Concept for 'too much exposure to a bad idea can make it seem normal'? I wanted to know if there was a studied concept/term for the notion that too much exposure (in terms of sensory stimulus) towards a bad idea/thing (eg. say drinking) in a normal connotation can make the idea look less bad and more normal.

Eg. If a person keeps getting a lot of jokes etc. on a group chat (say, Whatsapp) or in his/her Facebook feed etc. about getting drunk, and the jokes are somehow glorifying this behavior (eg. 'I am an introvert, but when I bring in the drinks, I attract everyone' (I know, bad joke)). So getting a lot of such input toward a hazardous behavior may entice a not-so-heavy drinker to go full blast, because (s)he may start thinking that this is very normal and probably even fun. This is just an example, this can be thought for many other hazardous behaviors.

So my question is that has such behavior been studied, and is this somewhat true?

Are you thinking of desensitization?

From wikipedia: In psychology, desensitization is defined as the diminished emotional responsiveness to a negative or aversive stimulus after repeated exposure to it. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desensitization_(psychology))

Desensitization seems to match the question as posed in the title, but maybe not the question as posed in the text.  Desensitization occurs based on mere repetition.  In the body of the question, it seems like you're referring to repetition that takes place in the context of otherwise normal (non-negative or aversive) context, so that the once-negative subject acquires some of the normalcy of the context.


Which paper or book from cognitive science do you think everyone should read or know about, and why? I have created a community wiki question to encourage/enable users to share the books or paper from cognitive science that you think is most important for others to read and know about. Please just give one suggestion per answer and please make sure that you explain why it is important that people understand this reading and what it explains.

Note that you can suggest more several pieces of content if you think that they are all equally essential but this is generally discouraged.

I note that a previous question, which I have voted to reopen, asked for the must know papers of cognitive science and was closed for being too broad. If that policy of closing these sorts of "polls" remains in place then I am happy to remove or modify my question.

However, I would suggest that the question be left open as I have seen similar questions (1, 2) being very well received on other stackexchange forums and attracting considerable interest and engagement.

While some of these question have since been closed, I oppose that policy as I accord with the view from here, that "'must read books' questions are pretty much my favourite part of every stackexchange site – Damon Mar 9 '11 at 17:48"

Ok, I will start. I don't necessarily know if these are definitely the best three books I have read, but they are three of the best. If I think of better ones then I will add them.

Thinking, Fast and Slow
Predictably Irrational
Influence: Science and practice

My interest in cognitive science is about i) understanding my own irrationality and ii) understanding how to change behaviour (e.g., persuasion, influence etc) to help people to have better lives. My three choices reflect this.

As related to this, I think that these books would be valuable for anyone to read as they could help you to better understand how to i)  make better decisions, ii) help other people to make better decisions.


Is there a formal name for the effect/cognitive bias of seeing something new I'm wondering if there is a formal neuroscience or psychology term for the following: We see something new, fresh, and different and as a result pause just a little bit longer to look it over.
Imagine a hiring manager going through a pile of resumes. They all look the same. Suddenly they come across one that has a fresh, new template and spend some more time looking it at. As a result they might just short-list this candidate.
Would this be an effect or a cognitive bias? Does it have a name?
PS: Not a psychologist or neuroscientist, just curious.

Salience comes to mind, which in Psychology can be defined as...

... anything (person, behavior, trait, etc.) that is prominent, conspicuous, or otherwise noticeable compared with its surroundings. Salience is usually produced by novelty or unexpectedness, but can also be brought about by shifting one’s attention to that feature. Salience usually depends on context. A child would not be particularly salient at his or her school, but would be at a nursing home. The act of crying would not be salient at a funeral, but would be at a job interview. A salient feature can be thought of as the “figure” that stands out against the “ground” of all other nonsalient features.

Source
IResearch.net: Psychology Research & Reference


How does the brain use old information to make new connections? I assume that if my brain forms a new connection (registers a new information), it can't really know "where does the new element stand in the system of things". Nonetheless, it is being said that information is useful even if you forget it.

Let's say I would learn how photosynthesis works (not the words itself) when I'm 5 years old and forgot it (at least the conversation about it) since. Is it possible that the brain somehow brings the knowledge up when I'll hear about it in school ten years later?

I think I need to learn about the basic "remembering algorithm" brain generally used. It seems weird to me that the brain would automatically find the exact same neurons where the information had been stored before.

In other words: How does the basic architecture of the brain work so that the "consciously forgotten" information (in the sense that we cannot consciously recall the information) still be useful?

if my brain forms a new connection (register a new information) it can't really know "where does the new element stand in the system of things"

There is a lot of contention on the specifics, what we have are theories of Memory and Information processing in the brain, and as such nothing I am going to mention is settled.

In a nutshell, there are 2 main overarching themes into how the brain processes environmental information: Maps and Hierarchies, perhaps the most researched map is that for vision or what is know as a Retinotopic map this is a simplification,there is a lot of processing and multiple overlapping maps ( movement,orientations,color),1
 the Hierarchy part comes into play as the outputs of these primary maps combine to make more novel maps like edges and shapes, other parts of the brain in turn connect these primary and secondary maps into higher meaningful percepts, perhaps the most striking feature, is that you recreate the original pattern as you remember, that is the neurons (or a subset) that fired when you first experienced something, fire again when you remember it for a second time2.

This scheme more or less repeats through the brain with a number of specializations3, we devote a lot of real state to vision,social behavior ( maps and hierarchies of how to behave in public and what other people are thinking), language ( maps and hierarchies of words and meaning or a mental lexicon), as well as personal history (all the people that have wronged me, my favorite food), and finally, we have areas devoted solely to the association of other areas, a map of maps and a hierarchy of hierarchies with temporal buffers.

This was a whirlwind overview of how we believe information is organized, but it does not answer your question since I have mostly neglected mentioning how the information is stored and retrieved, that is mostly the domain of memory.

Memory is not a unitary concept and by that I mean that there are a lot of behaviors that are bunched all together into the word memory ( there are around 11 different types for instance)4, I am skipping much of the details that are not relevant, but we believe that the following mechanism is at play for the type of memory you are describing:

When you experience something, besides direct access to your primary processing maps and hierarchies, an extra or a number of extra copies are generated and routed through a switchboard, ( the Hippocampus and related structures), it is in this switchboard that the interconnections necessary for associations are first generated, and later through a process of selective repetition, the relevant ones are preserved and eventually consolidated closer to your primary maps and hierarchies.5

  Is it possible that the brain somehow brings the knowledge up when I'll hear about it in school ten years later?

Yes, the specific phenomenon is called priming, granted, in light of the previously discussed models, It will depend on some variables, was the information stored originally in long term memory, has there been interference from other more recent memories, how much time has it been.

  It seems weird to me that the brain would automatically find the exact same neurons where the information had been stored before.

Yes, it is amazing, the information finding happens due to the organizational scheme previously described and another phenomenon called plasticity or synaptic plasticity, this last part utilizes the connective weights in between neurons to both preserve ( connections with higher weights get preserved)  and then finding related connections ( through a path of least resistance in between neurons with high weights). Additionally, long term memories utilize other strategies and optimizations and there could be further temporal and functional aspects to encoding,storing and retrieving. 6

  In other words: Can the totally forgotten information still be useful?

Yes,provided the information was encoded and stored originally,even after years of non use, there is evidence that a priming effect might still be available.

Notes, reference & sources:

1. For an early look at Hierarchies and maps I think Vision (Marr) is a good introduction, Vision science (Palmer) has the full overview.

2. This one fact deserves more attention, a good overview is found in Cognitive Science (Gazzaniga)

3. Neuroscience (Purves) & Cognitive Science (Gazzaniga) both deal with how the neocortex subdivides and specializes.

4. Cognitive Science (Gazzaniga) has a great overview of Memory and The Oxford Handbook of Memory (Tulving,Craik) is a comprehensive bible of sorts if slightly outdated.

5. Gateway to memory (Gluck, Myers) has a very readable and detailed overview of the hippocampus, Rythms of the Brain(Buzsaki) expands it.

6. In search of Memory (Kandel) deals with plasticity at length.


How to measure verbal and visual working memory? I need a task which can measure verbal also visual working memory. I am not going to run the test, this is just for theoretical interest. Which tests can be used in this research?

Conway et al. (2005) gives a really nice overview of tasks to measure working memory capacity (WMC). I would refer to that publication for details about the tasks. I'll summarize two tasks below that are related to your question.

Verbal Working Memory.
A classic way to measure verbal working memory is a reading span task. The task involves presenting sentences to a subject who makes a judgment about whether the sentence is coherent or not. The subject must also remember some key word (e.g. the last word) in the sentence. The subject reads several such sentences, and then has to recall all of the key words in order. The more sentences that the subject can read, the higher their verbal working memory.

Visual Working Memory
Visual/spatial working memory can be tested in a similar way, but with spatial stimuli instead of sentences. One such task is a rotation-span task. In this task, you see a rotated letter, like this:

You have to make a judgment about whether the letter is in the correct orientation (if it were upright, would it be normal or flipped?). After you do that, you then see something like this:

You have to remember what direction the arrow was pointing. You then repeat the process several times, alternating between letters and arrows, until you are asked to recall the order of orientations for all the arrows you saw.


Why does suicide risk increase just after starting an antidepressant? There are many ways of treating depression, one of which is administering antidepressants. From this site, and several others, I read that risk of suicide increases after starting an antidepressant.

  A few people do become more agitated, depressed, and anxious shortly
  after an antidepressant is started or after the dose is increased.
  Some people, especially younger children and adolescents, become
  increasingly suicidal if these symptoms are not detected and rapidly
  treated. This finding was first reported with SSRIs, but the risk
  probably does not differ among classes of antidepressants.

