Are there additional animal studies about superstitions? In one particular case, Skinner decided to go random on his hungry
pigeons. He dropped food into the box at completely random times,
independent of any behavior on the part of the pigeons. But the
behavior of the pigeons, he found, didn't stay random. After a few
drops of the food, the pigeons began exhibiting certain consistent
behavior. One circled counter-clockwise, another spun around in
circles; seventy-five percent of them exhibited some kind of odd
behavior.   Skinner concluded that the pigeons had come to display
'superstitious behavior'. It was like the superstition of gamblers who
believe they have a lucky hat. If the gambler wears the hat, they
can't lose. If the pigeons circle the cage counter-clockwise, they
will bring on food pellets.

from How-pigeons-get-to-be-superstitious....
Seems curious that this wouldn’t have been pursued as an avenue of study with other animals.
Can anyone find me a citation of such studies and does anyone know if the study has been repeated elsewhere?

For instance, the same behavior was also shown in orang-utan and dog. Already two years after the study by Skinner (1947) mentioned in the news article, Kellogg (1949) gave a review of some of the experimental results, but advocates a less anthropomorphic interpretation:

  Kellogg, W. N. (1949) 'Superstitious' behavior in animals. Psychological Review, Vol 56(3), 172-175. doi: 10.1037/h0055221

  Abstract

  The orang-utan and dog as well as the pigeon have shown "superstitious" behavior. It has appeared in conditioning and multiple-choice experiments. Interpreting such behavior as superstitious is mentalistic and anthropomorphic. "An alternate and less complicated interpretation would be that these activities—whether relevant or irrelevant to the solution of the problem—are ordinary instances of the association of a sequence of movements with a reinforcing stimulus."

Interestingly, superstitious behavior is still a topic of interest for research done with humans. See for example the results of a PubMed search with this search term: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&cmd=DetailsSearch&term=%22superstitious+behavior%22&save_search=true

References
Kellogg, W. N. (1949) 'Superstitious' behavior in animals. Psychological Review 56(3), 172-175.
Skinner, B. F. (1947) 'Superstition' in the Pigeon, Journal of Experimental Psychology 38, 168-172.


Is there a word that differentiate between image rotation and image translation? For an image with an object (e.g., a cat) and its slightly tranlsated image (or its flipped image), an average person can instantly recognize that the objects in the both images are the same (i.e., a cat).
However, for an image with an object and its 90 or 180 degree rotated one, one cannot instantly recognize the objects in the images are the same especially when the object is quite a complacted or unfamiliar one.
In this context, is there a technical terminology (in neuroscience) that differentiate between image rotation and image translation?

I believe you are talking about recognition part that say if the image is transformed to be flipped one is able to righaway recognize the object, however if the transformation is say 90 degrees then its hard. I believe the word is transformation-invariance.


Can listening to sad songs lead to depression? When we listen to a sad song, we may experience sadness ourselves.  Can this sadness lead to depression?

If you are talking about clinical depression as an illness, the direct answer to your question is: I don't know.

There was a study of the effect of different genres of music on how people felt (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27900748). Note the participants only listened to the music for 15 minutes and the study in general is not that powerful.

But if you are talking about making people feel sad or low then maybe. There have been studies that show that negative ruminations can lower people's mood. My thinking is that if the songs lead to negative ruminations then yes it can depress your mood.

There are also some other research suggesting that "sadness" as a feeling can be felt helpful or pleasurable by some people.

It is important to distinguish between sadness and depression. The latter is a clinical diagnosis made by a professional that is generally constant in a person's life, the former is a feeling or emotion that is fluid and can change from one moment to another.

Also an important question to think about is causation: is it really the songs leading to sadness or sadness leading to listening to these songs?

Reference:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26257625

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29094761


What is happening neurochemically when we seek to reduce stress by taking aggressive action? As a layman, it seems to me that humans have 2 primary strategies for controlling stress (cortisol). I tend to use the words “connection” and “aggression” to refer to these strategies.

The “connection strategy” involves deepening an empathetic connection with others.
This deeper connection enables us to be aware of their current emotional state and thus to set them at ease which opens them up to be influenced.
Because we can now feel their emotional state in real time, we can calibrate our interactions with them to influence their thoughts, feelings and actions more skillfully.

I like to think of this as the Non Violent Communication strategy used by Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, etc. to remain calm even when threatened with danger.

It seems that oxytocin is involved in this connection strategy.
When our response to stress involves shifting our focus and intention to connection, oxytocin increases and cortisol decreases. (I think)

The “aggression strategy”, on the other hand, seems to involve involves taking determined action to conquer something that we believe to be causing the stress.

I am guessing that hormones like adrenaline and maybe testosterone are involved in this process but I’m not sure.

What is actually happening neurochemically when we get aggressive?

I believe that serotonin is involved in both strategies.
Serotonin being the neurochemical that is released when we have confidence that our needs can be met.
I believe that both the connection and aggression strategies seek to reduce cortisol and increase serotonin, but I would really like to understand exactly how this works.
Especially for the case of aggression.

So there's a lot of things to talk about here.

First off, there are many strategies one can use to regulate stress.  James Gross, for example, has put forward an incredibly influential process model of the strategies we might use. His work and others have pointed to:

Distraction
Reappraisal (reinterpreting the situation)
Expressive suppression
Thought suppression (Wegner)
Rumination (Nolen-Hoeksema)
Worry
Self-distancing (Ayduk, Kross)
Situation selection
Situation modification
Interpersonal regulation (social support)
Acceptance (Linehan)
Exercise
Social sharing (Rimé)
Externalizing behavior (e.g., aggression)
Drugs
And more…

Not all of these are "effective," but you can see that there are a lot of ways to cope with stress.

