Threat — the idea that we take on and act out the stereotypes we think others have of us.
As it turns out, research shows that such performance failures cannot always be attributed simply to inherent lack of ability or incompetence. Although some have jumped to the highly controversial conclusion that differences in attainment reflect natural differences between groups, the roots of many handicaps actually lie in the stereotypes, or preconceptions, that others hold about the groups to which we belong. For instance, a woman who knows that women as a group are believed to do worse than men in math will, indeed, tend to perform less well on math tests as a result.
The same is true for any member of a group who is aware that his or her group is considered to be inferior to others in a given domain of performance—whether it is one that appears to tap intellectual and academic ability or one that is designed to establish athletic and sporting prowess.
Whether lured into attentiveness by a bottom-up or top-down mechanism, scientists said, the results of change blindness studies and other experiments strongly suggest that the visual system can focus on only one or very few objects at a time, and that anything lying outside a given moment’s cone of interest gets short shrift. The brain, it seems, is a master at filling gaps and making do, of compiling a cohesive portrait of reality based on a flickering view.
I was watching TV tonight and saw a new ad. It’s for Altoids, and the slogan is “A slap to the cerebellum since 1780.” Hmmm… I think it meant to say cerebrum, not cerebellum. The implication in the ad is that eating the Altoid mint gave the young office maiden an inspiration for solving the printing problem. That would come from the higher, executive functions of the cerebrum, not the voluntary motor movement, and coordination functions that the cerebellum is associated with. This is reportedly the first in a series of commercials with this slogan, so they’ll be getting it wrong in all of them I suspect…Technorati Tags: neuroscience, psychology
In Abnormal Psychology, we’ll be discussing dissociative disorders next week. Mind Hacks has a good summary of dissociative disorders and trauma, including the role of hypnosis:
Dana’s online neuroscience magazine Cerebrum has a fantastic article on trauma and dissociation – the splitting of consciousness that apparently makes some aspects of the mind inaccessible to others.
The excellent neuroscience blog, Mind Hacks, has a very interesting post about the stigma of mental illness, particularly as it relates to moral weakness and politics…
One of the most remarkable stories from recent years comes from Scandanavia, where Kjell Magne Bondevik, the then serving Prime Minister of Norway, announced he needed three weeks sick leave owing to an episode of depression.
Bondevik returned to work and was re-elected in the subsequent election. He’s now retired from politics, campaigns to fight the stigma associated with mental illness and was recently interviewed (realvideo) about his experiences on BBC’s Newsnight programme.
We are studying memory this week in our introductory psychology course. Luckily, there are a couple of good recent posts on memory in my favorite psychology blogs…
Over on the excellent blog Cognitive Daily, there is a summary of a research study on the effects of changing camera angles on accuracy of memory for details in the scenes.
There was no significant difference in the results for a static camera versus a moving camera, but viewers were significantly less accurate when they saw an abrupt cut in the movie. This decrease in accuracy was almost entirely found at the point in the movie immediately following the cut, suggesting quite strongly that the cut itself momentarily disoriented viewers. So although the perceptual system can handle cuts in a movie presentation, those cuts do have some cost.
PsyBlog has a fascinating post on studies of the “tip-of-the-tongue” phenomenon.
