Category Archives: Perceptual Organization

Hindsight Bias

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It was close to January in high school. I was sitting in my living room waiting for the mailman to come by. I was waiting on the acceptance letter to the college. The college I desired to attend was the great school named Penn State University. I was extremely nervous because I really wanted attend this school and had no idea what the results were going to be. The mail comes in. I GOT ACCEPTED.  I happily jumped around and immediately ran to my mother and told her the amazing news. She replied, “I knew you were going to get in!” She congratulated me and explained how it was no surprise to her. Later that day, I also shared this news with my father. In the middle of my conversation, my dad blurted out and said that “to think your mom was talking to me about her doubts about you getting into Penn State earlier this week.”

What occurred with my mom in psychology is called hindsight bias. Hindsight bias is referred to the tendency to overestimate their ability to predict what will occur when they could not have actually predicted what occurred. In hindsight bias, many people would say, “I knew it!” making it seem like they made a correct guess in what occurred. This is when people believe that they knew that they predicted what had happened after the event has already occurred.

This phenomenon is also referred as the knew-it-all-along effect. The phenomenon of hindsight bias is an example of constructive-processing view. Constructive-processing view is the retrieval of memories in which those memories are altered, revised, or influenced by newer information.  Through my case, it would have been impossible for my mom to know that I had got accepted or not. She was influenced by the hindsight bias effect by falsely believing that she knew the outcome of my acceptance to Penn State because she placed her knowledge of the event’s true outcome into her memories through revision of older memories to include the newer information.

 

Ciccarelli, Saundra K., and J. Noland White. Psychology. Third ed. N.p.: Pearson, n.d. Print.

 

 

Cramming vs Scheduled Studying

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In class, the differences in the results from cramming and scheduled studying was discussed. It was seen that the person who spaced out their studying performed a lot better on the task of recalling the materials that was studied than the person who crammed for the task the night before. At my apartment, two of my roommates are both aerospace engineering majors. They both take the same classes, have the same homework, take exams at the same time, and even have labs together. The only difference between the two are their studying habits. One of them studies the exam materials across several days, which I’ll call him Student 1. The other usually pushes studying until the last day and ends up cramming throughout the night, which I’ll call him Student 2. With their exam coming up, I thought this would be a perfect scenario to test if the two methods will result as predicted in class.

In the beginning of the week of the exam, Student 1 was seen finishing up work for another class and asked him if he was done for the night. Student 1 replied that he was finished with work that was due, however he was going to study a small portion of the exam for about an hour that night. I walked downstairs and saw Student 2 finishing up the same work that was due and asked him if he was finished for the night. He replied that he was done his work and proceeded to relax and watch the television. The next two days went by, Student 1 was seen studying for the exam for about 1-2 hours both nights, while Student 2 proceeded to just finish any work that was due immediately and not start studying for the upcoming exam. On the night before the exam, Student 1 felt pretty comfortable about the exam and reviewed the material for about 2-3 hours before heading to sleep. Student 2 looked very stressed and was not prepared at all. Student 2 would end up cramming for this exam throughout most of the night. The two went off the take the test the next morning.

When both students returned, I asked them how their exams went. Student 1 replied that he felt very comfortable with it, while Student 2 looked distraught and said he did not think he did that well. When the results of the exam came up, as predicted, Student 1, who studied the material spaced out over a week, scored a lot better than Student 2, who crammed for the exam the night before.

The experiment seems to hold the hypothesis that the task of recalling will be higher when rehearsal is done in short spurts over a long period of time, rather than a long session in a short period of time. to be true

Hindsight Bias

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Today, as I walked in the door of my apartment from class, my roommate was singing a song that she had stuck in her head. The lyrics sang, “You’re just what I need” and after singing a few verses she promptly quizzed me to see if I could remember what movie it was from. She tried to give me a few subtle hints such as telling me that it was something I have seen a few times and that I would be mad once I hear what the answer is. Finally after going to my other roommate for help and having both of us stumped, she told us the answer, “Bring it On!”. As soon as she said this, I was instantly saying to her, “Oh my gosh how didn’t I know that!”. Immediately after saying this, I realized I had experienced hindsight bias that we had just talked about in class.

