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Clever Hans

the “thinking horse,” reputed to be able to solve mathematical problems, spell words, distinguish colors, and identify coins, that became famous in Berlin around 1900. It signaled its answers by tapping its foot. However, German psychologist Oskar Pfungst (1874–1932), using experimental methods, demonstrated that the horse was responding to minimal cues in the form of involuntary movements on the part of its owner.

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Psychology term of the day

May 10th 2024

object-superiority effect

object-superiority effect

in visual perception tasks, the finding that judgments about a briefly presented line are made more efficiently when the line is part of a drawing of a three-dimensional object than when it is part of a two-dimensional figure. See configural superiority effect; word-superiority effect.