Sense of Control Warps Pattern Perception
Sunday, December 28th, 2008
Research findings from University of Texas at Austin reported in Science Magazine, suggest that feeling in control (or not) strongly influences how effective we are at a wide range of pattern recognition tasks.
“Participants who lacked control were more likely to perceive a variety of illusory patterns, including seeing images in noise, forming illusory correlations in stock market information, perceiving conspiracies, and developing superstitions.”
The perception of illusory patterns can lead to poor judgements and decisions making. So this finding has implications for designers working on a wide range of cognitive applications from management decision-making and consumer choice to learning and perhaps even the design of new magic tricks!
