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HOW CANNABIS MAKES THOUGHTS TUMBLE How cannabis makes thoughts tumble. Cannabis smokers often report that when stoned, their thoughts have a free-wheeling quality and concepts seem connected in unusual and playful ways. A study just published online in Psychiatry Research suggests that this effect may be due to the drug causing ‘fast and loose’ patterns of spreading activityHARD AS NAILS
Hard as nails. Tom alerted me to this fantastic brief case published in the British Medical Journal where a builder is admitted to hospital in great pain after a nail penetrated all the way through his boot. But it turned out that the pain was entirely psychological, as the nail had missed his foot by sliding between his toes. WHAT CAUSED NIETZSCHE’S INSANITY AND DEATH? A paper just published in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica reconsiders the insanity and death of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who is commonly thought to have died of neurosyphilis. In contrast, the authors of the new study suggest that Nietzsche died of frontotemporal dementia - a type of dementia that specifically affects the frontaland temporal lobes.
THE SOCIAL PRIMING STUDIES IN “THINKING FAST AND SLOW” ARE In Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow" he introduces research on social priming - the idea that subtle cues in the environment may have significant, reliable effects on behaviour. In that book, published in 2011, Kahneman writes "disbelief is not an option" about these results. Since then, the evidence against the reliability ofsocial priming
EROTIC ASPHYXIA AND THE LIMITS OF THE BRAIN Erotic asphyxia and the limits of the brain. A guy who enjoyed whacking off while trying to strangle himself has provided important evidence that an outward sign considered to indicate severe irreversible brain damage can be present without any lasting effects. It was long thought that a body response called decerebrate rigidity– where the
MIND HACKS – NEUROSCIENCE AND PSYCHOLOGY NEWS AND VIEWS.LEARNINGINSIDE THE BRAINUNCATEGORIZEDNEWSREMEMBERINGVAUGHANBELL Oliver Selfridge was an early pioneer of artificial intelligence, and in 1959 wrote a classic paper outlining a system by which simple units, each carrying out a specialised function, could be connected together to perform complex, cognitive tasks.. This ‘pandemonium architecture‘ inspired research in neural networks, which in turn led to modern machine learning about which we hear so much HACK 101: MAKE EYES (OR ANYTHING) IN PICTURES FOLLOW YOU The answer is simple: photograph, or paint, the face looking straight out. If it’s a photograph they must look straight at the lens of the camera. In the words of James Todd of Ohio State University, one of authors of the study, ‘If a person in a painting is looking straight out, it will always appear that way, regardless of the angle at HOW TO FORMULATE A GOOD RESOLUTION The date is completely arbitrary, but it provides a clean line between our old and new selves. The practical upshot of the theory is that if you make a resolution, you should formulate it so that at every point in time it is absolutely clear whether you are sticking to it or not. The clear lines are arbitrary, but they help the truce between THE PSYCHOLOGY OF BEING SCAMMED I'm just reading a fascinating report on the psychology of why people fall for scams, commissioned by the UK government's Office of Fair Trading and created by Exeter University's psychology department. It's a 260 page monster, so is not exactly bed time reading, but was drawn from in-depth interviews from scam victims, examination of scam THE ORIGIN OF THE ‘NERVOUS BREAKDOWN’ The Cambridge academic German Berrios (personal communication) informed me that “breakdown” is a 19th century construction, initially used to refer to breakages and fractures in machinery and leading to the need for “breakdown gangs” (i.e., teams of navvies whose job involved addressing the mechanical disruptions to thefunctioning of
HOW CANNABIS MAKES THOUGHTS TUMBLE How cannabis makes thoughts tumble. Cannabis smokers often report that when stoned, their thoughts have a free-wheeling quality and concepts seem connected in unusual and playful ways. A study just published online in Psychiatry Research suggests that this effect may be due to the drug causing ‘fast and loose’ patterns of spreading activityHARD AS NAILS
Hard as nails. Tom alerted me to this fantastic brief case published in the British Medical Journal where a builder is admitted to hospital in great pain after a nail penetrated all the way through his boot. But it turned out that the pain was entirely psychological, as the nail had missed his foot by sliding between his toes. WHAT CAUSED NIETZSCHE’S INSANITY AND DEATH? A paper just published in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica reconsiders the insanity and death of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who is commonly thought to have died of neurosyphilis. In contrast, the authors of the new study suggest that Nietzsche died of frontotemporal dementia - a type of dementia that specifically affects the frontaland temporal lobes.
