Do some Photosensitive epileptics desire seizures? It seems absurd, but from the Wikipedia article on Photosensitive Epilepsy:

  Some PSE patients, especially children, may exhibit an uncontrollable fascination with television images that trigger seizures, to such an extent that it may be necessary to physically keep them away from television sets. Some patients (particularly those with cognitive impairments, although most PSE patients have no such impairments) self-induce seizures by waving their fingers in front of their eyes in front of bright light or by other means.

Wikipedia fails to give a citation as to the existence or commonality of this, but it still strikes me as odd.

Have any studies (case studies or preferably experimental results) validated that some PSE patients want or enjoy seizures? Is there some attraction to the causes of these seizures in the patients that causes this behavior?

The article I found goes into the general phenomenon of seizure self-induction, but does spend quite a bit of time on photosensitive epilepsy (PSE).  It's a review, so there are plenty of references.

It first points out the prevalence of PSE, which occurs in between 2-5% of the population, and approximately 25% of those affected by the disorder are thought to self-stimulate.

The article supports the assertion on Wikipedia that developmentally challenged and "learning disabled" children are most prone to these self-inductive behaviors, but states that children of normal intelligence and higher may have developed strategies to avoid getting caught doing so during recorded sessions.  It does not go into much depth regarding adults self-inducing, but tacitly assumes that adults of normal intelligence would be more likely to understand the harm that a seizure could bring them.

There is support for the notion that children with television induced seizures do try to seek out televisions for this self-stimulation behavior, but the article cautions that this compulsive behavior may be associated with the seizure activity itself, and not something the patients are consciously doing, many describe it as "irresistable."

The article lists a handful of reasons that are commonly thought to promote self-induction:

  Compulsion - whether for pleasure seeking or as a result of seizure activity
  Willful avoidance of stress or boredom
  Hedonistic motivation - to experience an "aura"/trance or other pleasurable feelings
  Sense of control - so they can have a "say" over when their seizures occur, and also so that they can reap the benefits of the refractory period
  Attention seeking - being the "sick patient" for sympathetic family members
  Self-treatment - the patient can give themselves a dose of "convulsive therapy" at will, if this gives them therapeutic relief of concomitant disorders

Stronger doses of anticonvulsant medications, medications to quell any pleasurable reinforcement gained from inducing seizures, specialized contact lenses or glasses to block more light (in the case of PSE), and general behavioral modification strategies are all treatment approaches that can be used.  Emphasis is given to knowing when children are self-inducing and involving a psychiatrist in the loop of neurological and pediatric care.

  Ng, B-Y (2002) Psychiatric aspects of self-induced epileptic
  seizures.  Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry,36:534–543.


Effectiveness of "non-focused" learning Is anything known how effective is "non-focused" learning. For example when I am focused on something else (watching TV, doing work in the office) while listening to language learning material (words and phrases and their translations for example). Or playing scales on your guitar while watching TV (okay, seem to be more invovled then merely listening, but I guess you get the idea).

So is there anything known about that, or any studies on that?

EDIT: I do not have found any studies, mainly because I do not know what to search for, googling terms like "non-focused learning", "passive learning", "distractive learning" do not give anything useful. I have a minor in psychology and if I see a study I can relate it to what I am looking for, but I am not a researcher in psychology. So this question came up out of curiosity of my own (and to be honest, its quite practical if possible to learn something by "not even trying" to say in lax language). I know about the 10k rule of expertise, and they always talk about "deliberate practice", obviously the kind of practice I am looking for is not deliberate, but maybe someone asked if its still beneficial, even if on a much smaller scale. I would suspect that it is not difficult to design studies for it, just let people perform some task, tell them its the main task, then do some distraction in the background (which is the supposed learning content, melodies, words whatever). Then afterwards (obviously to the surprise of the subject) ask question about that your let it perform a task to access gained knowledge.

I think this is a somewhat controversial area of research. On one hand

Participants were asked to predict the weather after receiving a repeated set of cues. During part of the learning, researchers added a second task where participants had to keep a running mental count of high tones that they heard, thus adding an element of distraction.
The results showed that when doing single-task learning, the brain used the region associated with declarative memory, while the habit memory region was associated with dual-task learning.
The dual-task learning did not affect the participants' ability to predict weather at the time, but it reduced their knowledge about the task during a follow-up session later.

On the other:

Psychologists know that the things we learn in one context might not be remembered in another. Famously, investigators once showed that words learned while scuba diving are easier to recall underwater than on dry land. Now Brown University psychologists suggest something similar happens with distraction. The researchers trained 48 people to hit a computer-screen target using a wonky touch pad—tracing up, for example, might move the cursor diagonally—and later evaluated them on their ability to quickly hit the mark. During both training and the test, participants were randomly selected to do a distracting second task: counting letters on a screen. Those distracted during just one phase performed poorly when tested, but those who had done the letter-counting task during both training and testing performed just as well as those who had trained and been tested without distractions, according to the results published in February in Psychological Science.
The consensus remains that distraction is typically bad for learning, the scientists explain. But if you anticipate a distracting testing or performance environment, try to mimic those distractions as you study or practice to avoid being caught off guard.

So distractors are generally bad, but not always.
There's even more controversy whether background music helps or doesn't with school activities or learning other stuff.


Are psychologists more immune to psychological problems? Does knowledge of a psychological problem prevent (or enable one to better defend) the development of psychological issues? For example, if a person has studied about depression and is familiar with the causes and cures of it, is that person more able to prevent himself/herself from going into depression?

Are there statistics about the ratio of mental health problems among psychologists and therapists vs the general public?

Barriers to Psychologists Seeking Mental Health Care by Jennifer L. Bearse, Mark R. McMinn, Winston Seegobin, and Kurt Free of George Fox University asks a similar question.

  Professional psychologists provide help to people in need, but how freely do psychologists seek psychotherapy themselves when facing personal challenges and struggles? What obstacles make it difficult for professional psychologists to seek psychotherapy? A survey of 260 professional psychologists (52% response rate) was conducted to investigate the frequency of various stressors impacting professional psychologists and the barriers they experience in seeking mental health services. Though none of the stressors were rated with particularly high frequencies, burnout was identified as the most frequent problem. Difficulty finding a psychotherapist and a lack of time were identified as the greatest obstacles to seeking psychotherapy. Practice and training implications are discussed as well as future research directions.

As I have said in a previous answer - see for more info., there is Clinical Supervision, which is standard practice and required in codes of practice for registered counsellors, psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, etc. and those in training. However, what is concerning is that I came across an article by Els van Ooijen in Therapy Today, November 2015, Pg 32 that said

  The number of supervision training courses is ever increasing, yet it is not uncommon for practitioners to receive supervision from untrained supervisors. During my 15 years’ experience as a supervision trainer I have heard many stories about the kind of supervision people receive, ranging from excellent and supportive to unhelpful and traumatic, with many shades in
  between.

An article in Quora listed the following research but the references information provided is not all that great so where I could I found the referenced articles and linked them below.

  One study found the lifetime rate of depression in psychologists and social workers to be higher than that of the general population. (Deutsch, 1985)

  Research has shown that female therapists commit suicide at higher rates than the general population. (Roeske, 1986; Steppacher & Mausner, 1973)

  In one study, 61% of their sample of psychologists had experienced at least one episode of clinical depression. Of the 84% who had received therapy treatment, 29% had reported suicidal feelings and 4% had made at least one suicide attempt. (Pope & Tabachnick, 1994)

Non Linked References Above

Roeske, N. (1986), Risk factors: Predictable hazards in a health care career. In C. Scott & J. Hawk (Eds.), Heal Thyself: The Health of Health Care Professionals


How can one estimate the excitability or mood of general public on a specific day? I'm interested if there are publicly available tools or resources that can be used to gauge the overall activity/excitability or mood of general public for a specific day.

For example, yesterday I noticed that my favorite restaurant was packed, and their receipt order count was close to 700 orders before 7:30PM. At my favorite hackerspace, there were significantly more people than usual, and multiple new people have shown up. There was a large donation left at the hackerspace.

A situation like the one described above peaks my interest in whether or not there are some environmental factors that affects general population of the United States. Naturally, the first step is to demonstrate that some sort of statistically significant changes from day to day exist, then find potential sources.

I'm aware of this question that suggests that twitter analysis can be used to detect sentiment, but are there tools that can do this kind of twitter analysis for a layperson, like myself?

In psychology, you have two types of measurement: either a trained observer judges the behavior of the subjects without them having to actively partake in any kind of test or experiment; or the test subjects fill in a test (self-report) or take part in an experiment.

Obviously the mood in a city cannot be re-created and measured in an experiment, but you still have the two other options:

1) If you want to estimate public mood without the cooperation of members of the public, all you need is an experienced observer. His observations will become more reliable, if he creates a scale of symptoms to watch out for (similar to the diagnostic tools in clinical psychology), instead of letting his gut-feeling decide. It would take a comparison of many observations over a long period of time to "normalize" or "standardize" these judgments. You could take objective data into account, like amount, speed and movement patterns of traffic, number of accidents, medical emergencies and their type (heart attack), public activities like street music, sunbathers etc. How these relate to certain moods I don't know, but a long term observation might show relations.