My question is, simply, why is that? These antidepressants work long-term, but cause strong suicidal thoughts when taken initially. Does it have something to do with hormones?

This comes from talking to a psychiatrist about the issue:

One of the effects of depression is a loss of motivation.  In some suicidal individuals, this has the result that they want to die, but can't work up the motivation to do anything about it.  Once they start taking antidepressants, however, the lack of motivation goes away before the depression does, creating a short period of increased suicide risk.


Relation of serotonin level and mood/depression Not a biologist. Not even related to science, however I read a lot of popular psychology stuff, plus read some info about antidepressants and a question tortures me :)

Antidepressants arise amount of serotonin in blood in short period of time. However, you should take antidepressants for quite a long period of time so that it took effect. Up to 1-4 months.

As I heard there is no explanation about this fact. On the one hand we know that serotonin affects our mood, on the other hand for some reason we cannot fix our mood by just increasing its level straight away.

So the question is: is there any explanation of this, and what I (as a non-scientist) am wondering more about is that why then we feel better after consuming such things as chocolate, sugar etc, which indirectly might increase serotonin level?

Plus, why we cannot consume large amounts of L-tryptophan for example? If I overdose tryptophan nothing scary happens, while if I overdose prozak or zoloft, I can end up with coma probably.

There are a lot of pop psychology articles talking about hormones, however I suspect that trying to change the level of hormones by some actions (which are advised by the articles, I don't know, starting from eating sweeties and ending with doing sports) won't change it much. I know that there should be some "normal" values of serotonin in blood (ng/mL). But I don't believe that if I go to sauna and eat snickers it will increase this level drastically :) Nevertheless I'll feel better. While if I take antidepressants and they will indeed increase the level, I won't feel happy right away. Why so?

You say that

Antidepressants [a]rise [the] amount of serotonin in blood in short period of time. However, you should take antidepressants for quite a long period of time so that it took effect. Up to 1-4 months.
As I heard there is no explanation about this fact. On the one hand we know that serotonin affects our mood, on the other hand for some reason we cannot fix our mood by just increasing its level straight away.

There are some studies which suggest effect after the first week. E.g. Early Onset of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor Antidepressant Action: Systematic Review and Meta-analysis (2006):

Pooled estimates of treatment effect on depressive symptom rating scales were calculated for weeks 1 through 6 of treatment. In the primary analysis, the pattern of response seen was tested against alternative models of onset of response. The primary analysis incorporated data from 28 randomized controlled trials (n=5872). A model of early treatment response best fit the experimental data. Treatment with SSRIs rather than placebo was associated with clinical improvement by the end of the first week of use. A secondary analysis indicated an increased chance of achieving a 50% reduction in Hamilton Depression Rating Scale scores by 1 week (relative risk, 1.64; 95% confidence interval, 1.2-2.25) with SSRI treatment compared with placebo.

They actually suggest a logarithmically increasing treatment response:

Also a very similar study a year before: "Is there a delay in the antidepressant effect? A meta-analysis." (2005):

The time course of improvement on active medication and placebo was nearly identical, as 60.2% and 61.6% of the improvement that occurred on active medication and placebo, respectively, took place during the first 2 weeks of treatment. Drug-placebo differences were not only present but were most pronounced during the first 2 weeks of treatment and diminished in a stepwise fashion thereafter. A series of subanalyses confirmed that this early drug-placebo separation was clinically observable and represented a true drug effect.

I think there are some practical difficulties with collecting data more than weekly in large trials. Also, a small increase is not likely to be noticed in everyday clinical practice (non-trial).
SSRI effectiveness has been mired in some controversy though, with a lot of the trials being (obviously) sponsored to some extent by drug companies.

And eating sweets will increase your serotonin, as will smoking (nicotine) for instance. The problem with using these as anti-depressants is how much you'd have to consume and for how long to get the same effect as from a SSRI. Quoting "Brain serotonin, carbohydrate-craving, obesity and depression":

Serotonin-releasing brain neurons are unique in that the amount of neurotransmitter they release is normally controlled by food intake: Carbohydrate consumption--acting via insulin secretion and the "plasma tryptophan ratio"--increases serotonin release; protein intake lacks this effect. This ability of neurons to couple neuronal signaling properties to food consumption is a link in the feedback mechanism that normally keeps carbohydrate and protein intakes more or less constant. However, serotonin release is also involved in such functions as sleep onset, pain sensitivity, blood pressure regulation, and control of the mood. Hence many patients learn to overeat carbohydrates (particularly snack foods, like potato chips or pastries, which are rich in carbohydrates and fats) to make themselves feel better. This tendency to use certain foods as though they were drugs is a frequent cause of weight gain, and can also be seen in patients who become fat when exposed to stress, or in women with premenstrual syndrome, or in patients with "winter depression," or in people who are attempting to give up smoking. (Nicotine, like dietary carbohydrates, increases brain serotonin secretion; nicotine withdrawal has the opposite effect.)

WebMD has fairly accessible article on the latter, which says among other things:

Researchers at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago found that carb cravers who have a mildly depressed mood seem to be self-medicating. They studied women who were overweight and had a history of carb cravings. They gave them a choice between a protein-rich beverage or a carb-rich one. They found that when the women reported being in the worst moods, they picked the carb beverage more often than the protein one. In addition, the carb drink improved their mood better.


Is there a name for this feeling? With the intent of being seen as a big shot, a person induces unsuspecting observers to underestimate them by intentionally failing in trivial tasks but then successfully completing more complex tasks.

The emotions may include: duplicitousness, slipperiness, artfulness, craftiness, deviousness, wiliness, cunningness, deceitfulness, slyness, sneakiness, crookedness, vanity, haughtiness, pretentiousness, affectation, conceitedness, smugness, superciliousness, bumptiousness, condescension, obstreperousness, grandiosity, hubris.


Is the depletion effect of self-control reliable? Although a lot of research (Muraven, 1998) has indicated the ego depletion of self-control, a recent paper (Xu, 2014) claims that they fail to replicate the depletion effect: impaired performance in subsequent tasks.
So, is the depletion effect of self-control reliable?

References

Muraven, M., Tice, D. M., & Baumeister, R. F. (1998). Self-control as a limited resource: Regulatory depletion patterns. Journal of personality and social psychology, 74(3), 774. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.3.774
Xu, X., Demos, K. E., Leahey, T. M., Hart, C. N., Trautvetter, J., Coward, P., ... & Wing, R. R. (2014). Failure to Replicate Depletion of Self-Control. PloS one, 9(10), e109950. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0109950

Short answer: We don't really know yet, but we should know soon.

Long answer:

There has been much research about the ego-depletion effect. The effect has been found in many published studies. As cited in APS Observer (2014):

  A recent meta-analysis revealed a medium effect size (d = 0.62) across 198 tests of the ego-depletion effect (Hagger, Wood, Stiff, & Chatzisarantis, 2010).

However, there have been some doubts whether these results reflect publication bias (only studies that found the effect may have been published, those that have found no effect or the reverse effect may have landed in the "file drawer") or weak methods (small samples).

APS Observer (2014):

  Despite these findings, some researchers have questioned the strength
  of the ego-depletion effect. A recent analysis conducted by Carter and
  McCullough (2013, 2014) suggested that the effect may be quite small
  or entirely an artifact of publication bias. The researchers cite
  evidence that many tests of the effect were substantially underpowered
  suggesting that the likelihood of finding such a large number of
  significant effects in the literature is improbable. Although the
  interpretation of these analyses have been questioned (Hagger &
  Chatzisarantis, 2014), it is possible that publication bias may have
  inflated the size of the effect evident from the literature.

That is why the APS journal Perspectives on Psychological Science has accepted the proposal for a large scale replication project led by Alex O. Holcombe and Martin S. Hagger.

APS Observer (2014):

  By using preregistered replications across multiple laboratories, this [project] will allow for a precise, objective estimate of the size of the ego depletion effect.

More details about the project can be accessed at its website on the Open Science Framework.

References

Carter, E. C., & McCullough, M. E. (2013). Is ego depletion too incredible? Evidence for the overestimation of the depletion effect. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36, 683-684. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X13000952

Carter, E. C., & McCullough, M. E. (2014). Publication bias and the limited strength model of self-control: Has the evidence for ego depletion been overestimated? Frontiers in Psychology, 5. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00823

Hagger, M. S., & Chatzisarantis, N. L. D. (2014). It is premature to regard the ego-depletion effect as ‘too incredible’. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 298. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00298

Hagger, M. S., Wood, C., Stiff, C., & Chatzisarantis, N. L. D. (2010). Ego depletion and the strength model of self-control: A meta-analysis, Psychological Bulletin, 136, 495-525.


Publicly accessible database for the Autistic brain under MRI and/or fMRI American neuroscientist James H. Fallon released many of the images of MRIs from diagnosed psychopaths and was able to identify a pattern when compared to the average individual. Is there a database for Autism that can be used in a similar way? If anyone can find a study specifically comparing autism and another type of brain that will be fine, as I seek to compare autistics, neurotypicals, and other different types of neurological disorders identifiable through brain imaging.

I'm not personally familiar with this project (outside my area of research), but a quick search brought me to the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE):

http://fcon_1000.projects.nitrc.org/indi/abide/

Based on citation counts for the primary articles, it seems popular. If you want to compare to other types of brains you will probably need to use multiple data sets and combine them.

Di Martino, A., Yan, C. G., Li, Q., Denio, E., Castellanos, F. X., Alaerts, K., ... & Deen, B. (2014). The autism brain imaging data exchange: towards a large-scale evaluation of the intrinsic brain architecture in autism. Molecular psychiatry, 19(6), 659. doi: 10.1038/mp.2013.78.