THE SOCIAL PRIMING STUDIES IN “THINKING FAST AND SLOW” ARE In Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow" he introduces research on social priming - the idea that subtle cues in the environment may have significant, reliable effects on behaviour. In that book, published in 2011, Kahneman writes "disbelief is not an option" about these results. Since then, the evidence against the reliability ofsocial priming
EROTIC ASPHYXIA AND THE LIMITS OF THE BRAIN Erotic asphyxia and the limits of the brain. A guy who enjoyed whacking off while trying to strangle himself has provided important evidence that an outward sign considered to indicate severe irreversible brain damage can be present without any lasting effects. It was long thought that a body response called decerebrate rigidity– where the
THE MASTER AND HIS EMISSARY The Master and His Emissary. I’ve been struggling to understand Iain McGilchrist’s argument about the two hemispheres of the brain, as presented in his book “The Master and His Emissary” . It’s an argument that takes you from neuroanatomy,THE MEMORY TRAP
I had a piece in the Guardian on Saturday, ‘The way you’re revising may let you down in exams – and here’s why.In it I talk about a pervasive feature of our memories: that we tend to overestimate how much of a memory is ‘ours’, and how little is actually shared with other people, or the environment (see also the illusion of explanatory depth). THE GINGER JAKE POISONINGS The Ginger Jake poisonings. A mysterious epidemic of paralysis was sweeping through 1920s America that had the medical community baffled. The cause was first identified not by physicians, but by blues singers. During the prohibition, alcohol was banned but BELIEVING EVERYONE ELSE IS WRONG IS A DANGER SIGN I have a guest post for the Research Digest, snappily titled 'People who think their opinions are superior to others are most prone to overestimating their relevant knowledge and ignoring chances to learn more'. The paper I review is about the so-called "belief superiority" effect, which is defined by thinking that your views are better A DIAGNOSIS OF ‘STRANGE AND INEXPLICABLE BEHAVIOUR’ The World Health Organisation's ICD-10 manual of diseases and health problems has a diagnosis of 'Strange and Inexplicable Behaviour' that gives, rather appropriately, no further explanation, except that it's classified with code R46.2 It is from Chapter XVIII of the ICD-10 which tackles 'Symptoms, signs and abnormal clinical and laboratory findings, not elsewhere classified'.SLEEP FREEZE
The August edition of The Psychologist has a fascinating article on the awareness during sleep paralysis, a state where we wake but can't move and sometimes experience intense hallucinations. This form of awake sleep paralysis is remarkably common and has been explained throughout the world with a diverse and colourful range of culturalexplanations.
THE REAL HISTORY OF THE ‘SAFE SPACE’ The real history of the ‘safe space’. There’s much debate in the media about a culture of demanding ‘safe spaces’ at university campuses in the US, a culture which has been accused of restricting free speech by defining contrary opinions as harmful. The history of safe spaces is an interesting one and a recent article in Fusion cited WAKING LIFE CROSSWORD EXPERIMENT In Richard Linklater's Waking Life (2001) two of the characters discuss the idea synchronicity. They mention an experiment where people were isolated and given daily crosswords. If the crossword puzzles were a day old, meaning that thousands of people had already completed them, then people found it easier to get the answers -because the
DON’T PANIC BUT PSYCHOLOGY ISN’T ALWAYS A SCIENCE Every so often, the 'is psychology a science?' debate sparks up again, at which point, I start to weep. It's one of the most misplaced, misfiring scientific discussions you can have and probably not for the reasons you think. To understand why it keeps coming around you need to understand something about the politics of MAN HAMMERS NAIL INTO HEAD EVERY WEEK FOR 11 I just found this jaw-dropping case study of a man who banged 11 nails into his head while sadly quite distressed and psychotic. The X-ray images are striking on their own, and what is even more astounding is that he made a full recovery. Penetrating head injury in planned and repetitive deliberate self-harm. Mayo ClinicSkip to content
MIND HACKS
