The Minimal Counterintuitiveness Effect
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The Minimal Counterintuitiveness Effect
Cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer argued that minimally counterintuitive concepts (MCI) i.e., concepts that violate a few ontological expectations of a category such as the category of an agent, are more memorable than intuitive and maximally counterintuitive (MXCI) concepts. A number of experimental psychology studies have found support for Boyer's hypothesis. Upal labelled this as the minimal counterintuitiveness effect or the MCI-effect. Boyer originally did not precisely specify the number of expectation-violations that would render an idea maximally counterintuitive. Early empirical studies including those by Boyer himself and others did not study MXCI concepts. Both these studies only used concepts violating a single expectation (which were labelled as MCI concepts). Atran was the first to study memory for MXCI concepts and labeled concepts violating 2-expectations as maximally counterintuitive. Studies by the I-75 Cognition and Culture Group also labelled ideas viola ...
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Pascal Boyer
Pascal Robert Boyer is a French-American cognitive anthropology, cognitive anthropologist and evolutionary psychology, evolutionary psychologist, mostly known for his work in the cognitive science of religion. He taught at the University of Cambridge for eight years, before taking up the position of Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches classes on evolutionary psychology and anthropology. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Lyon, France. He studied philosophy and anthropology at University of Paris and University of Cambridge, Cambridge, with Jack Goody, working on memory constraints on the transmission of oral literature. Boyer is a Member of thAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences Work Pascal Boyer, an anthropologist, studies how human biases and cognitive faculties have resulted in or encouraged cultural phenomena. He advo ...
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Counterintuitive
A paradox is a logically self-contradictory statement or a statement that runs contrary to one's expectation. It is a statement that, despite apparently valid reasoning from true premises, leads to a seemingly self-contradictory or a logically unacceptable conclusion. A paradox usually involves contradictory-yet-interrelated elements that exist simultaneously and persist over time. They result in "persistent contradiction between interdependent elements" leading to a lasting "unity of opposites". In logic, many paradoxes exist that are known to be invalid arguments, yet are nevertheless valuable in promoting critical thinking, while other paradoxes have revealed errors in definitions that were assumed to be rigorous, and have caused axioms of mathematics and logic to be re-examined. One example is Russell's paradox, which questions whether a "list of all lists that do not contain themselves" would include itself, and showed that attempts to found set theory on the identification ...
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Context-based Model Of Minimal Counterintuitiveness
The context-based model of the counterintuitiveness effect is a cognitive model of The Minimal Counterintuitiveness Effect (or MCI-effect for short) i.e., the finding by many cognitive scientists of religion that minimally counterintuitive concepts are more memorable for people than intuitive and maximally counterintuitive concepts The context-based model emphasizes the role played by the context in which a concept appears in making it counterintuitive. This is in contrast to the traditional (also called ''content-based'') accounts of the MCI-effect which underscore the role played by context. Barrett & Nyhoff (2001) claim that this is necessary in order to explain cross-cultural success of religious concepts. Although research on schemas and scripts suggests the possibility that incongruent concepts may be better remembered thus contributing to their transmission, these conceptual structures are culturally variable to a large extent and will not provide an explanation for cross ...
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Uncanny Valley
In aesthetics, the uncanny valley ( ja, 不気味の谷 ''bukimi no tani'') is a hypothesized relation between an object's degree of resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to the object. The concept suggests that humanoid objects that imperfectly resemble actual human beings provoke uncanny or strangely familiar feelings of uneasiness and revulsion in observers. "Valley" denotes a dip in the human observer's affinity for the replica, a relation that otherwise increases with the replica's human likeness. Examples can be found in robotics, 3D computer animations and lifelike dolls. With the increasing prevalence of virtual reality, augmented reality, and photorealistic computer animation, the "valley" has been cited in reaction to the verisimilitude of the creation as it approaches indistinguishability from reality. The uncanny valley hypothesis predicts that an entity appearing almost human will risk eliciting cold, eerie feelings in viewers. Etymology Robotics ...
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Memory
Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembered, it would be impossible for language, relationships, or personal identity to develop. Memory loss is usually described as forgetfulness or amnesia. Memory is often understood as an informational processing system with explicit and implicit functioning that is made up of a sensory processor, short-term (or working) memory, and long-term memory. This can be related to the neuron. The sensory processor allows information from the outside world to be sensed in the form of chemical and physical stimuli and attended to various levels of focus and intent. Working memory serves as an encoding and retrieval processor. Information in the form of stimuli is encoded in accordance with explicit or implicit functions by the working memory processor. ...
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