Di Martino, A., O’connor, D., Chen, B., Alaerts, K., Anderson, J. S., Assaf, M., ... & Blanken, L. M. (2017). Enhancing studies of the connectome in autism using the autism brain imaging data exchange II. Scientific data, 4, 170010. doi: 10.1038/sdata.2017.10.


Would the Milgram Experiment results be replicated in Eastern cultures? When the Milgram Experiment was performed in the 1960s and replicated multiple times up until the 1980s, it was performed in Western cultures. When it was replicated in 2006, it was again performed in the USA. One of the interesting observations that was made, was that the subjects in most cases, agreed to continue the shock treatments if they were reassured that they cannot be held  responsible for anything that happens and cannot be sued*.

This to me, sounds to be an individualistic reaction to the experimenter's command as opposed to a collectivistic response where subjects would not only try to protect their self interests but would also act to protect the confederate being shocked from ill treatment**. Is this an accurate assertion?

As we know, Western cultures are known to emphasize on individualism whereas Eastern cultures are known for inculcating collectivism. So, would the experimental results differ if the experiment were replicated today in an Eastern culture (Japan, for example)?

Have any such studies been conducted in the East?

 *Mentioned in Burger, Jerry M. (2008). "Replicating Milgram: Would People Still Obey Today? and also a video clip was featured on ABC News’s January
3, 2007, broadcast of Primetime.

**Personal argument/reasoning

While I don't know of the Milgram studies being replicated cross cultural there's an older, less severe conformity study by Asch. Those use less authoritarian and more group conformity pressure.

Eastern cultures showed higher conformity and western showed falling conformity over time.

Bond, R. & Smith, Peter. (1996). Culture and conformity: A meta-analysis of studies using Asch's (1952b, 1956) line judgment task. Psychological Bulletin, 119(1), 111-137. doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.119.1.111


Is religiousness a genetically heritable feature? I know that parent beliefs have very strong influence on child, but is it possible that genetic factor also play a role? I doubt that the content of any religion could be heritable through genes nor anyone could be genetically predestined to be Christian, Jew, Buddhist or votary of any particular religion. But is it possible that some kind of sensitivity to religious aspect of life could be heritable?

I know that it is hard to distinguish genetic and environmental factor in such case, but maybe someone have already made such research for example on monozygotic and dizygotic twins or adopted children?

I've thought that if it is indeed heritable, then celibacy in the Catholic Church might be suicidal for this faith, as it eliminates the (potential) "godliness genes".

Monozygotic twin studies are the general course of action for this kind of question. Genetic and environmental influences on multiple dimensions of religiosity: a twin study concludes there is a genetic component.

A complete approach for these kind of studies is to take twins that have been separated to different households from birth and compare them to twins in the same household. I'm not sure what this particularly study does (haven't read it) but its a typical approach in behavioral biology.

A summary of the above article, also references a book where they compared monozygotic twins to dizygotic twins.

The difference between monozygotic and dizygotic twins is that monozygotic twins share almost a complete set of genetics (mutations happen) while dizygotic twins share the same amount as a normal set of siblings.  The idea being that if monozygotic twins share traits at a higher statistical rate than dizygotic twins, that there is a genetic component to that trait.  This, of course, does not mean the trait "is genetic" in totality.  Most behavioral traits have a combination of genetic and environmental (be it developmental, social, toxicological, or else wise environmental) factors.  There's also a new factor discovered recently that lies somewhere in between: epigenetics.  I can't be certain, but I'd think this would appear in monozygotic similarities, probably confounding results a bit.


What is the difference between behavioral science and cognitive science? Is cognitive science a part of behavioral science or vice versa?

The cognitive sciences are largely an element of the behavioral sciences.

The subject matter of the behavioral sciences is animal or human behavior. It is an interdisciplinary endeavor that involves a diverse set of fields such as psychology, ethology, behavioral genetics, criminology, etc.

The cognitive sciences study how the mind determines behavior via mental processes such as perception, reasoning, emotion, and volition. This also is a multidisciplinary endeavor involving neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, and so on and so forth (see for example Harré, 2002). In the sense that the ultimate goal of (most) of the cognitive sciences is to explain behavior, they can be regarded as behavioral sciences. At the same time, it is clear that not all behavioral sciences focus on the mind as their explaining variable. Therefore it is the broader term.

It is important to note, however, that the cognitive sciences may investigate the mind without observing actual behavior in a given study. For example, there may be brain imaging studies without any behavioral measures. As another example, artificial intelligence research may simulate thought processes as a means to understand human reasoning, but conceptualize and measure behavior only in a very abstract sense.

Sometimes, the term "behavioral science" is used more strictly to connote a focus on behavioral experimentation and observation. This usage would exclude some research within the realm of the cognitive sciences.

Finally, there is research that may be regarded as cognitive science that is not a behavioral science in any sense of the term. A case in point is artificial intelligence research that does not aim at simulating or understanding animal or human thinking.

References

Harré, R. (2002). Cognitive science: A philosophical introduction. London: SAGE.


Could Fitts Law be used to measure difficulty in platform genre games? I've been learning about Fitts' law and am wondering if it's applicable to measuring the difficulty of platform type games where the challenge is to hit the platforms?

If so, this could be used to ensure there is a well designed difficulty curve.

I'm also wondering if anybody has heard if Fitts law was used to measure difficulty in a game.

Probably, though my brief literature search didn't turn up any examples of people actually measuring game difficulty using Fitts' law. One thing to keep in mind is that motor movements are only a portion of what might make a game physically or cognitively demanding, even in platform games which are typically quite simple. Users have to make additional decisions, such as which platform to jump to or where to attend (do I look at the platform I'm jumping to, or do I look ahead to anticipate the next jump?)

I did find one interesting paper by Looser, Cockburn, & Savage (2005), who use Fitts' law to predict movement time in first-person shooters. The authors found that the time taken to pan (using a mouse) to acquire a target could be accounted for by Fitts' law. So if the time to acquire a target (e.g. before an enemy starts shooting at you) is critical, it certainly suggests that your methodology could be used to moderate difficulty level, say, by placing enemies farthest away from the current position.

Again, this is mostly speculation as I don't think there are any actual studies that address your specific question. But your intuition seems quite reasonable.

  Looser, J., Cockburn, A., & Savage, J. (2005). On the validity of
  using First-Person Shooters for Fitts' law studies. Proceedings of.
  People and Computers XIX, 2, 33-36. PDF


What causes some women to have repeated abortions? Fisher et al. (2005) studied the characteristics of women who have repeated abortions. The study was conducted in countries where reliable contraception and education about birth control are readily available. There appears to be a link between a history of physical or sexual abuse and women who have repeated abortions.

However, not all women having repeated abortions have been abused. Another factor must come into play for non-abused women having repeated abortions.

Thus, my question is:

What other factors besides physical and sexual abuse cause some women to have repeated abortions?

Some examples might include poor living skills, lack of education, low self esteem, self abuse, socioeconomic conditions, a true desire to have a baby, ambiguity about wanting a child, fear of being a bad parent, fear of being tied to an abusive partner, lack of responsibility etc. This list is by no means exhaustive.

References

William A. Fisher, Sukhbir S. Singh, Paul A. Shuper, Mark Carey, Felicia Otchet, Deborah MacLean-Brine, Diane Dal Bello, and Jennifer Gunter   Characteristics of women undergoing repeat induced abortion  CMAJ. 2005 March 1; 172(5): 637–641.

It is certain that a desire to have sex without contraception and a lack of desire to be a parent cause women to have multiple abortions. (precluding rape)

A certain amount of a desire to have sex is natural. Causes for increased sexuality are so numerous that is not tenable to search.
Risk taking behaviour is associated with sex without contraceptions. A stable long term relationship might be one reason to have sex without protection where the risk is perceived to be less based on the lack of infidelity. A lack of responsibility could also motivate someone to consistently not use protection. Peer pressure by the male or even religion is also possible.
Finally there are many reasons people decide not to be a parent. Primarily they are unable to be a mentor and they are incapable of nurturing. There are many additional reasons at this link about why certain reasons to have children are irrational. However it should be stated that just because one is incapable of being a good parent doesn't leave abortion as the only option. The child can be given up for adoption however that is not popular.


How do humans perceive height or vertical drop? I'm looking at this video: Neil Burgess: How your brain tells you where you are, which discusses neurons within the brain that help people remember where stuff is in relation to other objects.

I'm interested if there are similar kinds of neurons or areas of the brain that are specifically involved in recognizing heights. For example, I can be looking at a flat suface across horizontal distance and I feel fine (for example looking at a distant building). But if I'm looking at another flat surface, of the same distance, but straight down, I may feel uneasy. This feeling of unease tells me that an additional mechanism may be involved in perceiving heights.

The question is - what part of the brain can differentiate horizontal distance from vertical drop?

The answer that I recently discovered is that humans have a number of mental adaptations to environmental challenges, as described by Evolutionary Psychology.

For example, This TED talk on beauty describes how most "beautiful" landscape paintings share common traits, like looking down a valley with wildlife, a water source AND gravitational advantage (as if looking down from a tree).

The explanation given is that gravitational advantage (being higher) helps evade predators and spot them as they approach.

From looking at these adaptations, it appears that there's neural circuits in the human brain which can recognize height and prefer it in some amount (as in sitting in a tree), but feel aversion towards it in greater amounts (staring down a cliff).


Effect of time on emotion self-perception When I participated in the study that led to "A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind" I answered questions on my phone that insisted that I answer as soon as I got the notification. This made me assume that there is a significant change in emotional perception as time passes, however I can't find any evidence of this. In other words, how is the experience of an emotion affected by the amount of time between it's experience and it's recollection? If this question is too broad, it can be narrowed down to pain and pleasure.

