Minds in Motion

Corpus Callosum Disorders (CCDs) are a rare congenital anomaly effecting the development of the key connection between the two hemispheres of the brain, commonly co-occuring with Autism, ADHD, many other conditions. Studying CCDs offer insight into many mental health conditions as well as neuroplasticity, and brain development in general. Studying presentations of anxiety in CCDs using qualitative research methods fills a gap in our knowledge about about how disabled people relate to the world around them by using their own lived experience as data and has implications for anxiety research more broadly that is not being addressed by traditional psychology and neuroscience research.

Most of the time, people’s preferences are stable. That is, what someone likes does not vary much moment to moment. However, there are times when this is not always true.
In this study, we tested that idea using a 40-minute choice experiment. Participants repeatedly chose between two toothpaste options, each described by five attributes like price, size, and whitening ability. This allowed us to track how their decisions changed over time.
As the task went on, people sped up their responses and at the same time, their choices became less consistent. Specifically, their preference strength weakened, and they became worse at identifying optimal options (cases where one option was objectively superior).
So what’s going on? We explored two possible explanations. One assumes that people make more random choices over time, either due to fatigue or disengagement. The other assumes that their decisions become noisier, even if they’re still trying to do the task properly. Both explanations could reproduce the patterns we observed. Further analysis found that participants were still pretty good at spotting the best option, even late in the task. This finding is hard to explain if people were just randomly guessing. Instead, it suggests that people stayed engaged with the task, but their decisions became increasingly noisy over time.
The key takeaway is preferences aren’t always fixed. Over the course of less than an hour, decision behaviour can shift in systematic ways.

Professor Arnold has Aphantasia – he cannot visualise. He will talk about life with a ‘blind mind’, and about common imaginative differences that govern how able you are to control of your thoughts, and how you experience your thoughts when you think about the past and the future. It turns out that your experiences of thinking are different to other people’s.