When talking about aggression, there's likely a bunch of processes going on that could change depending on the context and individual.  The psychophysiology and neurochemical changes from one instance to another, and from one person to another, are likely not going to be the same. So there's not really one answer to your question.

Indeed, aggression:

can be negatively or positively valenced (i.e., it can feel good or bad; e.g., Chester & DeWall, 2015)
might involve some sort of external or internal focus (recruiting relatively more exteroceptive attentional networks, e.g., Wager et al., 2015 or interoceptive cortex, e.g., Dambacher et al., 2015, respectively)
might involve a lot of top-down regulation (e.g., Achterberg et al., 2016) or be largely impulsive
might motivate approach or withdrawal behaviors

And this logic extends to neurotransmitters, neuropeptides, and hormones.  Their activity depends on the context and the person (over time).  In general, you can probably expect a complex interaction among these things, and involvement of practically all of them.

So as with most things in psychology, the answer is: it depends!


Why do most people laugh with a "ha" sound? When people laugh, the most common sound is "ha", while some may "ho" or "he". When do people pick this up when they grow, or is this just natural?

Some people laugh differently again, but I tend to believe they are just acting, not naturally letting it out, just so they feel different from others. Is this true?

Since this question has been unanswered for quite some time I will try to provide an acceptable approximation to an answer. Excuses beforehand for the many block quotes but it is not my area of expertise. The quotes are from a revealing article by Provine (1996).

As commented on by others, laughter can be specified better by their actual sound then by the written word (for a nice link on the bewildering variety of written laughter: http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=419591). Spectral analysis of laughter in the lab showed that it is

  [...] characterized by a series of short vowel like notes (syllables), each about 75 milliseconds long, that are repeated at regular intervals about 210 milliseconds apart. A specific vowel sound does not define laughter, but similar vowel sounds are typically used for the notes of a given laugh. For example, laughs have the structure of "ha-ha-ha" or "ho ho-ho," but not "ha-ho-ha-ho."

And

  The Stereotypic structure of a laugh is, at least in part, a result of the limitations of our vocal apparatus.

The fake laughters may indeed be different, for example fake crying is also very challenging. Emotionless laughing is also characterized by different facial expressions.

As to where laughter comes from it is important to note

  [...] that chimpanzees and other great apes perform a laugh-like vocalization when tickled or during play. [...] Breathy, panting laughter is probably the primal form that dates back to the common ancestor of all great apes and people. Human beings evolved their characteristic laughter after branching from an ancestor in common with chimpanzees (estimated to be around six million years ago, according to DNA hybridization data).

Laughter will, however, undoubtedly be affected by your surroundings, since

  Laughter is a decidedly social signal, not an egocentric expression of emotion.

Hence, laughter is born out of an interplay of nature (evolution and restricions imposed by the vocal apparatus) and nurture (social setting).

Reference
Provine. Laughter. Am Sci 1996;84:38-45


Why are dreams about failing exams so common? Why so many people have a dream in which they are just about to take a mandatory school exam and they're totally unprepared, or they've missed it because show up in the wrong day, or the exam is on the very next morning, etc.; and get extremely nervous and anxious, up to the point of waking up panting and taking several minutes to figure out it was all just a dream?

Or maybe they're only being whipped... that's so reassuring!

Is there a technical term denoting this kind of dreams? What's their nature? Is it specific to the Western world/culture? Are there other examples of it?

Yes this kind of dreams are commonly called nightmares. The reason we experience nightmares is to prepare us for threats in the real life.

"A dream-production mechanism that tends to select threatening waking events and simulate them over and over again in various combinations would have been valuable
for the development and maintenance of threat-avoidance skills."

http://www.unil.ch/files/live//sites/ln/files/shared/Revonsuo_1.pdf


What is the fastest language to think in? If you think in any language you're never misstaken on what word you mean even if there are many words that are spelled/pronounced the same. This causes a language with only one word meaning every possible word there is to work, in theory, if used only while thinking. I don't think I'd be able to think clearly in such a language, though. The fastest language seems, for me, to be no language. It is however hard to not think in a language.

What is the fastest language to think in?

With your question you are limiting thinking to conscious and rational thought. But human information processing has so many more aspects, some of them faster and more efficient than cogitation.

If, for example, you sit in front of the computer and have forgotten that you have put water on the stove, and suddenly you hear the noodles cooking over, you'll jump up and run to the kitchen quicker than you can form the sentences that describe what is happening and what you need to do. It is not a reflex (like flinching away from being hit), but clearly a conscious understanding, a consideration, and a decision, only not verbal. For me, parts of that process are visual (I see what I need to clean away, when I hear the water hit the hot plate), others include a body-memory projection of me moving to the kitchen, a muscular plan of action that is forming while I jump up, see what is on my path, and "pre-feel" how I will navigate it at maximum speed.

Another example is what I have often experienced when I "sleep over" a decision; what has been exemplified in Einstein dreaming of relativity theory; and what I have read about again a few days ago in a book summarizing current research on intuition: that conscious rational thought is only able to make decisions in situations with a limited complexity (the level of complexity was the focus of some research), and that highly complex decisions, involving too many aspects to "juggle" in your (conscious) mind, are made on an unconscious level, with "you" (that is consciousness) only receiving the outcome (that is intuition) of that information processing.

Language is a very recent development in evolution, and consciousness is not much older, and it is my opinion that we are misled by our self-identification with the constant chatter in our minds to believe that we are this speech, while in truth language and consciousness are just tools that are as peripheral to our core selves as our arms are to our bodies. There is this famous experiment, conducted a few years ago, that showed that the muscular impulse for a movement happens before the conscious decision for that movement is made. It shows that what we perceive as decisions happens after a behaviour has already begun. The ego, as Freud said, is not master in its own house.