As shown in the Wikipedia section "Memory of felt emotion" there are many ways that recollected emotion is significantly different than experienced emotion. From the section:

  Another study found that people's memories for how distressed they
  felt when they learned of the 9/11 terrorist attacks changed over time
  and moreover, were predicted by their current appraisals of the impact
  of the attacks (Levine et al., 2004). It appears that memories of past
  emotional responses are not always accurate, and can even be partially
  reconstructed based on their current appraisal of events. [45]

  Studies have shown that as episodic memory becomes less accessible
  over time, the reliance on semantic memory to remember past emotions
  increases. In one study Levine (2009)[47] primes of the cultural belief
  of women being more emotional than men had a greater effect on
  responses for older memories compared to new memories. The long term
  recall of emotions was more in line with the primed opinions, showing
  that long term recall of emotions was heavily influenced by current
  opinions.

  [45] Levine L.J. and Pizarro D.A. (2004) "Emotion and memory research:
  A grumpy overview" Social Cognition, Vol. 22, No. 5, 2004, pp.530-554

  [47] Levine; Lench, Heather; Safer, Martin (2009). "Functions of
  Remembering and Misremembering Emotion". Applied Cognitive Psychology.
  23: 1059–1075.


Does intoxication ever improve reaction time? Background: As I write this I am rather "tipsy." I wanted to do some experiments and test my reaction time. I noticed that ironically, my reaction times were a lot quicker than when I am sober. Is there a reason for this? Perhaps slight intoxication may improve reaction time?

I know that slight intoxication can improve creativity according to Jennifer Wiley.

Are there laboratory results backing up the fact that reaction time could actually be faster under these circumstances?

In short: none that I could find. Indeed, it's a very one-way relationship - the more you drink the worse reaction time gets. However, there is a starting point, which is generally put around .02-.06 depending on your chosen study - below that threshold the effect of BAL on reaction times is difficult to pin down. Most studies I found showed that below .05% often showed no change in cognitive functioning regarding reaction times, though it was often theorized that intoxicated people are able to compensate for their impairment under normal testing conditions, as in this study: Alcohol increases reaction time and errors during decision making

This suggests a possible answer, however - you knew if intoxicated your reaction times could be worsened, so you focused extra resources on maximizing them.

Also, studies in general are statistical in nature - none say that "no one ever showed improved reaction time while intoxicated", because sometimes its just a fluke, sometimes people are especially trained at compensating for intoxication (even at a subconscious level), and a host of other similar factors.

What this all indicates is that even if your reactions were repeatedly tested under measured circumstances, you might very well be able to show improved reaction times under varying level of intoxication; however this is extremely likely to require more of your mental resources, so that under stress or complicated situations you would find real-world performance to be poorer.

Finally, I would also warn that reaction time does not necessarily correlate with any/all other cognitive tasks. Those with even .05 BAL are often found be twice as likely to be in an automotive accident, even though most reaction time studies and general cognitive ability tests would show low/no impairment.

But, still I cannot say there is any literature I can find that studies specifically the effect of low-moderate levels of intoxication on a variety of individuals, especially with the goal of identifying potential enhancement of any cohort within the study. At least if there was such a study it could have been considered to have failed to find any result worthy of publishing, or be rephrased to be a study that showed reduce reaction time in fitting with other similar research.


Why might sleeping on the floor alleviate PTSD symptoms? Question:
Does sleeping on the floor have similar neurotransmitter effects, as sleeping under a weighted blanket might? Psychiatrically, would it be expected that a person having PTSD would find similar results sleeping under a weighted blanket as they do when they sleep on the floor?
Could sleeping on the floor actually be a subconscious attempt at regulating neurotransmitters or possibly even to promote better REM sleep?
Background:
There are many views on the interplay of different neurotransmitters and hormones, (dopamine, serotonin, etc.), and PTSD, anxiety, depression, etc.
There is also a lot of consensus on how weighted blankets seem to help alleviate these symptoms, providing that sense of security. They also seem to be used a lot by parents of children with Autism, Aspergers, and ADHD.
There are a variety of theories why people with PTSD sleep on the floor, could a valid rival hypothesis be a neurotransmitter affect?

To be in a position to respond to threats more effectively.
To askew comforts, and lavishness, in view of self-worth.
The sense of security and being "grounded".

Article linking sleeping on the floor with hypervigilance: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Reactions.

Why might sleeping on the floor alleviate PTSD symptoms?
Question: Does sleeping on the floor have similar neurotransmitter effects, as sleeping under a weighted blanket might? Psychiatrically, would it be expected that a person having PTSD would find similar results sleeping under a weighted blanket as they do when they sleep on the floor?
There is also a lot of consensus on how weighted blankets seem to help alleviate these symptoms, providing that sense of security. They also seem to be used a lot by parents of children with Autism, Aspergers, and ADHD.
Could sleeping on the floor also be related to this, possibly because of the firmness and sense of security felt from being on the floor? (Even if physically uncomfortable.)

No. Don't connect those very different studies and use it as a basis for a conclusion.
The article you reference mentions the word "floor" 3 times, twice to mention that 2 children sleep on the floor and the third time the author writes:

"Children who sleep on the floor instead of their bed after a trauma do so because they fear the comfort of a bed will let them sleep so hard that they won’t hear danger coming.".

It is the claim, of proponents of weighted blankets, that they: reduce movement, let you feel as if you are being held, and thus promote better sleep.
Source: "What's the deal with weighted blankets?":

"The thought is that this weight mimics the pressure of being held, which helps release anxiety to let you fall asleep faster. Some studies, including a 2015 one "Positive Effects of a Weighted Blanket on Insomnia" from the Journal of Sleep Medicine and Disorders, back this up (.PDF). The research found that weighted blankets did in fact provide a "beneficial calming effect" for those suffering from insomnia.

In case one it is the decision of a few children that they won't sleep as well, in the second case it is businesses that want to sell weighted blankets to cause you to sleep better. Opposites.
References on beds such as Wikipedia's "Bed" webpage or Mattress Mart's "History of the Bed" ;) attribute the invention of the bed as a means to increase comfort. One must also consider pressure ulcers caused by insufficient padding and reduced movement.
Comparing misread articles, few in number, and extending it to other unreferenced articles and ailments isn't a supported basis on which to advance a theory on psychology involving biological, behavioral, cognitive and social disciplines.

Prior to 3600 BC mankind did without bedding.

Source: "History of the world - Early Humans":
The closest living relatives of modern humans, Homo sapiens, evolved around 4.6 to 6.2 million years ago. Anatomically modern humans arose in Africa about 200,000 years ago, and reached behavioural modernity about 50,000 years ago.

By the reasoning of your theory and extension of those two prior paragraphs one would conclude that prior to 5620 years ago there were no PTSDs, it is the modern bed that is a contributing factor.


What is the difference between behaviorism and cognitivism? Recently I've been reading about the subject, and I have trouble finding a definite difference between the two. What is the difference between behaviorism and cognitivism?

Short answer:  Behaviorism treats the human brain/mind like a black box whose internal processes cannot be known.  As such, behaviorists claim that it only makes sense to study the association between a given stimulus and the behavioral output it produces.

Cognitivists, on the other hand, examine internal mental processes (attention, executive control, predictive coding, etc) and are just as interested in what behavior a stimulus elicits as how it elicits it.


How long do dreams last? What is the relationship between time perceived in a dream and time in the external world?

Is time running in  dreams always faster than the time running in the real world? Is it  ratio of real time and dream's time?

In experiments conducted in the 1950's, William C. Dement, a pioneer sleep researcher, asked subjects to write down their dream content.  What he found was that the number of words in the subjects' dream diaries correlated strongly with REM time, suggesting that perceived dream time matches actual dream time.

Although REM time is no longer considered a reliable measure of dream time, this paradigm of using Total Word Count (TWC) or sometimes Total Recall Count (TRC) from dream diaries (referred to as sleep mentation reports) to measure dream length, is in common use today.

Further validation of this method was found in subjects with RBD, a disorder that features twitching and movements during sleep, and other parasomnias such as sleep talking.  Here, timings in dream reports match recorded timings of muscle movements and sleep talking.  In other experiments, external stimuli delivered during dreaming - such as sounds, smells, or touch - are incorporated into dream content, again with timings matching reports.

More recent research by Matthew Wilson focusing on memory consolidation in dreams adds an important detail to this however.  Dream sequences are often disjointed, on a faster time-scale, and sometimes in reverse order with respect to the events they reflect.  Think of it this way: If you watch a video in fast-forward (ie, skipping frames), then the time in the video is faster than real-time, but you are nonetheless aware that you have been watching for a shorter period of time.  The same appears to be true of dreaming: Dreams may play in fast-forward (also skipping frames), but dreamers are nonetheless aware of the actual passage of time.

In the experiments with rats traversing a maze for example, dream imagery reflected important points in the maze, such as major intersections, areas with unique smells, obstacles, etc, rather than long boring monotonous hallways.  Think of it like a tourist taking photos of a hiking trail: The photos are not evenly spaced out in time - there are fewer photos from boring parts of the trail, and more photos from the interesting parts.  That is, dream content does not necessarily play at a constant speed relative to real-time - it may be faster (skip frames) or slower (add frames), and change over the course of each dream.

Note: Dreams are typically 30 minutes or less in length.


Do widespread brain toxins explain violence rates? Saw this: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline

  Lead emissions from tailpipes rose steadily from the early '40s
  through the early '70s, nearly quadrupling over that period. Then, as
  unleaded gasoline began to replace leaded gasoline, emissions
  plummeted.