  Pines and Maslach developed a matrix to calculate the resources
  required to support a public event and use the audience profile for
  assessment of crowd mood. Their model is two-fold. First, they use
  descriptors to clearly identify separate groups (for example,
  families, young adults, children, elderly, and rival factions).
  Second, they attach a rating scale (1–5) to these groups. This rating
  scale is used to grade the amount of verbal noise, physical movement
  and overall audience participation. ...

  Using this model to assess 35 events, Zeitz et
  al found that crowd mood was an important factor in predicting medical
  workload at a mass gathering event, although it did not significantly
  affect the work of other emergency services, such as police or fire
  and rescue. ...

  Practical strategies to monitor and measure crowd mood
  and type, along with the resultant behavior of a crowd, have received
  limited attention. (http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1049023X12000155)

2) Similar to the example from Vilnius, Lithuania, given in a comment by Damien, or television audience measurement, you can select a representative sample from the population in question and measure their moods or relevant behaviors through self-report or objective measures (biophysiological measures, tracking mobile phone location etc.). Similar techniques have been used in a multitude of psychological experiments, from using mobile phone data to analyse friendship networks, to people reporting their behavior to the experimenters in real time using apps.

I am not aware of any research done on public moods in this way apart from the example from Vilnius, but I have not been looking very hard and I think something might be found, if you do a more thorough search. Relevant keywords might be "assessment, monitoring crowds, mass gatherings, mob psychology".


Component naming of MEG vs. EEG My question is why we use P and N for naming positive and negative EEG component(for instance N170 or P100) but for MEG data we use M in both case, I mean M170 and M100 in this example?

EEG and MEG measure two different but related signals. While EEG records the electric activity from the scalp, MEG records changes in the magnetic field induced by electric activity in the brain. Because of this, MEG is largely insensitive to sources oriented radially, but can pick up sources oriented tangentially to the cortex. Moreover, EEG is sensitive to volume currents (i.e., the spread of currents across the brain), while MEG less so [1].

Because of this distinction, while two components can have the same latency — let's say the face-specific N170 and the M170 — the sources originating them might be different. Naming the components differently stresses this important distinction.

For reference, I recommend the following articles and books

Baillet, S., Mosher, J. C., & Leahy, R. M. (2001). Electromagnetic brain mapping. Signal Processing Magazine, IEEE, 18(6), 14–30.
Hansen, P., Kringelbach, M., & Salmelin, R. (2010). MEG:An Introduction to Methods. Oxford University Press, USA.


Are there any theories suggesting mindfulness is the opposite mental state to self-regulation? Meditation practice focuses on emotional acceptance (Teper & Inzlicht, 2013), and self-regulation is related to emotional control (Braumeister, 2003). Could someone provide me with pointers to some models/theories or related literature (if there is any) contrasting these two mental states?

References
Teper, R., & Inzlicht, M. (2013). Meditation, mindfulness and executive control: the importance of emotional acceptance and brain-based performance monitoring. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 8(1), 85-92.
Baumeister, R. F. (2003). Ego depletion and self‐regulation failure: A resource model of self‐control. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 27(2), 281-284.

I don't think there's any evidence suggesting that mindfulness or meditation are the opposite of self-regulation. In arguing why, it'll be useful to define terms.
Meditation and mindfulness
First off, meditation and mindfulness are not the same thing. Meditation generally refers to a family of practices for investigating or inducing different states of consciousness. For example, "loving-kindness" meditation requires focusing your attention on the feelings of love and closeness you have towards someone in your life (and has been studied by Fredrickson, et al., 2008). There are many forms of meditation, and so the link between meditation and self-regulation could vary based on the type of meditation one is thinking of. The type of meditation you seem to be thinking of is mindfulness. So let's talk about what mindfulness is.
Mindfulness is generally thought to have two components: 1) a regulation of attention to conscious experience of the present moment and 2) non-judgement or non-evaluation of that experience. (a definition I paraphrased from Greenberg et al. (2012); note that they discuss alternative conceptualizations as well). So, when you catch yourself in yoga class, daydreaming about what you're going to make for dinner tomorrow, and then stressing about whether or not your dinner guests will like it, you are failing both criteria for mindfulness. Conversely, if you find yourself in a yoga class, aware of how each of the positions makes your body feel, and you simply notice (rather than judge or react to) these feelings, then you're being mindful.
Emotional self-regulation
Your question relates to the link (if any) between mindfulness and emotional self-regulation in particular. So, let's clarify what emotional self-regulation is.
Emotional self-regulation is the ability to override one's undesirable emotional impulses into more desirable ones. For instance, you may find your mother-in-law insanely irritating. When she comes around, you have a strong impulse to yell and shout about how obnoxious she is. However, this action doesn't really jive with your goal of maintaining a peaceful, pleasant relationship with your spouse. So, if you manage to suppress the urge to shout at your mother-in-law, and replace it with a more acceptable tight-lipped grin, you've successfully self-regulated (much better than I probably could).
Link between the two
It seems that mindfulness ought to increase one's ability to self-regulate in this way. Specifically, mindfulness should help one A) identify the emotional impulse as it shows up by increasing attention to one's present moment and B) neutralize the intensity of the emotional impulse by reducing the extent to which one justifies or identifies with it.
If you're viewing emotional impulses mindfully (noticing them as they show up, and not judging or evaluating them), then you're simply treating them as perturbations of conscious experience. In other words, they're just another change in your experience, as if someone had changed the color of the lights in the room. Seeing emotional impulses as mere changes in conscious experience creates some mental space between you and them. All of a sudden you don't feel so identified with your emotional experience (any more than you feel identified with the color of the light in the room).
The literature offers some support for these arguments. Brown & Ryan (2003) find a positive correlation between trait mindfulness (one's general propensity for mindfulness) and several constructs related to emotional self-regulation. It's correlational work, so we're not sure which of these is causing the other. Nevertheless, the signs of the correlations suggest the concepts are, at the very least, not opposites. More mindfulness tends to be associated with more emotional self-regulation

References
Brown, K. W., & Ryan, R. M. (2003). The benefits of being present: mindfulness and its role in psychological well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(4): 822. http://selfdeterminationtheory.org/SDT/documents/2003_BrownRyan.pdf
Fredrickson, B. L., Cohn, M. A., Coffey, K. A., Pek, J., & Finkel, S. M. (2008). Open hearts build lives: positive emotions, induced through loving-kindness meditation, build consequential personal resources. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(5): 1045. http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2008-14857-004
Greenberg, J., Reiner, K., & Meiran, N. (2012). “Mind the trap”: mindfulness practice reduces cognitive rigidity. PLoS One, 7(5): e36206.


What form might Jungian archetypes take in the brain? Modern psychology and psychiatry are very well grounded in scientific principles.  Both, however, have a history in various analytical philosophies.  Jung had the notion of an archetype, a universally known symbol.  While these are perhaps fanciful concepts, I think that it can be interesting to try to reconcile them in terms of current knowledge.

A modern author (Knox 2001) makes the following assessment:

  I suggest that although, like Freud, Jung contradicted himself at times, there is a lot of evidence that he viewed archetypes as innate predispositions with an organizing function.  I think it is one of the possible models for archetypes that we need to research extensively by investigating the ways in which an understanding of 'frames' and image schemas may advance our concept.  We need to gain a clearer understanding of the extent to which archetypes are 'hard-wired', genetically inherited structures or, on the other hand, self-organizing patterns that emerge as a central part of the development of meaning by the human brain as...recently proposed.

I think the arguments about genetically driven versus self-organizing patterns are fascinating, but in this question, I'd like to presuppose the latter.

If these patterns were to exist, what sensory modalities would be stored in combination?  Are they exclusively visual, or is there a tight binding between the visual and auditory components of these memories?  Could different memories be combinations of modular archetypal "bases" or would each be unique?

  Knox, J.M. (2001).  Memories, fantasies, archetypes: an exploration of some connections between cognitive science and analytical psychology.  Journal of Analytical Psychology, 46:613-635.

As you mentioned in your question, Jung was less than perfectly consistent in his definition of archetype throughout his career. This ambiguity reflects the continuing debate about semantic representation in the brain.

His early work stressed the emergence of archetypes as fundamental dichotomies of self experience- whose Enantiodromaic character was the origin of their emergence in the psyche. Thoughts are either expressed or not expressed, whence the self is divided into Persona and Anima; thoughts (at least if one takes Jung at his word in his characterisation of thought as Libido) provide desire or fear, whence Ego and Shadow. This presents a potential picture of Jungian archetypes in the brain as primarily distributed phenomena-a set of pairwise partitions of the conscious brain.

His later writings, however, while still shewing their enantiodromia in their dialectical function, are more liberal concerning their origin. Concerning the Senex archetype for example; is a thought either that of a young or old man? -I would doubt it. The archetypes of these later writings are much more amenable to so-called 'sparse' representation.

Sparse representation is the (to borrow a term!) enatiodromaic opposite of distributed, in which small populations of neurons, or even single neurons can code for a given semantic character. Under assumptions of sparse representation, hypothetical 'Grandmother cells' could code for whole semantic classes, and so archetypes themselves.

Evidence for sparse representation has been found implicating the Medial Temporal Lobe in representing semantic classes across sensory modalities in single neurons (Quiroga  et al., 2005). This is however hotly contested, and experimental limitations abound (there's a nice microcosm of the debate at the wiki page for Grandmother Cell, which also features a potted summary of the linked experiment).