Is there a name for the phenomenon of perceived repeated interruption? Is there a documented name for the phenomenon of repeated social interruptions. It's something I've discussed with others who seem to share the observation that often, when one is alone in a public space, others will consistently run into them.

One example is in single stall bathrooms. This is one that I've discussed with others, to much amusement: it seems that whenever I find an unattended public restroom, even in a secluded space away from population, more often than not someone will approach and knock within seconds.

Another would be driving along a typically empty road late at night, and having someone follow every single turn you take up until you get home, where they turn around and go from whence you both came, making seemingly no sense.

Obviously, this is a cognitive bias of some sort and likely not truly indicative of some social behavior. It reminds me of the spotlight effect, but the spotlight effect is defined as heightened self awareness, no? This seems to happen regardless of that, like there are people just waiting around to stumble upon oneself at the most inopportune times.

Paranoia might be one word for it, but talking with others anecdotally, it seems like most people have had this thought before.

I would classify this as a cognitive bias. Specifically, selection bias:

  Selection bias is the bias introduced by the selection of individuals, groups or data for analysis in such a way that proper randomization is not achieved, thereby ensuring that the sample obtained is not representative of the population intended to be analyzed.

These are 'every day' actions you describe. They are not very memorable. In contrast, when encountering such interruptions during these otherwise 'normal' actions they become more memorable and stick with you.

Consequently, this then leads to a selection bias: only the interrupted actions come to mind immediately. If you were to systematically count how many times this occurs it would be less frequent than it seems.


Is inhibitory brain circuitry involved in cross-modal sensory perception? In many research articles, a vague description of a inhibitory circuitry in the brain is mentioned. This is presented as an inhibitory mechanism that prevents input from one sensory modality to excite another region (for example touch exciting visual cortex) or in general prevents any signal not coming from the visual nerve to excite the visual cortex. And that preventing test subjects from their sight (blindfolding for a longer period) interferes with those inhibitory circuits and deactivates them. The results are presented here where subjects started having hallucinations and perceiving things even though totally blindfolded. I am interested to know if there is some active research about those inhibitory circuits in the brain and if they are well understood.

I am trying to find out if normally sighted or normally hearing people could get visual/auditory information from both the original sense and through the skin via an electrotactile pattern through a sensory substitution device, to see if passive learning can be achieved.

As far as I know, there is just one article that explicitly mentions the generation of cross-modal qualia, i.e., visual qualia in response to tactile stimulation (Ortiz et al., 2011). Before continuing about this article I do wish to emphasize it is a single, isolated study that hasn't been supported by other studies at the time of this writing. Moreover, the journal PlosONE is not my favorite and a bit of a strange journal to throw such an important observation in. I would have trusted this work more if published into a more appropriate journal for such strong claims, such as J Neurosci. Having said that:

The authors trained 18 blind subjects and 10 sighted, blindfolded controls for 3 months, on a daily basis using a tactile vision-substitution device; a vibrotactile display equipped with a camera. They deployed a grating acuity task and 7 out of 18 subjects reported 'seeing' visual qualia after 3 months, i.e., these subjects started seeing the gratings instead of feeling them. It was only blind folks that reported this, not any of the sighted controls. Those blind folks reporting qualia showed increased activation of the primary visual cortex upon using the tactile device. The authors conclude that recruitment of the deafferented V1 in blind people led them to 'see' the tactile stimuli after sufficient training (Ortiz et al., 2011).

You are right that it is believed that a disintegration of inhibitory circuits in the cortex is believed to underlie crossmodal cortical recruitment of (e.g.) the visual cortex to tactile stimulation (Stronks et al., 2015). Chronic visual deprivation is believed to reduce the inhibitory circuits, while visual stimulation is believed to enhance them. For example, tetanic stimulation of inhibitory neurons (presumably through GABAA) resulted in more long-term potentiation of inhibitory responses in young rats than in adult rats (Komatsu, 1994). This is in line with the theory that shaping of the brain is critically dependent on sensory input in early life, i.e., inhibitory circuits are thought to be actively developed through experience, resulting in containment of visual processing in the visual cortices and tactile processing in the somatosensory cortex etc. Note, however, that even V1 has shown to be multimodal even in normally sighted folks, i.e., while V1 is dedicated to visual processing, it is not exclusively devoted to it. One theory about synesthesia is that the development of inhibitory circuits is compromised, leading to crossmodal activation in folks without any sensory disability. This theory has made people conclude that babies are all synesthetes (e.g., Wagner & Dobkins, 2009).

References
- Komatsu, J Neurosci (1994); 14(11): 6489-99
- Ortiz et al., PlosONE (2011); 6(8): e23264
- Stronks et al., Brain Res (2015); 1624: 140–52)
- Wagner & Dobkins, JOV (2009); 9: 699


Memorizing sets of items It is often useful to memorize a set of items. Many times ordering is not important and we need to memorize a lot of sets. I already know a method for
memorizing lists where we memorize an item for each number and then create crazy associations between the new items and our memorized list of items. This method is not so good when we want to memorize e.g.

DivisionA = { John, Robert, Alex, Arnold, Sarah }
DivisionB = { another 5 names }
DivisionC = { another 5 names }
...
DivisionX = { another 5 names }

This is only a possible example. The sets can change during time, so the memory technique should be flexible. There are a lot of real life examples where is it useful to memorize a set, e.g. a doctor could learn a set of side effects of certain drug. A historian could learn family members of certain king. A movie-expert would like to remember filmography of certain director. There are a lot of such examples when people desire to remember higher number of sets.

