Wearing lab coat might help in taking SATs

Say you're getting ready to take the SAT. You spend hours brushing up on vocabulary; you do hundreds of practice problems; you learn tips on test-taking from a tutor.

Those are good techniques, but you might consider adding a new trick: wearing a lab coat.

People who wore white lab coats made half as many mistakes on attention-related tasks as those in their regular clothes, according to a study published this year by Hajo Adam, a visiting assistant professor at Northwestern University, along with colleague Adam Galinsky.

It isn't clear whether the effect wears off over time, or if knowing the trick removes its effectiveness. But the idea that "smart clothes" make you smarter is one example of embodied cognition, a growing field within psychology.

Embodied cognition is the notion that our physical experience permeates our thoughts and feelings, often unconsciously. It challenges what many of us think about ourselves: that we can make balanced, objective analyses independent of our physical state.

That revelation signals a shift in how we think about thought -- and it has practical implications for other fields, from education to medicine.

The brain doesn't make an artificial distinction between thinking and physical perceptions, researchers say.

"Even potentially quite abstract thought is grounded in the same neurological structures that support perception and action," said Roberta Klatzky, a professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University.

Klatzky and colleague Brian MacWhinney say that phenomenon begins with body representation, our ability to understand how our bodies function in space. The level above representation is imitation, they say, the ability to project others' bodily movements onto our own.

Embodied cognition functions at lower and higher levels of brain activity. That hills look steeper to those wearing backpacks than those not is an example of lower-level functioning, Klatzky says.

But physical sensations also can influence higher-level cognition and social views. When prompted in one experiment to think about the H1N1 virus, those who were not vaccinated were more negative toward immigrants than those who were.