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Lecture Notes

So certainly, those heuristics give us some insight into how we might make automatic judgments about the world around us. Let's also talk a little bit about some of the biological aspects of cognition, what's going on behind the scenes in the brain; and what we find is that the brain's better at performing simple tasks using one hemisphere rather than two. That's because when a task is easy, the translation between the hemispheres just takes too much time. So for instance, if you're in an experiment and you have to press a button when a visual stimulus is presented on a screen, this might be an example of one of those easy tasks in which one of the hemispheres allows for better performance than rather relying on both hemispheres to make that response. We also see that if you were presented with a picture, your right hemisphere is going to process the overall configuration; it's going to look sort of at the big picture, if you will, while your left hemisphere is going to process a lot of those details. So the hemispheres are kind of working on different aspects of that recognition and cognition.