Another technique that I don't find much smart is suggested here as converting the set to the list and then memorizing the successors of individual items with spaced repetition. Though, converting to some kind of ordering or association with something else seems to be unavoidable. The bad part is actually the pure memorization.

The disadvantage of the method of loci is that we have to memorize many locations (prepare them in advance) before we can store items to discrete places in that locations. Maybe this technique could be improved in some way.

Which memory techniques are appropriate for this task?
It should have long time retention, good recall, be dynamic (sets can change a little during time).

The literature generally provides strong support for the use of self-testing in cases like this, particularly via the use of flash cards (Karpicke and Roediger, 2008). The efficacy of self-testing for facilitating learning of arbitrary or complex sets of items has been suggested to be driven largely by the combination of two effects: the generation effect (Slamecka and Graf, 1978) captures the tendency for active retrieval of memory (e.g. fill-in-the-blank) information to increase the probability of successful future recall, as well as the spacing effect (Donovan and Radosevich, 1999), which captures the tendency for learning at a moderate intensity over time to outperform learning all at once.
References

Donovan, J. J., & Radosevich, D. J. (1999). A meta-analytic review of the distribution of practice effect: Now you see it, now you don't. Journal of Applied Psychology, 84, 795-805.
Karpicke, J. D., & Roediger, H. L. (2008). The critical importance of retrieval for learning. Science, 319(5865), 966–968. doi:10.1126/science.1152408
Slamecka, N. J., & Graf, P. (1978). The generation effect: Delineation of a phenomenon. Journal of experimental Psychology: Human learning and Memory, 4(6), 592-604.


What exactly does paranoid mean in terms of psychoactive drugs? When I went to my local marijuana dispensory, since recreational use of it is legal, they told me that when I first use it, I might get paranoid. When I read this word in context, I imagined somebody being afraid of getting caught. So, wouldn't you be paranoid if you didn't want other family members knowing that you smoked weed? Or, would this feeling or emotion be sharpened by THC?

Studies have shown that strong doses of THC can significantly increase paranoid thinking. See the article, "How Cannabis Causes Paranoia: Using the Intravenous Administration THC to Identify Key Cognitive Mechanisms Leading to Paranoia" by Freeman et al. for a more authoritative reference.

From the article:

  In this large study of intravenous THC (Schizophrenia Bulletin, Volume 41, Issue 2, 1 March 2015, Pages 391–399), it was definitively
  demonstrated that the drug triggers paranoid thoughts in vulnerable
  individuals. The most likely mechanism of action causing paranoia was
  the generation of negative affect and anomalous experiences.

And, certainly, anxiety over people “finding out” you are doing something that can be perceived as wrong or inappropriate can lead to paranoia.


Jung - Anima and Animus In the book Man and His Symbols Jung discusses the Anima and Animus extensively.  As I understand it they are the two primary anthropomorphic archetypes of the collective unconscious.  The Anima is expressed as the inner feminine personality in the unconscious of man; the Animus as the inner masculine personality of the unconscious of female

I found it strange that Jung only talks about the Anima in terms of the male psyche, and the Animus in term of the female psyche.

My question is why isn't there an Animus concept in the male psyche or an Anima concept in the female psyche?

Where is the archetype of the male part of the male unconscious and the female part of the female unconscious? Is that just another piece of the psyche the Jung defines as part of the Self?  Where does the Animus live in the male total psyche?

From the way I understand it, everyone, male or female has both masculine and feminine personalities and it is up to the subjects whether they recognise that or not and to what level.  The idea is that in order to become all you can be you need to integrate yourself with your inner opposite sex.

The animus within the woman and the anima within the man are the opposing personalities to their sex and how they are 'supposed' to behave.  An example would be that if a man has a strongly developed anima (fully accepted and integrated into his psyche) the man will be fully open to emotionality.

The article from Wikipedia and this good article from Psychology Today may help.


Persistent problems among relationsips Firstly my apologies if this isn't the correct se sight to ask this.

Background

I had a psychology professor some years ago (now that I think of it probably more like many years ago...) who proclaimed that a lot of the problems individuals experience in their relationships will be (we'll say persistent but it may not be the best terminology(?)) persistent across most of their relationships.

His actual quote was "You'll find that whatever issues you're having in your relationships now, you'll find persist across all your relationships, despite your partner, so do your best to make the one you have work"

Several years after him saying this, I started to notice this in my relationships, that no matter the person, we would always end up having some form of issues I had with relationship partner n-1. But probably this would be best if I left myself out of this and spoke more generally.

Question

[1] I am curious if there is any validity to my professors statement, I currently only have two data points in my sample space (my professor and myself). I do understand the notion that individuals to in fact bring baggage to relationships that will cause said issues, and I'm not sure how to reconcile this without bringing myself into said question which is what I'd like to avoid so not to come off in the wrong way.

Previous Research

I have tried googlingduck duck go'ing to not much avail, My searches have been problems persisting throughout relationships, relationship patterns, relationship cognition but I didn't really find much pertaining to the question at hand. Also I'm not sure if it is in any way related, but when studying at university I did a decent amount of research into mathematical dynamics of relationships similar to http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pubs/paper277.pdf

EDIT: It may be possible I didn't present the question in an intelligble way. So along with [1], based on my own experiences and the testimony of said professor coupled with the research I did into the dynamics of relationships, it would seem that outside of initial attraction, the "who" of the relationship doesn't really  matter so much. Meaning that most relationships work not because of some fundamental fact of nature, but more because each individual understands that the problems are an amalgamation of themselves and manifest in some form or another in all their relationships.

