Electron Hut: Kyle Bedell’s Blog

I’ve been doing some research for my latest Information Visualization paper on decision-making up here in the library, and I’m finding that the decision making process is influenced heavily by a number of cognitive biases, which are basically faults in the way we process information. While not all of them apply directly to the decision making process, anything that distorts or alters our information storage/retrieval/processing capabilities is also affecting our evaluations of various options. It seems like being able to effectively make decisions is as much about acknowledging and circumventing those biases as it is about managing attention and minimizing load on working memory.

The actual biases are really interesting to read about. While I don’t recommend relying on Wikipedia for your research papers, you can run some of cited names from these articles through Google Scholar and tap into a plethora of research.

Something else that’s really cool: if you happen to be at a college or university (like Bentley!), Google Scholar actually picks up on your IP range and points you towards full-text articles available at your school library. Nifty!