Hindsight bias is a false conviction that the result of an event was predictable. To further this idea, it essentially means that once you know something, it is really hard to imagine your life before you knew that information. In my example with my roommate, once she told me what movie the song she was singing was from, I found it impossible to see how I did not know the movie before she said it. My immediate thought after she told me was that I should have known that, yet this was just an effect of hindsight bias and the reality is I probably would not have ever known where the song was from unless she told me. Hindsight bias has a big impact on our memories and how we construct them. The next time you think to yourself, “I should have known that”, try to remember this concept and realize that maybe you actually should not have.

Motion Parallax

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Last Thursday, as I was getting ready to head out to my calculus quiz, I looked out the window adjacent to my desk and noticed flurries of snow.  The speed appeared to change with the wind, so I watched for a minute and noticed something peculiar.  This was that as I looked at the snow falling closest to the brick wall, several feet away from my window, the snow seemed to fall very peacefully.  When I looked at the snow closest to my window, it seemed to fall quickly and, at times, almost violently.  However, the speed of snowflakes was not different right next to my window compared to a few feet away. This is when I realized that I was observing the monocular cue known as motion parallax that we had learned about a few days prior.

Motion parallax is when objects that are closer to you seem to move at a quicker pace than those farther away from you.  Our eyes trick us into thinking that closer objects are moving faster and farther ones slower because with monocular cues such as relative size, interposition/occulsion, aerial perspective, linear perspective, texture gradient, and, of course, motion parallax , our depth perception only uses 1 eye to judge distances.

So, when I looked at the snowfall, my perception was that the snow was falling at different speeds everywhere that I focused my attention.  Prior to this class, I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about the rate of snowfall.  Perceptual organization examples such as this are interesting and can help us to understand more about the illusions that our eyes create.  These illusions are so powerful that they could have made me think that the snow actually was falling quickly closer to me, however I don’t believe this would even be possible.

Have you ever experienced a similar phenomenon?

Forgetting and Examples of Attention Deficit

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In my life, there have been many occurrences in which encoding failure and rehearsal failure have been detrimental to me.  One experience happened at my house before college where I wanted to hide something that was completely trivial but important at the time since I was a kid.  I put the item in above a shelf high up where no one would see it.  Due to an encoding failure and forgetting it in nearly one minute, it led to unneeded anxiety and accusations.  Since I was a kid, I would blame my sister for taking something that wasn’t hers.  If the item was truly important there would be more attention given to it and I wouldn’t have forgotten it.  Since it was forgotten, it led to an embarrassing conclusion where my father found it and showed it to me before finally directly accusing my sister.  This would have led to me truly being ashamed of myself and regretting absence of mind when hiding it.  Fortunately, nothing major happened due to this.

Another instance of forgetting happened when I used to work.  I used to work at a garage where I would work on cars and pump gasoline into cars.  On a daily basis, I would deal with almost two hundred customers because gasoline and car maintenance is a necessary thing.  One example of forgetting comes from my boss quickly telling me what to do with a lot of noise from the environment.  Due to my lack of attention, some of the tasks asked of me would be forgotten.  This led to negative consequences and additional time wasted by my boss.  Ultimately this is an event I have learned from and will be attentive to for the rest of my life.  This would be an example of retrieval interference and encoding failure in the auditory sense.

In terms of Rehearsal Failure, there is another example from work that happened on a daily basis.  Most of my tasks included being very repetitive because it was a first job and car maintenance on multiple cars tends to include the same task.  With a car wheel, there is a hub, and the tire.  Every time the tire needs to be replaced, there is a machine inside of a garage that would need to be used.  It is called a mounting machine.  This includes using the machine with multiple processes to remove the broken tire and replacing the tire.  This process includes using four pedals and an arm that moves on the top of the tire.  These pedals and the arm have to be pressed in a very precise order and moving the arm is included in the order.  This means that remembering the order and methods is important for finishing the task quickly.  Of course I forget the order and the process because the directions given to me were not processed in my brain because of my attention deficit.  Forgetting these things and not paying attention leads to messing up the process, making a person wait longer, and negatively affecting my boss.  This would be considered a rehearsal failure and encoding failure during training.

More attention is needed for a lot of these technical processes.