Neuroscience and psychology news and views. DO WE SUFFER ‘BEHAVIOURAL FATIGUE’ FOR PANDEMIC PREVENTION MEASURES? _The Guardian_ recently published an article saying “People won’t get ‘tired’ of social distancing – and it’s unscientific to suggest otherwise”. “Behavioural fatigue” the piece said, “has no basis in science”. ‘Behavioural fatigue’ became a hot topic because it was part of the UK Government’s justification for delaying the introduction of stricter public health measures. They quickly reversed this position and we’re now in the “empty streets” stage of infection control. But it’s an important topic and is relevant to all of us as we try to maintain important behavioural changes that benefit others. For me, one key point is that, actually, there are many relevant scientific studies that tackle this. And I have to say, I’m a little disappointed that there were some public pronouncements that ‘there is no evidence’ in the mainstream media without anyone making the effort to seek it out. The reaction to epidemics has actually been quite well studied although it’s not clear that ‘fatigue’ is the right way of understanding any potential decline in people’s compliance. This phrase doesn’t seem to be used in the medical literature in this context and it may well have been simply a convenient, albeit confusing, metaphor for ‘decline’ used in interviews. In fact, most studies of changes in compliance focus on the effect of changing risk perception, and it turns out that this often poorly tracks the actual risk. Below is a graph from a recent paperillustrating a
widely used model of how risk perception tracks epidemics. Notably, this model was first publishedin the 1990s
based on data available even then. It suggests that increases in risk tend to make us over-estimate the danger, particularly for surprising events, but then as the risk objectively increases we start to get used to living in the ‘new normal’ and our perception of risk decreases, sometimes unhelpfully so. What this doesn’t tell us is whether people’s behaviour changes over time. However, lots of studies have been done since then, including on the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic– where a lot of
this research was conducted. To cut a long story short, many, but not all, of these studies find that people tend to reduce their use of at least some preventative measures (like hand washing, social distancing) as the epidemic increases, and this has been looked at in various ways. When asking people to report their own behaviours, several studies found evidence for a reduction in at least some preventative measures (usually alongside evidence for good compliance with others). This was found was found in one studyin Italy, two
studies
in Hong Kong, and onestudy in Malaysia.
In Holland during the 2006 bird flu outbreak, one study did seven follow-ups and found a fluctuating pattern of compliance with prevention measures. People ramped up their prevention efforts, then their was a dip, then they increased again. Some studies have looked for objective evidence of behaviour change and one of the most interesting looked at changes in social distancing during the 2009 outbreak in Mexico by measuring television viewing as a proxy for time spent in the home. This studyfound
that, consistent with an increase in social distancing at the beginning of the outbreak, television viewing greatly increased, but as time went on, and the outbreak grew, television viewing dropped. To try and double-check their conclusions, they showed that television viewing predicted infection rates.One study
looked at airline passengers’ missed flights during the 2009 outbreak – given that flying with a bunch of people in an enclosed space is likely to spread flu. There was a massive spike of missed flights at the beginning of the pandemic but this quickly dropped off as the infection rate climbed, although later, missed flights did begin to track infection rates more closely. There are also some relevant qualitative studies.
These are where people are free-form interviewed and the themes of what they say are reported. These studies reported that people resist some behavioural measures during outbreaks as they increasingly start to conflict with family demands, economic pressures, and so on. Rather than measuring people’s compliance with health behaviours, several studies looked at how epidemics change and used mathematical models to test out ideas about what could account for their course. One well recognised finding is that epidemics often come in waves. A surge, a quieter period, a surge, a quieter period, and so on. Several mathematical modelling studies have suggested that people’s declining compliance with preventative measures could account for this. This has been found with simulated epidemics but also when looking at real data, such
as that from the 1918 flu pandemic. The 1918 epidemic was an interesting example because there was no vaccine and so behavioural changes were pretty much the only preventative measure. And some studies showed no evidence of ‘behavioural fatigue’ atall.