  Intriguingly, violent crime rates followed the same upside-down U
  pattern... The two curves looked eerily identical, but were offset
  by about 20 years.

They claim a strong methodology: they studied during the phaseout of leaded fuel (which was not implemented uniformly across places, crucially) and subsequent violence levels. The same trend was proved across the world. Lead shrinks the part of the brain responsible for empathy, hence where lead poisoning was more common, people are more predisposed to violence. Big cities thus become more violent.

Do widely-spread brain toxins explain more violence? Are many violent criminals people who got their prefrontal cortexes shrunk by toxins? Do big cities make people aggressive and violent due to increased concentration of toxins?

There is some truth to this. I don't have the time to go into details but I've found an interesting link..

https://books.google.ch/books?hl=en&lr=&id=5lMP9ivOoxcC&oi=fnd&pg=PA11&dq=environmental+toxins+violence+rate&ots=SKB0rFeBnA&sig=w4g2Ne5JfwT0v36m5gFwPbqJCRw#v=onepage&q=environmental%20toxins%20violence%20rate&f=false


Functional vs. synaptic connectivity I used to believe that connectivity is nothing but synaptic connectivity and thus a long-term concept: synapses grow and synaptic strengths change on rather large time scales. But recently I found that connectivity sometimes is used as a short-term concept, e.g. in statements like this:

  »[C]ortical connectivity will reflect clear changes when transitioning
  into states of reduced consciousness.«

Assuming that transitioning into a state of reduced consciousness takes place in some seconds or minutes, also connectivity would have to change on this time scale. But what kind of connectivity would this be?

The authors of the paper cited above call it "functional connectivity" and measure it by the so-called "weighted phase lag index".

How is functional connectivity defined or explained (understandable to a non-specialist) and how does it relate to synaptic connectivity (which can easily be understood by non-specialists)?

That one looks a bit familiar to me!

Short, simple answer

(extracted from the longer answer below...)

Measures of functional connectivity are just correlations (correlation here referring broadly to statistical relationships, not a specific statistic): they do not say anything about the causes of those correlations including whether they are direct or indirect. The "connectivity" is functional in that it is measured only by the function at the measured nodes.

Functional connectivity

Functional connectivity refers to temporal correlations in some measure of nervous system activity. Both positive and negative functional connectivity is possible. The canonical example is correlation in the BOLD fMRI signal, which is often defined as the Pearson correlation in the resting state BOLD signal time series between remote voxels, or across blocks during some task.

For EEG, functional connectivity measures include coherence, amplitude correlations (such as the Pearson correlation of the signal envelope, typically band-pass filtered into named bands like delta/theta/alpha/beta/gamma), and measures of phase relationships such as the phase lag index and weighted phase lag index.

What these measures share in common is that they record some statistical non-independence in the activity measured in different areas of the brain. However, they differ greatly in temporal and spatial scale depending on the modality and subsequent signal processing.

Importantly, measures of functional connectivity are just correlations (correlation here referring broadly to statistical relationships, not a specific statistic): they do not say anything about the causes of those correlations including whether they are direct or indirect. The "connectivity" is functional in that it is measured only by the function at the measured nodes.

For example, consider a weighted directed graph of nodes A, B, and C. Even if there is no edge connecting A and B, if C drives both A and B then there will be functional connectivity between A and B.

You would even expect to observe functional connectivity between the brains of different people if they were, for example, watching the same video (as an aside...I think someone actually did this experiment, leading to some bogus claims about universal consciousness or something like that...the real explanation is more like "when two people listen to the same audio track, in which sometimes there is speech and sometimes there is no speech, they both have more activity in their auditory cortex during speech" which is considerably less profound...).

A synaptic connection between nodes P and Q almost certainly implies there will be functional connectivity between P and Q (though it may not be measurable depending on the strength of that connection and the structure of the rest of the network), but the inverse is not true: functional connectivity is insufficient to claim a real synaptic connectivity.

Personally, I wish another term was used besides connectivity but this is the field standard terminology.

Functional connectivity can be distinguished from two other types of connectivity: effective and structural.

Effective connectivity

Effective connectivity refers to model-based measures of causal influence of some brain area on another. Examples include the use of dynamic causal modeling (see for example Friston 2009, which is also highly relevant to the rest of this answer) and multivariable autoregressive modeling (see for example Cheung et al 2010).

Structural connectivity

Structural connectivity refers to the physical axonal connections between brain areas. In neuroimaging, it is often measured using diffusion tensor imaging which takes advantage of the fact that water more freely diffuses along axon tracts rather than perpendicular to them. Structural connectivity can also be measured more directly using neuronal tracers (dyes).

The term structural connectivity is used both in the context of connection strengths between certain areas relative to other areas, as well as to overall white matter integrity which can be disrupted in disease.

Note that while structural connectivity is often expected to correlate with functional connectivity, it doesn't need to.

Synaptic connectivity

These other terms are mostly used in the broad areas of neuroimaging and EEG/MEG. Using these modalities, even effective and structural connectivity only loosely imply synaptic connectivity. Detecting true synaptic connectivity requires more invasive electrophysiological techniques such as paired patch clamp recordings, or via anatomical reconstructions using tracers or electron microscopy. Synaptic connectivity can also be observed in real time using live-cell imaging of dendritic spines after injection or genetic expression of a fluorescent marker.

Cheung, B. L. P., Riedner, B. A., Tononi, G., & Van Veen, B. D. (2010). Estimation of cortical connectivity from EEG using state-space models. IEEE Transactions on Biomedical engineering, 57(9), 2122-2134.

Friston, K. J. (1994). Functional and effective connectivity in neuroimaging: a synthesis. Human brain mapping, 2(1‐2), 56-78.

Friston, K. (2009). Causal modelling and brain connectivity in functional magnetic resonance imaging. PLoS biology, 7(2), e1000033.

Jones, D. K., Simmons, A., Williams, S. C., & Horsfield, M. A. (1999). Non‐invasive assessment of axonal fiber connectivity in the human brain via diffusion tensor MRI. Magnetic Resonance in Medicine: An Official Journal of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, 42(1), 37-41.

Nägerl, U. V., Willig, K. I., Hein, B., Hell, S. W., & Bonhoeffer, T. (2008). Live-cell imaging of dendritic spines by STED microscopy. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(48), 18982-18987.

Vinck, M., Oostenveld, R., Van Wingerden, M., Battaglia, F., & Pennartz, C. M. (2011). An improved index of phase-synchronization for electrophysiological data in the presence of volume-conduction, noise and sample-size bias. Neuroimage, 55(4), 1548-1565.


What are the neurobiological factors associated with intelligence in animals? For example, is there a well-defined relationship between "number of neurons in the cortex" and some measure of "intelligence" in animals?

I'm familiar with the encephalization quotient - that is, "the ratio between actual brain mass and predicted brain mass for an animal of a given size," which is hypothesized to be a rough estimate of an animal's intelligence.  Are there any other similar concepts?  Or, are there any brain structures or measures of complexity that are only present in "higher functioning" animals?

Title question: See below
Question 1: Sort of.
Question 2: Yes.
Question 3: Yes.

The wrinkly outer layer of the human brain, the neocortex, is an anatomical feature found only in mammals. It is largely responsible for our ability to process sensory information in great detail, and plays a large role in memory formation, recognition, and higher thought.

Unlike the thalamus or cerebellum, the shapes of which could be characterized as 'lumps', the neocortex can be thought of as a sheet; a larger surface area is related a larger neocortex, which translates directly to a greater supply of computational resources. Thus the wrinkly nature of the exterior of the human brain shows its usefulness; more wrinkles means more surface area.

It may be useful to keep in mind with regard to humans that our own accomplishments, often attributed to our intelligence (and rightly so), have depended on much more than our brain. Our physical ability to speak, which allows us to quickly share ideas and learn from one another, is not a feature shared with other animals (See reference 1). Moreover, our ability to manipulate objects allows us to record information, enabling us to much more easily stand on the shoulders of the giants who have preceded us. Were we lacking in either of these abilities, or both, we may not appear as intelligent as we do.

Diagrams:

Here is a diagram of the brains of various animals including both mammals and non-mammals: http://www.neurocomputing.org/Images/Brain_Introduction/Comparative_Neuro/brainpicts.gif
Unfortunately, I'm new and don't have the reputation score sufficient to post more than two links

Notes for further reading:

Jeff Hawkins' book "On Intelligence"
Although more perception-specific, the topic of cortical magnification is a handy topic to know

References:

http://www.mpi.nl/q-a/questions-and-answers/why-cant-apes-speak
On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins


Establishing personality from shape AND color preferences There are many resources on the web that discuss correlations between the personality of an individual and their preferred shapes or colors.  To give just one example of each

http://listening2leaders.com/shape-quiz-learn-colleagues/
https://www.kent.ac.uk/careers/Choosing/colour-personality.htm

My questions here are:

The second of the two links above is from an academic source.  Are there extended experimental, peer-reviewed, studies that establish the validity of such correlations?
From my own empirical observations I know that such correlations do indeed work though they are not not quite as clear cut as these articles make them out to be.  Are there any studies that look at both color and shape preferences at the same time?

I have found that one very good use to combine shape + color preferences is to weed out deliberately misleading responses.  Take the following example

We have the shapes - square, circle, triangle and squiggle
we have the colors - red, yellow, orange, green, blue, white and black

Interpolating between the ideas proposed in the two links I have quoted above a "Triangle" personality is far more likely to be a "Red", "Orange" or "Yellow" personality than say a "Blue" one.  This could be used to assign a weighting to user responses in order to reduce the likelihood of invalid conclusions being drawn from deliberately misleading responses to the "my favorite shape" question.

Sounds plausible but once again I would like to know if there is any published research on the subject.