Please feel free to ask for clarification if need be, it would seem our "in house translator" may have oversold his skills :shrug:

Psychology in my opinion is (just like any other science) a science based on loads of observations, which have eventually been formed to create some framework or model that seems to fit real life, but still always evolving.

Loads of very observant people had loads of overlapping and non overlapping observations, and opinions.

There is absolutely no one to tell, if what we think is going on "in someone", is really what is going on.
Observations and our instinct are all there is to create the model, that makes us think that we understand the "problems" more. (they are not problems)

You could take any famous characters of psychology (e.g.. Sigmund Freud), who has surely contributed a lot to science, so we think we understand more how our psyche works, but for sure no one will ever know.
All we know is the model we apply to understand people, seem to work for a mass of people, but it will never work for everyone every-time.

I believe it is false to say that:
"You'll find that whatever issues you're having in your relationships now, you'll find persist across all your relationships, despite your partner, so do your best to make the one you have work"

People are all sorts.
People change by self observation, and change even more by observing others.
If they ever notice despite how different we are, how much the "same" we all are at the same time. If they ever notice, that our "so unique" ways of behaving and living life have such a strong template like nature.

Some people will surely suffer from what the above statement says.

Some will not, because the more intelligent and openhearted someone becomes with time, the more wisdom it will develop inside.
The more wise someone becomes, the more it will understand about him or herself, the more it will accept him or herself.

That is all that matters, not to go against of who we are.
We do that by slowly learning what the "Baggage" means in our case (this time around, in this life of ours).

From that era in ones life, life can be like anything, even very different from what it has been before.

When one comes to embrace the true self, how ever (f..d up) it may have seemed before (when we still thought the "Baggage" was part of the definition of the self),
that "newborn" will have a different presence, it will attract a very different audience.

That "new shape" of attraction is what will define our later relationships.

So to say that:
"I am curious if there is any validity to my professors statement..."

I am not sure you'll ever truly find any validity... it is surely valid from your professors point of view, but does it have to be valid from your point of view???

You surely cannot expect someone else to tell you whether your professors opinion should be your opinion too?

Few lines above I was saying the opposite of your professors opinion, because that is what I think of life.

Both yours professors and my contributions (and even Sigmund Freud's), are at the and of the day just opinions, based on how we individually perceive life (including others').

The only thing that matters is how YOU perceive life, and perceiving others living their life.

If your perception of life (relationships, ....) is not good enough according to someone at University, or wherever you get in life, that is not your problem.

Referring to your relationships, that is all there is to you first hand, so how could you not look at life generally through those experiences?

(again this is my opinion)
If you are curious enough to keep digging and thinking about what recurring problems you have had in any of your relationships, then once you may compile a short list of these things.
You may find, that no matter how many types of conflicts, misalignment you have ever had
with your partners, they will always be about 1 or 2 MAJOR things in life.

Any of the conflicts, or what ever you don't like about others or yourself, you'll be able to break down into very basic personal feature of YOURS. The "problem" (it is not really a problem, rather cause in you) is usually so simple you don't even suspect it to cause certain things.

All those problems will come down to 1 or 2 of basic things, like low self-esteem is one of the most common one.

I am sure it is obvious to you, that whatever it is, it is part of your "Baggage"...

The fact that you are still experiencing those recurring problems means you haven't adequately figured out your baggage, and THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT.

Life is giving these opportunities and time to you to find the answer, and then once you know what it is, to make friends with it.

The rest of your life is still ahead of you to achieve that, it may or may not take that long.

At the end of the day, I believe we are here on Planet Earth to watch the "show".
Whenever we see something we need to react to, we do so, because it is in our nature, whether we want to react or not.

We cannot "screw up"... we just live life, and get experienced that way.
Or if we become numb and indecisive, then life will live us, and get experienced that way. (it gets rather bitter that way...)

Either way we get what we are here for, even if we forgot what we came here for.

I am sorry, this turned into a "What are we here for???".
I shut up now.

I wish you the best...
(the easiest is often not be the best, just listen to your heart)


Why do brains prefer internal consistency? I need to preface this by saying I know next to nothing about this topic, so if the question is built on wrong premises, feel free to address that in an answer.

From and related to: What is the psychological term for disregarding correct but unwanted information?

  (...) people strive for internal consistency even at the expense of truth.

My question is why?

Are there mechanisms on the neuron-level that resist the rewiring of the brain? By rewiring I mean avoiding a certain cost to changes in the thought-process or to the acquiring of new information.

And from an evolutionary perspective, how helpful is the 'internal consistency' if thought of as a built-in protection of sorts?

Short answer
Cognitive dissonance arises because people want to protect their world-view or self-concept. Even people well versed in science may deny the facts in favor of false beliefs.

Background
The question spans three levels of grossly different arenas of research:

  [Why so people strive for internal consistency [] at the expense of truth?

This is a matter of Psychology and perhaps even Philosophy

  [What are the] mechanisms on the neuron-level that resist the rewiring of the brain?

This steps all the way down to cellular and molecular neurophysiology

  [What is the selective advantage] from an evolutionary perspective?