References

Quiroga RQ, Reddy L, Kreiman G, Koch C, Fried I. (2005) Invariant visual representation by single neurons in the human brain. Nature 435, 1102-1107. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v435/n7045/full/nature03687.html


How to filter noise in EEG data I am a computer science student and I'm doing something for a psychology professor.

We have EEG data from an experiment where a person was shown 140 images for 2 seconds each. We placed 64 electrodes on the scalp so we have 64 channels of continuous data.

We want to correlate each node with every other node so that we can graph it using a chord diagram.

Since my professor is abroad, I am having trouble with the directions he gave me to manipulate the data to get the correlations.

  "Once you are able to read the matrix of channels I suggest subtracting the mean signal from each, filtering to remove noise above 30 Hz."

My question is how to remove the noise above 30 Hz? For example, data for 1 electrode for 10 milliseconds looks like this (measured in uV):

[ 31172.50, 31173.53, 31174.80, 31177.34, 31173.73,
  31172.85, 31172.75, 31172.70, 31174.95, 31178.95]

The python script I am using also gives this data:

sampling rate: 1000.0 Hz
time: 0.0 s to 1883.15 s

Can anyone point me in the right direction what steps to take to remove noise above 30 Hz? And also, is that a good way to compute the correlations between the electrodes?

Removal of noise can be done in various ways:

Conventional filters: You could create a digital low-pass filter, such as a Chebyshev or Butterworth filter with a cut-off frequency at 30 Hz (filt or filtfilt function in Matlab).

FFT-based filtering: FIR filters remove frequencies in the frequency domain. So first a Fourier transform is done and then the frequencies >30 Hz can be removed from the signal simply by assigning '0' to the FFT coefficients at >30 Hz. A reverse FFT then brings your signal back (fftfilt in Matlab).

Wavelet transforms: Being a relatively complex and processing-power-hungry method, it may not be the method you are after. However, it may be more efficient in removing certain types of noise or to extract certain features from a signal (cwt or dwt functions in matlab).

I'm not familiar with Python. Finding the corresponding filters in Python should be fairly straightforward. There are more filtering procedures but the above should get you going.

Correlation analysis can be done by various methods, including Pearson product moment correlation, Spearman rank order correlation, Kendall rank order correlation and mutual information. See Bonita et al., 2014, DOI: 10.1007/s11571-013-9267-8.

Subtracting the mean signal from a particular channel basically reduces signal offset (the DC signal), comparable to a high-pass filter with a very low cut-off frequency.


What is the relative effectiveness of self initiated versus therapy approaches to repairing damaged body schema? Several studies discuss the damaged body schema of amputees and people suffering from CRPS.
By damaged body schema I mean where the body their mind constructs doesn't match up with the body that is objectively there. Ie. limbs perceived as there or not there despite evidence, CRPS, extension/contraction of perceived limbs differing from reality.

The types of damage I'm most interested in are pain resulting or allegedly resulting from a disruption of the body schema itself such as phantom limb pain, autoscopy/out-of-body experiences and CRPS. Phantom limb sensation also interests me. Mostly, the important distinction I wish to draw is healing through the power of one's own volition or through the help of others, as diametrically opposed as I can get it.

What is the relative effectiveness of self-initiated versus therapy provided by others in repairing a damaged body schema?

Background

Phantom Pain happens when a limb is lost over the course of one's life or missing since birth. Essentially the brain generates pain and sensations for the missing limb. It is thought to be a psychological problem brought on by inherit physiological traits of the human brain. As a psychological problem it is subject to conscious and unconscious retraining. No treatment has as yet proven completely effective against phantom pain.

Mirror Therapy is one scientific clinically useful treatment for phantom pain developed by Vilayanur S. Ramachandran. It normally involves the use of a mirror box in later stages of rehabilitation.

A mirror box was featured on the American Television show "House" as a treatment for a war veteran. This clip illustrating the fictional use of a mirror box from that episode is inaccurate as it shows the mirror box as a instant cure all however it does accurately describe the process by which the mirror box is used. The clip may be considered somewhat offensive because House is always somewhat offensive.

  In a mirror box the patient places the good limb into one side, and the stump into the other. The patient then looks into the mirror on the side with good limb and makes "mirror symmetric" movements, as a symphony conductor might, or as we do when we clap our hands. Because the subject is seeing the reflected image of the good hand moving, it appears as if the phantom limb is also moving. Through the use of this artificial visual feedback it becomes possible for the patient to "move" the phantom limb

-wikipedia

Mirror therapy has been proven by fMRI imaging to extort spatial attention.

  In this first study on the neuronal correlates of the mirror illusion in stroke patients we showed that during bimanual movement the mirror illusion increases activity in the precuneus and the posterior cingulate cortex, areas associated with awareness of the self and spatial attention. By increasing awareness of the affected limb the mirror illusion might reduce learned non-use. The fact that we did not observe mirror-related activity in areas of the motor or mirror neuron system questions popular theories that attribute the clinical effects of mirror therapy to these systems.

-The neuronal correlates of mirror therapy: an fMRI study on mirror induced visual illusions in stroke patients

Attention (which is in this case not the same word as "pay attention") is as William James deﬁned "withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.". Or as Shaun P. Vecera and Matthew Rizzo defined "The processes that permit an organism to choose some environmental inputs over others".

Spatial attention again defined by Shaun P. Vecera and Matthew Rizzo is "restricted to visuospatial attention—those attentional processes that select visual stimuli based on their spatial location".

Conclusion

Mirror therapy typically begins in a doctors office. A doctor trains a patient during in or out patient rehabilitation to look into the mirror and clench or move both the present and missing limb. After the technique has been proven useful to the individual it can be done at home without a doctor supervision and minimal training with the same overall results for both upper and lower body. Home based treatment results in nearly equal compliance.

It is my hypothesis that increased prevalence of virtual and augmented reality will allow for new kinds of spatial attention treatments for those with multiple amputations and chronic arthritis effecting both hands.


What concepts of perception should designers be aware of when designing? Visual perception is a huge topic, much of which is relevant to the work of a designer. I have identified topics in visual memory, visual cognition and colour perception that are relevant, and I'm sure there is more I don't yet know of.

What would be a good place to start for a designer looking for concepts of perception to be aware of when designing? For example, what books (or other accessible resources, such as web pages, applied research topics) exist that are suitable?

I'm very interested in learning more about visual perception and how it pertains to graphic design. I work predominately in print and environmental graphic design but any area of graphic design should be equally applicable.

Not surprisingly, there's a huge load of stuff you need to consider when designing things for users. Here's a good paper written by some perception and vision researchers on the topic that might give you a more detailed introduction that what you have seen so far:

Healey, C.G. & Enns, J.T. (in press). Attention and visual memory in visualization and computer graphics. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics

It's open access as well!


How does the L-game by Edward de Bono demonstrate lateral thinking? From the information I gathered about lateral thinking, it means to solve problems using unconventional means, sometimes even without using logic. Edward de Bono invented the L-game to illustrate lateral thinking. However, I fail to see how lateral thinking is used in solving the game. The L-game is essentially a very simplified version of Chess, both are strategy games and Chess is almost always the textbook example of logical games. In the analysis of the L-game, I found myself using purely logic (i.e. working backwards from the losing positions and identify which positions are "dangerous" etc). I do not see how "illogical means" could better help a player in winning the game. I might have misunderstood the meaning of lateral thinking, could anyone clarify?

The idea is not to use lateral thinking to win the game, but to teach people to think laterally.

The L can be flipped and/or rotated as well as translated - why should you do a particular transform, and when. What move to make requires a certain amount of lateral thought.

Similarly in moving a neutral piece - not all the moves available are immediately obvious to a novice player - they must learn them.

By the time someone has mastered a few of the advanced moves, they are beginning to think laterally (at least that is the idea!).


Name of association phenomenon What is the name of the problem to explain how the neural activation for "red circle and a blue triangle" is different from "blue circle and red triangle"? Just activating the neurons for "red", "blue", "circle", "triangle" is not enough.

Representing the relation between objects + their attributes in neurons is called The Binding Problem. The Wikipedia article I've linked to is a bit questionable at the moment, so you may want to read the paper "Biologically Plausible, Human-Scale Knowledge Representation" instead. In the paper, the authors describe different ways of encoding symbols and their relation in neurons, using the NEF and SPA.

The paper shows how populations of neurons can represent vectors and symbols can be defined as vectors. Relations between symbols can be defined as operations on these symbols carried out by connection weights between populations.

For example, the scenario in the original post could be represented as:

$V = BLUE*CIRCLE + RED*TRIANGLE$

Where each word is it's own N-dimensional vector, $+$ is vector addition and $*$ is circular convolution.

Further discussion of this model can be found in this StackExchange answer.


Audio Inculcation and Learning Suppose I have an audio file of a lecture of a professor explaining something to be learned - a physics concept for example, and I listen to the audio file over and over again, much like how people listen to music while working.

How effective is audio inculcation - listening to an audio file over and over again, even though I'm doing something else and not actively listening to the audio - for learning? How does this affect the subconscious?

Can this tactic be used to change  behavior: For example, recording a voice of  saying "Do not go on Facebook. Facebook is bad.," and listening it to it over and over again, much like one would do with music.

This LOP diagram explains it pretty well, acoustic information is remembered moderately well as it has moderate processing done on it to help you remember it, but as you can see, semantic  is the best way to remember stuff, something is semantic if it's understood well or has meaning to you, so the best way to learn it is it to make sure that you understand it!