The question made me think instantly of the Kiki/Bouba effect. This effect is seen when people are to ascribe the name Kiki to point shapes and and Bouba to rounded shapes (Fig. 1); the overwhelming majority calls the star Kiki and the blob Bouba. One hypothesis is that Bouba is associated with the round shape because a more rounded shape is made by our mouths when Bouba is said. The mouth is more angular shaped when we say "Kiki." Additionally, "K" is a harder-sounding letter than "B." Those who use the modern Latin alphabet may also be visually swayed: the written letters "K" and "B" are sharp and rounded, respectively (Scientific American, November 2012).

Follow-up studies on this effect have revealed that people

Associate between femaleness and round shapes, and maleness and sharp shapes.
associate adjectives previously judged to be either descriptive of a figuratively 'round' or a 'sharp' personality with names containing either round-or sharp-sounding phonemes, respectively.

The authors conclude that sound symbolic associations extend to existing lexical stimuli, and that form and meaning are non-arbitrarily mapped (Pexman & Sidhu, 2014).

Reference
- Pexman & Sidhu, Canadian J Exp Psych (2014); 68(4): 253-4

Fig. 1. Kiki and Bouba - which is which? source: Wikipedia


Is there evidence that STDP is responsible for the ability to infer causation? Spike timing dependent plasticity (STDP) is a property of synapses that modifies their efficacy based on timing relationships between action potentials in the pre-synaptic and post-synaptic neuron. A pre-synaptic neuron firing in a brief period before the post-synaptic neuron fires potentiates the synapse. When the pre-synaptic neuron fires after the post-synaptic neuron, the synapse is depressed.
Perceptually, we only really see (or hear, or feel) a sequence of events. To infer causation from that requires some mechanism. Kushnir and Gopnik (2005) claim even children do causal inference, which leads me to believe that it is not merely a skill learned later in life.
My question is, does any direct or circumstantial evidence exists that links STDP with causal inference?
References
Tamar Kushnir and Alison Gopnik (2005) Young Children Infer Causal Strength From Probabilities and Interventions. Psychological Science September 2005 vol. 16 no. 9 678-683 (doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2005.01595.x)

Fernando et al. (2008) proposed a neuronal mechanism to copy network topologies from one region of the brain to another which is based on Spike Timing Dependent Placticity (STDP) and argue that the mechanism of neuronal copying is a neuronal implementation of causal inference.

  Fernando C, Karishma KK, Szathmáry E. (2008) Copying and evolution of neuronal topology. PLoS One 3(11):e3775. [Free PDF]

  Abstract

  We propose a mechanism for copying of neuronal networks that is of considerable interest for neuroscience for it suggests a neuronal basis for causal inference, function copying, and natural selection within the human brain. To date, no model of neuronal topology copying exists. We present three increasingly sophisticated mechanisms to demonstrate how topographic map formation coupled with Spike-Time Dependent Plasticity (STDP) can copy neuronal topology motifs. Fidelity is improved by error correction and activity-reverberation limitation. The high-fidelity topology-copying operator is used to evolve neuronal topologies. Possible roles for neuronal natural selection are discussed.

In the discussion, the proposed relation between STDP and causal inference is addressed in detail:

  [...] In the process of thinking about promising mechanisms, we discovered two serendipitous ancillary benefits of copying. The first was that the mechanism of neuronal copying was a neuronal implementation of causal inference [86]. The capacity of STDP to capture temporal relations consistent with causality rather than just correlations has been described by several authors [65], [87], [88], [89]. However, to our knowledge, STDP has until now not been used in an algorithm to explicitly infer whole causal networks. Considerable attention has been paid recently to the capacity of animals such as New Caledonian crows [90], rats [91], non-human apes [91], children [92] and human adults [92] to undertake causal reasoning tasks, i.e. tasks in which good performance cannot be well explained by pair-wise associative learning alone. [...]

  [68] Florian RV (2007) Reinforcement Learning Through Modulation of Spike-Time-Dependent Synaptic Plasticity. Neural Computation 19: 1468–1502.

  [86] Glymour C (2003) Learning, prediction and causal Bayes nets. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7: 43–48.

  [87] Abbott L, Nelson SB (2000) Synaptic plasticity:taming the beast. Nature Neuroscience supplement 31178–1183.

  [88] Bi G-q, Poo M-m (2001) Synaptic Modification by Correlated Activity: Hebb's Postulate Revisited. Annu Rev Neurosci 24: 139–166.

  [89] Gerstner W, Kistler WM (2002) Mathematical formulations of Hebbian learning. Biol Cybern 87: 404–415.


Does intentionally being aware of an emotion or thought pattern increase the incidence of that thought pattern? As a means of tracking and exerting control over my life and emotions, I've considered doing a daily log to measure various life metrics, like what time I got up, how much coffee I've drunk, and various emotions etc.

One of the metrics I've considered measuring the prevalence of suicidal thoughts.

But what's put me off this idea is thought that actively considering this question would lead to further ideation, and would be counterproductive over all.

The question - does intentionally taking note of a particular thought, cause you to think that kind of thought more often? Are there any studies or related studies into this?

In general, theories of self-regulation, emotion regulation, psychoeducation, and many forms of therapy posit that, in one way or another, awareness of your emotions or thought patterns is largely adaptive.

This is true because self-awareness facilitates self-regulation (broadly speaking). For example, being able to identify the emotion you're experiencing allows you to plan a course of action to regulate it (e.g., Kashdan, Barrett, & McKnight, 2015).  If I become aware that I'm experiencing anger, then I know that I can modify my anger (up or down) by confronting the source of it (e.g., my friend who owes me money).  If I become aware of my sadness, then I know that I can down-regulate it by seeking social support.  And so on.

Similarly, promoting meta-cognitive awareness of thought patterns can reduce depressive and anxious symptoms (e.g., Papageorgiou & Wells, 2001; Wells, 2009). This is true because it allows you to examine your beliefs about how you think (e.g., "Is the way I think positive or negative? Does it make me feel good or bad?").  And once you've determined how adaptive your thought patterns are, then you'll be able to determine whether you should promote, maintain, or prevent their recurrence.

However, it's important to note that while self-awareness is necessary for better self-regulation, it is not sufficient.  Effective self-regulation also relies on your knowledge of, and ability to carry out, adaptive courses of action. For example, you've just identified your thought patterns as maladaptive, and now you want to downregulate those thoughts.  Toward this goal, you try to suppress them.  However, ironically, this strategy ends up spurring more of those thoughts (as predicted by ironic processes theory; Wegner, 1994).  So despite your awareness of your maladaptive thought patterns and your subsequent desire to decrease them, you've actually increased their incidence and made yourself feel worse.  Alternatively, you might have used more adaptive strategies like psychologically distancing yourself from your thoughts (e.g., Kross & Ayduk, 2011), engaging in mindfulness (e.g., Deyo, Wilson, Ong, & Koopman, 2009), reappraising the content of your thoughts (Beck, 2011), questioning your meta-cognitive beliefs (Wells, 2009), and other standard therapeutic and emotion-regulatory practices that would have more effectively modified your thought patterns.

So, overall, whether self-awareness increases or decreases the incidence of your thought patterns depends on your subsequent self-regulatory actions.


Does total time exercising matter for cognition more than the time exercising continuously? Will my brain benefit from cardio equally if I exercise at the same intensity level for 12 10 minutes sessions as it would for one 120 minute session?

Before giving my gut feeling as an answer in the final paragraph I'll first have to explain why I don't think the question can be answered in absolute terms (at least not without additional restrictions).

To start with I'll remind you that our bodies don't just flick over to exercise mode but instead ramp up and down in response to the demands put on them. As a result to make a proper comparison between bursts and sustained exercise isn't as simple as multiplying there duration.

If we take our [calculated MHR][1] as a basic measure of exercise intensity then say a respectable level is 50% to 70% of MHR, the quickest we are going to be able to get into that heart rate zone is with an all out sprint (a very bad idea without warming up) at which point our heart rate will overshoot the mark (sometimes reaching well over 100% since the MHR calculators are pretty rough without doing a full fitness workup) and then drop and eventually settle on a rate after maybe 2 minutes.

But the more likely and sensible scenario  is that we will start exercising at what we feel is the correct intensity and our heart rate will eventually increase over the space of several minutes so that it may be 5 to 10 minutes before we get in the zone.

So while I completely understand where you are coming from with your question it is one that I see a way of testing experimentally - and so i will just give you my subjective answer in what follows.

Since the physiological changes in the brain ([such as increased blood flow, seratonin, BDNF][2]) would I believe happen toward the start of the exercise session and then your brain would adapt to the new exercise demands and stop producing extras of all those goodies leaving them to begin dissipating before you ended the session and for a duration of time after means you would be better off doing bursts of exercise throughout the day to keep triggering that brain response that re-releases the goods.


What makes a sight or an image mesmerizing and irresistible? There are some examples of this.

What makes us:

Feel we just HAVE TO watch that video or an image again, it's common with comedy videos
Feel we need to stare at a such a beautiful sight, a person or an image

It's not that something is particularly interesting to the conscious mind, but yet we still can't resist but watch.

What's the science behind this process?

Setting aside the encyclopedic issue of what might make an unspecified stimulus funny, beautiful, or otherwise pleasing for its aesthetics, it's at least evident that you're asking about reinforcing stimuli that provide incentives via emotional reward(s). It's not clear how you expect to rule out conscious interest, but reinforcement learning may not necessitate consideration of conscious control, so I suppose we can disregard the whole issue of consciousness at this level of generality (or ambiguity/vagueness). That is essentially the approach of radical behaviorism, after all.

