Hydrox is back, but still misunderstood

The people have spoken and Kellogg’s has listened and are bringing back, for a limited run, the Hydrox cookie that was discontinued in 2003.  But, as the initial post about its demise noted (see “Evolutionary food chain”), the Hydrox cookie has always been misunderstood and continues to be even as it is being resurrected.  The entry from The Consumerist announcing the return of the cookie perpetuates the false perception of the Hydrox as a cheap knock-off of the Oreo:

“1,300 phone inquiries, an online petition with more than 1,000 signatures and Internet chat sites lamenting the demise of the snack.” That’s all it took for Kellogg to resurrect the odd Oreo ripoff cookies called Hydrox, which were discontinued in 2003 after nearly 100 years. Turns out some people really like their Hydrox! The product always seemed like an inferior, superfluous, knockoff cookie with a terrible name. Which it is!

Which it is most emphatically not — well, maybe except the terrible name part.  What’s even more sad is that the Wall Street Journal article that The Consumerist references as source explicitly corrects the misconception that The Consumerist’s perpetuates:

Hydrox also likely suffered from the impression that it was a cheap knockoff of the better-known Oreo. In fact, Hydrox was created by what would later become Sunshine Biscuits Co. in 1908 — four years before National Biscuit Co. (later Nabisco) launched the similar Oreo. Sunshine is now a unit of Kellogg.

I guess we should never underestimate the power of preconceived biases.

Learning to fail

An article in LiveScience examines the counterintuitive idea that ” We sure do learn from our mistakes, but what we learn is how to make more mistakes.  A study of the “tip of the tongue” phenomenon lead researchers to this conclusion.  The researchers tested word-retrieval in 30 undergraduate students:

The students were offered a series of definitions and had to indicate whether they knew the answer, didn’t know it, or if the answer was at the tip of his or her tongue. If a student answered TOT, he or she spent either 10 seconds or 30 seconds trying to come up with the word before getting the answer. Two days later, students completed the same word-retrieval test with the same definitions.

Students tended to report TOT for the same words that twisted their tongues in the first test. Those who were given 30-second stints to retrieve the words in past tests were even more likely to get stuck again.

The period in which people continue to rack their brains for the answer could be referred to as “error learning,” Humphreys said. “You’ll keep on digging yourself the wrong pathway, you either have 10 seconds worth of that extra bad learning or you have 30 seconds worth of that extra bad learning.”