Our Cognitive Limitations - Cognitive Science

Of course, we all have our own cognitive limitations. But one cognitive skill that we as humans are quite poor at is random number generation. Some numbers often seem more random to us than others. For example, the number seven seems more random than the number five. Random number generation is a difficult and challenging task involving a number of executive processes and working memory.

A nice anecdote on this matter is that in the last elections in Iran there were too many sevens and too few fives in the vote counting of the different regions. This pattern which deviated from the expected distribution is another clue that suggests the false results of these elections. Another clue may be that when looking at the last two digits of the regional vote count, the frequency of non-adjacent digits (such as 64 or 16 and opposed to 34) is too low. Difficulty with generating non-adjacent digits is also a characteristic of human number generation. (For a more comprehensive review click here).

This is just one example of why it’s important to know our cognitive skills limitations.

Written by Chen Rosner Or-Bach, (MA) Cognitive Psychology – Chen is a cognitive psychologist at Mind360, a leading scientific brain training games developer for boosting your memory, attention, executive functions, reasoning, and other key cognitive skills.