This ramps the question to an evolutionary time scale

I'll take a bash at this question from a more Psychological approach, mainly because the other two angles do not seem fruitful to me as

Rewiring (Neurophysiology) is a term often used in terms of gross plastic changes in the brain, such as that occur during intensive training (e.g. when folks learn to juggle), or after a stroke.
Evolutionary reasons seem far-fetched. The development of higher cognitive processes may have aided in our rise to domination. For example, the forging of social structures and accompanying cultural development may have be the foundation to the cross-generational transfer of intelligent tool-making and so forth. Such complex behaviors spanning millions of years may have led to other behaviors like the denial of facts. Such behavior may not be evolutionary beneficial, but a collateral development. You have to realize not every feature is perfect. On the contrary. The regenerative power of many a cell in the body allows for wound healing, but also gives rise to cancer. Aggressive immune systems defends us during our life against countless enemies, including cancer cells, but when going haywire it leads to devastating auto-immune diseases like multiple sclerosis. Likewise, intelligent behaviors may result in aberrant thought processes, like believing and holding on to something as to be true it, while the facts challenge that idea. Now why does that happen?
The Psychological approach seems most feasible. Denial of scientific facts to support ones own aberrant world views has been in the news a lot of late, sadly - Trumping the truth! (Shermer, 2018). Shermer says

  [A]ntiscience attitudes are formed in very narrow cognitive windows—those in which science appears to oppose certain political or religious views.

and

  For Republicans, the more knowledge they have about climate science the less likely they are to accept the theory of anthropogenic global warming []. People with more knowledge only accept science when it doesn't conflict with their preexisting beliefs and values [].

In another of his excellent columns, Shermer (2017) names a list of more examples:

Creationists [] dispute the evidence for evolution in fossils and DNA because they are concerned about secular forces encroaching on religious faith.
Antivaxxers distrust big pharma and think that money corrupts medicine, which leads them to believe that vaccines cause autism despite the inconvenient truth that the one and only study claiming such a link was retracted and its lead author accused of fraud.
The 9/11 truthers focus on minutiae like the melting point of steel in the World Trade Center buildings that caused their collapse because they think the government lies and conducts “false flag” operations to create a New World Order.
Climate deniers study tree rings, ice cores and the ppm of greenhouse gases because they are passionate about freedom, especially that of markets and industries to operate unencumbered by restrictive government regulations. Obama birthers desperately dissected the president's long-form birth certificate in search of fraud because they believe that the nation's first African-American president is a socialist bent on destroying the country.

The term here was launched after the description of a UFO cult that predicted the arrival of the mother ship Shermer (2017).

  When that failed to arrive at the appointed time, instead of admitting
  error, members of the group sought frantically to convince the world
  of their beliefs, and they made “a series of desperate attempts to
  erase their rankling dissonance by making prediction after prediction
  in the hope that one would come true.” Festinger called this cognitive
  dissonance, or the uncomfortable tension that comes from holding two
  conflicting thoughts simultaneously.

Cognitive dissonance is:

  [T]he mental conflict that occurs when beliefs or assumptions are contradicted by new information. The unease or tension that the conflict arouses in people is relieved by one of several defensive maneuvers: they reject, explain away, or avoid the new information; persuade themselves that no conflict really exists; reconcile the differences; or resort to any other defensive means of preserving stability or order in their conceptions of the world and of themselves.

Cognitive dissonance - why (Shermer, 2017)?

  Because [the facts] threaten[] their worldview or self-concept.

Science denial, for example is not typically rooted in blanket anti-science attitudes. Instead, people's denial of scientific evidence is based on motivations other than finding truth, such as protecting their social identity. It appears that the more science-literate people are, the more strongly they hold to their beliefs — even if those beliefs are incorrect. So it hasn't anything to do with education. It's about ones owns beliefs and holding on to them (source: Live Science).

Referencess
- Shermer, Sci Am, January 2017
-  Shermer, Sci Am, January 2018


How to track eye movements with electrodes? I'm an Information Technology student (bachelor's degree) and as a summer project, I'd like to develop a small "alarm" system for ALS patients in case of emergency situations.

I thought about tracking the eye movements of the patients via electrodes and then send the eye movement signals to the software system which I'm going to develop and then process the data. I'm planning to use Python programming language since I already have some experience on.

However, I don't have any experience with using electrodes, processing the signals to detect eye movements. Do you know any good and simple online sources for the beginners like me? I can't afford to buy books so I'd be grateful if you can suggest me free online sources.

I believe this tutorial covers exactly what you are looking for. It describes how to use a relatively cheap kit ($150) to detect eye movements and eye blinks. It includes software and hardware information.


Is there a learning style that involves learning best by teaching others? Background: I'm familiar with the more common learning styles of hearing, seeing and doing. For lack of a better word I consider myself a 'vicarious' learner which is something similar to a Bodhisattva from Buddhism only without the enlightenment part. I learn best by helping other people learn it, or through explaining it successfully to someone else. Case in point algebra never made a lick of sense to me as a kid until I was able to get my mom to understand it (she's not math minded in the least).

Questions:

Is there a term for someone who learns best by helping others learn?
Are there only the three theoretical learning styles at present?

Learning Styles

There is a large literature on learning styles particularly in educational psychology. See for example, the wikipedia page on learning styles.

You will soon discover that there are many different taxonomies of learning styles. Thus, there are certainly more than three "theorised" learning styles.

However, more importantly, there have been some serious critiques of the assumptions of learning styles. In particular, I would question whether people really have important domain general learning styles, and whether pedagogy should be adapted to such a domain general learning style.

I agree that instruction should be tailored to the individual. However, I think that generally it is more effective to consider what the individual already knows (and in some cases, think about their motivations) and tailor the format with regards to pre-existing knowledge and skills.

Furthermore, I think it is generally more useful to think about what makes for effective learning in general, as opposed to thinking about how people learn in different ways.

Learning by teaching

In the case, of learning by teaching, I imagine that this could be a relatively effective learning methodology in general. From personal experience, I know that I learn a lot about a subject by teaching it. It forces you to understand the material. Students can ask you questions which forces you to learn more. Consideration of how to teach the material can encourage a deeper understanding in order to provide a structured teaching experience. The mere fact of spending time on a subject should also foster further learning.