Does the number of alternatives in a multiple choice question affect the learning output? I have built several apps in Norwegian about hunting, philosophy etc. Students use the app to learn a subject and test their knowledge before doing their exam. In current state i have one question with three alternatives, where one is correct. The student will be presented with the solution to the question after they have chosen the alternative, and not on the end of the test.

For example:

What is the the capital city of Australia?

Canberra
Sydney
Melbourne

I was wondering if anyone know if there is any research on if students learn more/less/equal by being presented with 4 alternatives instead of three.

For example:

What is the the capital city of Australia?

Canberra
Sydney
Melbourne
Edmunton

Does this have any effect for learning, since it's less probable to just check the correct by chance. Maybe students have to do more active thinking since it's more alternatives to think about, and therefore learn more?

I doubt this has been studies as you ask, i.e. effect on learning. Most of the literature seems to hammer/contrast the effects on learning of multiple-choice vs constructed-response exams, e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3433302/

There have been more limited investigations of 3 vs 4/5 choice in tests. One
meta-analysis from 2005 titled "Three Options Are Optimal for Multiple-Choice Items: A Meta-Analysis of 80 Years of Research"

  Multiple‐choice items are a mainstay of achievement testing. The need to adequately cover the content domain to certify achievement proficiency by producing meaningful precise scores requires many high‐quality items. More 3‐option items can be administered than 4‐ or 5‐option items per testing time while improving content coverage, without detrimental effects on psychometric quality of test scores. Researchers have endorsed 3‐option items for over 80 years with empirical evidence—the results of which have been synthesized in an effort to unify this endorsement and encourage its adoption.

This meta-analysis has about 300 citations in Google Scholar, so at least people took notice. I don't know how well received its conclusions were. Wikipedia's page Multiple choice doesn't even mention this paper, but the page is rather sparse in citations anyway.

I did find one newer study 2010 (citing the meta-analysis), which confirmed its conclusions:

  Overall, three-option items perform equally as well as four-option items. Since three-option items require less time to develop and administer and additional options provide no psychometric advantage, teachers are encouraged to adopt three-option items as the standard on multiple-choice tests.

And another one from 2009, roughly confirming it:

  The low frequency of items with three functioning distractors in the four-option items in this study suggests that teachers have difficulty developing plausible distractors for most MCQs. Test items should consist of as many options as is feasible given the item content and the number of plausible distractors; in most cases this would be three. Item analysis results can be used to identify and remove non-functioning distractors from MCQs that have been used in previous tests.

In these papers, the reason why 3-item MC tests are often just as good has mostly to do with who makes the exam (and the time spend developing it) rather than than who takes it.

On the other hand, there's a 2012 paper on listening tests (evaluated with MCs), which somewhat disagrees:

  Mean test scores of the three-option tests were significantly higher than those of four- and five-option tests. While no difference was found in mean item discriminations across the three different test formats, reliability coefficients showed inconsistent patterns depending on the number of options and test versions. One possible interpretation of the low correlations among the scores of three test formats is that items with different numbers of options tap into skills other than listening. The findings suggest that statistically, three options may or may not be optimal depending on the point of view taken – from that of the test score users, or from that of the test stakeholders. Test developers must consider multiple statistical, affective, and contextual factors in determining the optimal number of options.

This was supposedly a high-stakes exam, according to the paper title, namely the CSAT. Of the post-2005 papers, this last one has the most substantial literature and arguments review, so it's worth reading its first 4-5 pages.


How do children understand the concept of number size? How do children understand that one number is larger than the other? For example, given the numbers "8" and "9", how do they learn that "9" is the larger one? This apparently develops as a precursor to addition. Is it memorized like the result of simple addition?

Short answer
It has been argued that infants are born with an ability to recognize,  distinguish and even operate on small numbers.

Background
Speaking from experience (n = 2 :-) toddlers learn to count, first of all. That means they know 2 comes after 1, 3 after 2 etc. In conjunction, we read them stories, like the very hungry caterpillar that graphically shows how, consecutively, the little critter starts eating holes in 1 apple, 2 pears, 3 plums and so forth, after which the caterpillar turns into a butterfly (Fig. 1). So there's the element of a growing and developing critter (time) eating more and more pieces of fruit (size). Meanwhile the parent will count the ever growing number of fruit out loud. These kinds of books are highly appealing to 2-year olds in my experience. My 3-year old can count, and has a reasonable idea of what it means. My 5-year old can perform simple mathematical operations, and will have a reasonable idea that 2+2 is less than 4+4.

So much for the anecdotal evidence - In the literature it has been argued that infants are born with an ability to recognize and distinguish among ones, twos, and threes, and can even operate on very small numbers, e.g., recognize that one object added to another makes two - all before they develop verbal-based counting competencies. It may in fact go so far that infants are innately born with counting principles, allowing them to count nonverbally (Baroody et al., 2005)

This information leads me to believe that all the effort (us) parents put into reading the 'Very Hungry Caterpillar' is more to associate language to mathematics, i.e., to provide the lexicon to talk about math, rather than to educate them on maths per se.

Fig.1. Graphical content of 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar'. source: Little Folk Visuals

Reference
- The development of young children's early number and operation sense and its implications for early childhood education. In B. Spodek & O. N. Saracho (Eds.), Handbook of research on the education of young children (187-221). Mahwah, NJ, US: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers


What areas of mathematics support the study of cognitive science? Which areas of mathematics can be formally studied in a cognitive science major? Or: which areas of mathematics can support the study of brain. Some areas that seem relevant would be: mathematical logic, graph theory, linear algebra. Is any element of topology relevant? Please direct to links/sources if possible. Is network science being used in these fields? I am asking this question, as I want to study further in mathematics, and would love it if I could do so while pursuing cognitive science.

Here's my list of math subjects that support the study of brain (from a computational neuroscientist's perspective):

Linear algebra

to understand high dimensions, to compute things quickly, foundation for other math

Calculus

basics for everything continuous valued

Statistics

to analyze any data, you need stats!
basis for modeling, regression, clustering, classification, and all

Differential equations (basis for dynamical system)
Dynamical system

intuition for neural dynamics (deterministic approximation)
modeling single neuron, synapse, small network

Statistical physics

modeling large scale noisy neural dynamics

Information theory

quantify how much "information" is coded in neural signal

Numerical computation

your data and algorithm needs to be implemented in a computer

Convex optimization

your statistics/model requires optimization

Probability theory (basis for stochastic process and statistics)
Stochastic process

model of neural signals, decision process (diffusion), basis for advanced statistics
point process theory is useful for dealing with neural spike trains

Time series analysis (your data is a time series!)
Signal detection theory

psychophysics is often designed to be a detection task

Brain is quite noisy, you need tools to deal with noise. More applied math than pure math is needed.

I have only seen topology being used a handful of times, and they were not very useful nor impressive. I love set theory and mathematical logic, but sadly never used it nor seen it being used.

In addition, real/complex/functional analyses are also useful, just in general.


How long does it takes for the feeling of vengeance to fade away by time? Psychologically, how long does it take for a person to forget the feeling of vengeance over other person or community?

For example, imagine this scenario: There was a city which was sacked by army and a soldier enters into a house. That house had a family of 4 members, a married couple with their son and daughter. The soldier killed the couples and the son before the eyes of the daughter. Then he took her as a sex slave in his house for 15 years.

As you know, at the beginning, the girl will have lot of vengeance over the soldier .That is she wants kill the soldier to avenge her family's death. But due to tight security she can't do it.

Now my question is, does the feeling of revenge exists for the whole 15 years OR eventually fade away? If later is true, then how long does it take for the vengeance feeling to fade away?

It depends on the individual (and possibly the trauma). Stockholm Syndrome, where captives develop a psychological alliance with their captors as a survival strategy during captivity can onset very quickly (in the original case 6 days). There are also cases where people are actively trying to escape and do not feel a bond with individuals.


Is there evidence or indication that highly sensitive people (HSP) can feel elektromagnetic waves? HSP's are often very sensitive persons for all kind of sensories, but are there any experiments that they can feel EM-waves or are more affected by them?

As of 2009 apparently not.

In Rubin's 2009 paper, he looked at studies analyzing symptoms and investigating triggers in more than 1,000 people who reported having electromagnetic hypersensitivity.
He concluded in the paper that "repeated experiments have been unable to replicate this phenomenon under controlled conditions."
It may be that Wi-Fi isn't the culprit, but that something else is to blame for people's symptoms, Rubin said. A number of health and environmental conditions, different for each individual, could be responsible.
Another factor at play could be the "nocebo effect," in which a person's belief that exposure to EMF triggers symptoms actually causes the real symptoms to appear, even if no exposure occur has occurred, he added.
Regardless of whether Wi-Fi "allergies" are real, the suffering certainly is, Rubin said.

And I think I tracked down the actual paper that is talking about; it's been reasonably summarized by the press.
I honestly expected researchers to stop bothering after that, but I found some 2017 experiments, which were also negative:

In the double-blind trials, no significant difference in symptom severity or exposure detection was found for any of the participants between the two conditions. Belief of exposure strongly predicted symptom severity score for all participants.

In the latter experiments, they really went out of their way to remove possible non-response causes, including testing people in their usual places where they reported the problems (using portable equipment), taking into account the history of their complaints, i.e. using equipment that was as close as possible to the sources the subjects claimed to be sensitive to, counterbalancing for time of day and time on task etc.


