Given that food is an essential requirement for all living beings, it is not surprising that we have an automatic inclination to move towards food. This approach bias (i.e., our tendency to move towards things we like or find appealing) can be influenced by many things, including how hungry we…
Research in the School of Psychology has been helping uncover the origins of stereotypes.
Stereotypes are bits of information associated with social categories (e.g., Scottish people are miserly, scientists are geeky, and men like the colour blue). Regardless of whether we believe them to be true we all have extensive…
When we interact with other people, we often find it relatively easy to understand the meaning behind their behaviour, and the reasons for why they act how they do often come to us unbidden. We seem to just know why our child drags us towards a shop window, why our…
Our eyes are continuously bombarded by an enormous amount of visual information – millions of shapes, colours and ever-changing motion all around us. For the brain, this is no easy feat. On the one hand, the visual world alters continuously because of changes in light, viewpoint and other factors. On…
One important learning tool in the classroom is metacognition, which involves thinking about and managing your own thinking. For example, when you pause halfway through reading a textbook and realise you haven't absorbed the material, you are engaging in metacognition by monitoring your own thought process.
Being aware of how…