I imagine there are many articles on the topic of learning through teaching.
I found one article by Cortese (2005) who wrote:

  The great learning potential inherent in teaching would appear to be
  generated as the result of a particular aspect of the teaching process
  itself: the encounter with diversity, which on the one hand tends to
  increase reﬂexivity while on the other hand tends to break down
  resistance to change. ... Teaching also proved to be an important
  opportunity for recognizing one’s own ignorance and thereby rendering
  oneself open to the possibility of learning.

References

Cortese, C. G. (2005). Learning through teaching. Management Learning, 36(1), 87-115. PDF


Why do many people not use tabbed navigation (e.g. in an internet browser)? I have noticed that many people do not use tabs even though tabs have been around in browsers for some time. I have been noticing that people either do not differentiate tabs as specific navigational elements (e.g. a web page with tabs) or do not use them even when they know what purpose they serve. A lot of people have not even heard the word "tab".

These are only my personal impressions so I am curious to learn if you  have noticed otherwise. Also I know a free add-on for MS Office which gives you a tabbed window. As far as I know it is not a massive success.

Why do some/ most people find it hard to use tabbed navigation (e.g. in an internet browser)?

Here is an informal study (blog published, 21 participants, all Firefox users, all students or friends of the author) that shows that most (of the recruited participants) do use tabs, but about half of the participants use them only rarely ("4 tabs for every 100 navigation actions"): http://dubroy.com/blog/how-many-tabs-do-people-use-now-with-real-data/

Since the sample in this study is not very representative (Firefox users have made a concious choice regarding browser usage and are therefore more aware of browser functionality; 21 is an extremely low number for analysing common behavior) we might safely assume that other user types (those using pre-installed browsers; those not friends to a computer nerd) will use tabs even less.

update:

a speculation just occurred to me: what if people, generally, find navigation much easier on a vertical (e.g. book contents/ web site left menu/ Win Explorer folder tree/ etc) or if not finding it easier, at least expect it there, while navigation ver a horizontal is either more difficult for some reason or unhabitual?

Because a majority of the people are just too plain stupid.

In an international study by the OECD on adult competencies (PIAAC) that evaluated literacy, numeracy, and problem solving in technology-rich environments, it was found that only every third adult (in Germany: 36%) between 16 and 64 was able "to master more complex tasks such as navigating the internet".

Read that again. A more complex task such as navigating the internet. Only one third manages that. In an educated country like Germany where 77% of the population 14 and older use the internet.

This means that more than half the internet users don't know how to navigate the internet.

The study also found that

every eighth person does not know how to use a computer mouse
every fifth person only knows basic arithmetics or less
every sixth adult (!) has the reading ability of a ten year old child

I think tabbed browsing is a minor problem. The study makes me doubt the principles of democracy. How can people be allowed to vote, if about 15% of the adult (!) population "can at best read short texts with simple words and extract from these only very limited information"?

Source: http://www.oecd.org/site/piaac/


What is the underlying genetic basis for ADHD? According to Psychcentral depression, bipolar disorder, ADHD, schizophrenia and autism are traceable to the same inherited genetic variations

According to AsapSCIENCE, depression could be genetic due to a variation in the serotonin transporter gene. Having at least one short seems to give some kind of genetic predisposition to depression.

So what's the analogue of the serotonin transporter gene in ADHD? Is there a dopamine transporter gene?

I have double posted this question on the Biology StackExchange.

I hope the few sources below answer your question. I strongly recommend you read actual sources as opposed to the parts I have quoted. I don't know much about this topic so I did not attempt to translate anything in laymen terms, since I might have distorted or misinterpreted information in the process. However, the three sources below are one of the best-known studies on the genetic basis of ADHD. I have quoted the two sources in direct response to your question about the proposed role of dopamine and serotonin transporter genes.

Percentage due to variation attributed to heritability

  Twin, family and adoption studies have suggested that there is a strong genetic contribution to ADHD, with a mean heritability estimate of 76 % However, it has been difficult to implicate any specific gene in ADHD beyond reasonable doubt. The difficulties encountered in identifying genetic variants increasing the risk for ADHD could be at least in part owing to the heterogeneity and complexity of this clinical syndrome.Consequently, it has been proposed that the use of intermediate phenotypes (or endophenotypes) relevant to ADHD are likely to be more informative than the DSM-IV1 diagnoses, allowing for increased detection of genetic effects.

Genome-wide linkage scans

  To date, seven genome-wide ADHD linkage scans have been published and
  some chromosome regions such as 5p13, 14q12, and 17p11 have been
  indicated in multiple studies [Fisher et al., 2002; Bakker et al.,
  2003; Arcos-Burgos et al., 2004; Hebebrand et al., 2006; Ogdie et al.,
  2006; Faraone et al., 2007; Asherson et al., 2008; Romanos et al.,
  2008]. However, no chromosome region has been consistently identified
  across the scans and the majority of the findings were unique to each
  study. This is not unexpected because the power of individual scans is
  likely to be low for a complex trait such as ADHD which may only have
  genes of small to moderate effects [Risch and Merikangas, 1996;
  Waldman and Gizer, 2006].

