5 ms·

physiologist have studied the relationship between activation(arousal, "passion?") phase of the motivational process and the performance. It turns out that more

physiologist have studied the relationship between activation(arousal, "passion?") phase of the motivational process and the performance. It turns out that more activation doesn't lead to more performance, but each task has its own optimal activation level, and it seems to be inversely correlated with how hard intellectually is the task. While it might be linearly correlated for physical tasks like running from a predator. See Yerkes and Dodson law[1] and I think Hebbs[2] also touched on this topic. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes–Dodson_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes–Dodson_law [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_O._Hebb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_O._Hebb

agumonkey 8y ago
Thanks a lot, I love pointers like these
scarejunba 8y ago
Woah, very cool. Thank you.
dTal 8y ago
It's worth noting that, despite its status as dogma in psychology, the Yerkes-Dodson "law" is almost completely unsubstantiated, having been generously extrapolated from an experiment on mice with somewhat dubious methodology, and not reliably replicated since then; the beautiful normal-distribution bell curves one so often sees are complete fabrications. The mice were given 5 levels of (uncalibrated!) electric shocks, which has since been taken to be the "arousal" axis; their task was to learn not to go down a dark hallway, and the number times they attempted this before learning that dark hallway = shock has since been taken to be "performance". This resulted in a jagged 5-point line in which the fastest learning did not occur at the highest or lowest shock levels. That's it. That's the experiment. Needless to say, even if the result were perfectly trustworthy, extrapolating this out to a neat bell curve that describes the performance of humans studying for a calculus test is unscientific. But like all pseudoscience, it has a sort of intuitive appeal. It should be noted that Yerkes and Dodson themselves never made any claims about "arousal" and so on - they were just trying to measure the effect of electric shocks on the speed of animal habit-formation. Here's a fairly comprehensive review of the methodological flaws with Yerkes-Dodson, too numerous to go into detail on here: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/jhpee/vol7/iss1/3/ https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/jhpee/vol7/iss1/3/
- alfonsodev 8y ago
  > not reliably replicated since then My understanding tis that the studies were replicated in rats, cats and humans. From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2657838/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2657838/ > Despite the limitations of their study, the findings of Yerkes and Dodson were subsequently replicated in cats (Dodson, 1915), rats (Broadhurst, 1957; Telegdy and Cohen 1971) and people (Dickman, 2002; Bregman and McAllister 1982; Anderson, 1994), and became part of the lexicon of the field of psychology as the “Yerkes-Dodson Law” (Young, 1936; Eysenk, 1955).

agumonkey 8y ago

Thanks a lot, I love pointers like these

scarejunba 8y ago

Woah, very cool. Thank you.

dTal 8y ago

It's worth noting that, despite its status as dogma in psychology, the Yerkes-Dodson "law" is almost completely unsubstantiated, having been generously extrapolated from an experiment on mice with somewhat dubious methodology, and not reliably replicated since then; the beautiful normal-distribution bell curves one so often sees are complete fabrications. The mice were given 5 levels of (uncalibrated!) electric shocks, which has since been taken to be the "arousal" axis; their task was to learn not to go down a dark hallway, and the number times they attempted this before learning that dark hallway = shock has since been taken to be "performance". This resulted in a jagged 5-point line in which the fastest learning did not occur at the highest or lowest shock levels. That's it. That's the experiment. Needless to say, even if the result were perfectly trustworthy, extrapolating this out to a neat bell curve that describes the performance of humans studying for a calculus test is unscientific. But like all pseudoscience, it has a sort of intuitive appeal. It should be noted that Yerkes and Dodson themselves never made any claims about "arousal" and so on - they were just trying to measure the effect of electric shocks on the speed of animal habit-formation. Here's a fairly comprehensive review of the methodological flaws with Yerkes-Dodson, too numerous to go into detail on here: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/jhpee/vol7/iss1/3/ https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/jhpee/vol7/iss1/3/

alfonsodev 8y ago
> not reliably replicated since then My understanding tis that the studies were replicated in rats, cats and humans. From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2657838/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2657838/ > Despite the limitations of their study, the findings of Yerkes and Dodson were subsequently replicated in cats (Dodson, 1915), rats (Broadhurst, 1957; Telegdy and Cohen 1971) and people (Dickman, 2002; Bregman and McAllister 1982; Anderson, 1994), and became part of the lexicon of the field of psychology as the “Yerkes-Dodson Law” (Young, 1936; Eysenk, 1955).