Why do people blame others rather than take responsibility? In business classes we are told to be responsible and take responsibility for our action. Get mugged? Well, lock your door next time. That sort of thing.

But that's not how most humans behave. Humans blame others for their mistakes and problems they could have prevented. Why?

What's the benefit of blaming others compared to taking responsibility?

The Abilene Paradox is one of the situations in which individuals may blame others for their actions because that is how they perceived the situation. Consider this anecdote (video):

On a hot afternoon visiting in Coleman, Texas, the family is
comfortably playing dominoes on a porch, until the father-in-law
suggests that they take a trip to Abilene [53 miles north] for dinner.
The wife says, "Sounds like a great idea." The husband, despite having
reservations because the drive is long and hot, thinks that his
preferences must be out-of-step with the group and says, "Sounds good
to me. I just hope your mother wants to go." The mother-in-law then
says, "Of course I want to go. I haven't been to Abilene in a long
time." The drive is hot, dusty, and long. When they arrive at the
cafeteria, the food is as bad as the drive.
They arrive back home four hours later, exhausted. One of them dishonestly says, "It was a great
trip, wasn't it?" The mother-in-law says that, actually, she would
rather have stayed home, but went along since the other three were so
enthusiastic. The husband says, "I wasn't delighted to be doing what
we were doing. I only went to satisfy the rest of you." The wife says,
"I just went along to keep you happy. I would have had to be crazy to
want to go out in the heat like that." The father-in-law then says
that he only suggested it because he thought the others might be
bored. The group sits back, perplexed that they together decided to
take a trip which none of them wanted. They each would have preferred
to sit comfortably, but did not admit to it when they still had time
to enjoy the afternoon.

Nobody wanted to go, yet the group decision was contrary to everyone's personal opinion since every individual perceived that another individual had taken a decision, arguing against which would simply result in discord.
When the decision turns out to be bad, then everybody simply states what they initially believed which was that another individual of the group had clearly wanted to go, and they had simply consented to the decision. This of course, is one scenario, in which individuals may blame another (specific) person for a group decision.
The benefits of this can be explained in many ways. One of the ways to analyze the benefit is by using cognitive dissonance theory. In simple terms, when our behavior (or thinking) does not match up with our belief, it results in mental stress due to the incongruity of the situation. To counter or save ourselves from that incongruity, we either adjust our belief or alter our behavior(thinking). In this case, the act of taking the trip was against our belief, and hence taking responsibility (agreeing that the decision was yours) for the action would be incongruous. Therefore, we blame another individual for the group decision, as that is easier to process (congruent) and less mentally stressful.


Is there a term for not recognizing that other people think differently, or projecting your thought patterns on others? For example I might make the argument that 'Women don't face discrimination in the workplace' or that 'There isn't actually any racism anymore'* because I myself don't think in an explicitly racist or sexist manner.

*Caveat: Of course I might qualify the statement with something like 'Everyone is a little unintentionally racist' or something like that. There's also the second problem that my workplace might be particularly progressive, and I'm not witnessing sexism that occurs in other workplaces.

This would be failure to recognize that while I think that way, not everyone else does and it may exist as a problem elsewhere.

Is there a term for this bias, and more importantly, is there some kind of experiment that demonstrates it?

Interesting question!

Theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states, motivations, etc. to others and recognize that others have separate intentions, states, and motivations from his or her own.

The specific phenomenon that you are describing may stem from this concept called naive realism, or the idea that we see the world as it truly is, and that others share the same perceptions as we do. There are several other social biases that stem from the notion of naive realism. You might be particularly interested in
the false-consensus effect, or the tendency to overestimate how many people share our beliefs. There is also attribution bias, or the tendency to interpret events in light of our own social world when trying to find reasons for the behavior of others.

Here are four studies that might be of interest to you, from a paper on the false-consensus effect and self-serving bias. As these are biases primarily from the realm of social psychology, most studies you find will be of groups and in-group biases. It might be more helpful to look for specific personality traits that may describe the phenomenon, i.e. lack of self-awareness.

You might also be interested in self-perception theory and, by extension, the truce experiment.


identifying scale of measurement for the dependent variable I am doing a research study on short-term memory. My research study will be whether gender has an impact on short term memory for college students. I need help identifying the scale of measurement for the dependent variable (which is the ability of both genders to recall the words) and providing a rationale.

I understand Dependent and Independent Variables as:

The Independent variable: What you Manipulate, in this case gender, and to a lesser degree the stimulus (word, nonsense syllable, size of nonsense syllable, etc)

The Dependent variable: A measure of performance, in your case if you are testing for word or nonsense syllable recall (I suggest the later as to avoid familiarity issues), how many they could remember after X time period, which you could turn into recall probability.

Source:

Tulving, Endel, and Fergus IM Craik. The Oxford handbook of memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Additional variations on dependent variables &tests targeting short term memory and variations are mentioned in various chapters, see page 20 for instance and the chapters on short term memory


If people did not have to work, what would motivate them to work? In industrialized countries around the world, "work" appears to be something that most people try to avoid as much as they can, dreaming of winning a lottery so they will never have to work again -- and be free to do nothing or do what they like. Money serves as a motivator for work, because in these cultures you need money to stay alive, or at least to live well.

Many social welfare states pay a basic income to people unable to find work. Despite the fact that usually this basic income is not unconditional but a transitional payment only and bound to the receiver's attempts to find a job, there is quite a lot of hostility from those who force themselves to their jobs each morning, towards those who appear to be happy with having little and prefer not to work.

Around the world there are proponents of an unconditional basic income that would free individuals from the necessity to take up work. I don't want to go into the whys and wherefores of such a freedom, or into how such an income could be financed, but want to ask you:

If everybody received an unconditional basic income that was high enough to make their lives reasonably comfortable, what would incite people to do the work (like baking bread) that needs to get done?

I am not lookig for opinions or theories here, those already abound on the net, but for empirical evidence for:

which percentage of a populace can be expected to busy themselves without need, and
how those that like to laze around can be motivated to work without need.

B.F. Skinner in his utopian novel Walden Two attempts to design a society where no-one is required to work more than four hours a day and unwanted jobs result in more credit points than desirable jobs, so that some people clean the toilet and then have more free time than those working at their dream jobs, but this concept relies on a virtual currency of points that you have to earn, so there is a need to work to earn your living, even if it does not have a payment of traditional "money".

In my question, the motivator for work must not be anything that has to be fulfilled, but something that does not take away the freedom not to work. Something that makes even the least desirable job attractive. In the case of the toilet it might be something simple like this being your toilet, and if you don't clean it, you'll have to use it anyway. But there are public toilets. What would work there?

If you take a look at games like minecraft, they have quite a lot of players who do not work (students, college students, etc). These people first mine thousands of blocks, then rearrange them in a creative way. There's absolutely no need to do so, it is entirely voluntary, yet people end up moving hundreds of thousands of blocks to do something creative or to fulfill their design.

Players of minecraft explore the game environment, make tools, extract raw resources and ultimately make virtual structures like in the image below.

Statistically speaking, minecraft has more players(11 million paid users) and instructional videos(with millions of views) on YouTube than any other game I know of.

From this, it appears that in a world without need to work, creativity, design and "market of 1 person" would motivate people to do something. Cleaning toilets is not such thing. Maybe painting toilets, or designing them is.


Is the visual cortex of a newborn baby immediately capable of object detection or is this skill learned over time, and if so, how? Is the visual cortex of newborn babies right off the bat capable of making sense of raw visual data, for instance, converting the constant stream of raw RGB images perceived by the eyes into a meaningful higher-level representation of objects in motion in a 3D world? Yes? No? If not, then does it mean this skill has to be developed over time by means of some learning mechanism?

If the visual cortex needs time to learn advanced visual skills, how does the actual learning mechanism work? Does the visual cortex have to optimize the connections between neurons, in a way analogous to how artificial neural networks optimize their parameters through backpropagation algorithm (machine learning)? If this is the case, then where does the visual cortex get its error signals from? To make the last question clear, in machine learning the typical approach is to compute the gradient of a loss function which compares the model's prediction with the ground truth, and the model's parameters are updated by moving the parameters in the direction of the gradient. If the visual cortex is learning advanced visual skills by virtue of a similar learning mechanism, then what kind of loss function is the visual cortex optimizing?

A newborn baby has difficulty focusing its eyes or telling the difference between two objects presented to it.

A baby learns to recognise its mothers face within the first week after birth, long before it can recognise objects that are not faces. They already show a preference for face-like visual stimuli while in the womb.

  The Human Fetus Preferentially Engages with Face-like Visual Stimuli
  Reid et al. Current Biology, March 05, 2018
  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2017.05.044

Babies start to follow moving objects with their eyes at around three months. They are capable of depth perception and have good colour vision by five months (at birth many babies are incapable of detecting some colours).

The American optometric association has a page on infant vision:

https://www.aoa.org/patients-and-public/good-vision-throughout-life/childrens-vision/infant-vision-birth-to-24-months-of-age

In precocial animals object recognition abilities are apparent very early on. For instance, chicks which are presented with an object immediately after they have hatched will often follow that object as if it were their mother. They show a preference for moving objects over stationary objects. For more information on this check out http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Imprinting.