One study
in the Netherlands showed a stable increase in people taking preventative measures with no evidence of decline at any point.Another study
conducted in Beijing found that people tended to maintain compliance with low effort measures (ventilating rooms, catching coughs and sneezes, washing hands) and tended to increase the level of high effort measures (stockpiling, buying face masks). This improved compliance was also seen in a study that looked at an outbreak of the mosquito-borne disease chikungunya. This is not meant to be a complete review of these studies (do add any others below) but I’m presenting them here to show that actually, there is lots of relevant evidence about ‘behavioural fatigue’ despite the fact that mainstream articles can get published by people declaring it ‘has no basis in science’. In fact, this topic is almost a sub-field in some disciplines. Epidemiologists have been trying to incorporate behavioural dynamics into their models. Economists have been trying tomodel the
‘prevalence elasticity’ of preventative behaviours as epidemics progress. Game theorists have been creatingmodels
of behaviour change in terms of individuals’ strategic decision-making. The lessons here are two fold I think. The first is for scientists to be cautious when taking public positions. This is particularly important in times of crisis. Most scientific fields are complex and can be opaque even to other scientists in closely related fields. Your voice has influence so please consider (and indeed research) what you say. The second is for all of us. We are currently in the middle of a pandemic and we have been asked to take essential measures. In past pandemics, people started to drop their life-saving behavioural changes as the risk seemed to become routine, even as the actual danger increased. This is not inevitable, because in some places, and in some outbreaks, people managed to stick with them. We can be like the folks who stuck with these strange new rituals, who didn’t let their guard down, and who saved the lives of countless people they never met. Author vaughanbell Posted on March 20, 2020March 20, 2020Categories
Togetherness 3 Comments on Do we suffer ‘behavioural fatigue’ for pandemic prevention measures?THE CHOICE ENGINE
A project I’ve been working on a for a long time has just launched: By talking to the @ChoiceEngine twitter-bot you can navigate an essay about choice, complexity and the nature of our minds. Along the way I argue why the most famous experiment on the neuroscience of free will doesn’t really tell us much, and discuss the wasp which made Darwin lose his faith in a benevolent god. And there’s this animated gif: Follow and tweet START @ChoiceEngineto begin
Author tomstafford Posted on September 13, 2018September 27, 2018Categories
Nonsense 5 Comments on TheChoice Engine
AFTER THE METHODS CRISIS, THE THEORY CRISIS This thread started by Ekaterina Damer has prompted many recommendations from psychologists on twitter. Here are most of the recommendations, with their recommender in brackets. I haven’t read these, but wanted to collate them in one place. Comments are open if you have your own suggestions.(Iris van Rooij)
“How does it work?” vs. “What are the laws?” Two conceptions of psychological explanation.Robert Cummins
(Ed Orehek)
Theory Construction in Social Personality Psychology: Personal Experiences and Lessons Learned: A Special Issue of Personality and Social Psychology Review(Djouria Ghilani)
Personal Reflections on Theory and PsychologyGerd Gigerenzer,
Selected Works of Barry N. Markovsky (pretty much everyone, but Tal Yarkoni put it like this) “Meehl said most of what there is to say about this” * Theory-testing in psychology and physics: A methodological paradox * Appraising and amending theories: The strategy of Lakatosian defense and two principles that warrant it * Why summaries of research on psychological theories are oftenuninterpretable
(Which reminds me, PsychBrief has been reading Meehl and provides extensive summaries here: Paul Meehl on philosophy of science: video lectures and papers)
(Burak Tunca)
What Theory is Not
by Robert I.
Sutton & Barry M. Staw(Joshua Skewes)
Valerie Gray Hardcastle’s “How to build a theory in cognitivescience”.
(Randy McCarthy)
Chapter 1 of Gawronski, B., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2015). Theory and explanation in social psychology. Guilford Publications.(Kimberly Quinn)
McGuire, W. J. (1997). Creative hypothesis generating in psychology: Some useful heuristics.
Annual review of psychology, 48(1), 1-30.(Daniël Lakens)
Jaccard, J., & Jacoby, J. (2010). Theory Construction and Model-building Skills: A Practical Guide for Social Scientists.Guilford Press.
Fiedler, K. (2004). Tools, toys, truisms, and theories: Some thoughts on the creative cycle of theory formation. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8(2), 123–131.(Tom Stafford)
Roberts and Pashler (2000). How persuasive is a good fit? A comment ontheory testing
From the discussion it is clear that the theory crisis will be every bit as rich and full of dissent as the methods crisis. UPDATES 16 AUGUST 2018(Richard Prather)
Simmering et al (2010). To Model or Not to Model? A Dialogue on the Role of Computational Modeling in Developmental Science (Brett Buttliere: we made a Facebook group to talk about theory) Psychological Theory Discussion Group(Eric Morris)
Wilson, K. G. (2001). Some notes on theoretical constructs: types and validation from a contextual behavioral perspective(Michael P. Grosz)
Theoretical Amnesia
by Denny Borsboom
(Ivan Grahek)
Fiedler (2017). What Constitutes Strong Psychological Science? The (Neglected) Role of Diagnosticity and A Priori Theorizing(Iris van Rooij)
More suggestions in these two theads (one, two
)
Author tomstafford Posted on August 15, 2018August 16, 2018Categories
Theory 3 Comments on After the methods crisis, the theory crisis OPEN SCIENCE ESSENTIALS: PREPRINTS _Open science essentials in 2 minutes, part 4_ Before a research article is published in a journal you can make it freely available for anyone to read. You could do this on your own website, but you can also do it on a preprint server, such as psyarxiv.com , where other researchers also share their preprints, which is supported by the OSF so will be around for a while, and which allows you to find others’research easily.