Aside from the tags and links included so far, there's plenty of science available on psychological reward:

Relevant neural structures include the ventral tegmental area and nucleus accumbens.
Dopamine is probably the most relevant neurotransmitter, but other catecholamines such as adrenalin and norepinephrine may affect impulse regulation and attention.
Relevant personality factors include the behavioral activation system and sensation-seeking. Other factors become more or less relevant depending on the nature of the stimulus, e.g.:

Openness to experience affects aesthetic preferences, especially in art and culture.
Cultural background affects interests, preferences, and incentives through taste acquisition.
Emotional stability and extraversion may affect attitudes toward arousing or social stimuli.
Sexual desire may be relevant, depending on the stimulus and the individual.
Emotional and physiological states affect the strength and relevance of other needs / motives.
Conscientiousness or control affects impulse regulation, which is relevant if urge resistance is.

We have a dedicated question about humor: How does our brain consider something to be funny?


Why do we forget what we try to remember? Almost everybody has had an experience where someone asks them what their favorite book is, and they immediately forget every single book they have ever read. This infuriating consequence of attempting to dig into memory is mysterious enough by itself. Why does this happen? Why do our memories suddenly disappear when provoked?

I have searched for this and this, but the results don't provide a direct and suitable enough answer.

What you are describing may be the tip of the tongue (TOT) phenomenon.

There are two major explanations for this: the direct-access view and the inferential view.

The direct-access view: the memory strength is just not strong enough to recall the item, but strong enough to trigger the recall
The inferential view:

  It claims that TOTs aren't completely based on inaccessible, yet activated targets; rather they arise when the rememberer tries to piece together different clues about the word. Emotional-induced retrieval often causes more TOT experiences than an emotionally neutral retrieval, such as asking where a famous icon was assassinated rather than simply asking the capital city of a state.

The second view is interesting, because frustration is an emotion by definition. So when you are frustrated for not remembering the word, your frustration by itself narrows down your ability to retrieve it. This loop goes on until you yell "fuck it. I quit".

So while emotion plays an important role in memorizing a piece of information, it also may hindrance you to recall it back. But if you can devote a lot of cognitive resource (thinking it hard) without being frustrated, then you can still retrieve it.

TOT is seemingly a very important topic in memory research.

Sources:  Tip of the tongue, Recall (memory)


What is the difference between Machiavellianism and good negotiating/influence skills? I have been addicted to 'Great courses' books for some time now and have read quite a few books on influence, social skills, conflict management, negotiating, etc.

Having basic knowledge in these areas I am now finding hard to see what is the difference between someone being Machiavellian and simply knowing how to negotiate, influence others.

One could argue that being moral is what separates the two however knowing about cultural differences across the world it would be quite hard to draw a line (we burned witches after having 'magna carta' and developed judiciary system for centuries) plus would inevitably have to delve in to moral philosophy... and eventually pretty much would end up having to make judgments subjectively.

Is there an actual difference between Machiavellianism and good negotiating skills?

The term "Machiavellianism" can be used to refer to adherence to a set of strategies and guidelines for manipulation (eg, "personally deliver good news but have bad news delivered by others"), a moral philosophy (eg, "the means justifies the ends"), or a personality trait (also called "Machiavellian intelligence").  Since you've posted this question on a cognitive science forum, I will focus on the latter definition.

Machiavellianism is measured (as any personality trait), using a self-report scale.  This test, the Mach-IV, developed by Christie & Geis (1970), does not measure negotiation skills, but mostly focuses on social and moral attitudes and beliefs.  As such, it would not normally be equated with any particular skills.

Fehr, Samson, & Paulhus (1992) review 17 years of research on Machiavellianism, including its association with persuasion:

  Several studies have found that high Machs are particularly adept at
  persuading others in bargaining situations.

The review also mentions some notable exceptions, including a study by Fry (1985), that showed that a simple visual barrier greatly reduces the influence of high Machs.  A more recent review by Jones & Paulhus (2009) also agrees:

  ... high Mach IV scores do predict who will and who will not engage in
  interpersonal manipulation.

So although the term refers to a set of self-reported attitudes about social relationships, and not a measure of any particular skills, it would be reasonable to say that Machiavellianism correlates with negotiation skills.

For completeness, I should mention that the strong correlation is not an accident.  In fact, as the review points out:

  ... the construct validity of Machiavellianism rests largely on the
  match between high Mach IV scores and actual pragmatic manipulation.

In other words, the test was written and adjusted to have this correlation, so it may be more accurate to say that Machiavellianism is validated by negotiation skills.


What does "they tend within and between classes" mean in 'The Irreducible Mind'? I am a philosophy student but I'm also interested in philosophy of mind, a field that overlaps issues in psychology and neuroscience these days. This passage is taken from a similar multidisciplinary book but this particular passage is mentioning various neuroimaging techniques. I have difficulty understanding what is meant by the embolden phrase. I am not sure whether "within and between" has a technical or simply a semantic/grammatical significance. In either case I remain confused. And hence I was not sure which site if at all is appropriate for asking clarification.
Within page 17 of the book Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century by Kelly, et al. (2007), it says...

The third development was the advent and maturation of the functional
neuroimaging technologies mentioned in the Introduction, which enable
us to observe directly, without opening up the skull , the activity of
the working human brain. Two principal classes of such methods are
currently available, although others are under development.12 The
first provides measures of the electric and magnetic fields directly
generated by neuroelectric activity in populations of suitably located
and oriented cortical neurons (electroencephalography [EEG]; magnetoencephalography [MEG]).
The second provides measures of hemodynamic or metabolic consequences
of neural activity such as local changes of blood flow, glucose
consumption, or blood oxygenation (especially positron emission
tomography [PET]; and functional magnetic resonance imaging [fMRI]).
All these technologies are complex and expensive, and they tend within
and between classes to have complementary strengths and weaknesses
(see, e.g., Nunez & Silberstein, 2000; Toga & Mazziotta, 1996; Wikswo,
Gevins, & Williamson, 1993). Together, they undoubtedly constitute a
major methodological advance for cognitive neuroscience. Indeed,
scarcely an issue now goes by of any cognitive neuroscience journal
that does not contain one or more papers featuring images outfitted
with colored spots identifying regions of "significant" brain
"activation" produced by some stimulus or task.13

I first posted the passage to esl and english.se but the answers I got were not definitive.
An answerer on esl.se told me it may have to do with within-subject and between-subject experiment methods or convey a similar meaning.
On english.se I was told it could simply be the common phrasal verb "tend to" with "within and between" breaking it up as a parenthetical clause with commas missed. That is it can be rewritten as "they tend, within and between classes, to have..."
In either case I don't know what "classes" the author is talking about. Are these classes of the imaging devices he enumerates? This latter question could be quite technical. Still excuse me if this was not the right question for this site.
References
Kelly, E. F., Kelly, E. W., Crabtree, A., Gauld, A., & Grosso, M. (2007). Irreducible mind: Toward a psychology for the 21st century. Plymouth, UK: Rowman & Littlefield.

This is kinda unclear so I'm not sure my reading is the correct one. But for me the two classes are the electric/magnetic class of imaging techniques and the hemodynamic/metabolic class of imaging techniques, and each class has multiple methods within it. It's a world that looks like this: {[EEG,MEG],[PET,fMRI]}. Within a single class, the multiple methods have complementary strengths and weaknesses, at the same time, the two classes have complementary strengths and weaknesses relative to each other. Within a class, you can be looking at the same type of information but have different trade-offs in terms of temporal and spatial resolution, or image quality and expense, depending on the method. Between classes, you're looking at fundamentally different types of information, so you get a different (complementary) picture of the brain's activity.
Squashing both of those contrasts down into one sentence, you have "they tend within and between classes to have complementary strengths and weaknesses"

Probably.


What is "Attention" in terms of brain activity? A rather basic question, but I don't know the answer to that - What is human "attention" that can be focused on different parts of the body or outside objects?

For example, I can focus my attention on my hand. What happens in the brain when I do so? Is attention localized to some specific brain area or neurotransmitter system (ex: reward seeking is mediated by the limbic system)?

Firstly its important to note that attention basically the outcome of automatic processes, although attention may easily be directed by conscious choices.

As a previous poster mentioned the reticular formation does have a mediating role in attention. However its doesn't really control attention, so much as it does direct it based on processing in other brain areas, Sturm and Willmes (2001) aptly encapsulate this as...

  For an interpretation of the findings, we have proposed a network in which the anterior cingulate gyrus and the dorsolateral frontal cortex intrinsically control the brain-stem NA activation system via the reticular nucleus of the thalamus.

The vast majority of attentional processing at the most basic level is scanning the environment, in order to create a simulation in our minds. This simulation is not perfect by any means, in fact it appears that we only pay attention to a few key features and it is only when we focus or are guided to use a narrow area of the perceptual field that we attended to things we might not have seen, such as demonstrated by the phenomenon known as 'change blindness'.

From a perception perceptive, early attentional processing is influence by a number of factors relating to stimuli variability, which may guide the deployment of attention, such as motion, size and colour.

Fig 1. Unguided environment scanning is non selective, feature scanning which requires more processing is selective and aids quick recognition. Searching for an object requires use of both of these systems.

This early feature recognition is strongly associated with activity in the ventral visual system, see fig 2.

Fig 2. Diagram of the dorsal visual stream (non selective) and ventral visual stream (selective).

The excellent work of Prof. Jeramy Wolfe, over views much of this perceptual research. When looking for particular information an individual easily guide there attention to the relevant information, such information may even be primed rather than instructed. The pathways and areas of the brain associated with selective attention are relatively simple: the frontal eye (motor control), super parietal lobe (suppress normal attentional flow to specify new target), intraparietal sulcus (spatial orientation, salience mapping, and short-term visual memory).

