Discovering Brain Power

Why your brain can’t always make good decisions
By Elizabeth Landau
CNN

(CNN) — We all make bad decisions sometimes. In some contexts, to a certain extent, psychologists know why.

Much research on the subject was done by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for their models of how intuitive reasoning is flawed in predictable ways. Kahneman is now professor emeritus at Princeton University, and Tversky died in 1996.

But other researchers are working on showing that, when it comes to more basic judgments, we’re not so bad.

Research in the current issue of the journal Neuron offers a mathematical model for how people make decisions about visual stimuli on a computer screen. They found that humans make accurate judgments about cues they can see.

“We’re discovering that humans aren’t so stupid after all,” said Alexandre Pouget, co-author of the study and associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester in New York.

Participants were asked to look at moving dots on a screen. Many of the dots moved randomly, but some moved in one clear direction. Researchers found that people very quickly realized which way the non-random dots were going.

The work complements that of Kahneman and Tversky in that it shows humans are good at lower-level, nonlinguistic tasks, while perhaps not so good at higher-level probability problems involving words, he said.

“In simple perceptual decisions — you have a visual stimulus on the screen and you have to make decisions about it — it looks like you do accumulate the evidence optimally, given that uncertainty,” Pouget said.

Here is the full article.

Special thanks to Gene Milener for sending in the link.