Preprint servers have been used for decades in physics, but are now becoming more common across academia. Preprints allow rapid dissemination of your research, which is especially important for early career researchers. Preprints can be cited and indexing services like Google Scholar will join your preprint citations with the record of your eventual journal publication. Preprints also mean that work can be reviewed (and errors-caught) before final publication. WHAT HAPPENS WHEN MY PAPER IS PUBLISHED? Your work is still available in preprint form, which means that there is a non-paywalled version and so more people will read and cite it. If you upload a version of the manuscript after it has been accepted for publication that is called a post-print. WHAT ABOUT COPYRIGHT? Mostly journals own the formatted, typeset version of your published manuscript. This is why you often aren’t allowed to upload the PDF of this to your own website or a preprint server, but there’s nothing stopping you uploading a version with the same text (so the formatting will be different, but the information is the same). WILL JOURNALS REFUSE MY PAPER IF IT IS ALREADY “PUBLISHED” VIA APREPRINT?
Most journals
allow, or even encourage preprints. A diminishing minority don’t. If you’re interested you can search for specific journal policies here.
WILL I GET SCOOPED?
Preprints allow you to timestamp your work before publication, so they can act to establish priority on a findings which is protection against being scooped. Of course, if you have a project where you don’t want to let anyone know you are working in that area until you’re published, preprints may not be suitable. WHEN SHOULD I UPLOAD A PREPRINT? Upload a preprint at the point of submission to a journal, and for each further submission and upon acceptance (making it a postprint). WHAT’S TO STOP PEOPLE UPLOADING RUBBISH TO A PREPRINT SERVER? There’s nothing to stop this, but since your reputation for doing quality work is one of the most important things a scholar has I don’t recommend it.Useful links:
* psyarxiv – preprint server for psychology * List of academic journals by preprint policy(Wikipedia)
* Search publishers policies on preprints by journal name atShERPA/RoMEO
* The preprint dilemma(Jocelyn Kaiser
in Science, 2017).
* ASAPbio Preprint FAQ * Bourne et al (2016) Ten simple rules for considering preprintsPart of a series:
* Pre-registration
* The Open Science Framework* Reproducibility
Author tomstafford Postedon August 14, 2018
Categories
Theory 2 Comments on Open Science Essentials: Preprints BELIEVING EVERYONE ELSE IS WRONG IS A DANGER SIGN I have a guest post for the Research Digest, snappily titled ‘People who think their opinions are superior to others are most prone to overestimating their relevant knowledge and ignoring chances to learnmore
‘.
The paper I review is about the so-called “belief superiority” effect, which is defined by thinking that your views are better than other people’s (i.e. not just that you are right, but that other people are wrong). The finding that people who have belief superiority are more likely to overestimate their knowledge is a twist on the famous Dunning-Kruger phenomenon, but showing that it isn’t just ignorance that predicts overconfidence, but also the specific belief that everyone else hasmistaken beliefs.
Here’s the first lines of the Research Digest piece: > We all know someone who is convinced their opinion is better than > everyone else’s on a topic – perhaps, even, that it is the only > correct opinion to have. Maybe, on some topics, _you_ are that > person. No psychologist would be surprised that people who are > convinced their beliefs are superior think they are better informed > than others, but this fact leads to a follow on question: are people > _actually_ better informed on the topics for which they are > convinced their opinion is superior? This is what Michael Hall and > Kaitlin Raimi set out to check in a series of experiments>
> in the _Journal of Experimental Social Psychology_. Read more here: ‘People who think their opinions are superior to others are most prone to overestimating their relevant knowledge and ignoring chances to learn more‘
Author tomstafford Postedon June 17, 2018
Categories
Reasoning 7 Comments on Believing everyone else is wrong is a danger sign REVIEW: JOHN BARGH’S “BEFORE YOU KNOW IT”I have a review
of John Bargh’s new book “Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do” in this month’s Psychologist magazine . You can read the review in print (or online here) but the magazine could only fit in 250 words, and I originally wrote closer to 700. I’ll put the full, unedited, review below at the endof this post.
John Bargh is one of the world’s most celebrated social psychologists, and has made his name with creative experiments supposedly demonstrating the nature of our unconscious minds. His work, and style of work, has been directly or implicitly criticised during the so-called replication crisis in psychology (example),
so I approached a book length treatment of his ideas with interest, and in anticipation of how he’d respond to his critics. Full disclosure: I’ve previously argued that Bargh’s definition of ‘unconscious’ is theoretically incoherent,
rather than merely empirically unreliable,
so my prior expectations for his book are probably best classified as ‘skeptical’. I did get a free copy though, which always puts me ina good mood.