The visual cortex already starts off with areas specialised for edge detection, colour detection, motion detection etc. However, much of visual perception is learned - if an animal has its eyes patched over at birth then it will have limited perceptual abilities when the patches are removed.

As for the question of how errors are propagated through the visual cortex, Seanny123's answer to this question might be relevant: Is back-prop biologically plausible?


Why do children sometimes not do what they are told, even though their environment supports them fully to do so? I see many children that do (at times) not listen to their parents, or even do the complete opposite of what other people want them to do. That while the social environment supports them (with positive feedback on positive behaviour and possibly negative feedback on negative behaviour) to do what they are told.

Do we know the main drivers for why kids (at times) do not do what they are told to?

Is it their drive for freedom and autonomy? Attention? Something else?

Children go through many phases of independence to detach from their parents.  The most (in)famous is the "no" stage (around 2 years old).  But they also get to a point where they actively do things that get a reaction.  There are two major incentives: one, it gets them attention on demand, and two, it establishes some power for them in the relationship.  Many parents reply with bribes, which validates the power struggle.

This is a good thing; by the time they are teenagers, a lot of what they do will be with their peer group and if they've gotten some practice, they'll be able to establish more favorable positions in power relationships with their peers.  If they're punished for questioning authority, they might form the habit of following authority without question, and once an authority has been established in their peer group, they won't question or challenge their decisions for the group.


How are neurons able to effectively communicate when there are way more dendrites than axons? Neurons can have up to 100,000 dendrites and typically only have a single axon. This means a neuron typically has a very large number of inputs while only having a single output. Surely you can see the math doesn't add up here. There are not enough axons to connect to all of the dendrites, so where are the dendrites getting their information from?

I did a quick Google search and I found out the following:
Although the University of Queensland, Australia states that the neuron has three main parts:

A neuron has three main parts: dendrites, an axon, and a cell body or soma

There is a part which is neglected to be mentioned, which answers your question, and that is the axon terminals (Biology Dictionary).
Dendrites
These are the receiving parts of the neuron. Dendrites receive synaptic inputs from axons, with the sum total of dendritic inputs determining whether the neuron will fire an action potential — a brain signal.
Axons
These are the long, thin structures in which action potentials are generated (the transmitting part of the neuron). After initiation, action potentials travel down axons.
Axon Terminals

(Also called synaptic boutons, terminal boutons, or end-feet) are distal terminations of the telodendria (branches) of an axon. An axon, also called a nerve fiber, is a long, slender projection of a nerve cell, or neuron, that conducts electrical impulses called action potentials away from the neuron's cell body, or soma, in order to transmit those impulses to other neurons, muscle cells or glands.(Wikipedia)

Image courtesy of WikiMedia Commons and licensed under theCreative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
While there is one axon, there are many terminations from that axon. Synapses at the end of the axon terminals pass the action potential to either another neuron cell body to be passed to many more or to muscle cells or glands.
Be aware though, that:

Neurons are not in direct contact with each other. There are extremely small spaces between each neuron known as synapses. Because there is not a direct connection, neurons must communicate with each other indirectly through the use of neurotransmitters. This communication is facilitated by the conversion of the electrical signals within the neuron to the chemical signals within the synapse.(Biology Dictionary)


How does the human brain store motor skills for long term? The way I understand it, memory goes through calcium influx induced LTP (Long Term potentiation) for short term storage. Long term storage requires protein synthesis. (#1).

However, a meta-analysis (#2) shows that:

  a procedural memory may never become fully stable and instead remains vulnerable to interference. When exposed to task B, participants may have retrieved the procedural memory associated with task A and modified it, ‘overwriting’ the memory for task A with information relevant to task B............ It implies that learning a new skill leads to the automatic destruction of another skill. It would never be possible to have skill in more than one task! Our ability to acquire multiple skills may depend upon having contextual cues available to signal the switch from one task to another.

This indicates that procedural memory never goes through protein synthesis. The problem is, procedural memory can be divided into three parts: 1. Motor, 2. Perceptual, 3. Cognitive (#3). We all know that motor skills are not volatile after being practiced. Only something like Parkinson's disease can damage motor skills (#4) while perceptual skills seem even more secure. Cognitive procedural memory alone seems very vulnerable, but I don't know why this is an exception.

Is there any theory that explains how our brain can store motor skills without any apparent LTP and protein synthesis phases?

#1. Biopsychology by John P. J. Pinel 6th ed. P. 285

#2. http://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(04)00937-6.pdf

#3. http://medicalfinder.jp/doi/abs/10.11477/mf.1416100315

#4. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01688639008400978

I second the comments on the question that the question-post looks kind of convoluted. But it seems it all boils down to the question:

  How does our brain store motor skills without any apparent long-term potentiation or protein synthesis?

I personally think the question premise, i.e. "LTP and protein synthesis are not involved in motor learning", is incorrect to start with.

Firstly, motor learning has been linked to long-term potentiation in the primary motor cortex (Avinzino et al., 2015);
Secondly, protein expression is involved in motor learning as well. Fos expression has been used for decades as an immunohistochemical protein marker for neural activation. Fos expression in the motor cortex has been linked to motor learning, alongside synaptogenisis processes (Kleim et al., 1996).

References
- Avinzino et al., Front Behav Neurosci (2015); 9:105
- Kleim et al., J Neurosci (1996); 16(14): 4529-35


Do men look more similar to each other than women? Looking at an awards ceremony, I find that all the men look the same to me. Whereas all the women look very "unique". I wonder if this is a psychological thing in which, because I am male, I am less interested in the particular characteristics of males than females.

It makes me wonder do females think most men look the same? In Western society it is usuall the men who do the chasing so it would make sense for women to at least appear to be distinct?

I suspect men's uniqueness might present itself more in facial hair which because mostly it's socially accceptable to be clean shaven then the uniqueness doesn't come through.

Any apparent difference between sexes probably has more to due with the perspective of the viewer than the physiological characteristics of the group. Males and females are both highly diverse in appearance. The particular balance of physiological diversity among a population will depend on the ethnic balance, cultural norms (e.g., having facial or head hair at a certain length), dress, etc.

People recognise different members of their own race more easily than of other races (well-established effect): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-race_effect

Finally, there's limited evidence suggesting an own-gender effect as well, potentially driven by how people see hair: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691803000520?via%3Dihub (Wright et al., 2003, 'An own gender bias and the importance of hair in face recognition').

In sum: this is probably in the eye of the beholder.


Why do people get addicted to things like TV, Facebook, games? I am studying for exams but there's a TV series I couldn't get enough of.

Is there any explanation to all addiction thing that happens with our brain?

EDIT
I'm not talking about procrastination but generalized addiction about non chemical(drugs) things that happens with us.

At least two phenomenons can be found here :

The drive to wath the TV series is higher than the drive to study.
The TV series are structured in such a way to attract and hook viewers.

I will try to answer the second :

TV series i.e. soap operas, Lost TV series etc mostly use two components to create addiction to viewers : curiosity and emotionally charged stories.

  Curiosity-drive theory relates to the undesirable experiences of
  "uncertainty". The reduction of these unpleasant feelings, in turn, is
  rewarding. This theory suggests that people desire coherence and understanding in their thought processes. When this coherence is
  disrupted by something that is unfamiliar, uncertain, or ambiguous, it
  is curiosity-drive theory that attempts to gather information and
  knowledge of the unfamiliar to restore coherent thought processes once
  again.

...

  British psychologist Edward B. Titchener (1867–1927) might have argued
  that we become glued to complex, emotionally-charged stories because
  of our ability to recognize the feelings of others. A newly identified
  phenomenon at the time, Titchener coined the term empathy in 1909. In
  addition to identifying others' discomfort or elation, "cognitive
  empathy" examines how humans can also adopt others' psychological
  perspectives, including those of fictional characters.


Are there "6 degrees of separation" for ideas? Sites like linkedin.com are built on the idea that you can be related to any person in the world though around 6 people. One person knows another one, that one another one, and in the end you are connected through intermediate connections.

I'm interested if something similar exists for ideas - does human mind naturally connect and infer from different ideas to find a relationship between ideas? I'm thinking about this in the context of Freudian dream interpretation. In his book on the analysis of dreams, Freud repeatedly lists examples where he uses analysis and logic to find meaning in dream imagery and experiences.

This makes me curious if what Freud has discovered is some function of memory or thinking that establishes connections between unrelated ideas through intermediate ones.

For example, there is no connection between cats and space flight. But ones mind may try to connect them through a cartoon episode which involved super intelligent cats from the outer space invading earth in spaceships. Now there is a connection between cats and space flight.

What I'm trying to ask is if it is natural for the mind to bridge gaps between unrelated ideas through intermediate ones, especially if/when a person is actively looking for a connection? if there are 6 jumps between two unrelated ideas/concepts, then there are 6 degrees of separation.

You are asking two different questions in your title and the text. I will answer the text question, explain why you are asking two different questions, and comment on the title question.

The human mind seems to have some sort of relational structure for how it works with ideas. This is usually study in the domain of memory via free recall. In a free recall experiment, a participant will memorize a list of items and then be asked to recall them in any order. Alternatively, there might be no list to memorize and instead the participant may be asked to name as many of some common things as they can quickly (for instance: name all the animals you know). The experimenter tracks the time delays between recall of items, and uses that to infer the "mental distance" between concepts.