Fig 3. Areas associated with attentional control, and orientation (Blue).

Luckily after years of research we understand attentional processing from a perceptual viewpoint rather well, however simple questions are far more complex than they at first seem. The current focus on research are narrowing down these areas, personally I think the more interesting questions regard saliency and hedonics. These questions look at reward processing in the brain, and how attention is implicitly guided, if your interested in this then you should check out Kent Berridge's research, which guides this area of research. Finally I'll just mention that acting on implicit processes seems to depend on executive functioning, and working memory capacity.


What is the status of evolutionary psychology in academia today? Having an interest in human psychology (but no formal training) I decided to take  Coursera's Introduction to Psychology as a Science. Here's a snippet from an introductory lecture (it requires signup, so I'll paste the transcription):

  Statement: "Much of human behavior is instinctive."

  Answer: "No, we have very few instinctive behaviors. There are some reflexes that
  young infants have, like for example the reflex to suck if you put
  something in their mouth or if you tickle the bottom of their feet,
  their toes will spread out. Those are reflexes that go away as the
  child gets older. We certainly have genetic predisposition to do
  things in a certain way. But, instinct, species specific behaviors
  that lower animals have, are very rare in human behavior."

This emphatic assertion really surprised me. It was my understanding that -at least at some degree- the fundamentals of evolutionary psychology had influenced "traditional psychology" over the years (not as explanation of every human behavior, sure, but certainly more than to explain the sucking reflex).

So here is the question: has evolutionary psychology found its place in universities (syllabus, articles, ...) or is it pretty much ignored in academia?

This is a bit of a quick answer and hopefully others will provide a more comprehensive response.

The number of reflexes that exist in humans is arguably a separate issue to the support for evolutionary psychology. The answer below focuses specifically on the support for evolutionary psychology in academic psychology.

Almost all researchers in psychology would agree that evolutionary processes have shaped what it means to be human. A good example of a well-developed theory is ACT-R, which provides a model of cognition. An underlying assumption of the theory is that the nature of the underlying structure of cognition has evolved to minimise the consumption of computational and biological resources (although you're better off reading ACT-R material directly to understand how they describe the interface of genetic and environmental adaptation, e.g., Anderson 1991). This still leaves many issues regarding how to conceptualise human nature and the extent of human plasticity.

However, "just so" arguments made in the name of evolutionary psychology are generally not respected in academic psychology. For example, Someone might say that women are better at multitasking because throughout evolution men's behaviour has required singularity of purpose in hunting and mate seeking, whereas women have had to juggle competing tasks of child rearing, looking after the camp, and so on. Of course, that's all rubbish. I just made that argument up out of nothing. Such an argument takes an observation, possibly not even true in the first place, and then seeks to find some vaguely plausible evolutionary story to justify it. It's a "just so" argument.
You can see further discussion of critiques of evolutionary psychology here.

References

Anderson, J. R. (1991). Is human cognition adaptive. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 14(3), 471-517. PDF


Is there an innate human bias against admitting you are wrong or uncertain? During interactions with people, I've noticed that it seems like certain people have a habit of admitting uncertainty and a willingness to admit error. There doesn't appear to be a clear group that I could bucket them into (like scientists, conservatives, etc.), but these people seem to be a minority.

After thinking about why people might bias against admitting they were wrong, I couldn't come up with a good reason. It would almost seem better for an organism to admit a mistake and learn from others, than stick to something that might actually be wrong.

Is there an innate human bias against admitting you are wrong/uncertain? If so, has any research been done on why?

It's surely a combination of self-serving bias and avoiding cognitive dissonance. I'm not sure it there's a more specific name for it that has wide acceptance. It's been variously called "certainty bias", "feeling of certainty", "illusion of certainty" etc.


Cognitive bias of comparing numbers on a relative scale Is there a name for the bias of comparing numbers on a relative scale?

Here are a few examples.

The car salesman sells you a \$900 navigation system as an up-sell to a \$30,000 car.  It doesn't seem like that much because it 900 is a relatively small percentage of 30000.  And let's say a top quality system installed, away from the dealership is \$700; a difference of \$200.

What causes us to think \$200 isn't that much?

But if shopping in a store where the top priced GPS was \$700 and all the others are priced around \$500, now \$200 seems too much.

Or how about a homeowner trying to sell a house for \$200,000 when a potential buyer bids at \$185,000 because of water damage in one room.  The seller accepts even though the cost to repair the damage might be only \$10000.  The \$5000 doesn't seem like that big of a loss for the hassle of having to do the repair, but in a lot of other circumstances (like selling a car) it's a deal breaker.

Another.  Take a trip to a neighboring town and you might go a mile or two out of your way to see an attraction you just discovered.  Take a trip across the country and you might visit a whole other state, hundreds of miles out of your way.

I know that anchoring bias can cause you to, for instance, perceive a price as being lower because of false higher price.  But is it the same as this relative scaling bias?  Or is this called something else altogether?

It's been called “relative thinking” in a few places (eg
http://journal.sjdm.org/11/10921/jdm10921.html). The earliest I can find is in a 2004 article by Ofer Azar. A Google Scholar search turns up many other references to the term as well.


What are different ways to determine centroids of fMRI activation, their drawbacks and perks? I'm reading an older article on bilingualism (Kim, Relkin, Lee, & Hirsch, 1997) for a seminar. They were interested in the spatial separation of two languages in early and late bilinguals.  They determined activated regions and their overlap in two conditions and across two groups.

To determine these areas, they first excluded all voxels where BOLD response difference to baseline was not above their empirically derived false positive rate (p<0.0005) and then used all these voxels as if they had the same activation to determine the "centre-of-mass".

They then calculated the distance between the centroids in the two conditions to measure spatial separation and counted the overlapping voxels.

I have some issues with this method:

it seems as if they're throwing away a lot of information by discarding all voxels where activity was not above chance level and maybe more importantly by treating all significantly activated voxels as the same even though there may be significant differences in their activation level
minor: it's volumetric, not mass, so it should be centre of volume, right? It may be a misunderstanding of the workings of fMRI on my part.

They also demonstrated that the derived distance held up well over two orders of magnitude in significance level, but still they didn't differentiate between highly and not-so-highly-but-still-significantly activated voxels. Is this still state-of-the-art?

My questions:

What are different ways to calculate centroids without discarding so much information but still backing up the conclusion inferentially (some sort of spatial confidence area?)?
What are their drawbacks (my lecturer says they all have some, so you can just as well use the above-mentioned multistage method, but this seems like the easy way out)?
What is a well-tested method to test spatial separation of activity for two conditions? I'm not asking about demonstrating functional separation, but once you don't treat voxels as on-and-off anymore, calculating degree of overlap becomes less trivial.

References

Kim, K.H.S. and Relkin, N.R. and Lee, K.M. and Hirsch, J. (1997). Distinct cortical areas associated with native and second languages, Nature. FREE PDF

This question gets close to something that might alternatively be posted to stats.stackoverflow.com. Personally, I've always felt that application of Null-Hypothesis Significance Testing (NHST) methods to neuroimaging data does a particularly good job of highlighting their scientific deficiencies.

Personally, these days I'd use Generalized Additive Modelling (GAM) to analyze data from an individual's scan and if aggregating multiple spatially normalized scans I'd use Generalized Additive Mixed effects Modelling (GAMM). In both approaches, I'd use an AIC-adjusted likelihood ratio to evaluate the strength of evidence for differences amongst groups/conditions in the activity patterns discerned by GAM. A posteriori investigation of any evidence-supported differences can be achieved by visualization and parametric bootstrapping of confidence intervals.

If you really want to explicitly evaluate evidence for a group difference in the distance between activation areas, then one approach is to assume an a priori model for the activation, say a mixture of two trivariate gaussians with a parameter that specifies their separation, then use something like hierarchical Bayesian modelling to establish credible intervals on the difference between groups on the separation parameter.


Ground a student survey in academic literature I'm planning to do a survey with students (age around 16) with questions/answer-possibilities that have been 'proven' to be significant indicators of student success/good grades. So, I'm not really interested in the relationship of the variables to the outcome, instead, I want to feed the data of the survey to a machine learning algorithm to check the algorithm's correctness.

Instead of coming up with the questions of the survey myself, I would like to ground them academically, i.e.: based on academic literature. I don't need very 'original' ones, the significance of the variables themselves is not the focus of my research (actually, I want 'proven' significant variables).

Best case scenario would be to find a canonical list of survey questions and answer-possibilities which have been 'proven' to be influential (significant) indicators of student success/grades, from which I can take the ones appropriate for my research.

Another thing that would be help me is a source which discusses good and bad practices for setting up a survey such as mine (which might also point me to the questions I want to ask).

I have found some papers, such as (Sykes & Kuyper, 2009) about predicting student success/grades, from which I can pick some variables/questions, but none of them were close enough to my case to be fully satisfactory for my purpose. If anyone can help me with a good paper that investigates roughly the same as my research, this would also help, as I might then base my survey (partly) on this research.

Both Carol Dweck and Angela Duckworth have fairly brief tests meant to measure student success and by some extension grades.

Dweck's work focuses on how having a "fixed mindset" limits a students ability to grow in a subject and is used to explain why students are so apt to give up when met with challenge. Her quiz would have to be formatted for pen and paper and her research is rather sparse on the subject.

Duckworth focuses on both grit and self-control. She has researched heavily the effects of grit over the last 10 years while Walter Mischel works on self-control and has been for the past 40 years. Duckworth was Mischels student. Unfortunately, his test for self-control would likely be too abstract for your needs.

Needless to say her work has been shown to measure student success over the last ten years. Her website offers several quizzes on grit or self control for adults and students. The same links provides access to her publications.