If you like short and sweet, please pay The Psychologist a visit forthe short review
.
If you’ve patience for more of me (and John Bargh), read on…. Continue reading “Review: John Bargh’s “Before YouKnow It””
Author tomstafford Posted on April 4, 2018April 5, 2018Categories
books 2 Comments on Review: John Bargh’s “Before You Know It” DID THE VICTORIANS HAVE FASTER REACTIONS? Psychologists have been measuring reaction times since before psychology existed, and they are still a staple of cognitive psychology experiments today. Typically psychologists look for a difference in the time it takes participants to respond to stimuli under different conditions as evidence of differences in how cognitive processing occurs in those conditions.Galton , the famous
eugenicist and statistician, collected a large data set (n=3410) of so called ‘simple reaction times’ in the last years of the 19th century. Galton’s interest was rather different from most modern psychologists – he was interested in measures of reaction time as a indicator of individual differences. Galton’s theory was that differences in processing speed might underlie differences in intelligence, and maybe those differences could be efficiently assessed by recording people’s reaction times. Galton’s data creates an interesting opportunity – are people today, over 100 years later, faster or slower than Galton’s participants? If you believe Galton’s theory, the answer wouldn’t just tell you if you would be likely to win in a quick-draw contest with a Victorian gunslinger, it could also provide an insight into generational changes in cognitive function more broadly. Reaction time data provides an interesting counterpoint to the most famous historical change in cognitive function – the generation on generation increase in IQ scores, known as the Flynn Effect. The Flynn Effect
surprises two kinds of people – those who look at “kids today” and know by instinct that they are less polite, less intelligent and less disciplined their own generation (this has been documented in every generation back to at least Ancient Greece),
and those who look at kids today and know by prior theoretical commitments that each generation should be dumber than the previous (because more intelligent people have fewer children, is the idea). Whilst the Flynn Effect contradicts the idea that people are getting dumber, some hope does seem to lie in the reaction time data. Maybe Victorian participants really did have faster reaction times! Several research papers (1,
2 ) have
tried to compare Galton’s results to more modern studies, some of which tried to use the the same apparatus as well as the same method of measurement. Here’s Silverman (2010):
> the RTs obtained by young adults in 14 studies published from 1941 > on were compared with the RTs obtained by young adults in a study > conducted by Galton in the late 1800s. With one exception, the newer > studies obtained RTs longer than those obtained by Galton. The > possibility that these differences in results are due to faulty > timing instruments is considered but deemed unlikely. Woodley et al (2015) have a helpful graph (Galton’s result shown onthe bottom left):
(Woodley et al, 2015, Figure 1, “Secular SRT slowing across four large, representative studies from the UK spanning a century. Bubble-size is proportional to sample size. Combined _N_ = 6622.”) So the difference is only ~20 milliseconds (i.e. one fiftieth of a second) over 100 years, but in reaction time terms that’s a hefty chunk – it means modern participants are about 10% slower! What are we to make of this? Normally we wouldn’t put much weight on a single study, even one with 3000 participants, but there aren’t many alternatives. It isn’t as if we can have access to young adults born in the 19th century to check if the result replicates. It’s a shame there aren’t more intervening studies, so we could test the reasonable prediction that participants in the 1930s should be about halfway between the Victorian and modern participants. And, even if we believe this datum, _what does it mean?_ A genuine decline in cognitive capacity? Excess cognitive load on other functions? Motivational changes? Changes in how experiments are run or approached by participants? I’m not giving up on the kids just yet.REFERENCES:
* Irwin, W. S. (2010). Simple reaction time: it is not what it usedto be .
_American Journal of Psychology_, _123_(1), 39-50. * Woodley, M. A., Te Nijenhuis, J., & Murphy, R. (2013). Were the Victorians cleverer than us? The decline in general intelligence estimated from a meta-analysis of the slowing of simple reaction time.
_Intelligence_, _41_(6), 843-850. * Woodley, M. A, te Nijenhuis, J., & Murphy, R. (2015). The Victorians were still faster than us. Commentary: Factors influencing the latency of simple reaction time.
_Frontiers in human neuroscience_, _9_, 452. Author tomstafford Posted on April 3, 2018April 3, 2018Categories
Nonsense 19 Comments on Did the Victorians have faster reactions?POSTS NAVIGATION
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