It a typical experiment, you will see clustering effects with participants quickly naming a bunch of objects of one type before taking slightly longer to transition to another type and then name many objects of that type quickly. As an example, I might be asked to name cartoon characters and I would start listing:

  "Bart" [short delay] "Homer" [short delay] "Marge" [short delay] "Lisa" [short delay] "Maggie" [long delay while my mind switches from 'The Simpsons' cluster to 'Futurama' cluster] "Fry" [short delay] Leela [short delay] Dr. Zoidberg [etc]

This suggests that I naturally connect and infer different relationships between ideas. In particular, the temporal structure of my recall reveals that I known concepts like "The Simpsons" and "Futurama" and I connect certain names to each other because they share a relationship of "being on the same show". Of course, how I structure my categories and recall is shaped by my expertise.

As an experimenter, I could represent the way people structure their ideas as a graph/network, with individual ideas represented as nodes and closely related ideas (or ones between which people usually transition often or quickly) connected by edges. Free recall is then a random walk on this network. The netwok is similar to a social network, except there nodes are people and edges exist between friends. However, just because what you are studying has a network structure, doesn't mean that it has "6 degrees of separation".

The "6 degrees of separation" idea is a subset of all networks that are known as small-world networks. Small-world networks are defined as networks on $n$ nodes where the longest shortest path (i.e. the fewest edges you need to follow to get from any arbitrary node to any other arbitrary node) is of length about $\log n$. Many networks, say a regular grid, are not small-world (in the case of the regular grid, the length of the longest shortest path is proportional to $\sqrt{n}$ which is much bigger than $\log n$). Thus, the question in the body of you post is not necessarily related to the title.

However, if we take a highly clustered small-world network and perform a random walk on it, then the results will be similar to what we see in free recall experiments. In particular, the random walk will tend to wander for a while in one cluster until taking a jump to another cluster where it would again linger. Thus, the relational structure of ideas might be consistent with small-world networks.


Standard Academic set of emotions, and cognitive functions As far as modern psychology is concerned, do we have a "standard" set of emotions agreed upon by academics? For example, happiness, anger, sadness, etc. Is there a single list that contains all emotions?

Also please pardon my novice understanding of psychology for this next question, but is there also a standard set of cognitive functions?
For example, Carl Jung proposed the following:

Extroversion: An attitude defining the self in accordance to the standard of the external world.

Introversion: An attitude defining the outer world in accordance to the standard of the self.

Intuition: Abstract perception of the environment.

Sensing: Concrete perception of the environment.

Thinking: Impersonal assessment.

Feeling: Person-centered assessment.

Is there a more modern understanding of these functions? And has academia been able to agree on a particular set?

There is no "standard" set of emotions or cognitive functions.  The set depends on the theory.

For example, some theories of emotion posit a basic six or seven (e.g., Ekman), while allowing room for many more "non-basic" emotions (e.g., Izard).  Others suggest that there are virtually infinite emotions and that none are basic (e.g., Barrett, Russell).

Similarly, for cognitive functions, some theories attempt to unify them under a basic set of brain computations (e.g., predictive coding, Friston). Others list a bunch like your Jung example.

It's important to keep in mind that emotions and cognitive functions are just concepts.  We can carve up the functions of the brain in a million different ways (concepts) and arrive at a different set of emotions and cognitions each time.  All of these could simultaneously be useful and explanatory.  Which one you choose depends on your assumptions, biases, experimental questions, methods, and so on.

Relevant sources:

Ekman, P., & Cordaro, D. (2011). What is meant by calling emotions basic. Emotion Review, 3(4), 364-370.

Barrett, L. F. (2006). Are emotions natural kinds?. Perspectives on psychological science, 1(1), 28-58.

Izard, C. E. (2007). Basic emotions, natural kinds, emotion schemas, and a new paradigm. Perspectives on psychological science, 2(3), 260-280.

Barrett, L. F., & Russell, J. A. (2014). The psychological construction of emotion. Guilford Publications.

Clark, A. (2013). Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(03), 181-204.

Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory?. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(2), 127-138.


Which experimental design is this? Factorial vs within groups I have two independent variables (age and gender) and one dependent variable (the results of a questionnaire using a Likert scale).
I'm trying to see whether age and/or gender have an effect on the results of the questionnaire. All participants answered the same questionnaire. Is this a mixed factorial design or a within groups design?

Let us see first what it is not:

Not a within subjects design. To be an within subjects experiment, you need a repeated measure, something that you would test for each individual multiple times. E.g.:

  In this experiment, subjects diagnosed as having attention deficit disorder were each tested on a delay of gratification task after receiving methylphenidate (MPH). All subjects were tested four times, once after receiving one of the four doses. Since each subject was tested under each of the four levels of the independent variable "dose," the design is a within-subjects design and dose is a within-subjects variable

Not a factorial design. For factorial designs, you need an interaction between different levels of your independent variables, which is not the case with age and gender. One might argue that your third variable might have levels that interact with the independent variables, but that is not an independent variable.

At the end of the day, you will have to look at your design this way: each combination of gender and age variables is a separate group of people, and you are testing the same variable on 3(male)+3(female)=6 or 4(male)+4(female)=8 groups of people, depending on how many age groups you are taking in consideration.

That is a between subjects design. For a study, not an experiment.

Note: I looked up the best explanation for it on several websites, here is the clearest I could find, which ended up being my source:


Personality trait in which the person's style is evident regardless of the situation? What is the term for the personality trait in which a person's style is evident in all they do? The person's particular behavior patterns expresses the attitudes and inner characteristics of the person, regardless of the situation. A person with this trait puts a little bit (or a lot) of themselves in all they do. In contrast, other people may blend in more and adapt their behavior more strongly to what is expected by others.

I once read about this term in a personality model article online and have never seen it since.

You may be referring to people who are low in self-monitoring.
Wikipedia has a good summary:

Self-monitoring is defined as a personality trait that refers to an ability to regulate behavior to accommodate social situations. People who closely monitor themselves are categorized as high self-monitors and often behave in a manner that is highly responsive to social cues and their situational context. High self-monitors can be thought of as social pragmatists who project images in an attempt to impress others and receive positive feedback. Conversely, low self-monitors do not participate, to the same degree, in expressive control and do not share similar concern for situational appropriateness. Low self-monitors tend to exhibit expressive controls congruent with their own internal states; i.e. beliefs, attitudes, and dispositions regardless of social circumstance. Low self-monitors are often less observant of social context and consider expressing a self-presentation dissimilar from their internal states as a falsehood and undesirable. People who are unwilling to self-monitor and adjust their behavior accordingly are often aggressive, uncompromising, and insistent with others. This may make them more prone to condemnation, rejection, and the possible consequent feelings of anger, anxiety, guilt, low self-concept, isolation, and depression. Even the occasional indiscretion can make social situations very awkward, and could result in the loss of a friend, co-worker, client, or even job. Those who are willing to adjust their behavior will often find that others are more receptive, pleasant, and benevolent towards them.

Self-monitoring is usually measured with Snyder's (1974) Self-Monitoring Scale or variants thereof.
The scale measures agreement to items such as:

I find it hard to imitate the behavior of other people.
My behavior is usually an expression of my true inner feelings, attitudes, and beliefs.
At parties and social gatherings, I do not attempt to do or say things that others will like.
I can only argue for ideas which I already believe.

References
Snyder, M. (1974). Self-monitoring of expressive behavior. Journal of personality and social psychology, 30(4), 526.


Opposite of White Bear principle? Is there any phrase/term to describe the opposite of White Bear principle (also known as ironic process principle)?
I'm looking for a word to describe the process where something eludes you the more you try to think of it (or remember it). I think I may have come across a term to describe this phenomenon but I'm not sure if such a phrase/term exists.

Short answer
Over-thinking

Background
Unconscious recall of information can be more effective than conscious recall of that same information. Disruption of the activity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (by TMS) improved image-recall in healthy subjects (source: UC Santa Barbara). The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is associated with executive functions including working memory and selective attention (Lehner et al., 2016). The effect over paying too much attention in an attempt to remember something has been referred to as over-thinking.

Reference
- Lehner et al., Genomics, Circuits, and Pathways in Clinical Neuropsychiatry, 1st ed. Elsevier (2016)


What is general fluid intelligence? I'm currently reading about executive control, a lot of papers (e.g. Kane and Engle 2002) discuss general fluid intelligence but don't explain it. What is general fluid intelligence?

Just did some more reading, going to answer my own question:

  Fluid intelligence (Gf) refers to mental operations that an individual uses when faced with a relatively novel task that cannot be performed automatically. Inductive and deductive reasoning are generally thought to be the hallmark narrow-ability indicators of Gf. Examples of Gf abilities are: Induction, Pigatian Reasoning, Quantitative Reasoning and Speed of Reasoning.

By comparison Crystallized Intelligence (Gc):

  Gc refers to the breadth and depth of a persons acquired knowledge, and the application of this knowledge. Examples of Gc abilities are: Language Development, Lexical Knowledge, General Information, Information about Culture, General Science Information, Communication Abilities etc..

Reference:
Reynolds, C. R., & Fletcher-Janzen, E. (2007). Encyclopedia of Special Education (Vol. 1). Wiley.

If anyone has anything better or more to add, please do.


