Study examines common cognitive biases (have you tried this brain teaser?) and ways to mitigate them

A fas­ci­nat­ing new study, Tver­sky and Kahneman’s Cog­ni­tive Illu­sions: Who Can Solve Them, and Why?, probes into the cog­ni­tive “heuris­tics and bias­es” researched by Daniel Kah­ne­man and Amos Tver­sky since the late 1960s. If you have nev­er encoun­tered the “Lin­da brain teas­er” before, please give it a try: Lin­da is 31 years old, sin­gle, out­spo­ken, and very…

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Brain Teaser for pattern recognition: The Empty Triangle

Here you have a quick brain teaser…which num­ber should be placed in the emp­ty tri­an­gle to  the right? This puz­zle works your exec­u­tive func­tions in your frontal lobes by using your pat­tern recog­ni­tion, hypoth­e­sis test­ing, and log­ic. Warn­ing: There can be more than one solution…but make sure what­ev­er you say works in all four tri­an­gles! The…

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5 quick brain teasers to sharpen two key cognitive skills: attention and working memory

Look­ing for some fun–and free–cognitive stim­u­la­tion over the week­end? Here you have a few quick brain teasers to chal­lenge your atten­tion and your work­ing mem­ory (work­ing mem­ory is the capac­i­ty to keep infor­ma­tion in your mind while work­ing on pro­cess­ing and inte­grat­ing it) Please give them a try…they are not as easy as they may seem :-)

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23. Quick brainteaser to test your cognitive skills…and biases

— Brain teas­er: Please con­sider Lin­da, a 31-year-old woman, sin­gle and bright. When she was a stu­dent, in high school and in col­lege too, she was deeply involved in social jus­tice issues, and also par­tic­i­pated in envi­ron­men­tal protests. Which is more prob­a­ble about Linda’s occu­pa­tion today?

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