What is the relationship between top-down mechanism and priming the visual system in the following experiment? I am currently conducting an experiment where a subject is shown a series of photographs of various objects. Each photo contains a single object. Before showing the photograph, a screen with a text indicating the name of the object is shown briefly. The objective is to analyze the eye-fixations that occur as subjects view the objects.

This is a free-viewing task, i.e. the subjects are asked to gaze at the pictures without explicitly searching for any attribute in particular. Typically, a bottom-up mechanism is thought to be active for such situations. Since I show the name of the object before showing its picture, most likely, I am priming the subject's visual system. Does this manner of priming make the task a top-down one even though there is no explicit "search" traditionally associated with top-down mechanisms ?

More generally, what is the relationship between top-down mechanisms and priming the visual system ?

This is potentially an example of a top-down influence on the visual system.

That is, if the experiment demonstrates as expected, that priming the visual system with a word influences the pattern of eye movements (compared to not priming) when free-viewing the following object, then that would support the conclusion of a top-down mechanism at work.

In Biased Competition Theory:

  Top-down processing is based on pre-existing knowledge when
  interpreting sensory information.

Top-down processes are contrasted with bottom-up processing that is based on sensory input alone - that is, it can be modelled using only features of the stimulus.  When attention (eg, eye movement) is directed in ways that are not accounted for by sensory input, this provides evidence for a top-down (higher level cognitive) mechanism.

Although much research on top-down effects on eye movement in scene viewing is done using visual search tasks, search targets are not necessary for demonstrating top-down effects, and many experiments use free-viewing (non-directed) tasks to test such effects.

One of the earlier studies showing evidence of top-down influence in free-viewing conditions is Parkhurst et al (2002), who tracked eye movements in free-viewing of various scenes.  Although bottom-up predictions correlated well with the data, some top-down influence was found as well.  Since then, most theories of visual attention incorporate both bottom-up and top-down mechanisms in visual processing, whether task-directed or not.

In fact, even conscious awareness is not necessary for top-down influence: Kiefer et al (2012) review the significant literature on top-down influence of masked (unconscious) priming of the visual system.  Per this review, priming the visual system in a variety of ways influences attention in a top-down manner.


Timing mental arithmetic training for specific event A test will take place in two months time. It will take place on 12:00 PM, and the test takes one hour. One has to perform tasks such as a basic IQ test, mental arithmetic and solving a sudoku. These types of tasks are known in advance.

Someone wants to train for this event by performing the tasks on a regular basis. What would be a good training schedule? Would it be best to train every day for an hour at exactly 12:00 PM, to condition the brain, or would it be better to train at random times to improve the brain's flexibility? Also, would it be better to take days off to have the brain rest, like you would do when training your body?

Firstly, I think you’re thinking too much tbh. But still, I would totally answer this question- I think both are good approaches. But at different period of time. Suppose it’s after a month. So for the first 20 days you work on different time period. It’s better you work longer- what I mean is you start by giving one sample test in one hour then take a 15 minutes break. Then again you do it for 3-4 hours. Take a good nap for 1-2 hours. Then again do it.
In the last 10 days. You practise hard at 12PM  for sure. But you also practise in the remaining time. Because you need the brain to work. Simple example- if a car is switched off for 30 days it will take time to start. But if it switched off 39 minutes back it will start asap. Think about it.

I hope it helps.


Is there a technical term for when the brain recalls an incorrect, but almost correct answer when trying to recall a word/name? For example: If I was trying to recall the name Elaine but instead only the name Ellen could come to mind. It's as though I know 'where' the memory is, but since the memory is poor and so similar to another name with more associated memories, the more dominant, false memory is recalled instead.

I'm not really sure the proper way to describe my question but perhaps one of you can infer what a fool like me is trying to ask.

If you want a very technical term, you could use "paraphasia", but most people just call it a "speech error" or "naming error". These are usually categorized according to error type: such as semantic (cat --> dog), phonological or "formal" (cat --> mat), mixed (both semantic and phonological: cat --> rat), nonword (cat --> kag), unrelated (cat --> log), etc. Your example would probably be considered a mixed error because it was semantically similar (another common female name) and phonologically similar (shared at least 2 phonemes). Tip of the tongue refers to a more specific case where you have a strong sense of knowing the name and some aspects of it, but not being able to recall it.

If you're interested in the neural correlates of these errors, Myrna Schwartz, Gary Dell, and their colleagues have published a series of articles investigating naming errors in stroke patients with language deficits (aphasia). A recent paper mapped aspects of their computational model of word production onto lesion locations in the left hemisphere (Dell et al., 2013, Cognition, 128:3, 380-396).


Do people always decide to do things that they believe will provide them the maximum amount of positive feelings in their conscious life? Is there any scientific study or theory which supports the following claim? - People always decide to act in accordance with things they believe will guarantee them the maximum amount of positive feelings in their conscious life.

Are there any other variables that play a role in the person's decision-making?

(*Note please that I don't have a background in psychology.)

I would say that the more compelling scientific evidence would suggest the opposite.

Daniel Kahnemann got a Nobel Prize for behavioural economics, part of which discussed that the default decision making is not a rational, thought through process.  His book Thinking Fast and Slow discusses it quite well.

Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational discusses similar concepts, and covers some cognitive biases - specific examples of how people make decisions other than following rational decision making process.

Both of these books are readily accessible for people without a Psychology background.

One of the books suggested a way to reduce the impact of this tendency: draft out the framework for the decision making process before going into the decision environment.

I'd suggest that more decisions are made from the aspect of minimising negative feelings in the short to medium term.


Can you make yourself like/hate something when you learned to hate/like it during early life? Suppose that someone develops liking (or even obsessing with) something since very early life, e.g watching football from age 5 to age 25. Is it possible to consciously make oneself hate it when one is older?

Can the converse happen also? Is it possible to hate something at a young age and then consciously make oneself like it when older?

If this "brain rewiring" can happen, what are the methods to achieve it? Is there any research on this subject?

I think most of "loving" and "hating" happens on unconscious level or conscious but automatic level. Aaron T. Beck noticed that thoughts were not as unconscious as Freud had previously theorized and called them "automatic thoughts".
I don't see any reason for someone to start hating football but also you can get bored for watching it for 20 years. But you have techniques, exercises and therapies that can help you love yourself, start hate smoking or stop overeating for example.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can be used for solving current problems and modifying dysfunctional (inaccurate and/or unhelpful) thinking and behavior.


Neuroscience student I'm thinking about studying neuroscience, but the only interests I have in the general area are:

Where thought or consciousness come from and how it all works
How memory works and why it can't be accessed at all times

Can it be increased, and does it have a limit?
How a smell can bring back a memory?
Why, if I remember a scene or a moment, can I not relive an entire day or month? Will this be possible in the future?

Also, I love biology and am doing a course in chemistry and lab work at the moment, but I'm afraid I'll be disappointed if I study neuroscience for these reasons. Are these questions more theoretical and philosophical than what a neuroscience student would actually study?

Cognitive sciences are an interdisciplinary field between:

psychology
sociology
philosophy
medical sciences
biology
physics
chemistry
palaeontology / anthropology
ethnology
information sciences
linguistics
I believe I forgot something

The core is probably somewhere around psychology, neurobiology (including endocrinology) and artificial intelligence, though others would lay the focus elsewhere.

It does not matter much which of these fields you study, if you aim at an academic career studying cognition, because you will have to make yourself familiar with, or even an expert, in most of the other fields, if you want to go beyond a master's degree. Where you put your focus, is a matter of personal preference, and no matter where that is, you will be working in a team of experts from different fields. I'm studying psychology, and at our institute (of psychology) we have researchers who studied medicine, physics, information science, and pedagogy. In the neuroscience institute next door, there are psychologists, biologists, medical scientists (including psychiatrists) and probably more that I don't know. Despite their different backgrounds, they now all work on the same research topics.

So while it does not matter (much) which first topic you choose, you need to be open and curious of mind, to be successful in science. If, as you say, you are interested only in a very narrow field, interdisciplinary work will be impossible for you. You won't be able to follow your topic to where it leads you. Sometimes, when you research something, you realize that the answer to a relevant question, that you need to answer before you can go on, lies in another field. Then you must study that field. If you don't, that will hamper your understanding and research.

The best scientists, in my opinion, are those that are basically curious and want to understand and learn. They all have their individual talents, and certainly no one can know and understand everything, but the most successful researchers today are experts in several fields and interested in several others.

On the other hand, there are those hard working lab rats that get things done, and they are invaluable, too. The question is, can you see yourself as doing the grunt work, or do you want to really understand it all?

But then maybe that is all something you cannot know in advance. You need to experience things to know if they are for you or not. When I was fresh from school, I had very limited interests and a wide array of clearly defined dislikes (everything I had to learn in school). But in the years that followed, I understood that I am basically interested in everything, even the subjects that I hated in school. And what I found the most interesting at first, I lost interest in after studying it for a few years. Now I study something else.

What I would recommend is:

read the internet sites of the university institutes and some introductory textbooks in the three or four fields that you are most interested in
choose the one whose methodology you like best: do you want to dissect brains, do statistical data analysis, program software, work on people or animals, theorize or spend nights in the lab, ... ?
study that
if after a year or two you realize you want something else, switch (but understand that every field includes stuff you find boring)
finish your master's
reflect on what you learned and understand what interests you for the next few years
find a research group and do your Ph.D.
again reflect and decide on the next steps
don't worry, there are many successful non-linear careers in science