Dopamine transporter (DAT1)

  The DA transporter (DAT1) gene harbours a 40-bp repeat sequence
  variable number tandem repeat polymorphism located in the
  3′-untranslated region. The most common alleles are the 10- (480-bp,
  71.9%) and 9-repeat (440-bp, 23.4%) alleles, although these frequencies are variable from one population to the next.
  Homozygosity for the 10-repeat allele was reported to be associated
  with higher DA transporter protein in the striatum, a region
  where it is heavily expressed56 and where it serves as the primary
  means of DA reuptake. Several studies have suggested a relation
  between ADHD and the DAT1 variable number tandem repeat, the 10-repeat
  allele being the risk allele; however, a roughly equal number of
  studies have failed to detect such a relation. In a review by Faraone
  and colleagues, the pooled OR associated with the 10-repeat allele in
  family-based association studies was estimated to be 1.13 (95% CI
  1.03–1.24).

  Loo and colleagues40 reported that children carrying 2 copies of the
  10-repeat allele exhibit higher commission errors, impulsive responses
  (β score) and reaction time variability compared with carriers of the
  9-repeat allele. Bellgrove and colleagues, who used a CPT–like task
  (the sustained attention to response task), found higher reaction time
  variability in children who were homozygous for the 10-repeat allele.
  However, in this study, the 2 groups did not differ in omission and
  commission errors.

Trypotphan hydroxylase 2 (TPH2)

  The TPH2 gene encodes the rate-limiting enzyme in the synthesis of
  serotonin in humans and was shown to be associated with completed
  suicide and major depression. Four studies have shown an
  association between multiple SNPs in this gene and ADHD.
  Recently, a significant association was observed between total errors
  of omission in the test of variables of attention and 2 SNPs
  (rs1386488, rs6582072). Similarly, a significant association was
  observed between rs1386488 and another SNP (rs1386497) and total
  reaction time scores as well as total reaction time variability
  scores. These intronic SNPs are part of 8 markers found to have strong
  linkage disequilibrium with each other and that compose a single
  haplotype block associated with ADHD in the tested sample. A second
  study tested IQ level and 4 SNPs previously reported to be associated
  with ADHD, but analyses were negative.

Sources:

Candidate genes and neuropsychological phenotypes in children with ADHD: review of association studies.
Oussama Kebir, Karim Tabbane, Sarojini Sengupta, Ridha Joober
J Psychiatry Neurosci. March 2009; 34(2): 88–101.

Molecular Genetics of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
Stephen V. Faraone, Eric Mick
Psychiatr Clin North Am. 2010 March; 33(1): 159–180.

Meta-Analysis of Genome-Wide Linkage Scans of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
Karin Zhou et. al.
Am J Med Genet B Neuropsychiatr Genet. 5th December 2008; 147B(8): 1392–1398.


What is the standard way to analyze EEG data in a mismatch negativity paradigm? I'm running an EEG experiment using a modified auditory mismatch negativity (MMN) design, and I'm wondering if anyone can tell me the best method for data analysis (and recommend any stats programs/packages for this purpose as well).

The experiment will only have a few (6-8) subjects with a high number of trials per subject (~700).  The matched condition makes up 75% of the trials.  The stimuli are selected from a closed set of 10 items, with an equal frequency of items in the matched/mismatched conditions.

One of the differences between this study and normal auditory MMN tasks is that the expected/unexpected stimuli vary between trials with the expectation set up on a trial-by-trial basis.  Therefore, it's possible that the difference in event-related potentials (ERPs) to expected/unexpected stimuli will be averaged out due to small variations in response to these changing stimuli.

Does someone out there know the best EEG data processing and analysis techniques to detect the small ERP in response to auditory MMN stimuli?  Can anyone recommend techniques to avoid averaging out small ERPs whose latencies might vary?

Programs/packages for EEG analysis
There are decent MatLab toolboxes with good tutorials for for the analysis of EEG data. The EEGLAB toolbox (tutorial) can be operated by both GUI and command-line (and script). The fieldtrip toolbox (tutorial) is mainly operated by command line / script.

Of course there are also (commercial) software packages for EEG analysis that do not require Matlab (e.g., BESA, Brain Vision Analyser, eeprobe), but I am not familiar with them.

Are there techniques to avoid averaging out small ERPs whose latencies might vary?
No, probably not. ERPs are calculated by averaging across multiple trials because this averaging cancels out all components that jitter in time (that is, mostly noise), i.e. the thing you want to avoid (canceling out of jittering components) is actually the purpose of calculating ERPs.

However, to be sure you should have a look at reviews or tutorials for the measurement of the mismatch negativity. See for instance

Duncan CC, Barry RJ, Connolly JF, Fischer C, Michie PT, Näätänen R, Polich J, Reinvang I, Van Petten C. (2009) Event-related potentials in clinical research: guidelines for eliciting, recording, and quantifying mismatch negativity, P300, and N400. Clin Neurophysiol. 120(11):1883-908.  (pubmed)


Do cultures differ in the perception of emotions from body expression? In their classic study, Ekman and Friesen (1971) identified seven facial expressions recognised by people universally across all cultures as depicting certain emotions: happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust and contempt. This is quite solid paradigm, but recent studies showed some cross cultural differences. For example Western Caucasian observers tend to look fairly evenly across all areas of the face, whereas Eastern Asian observers focus their attention toward the eye region (Jack et al., 2009).

  Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1971). Constants across cultures in the
  face and emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 17(2),
  124-129.

  Jack, R. E., Blais, C., Scheepers, C., Schyns, P. G., & Caldara, R.
  (2009). Cultural confusions show that facial expressions are not
  universal. Current biology, 19(18), 1543-8.

While facial expression literature on the topic is vast, there is very limited research into cross cultural differences in perception of emotions from dynamic body expression. There have been some attempts to look at the static body posture (Kleinsmith et al., 2006), but virtually nothing on the dynamic body expressions. Ok, there is one study by Sneddon et al. (2011) but their stimuli contain facial expression together with movement, and I am specifically interested in the research where participants only view body movement/expression.

  Kleinsmith, A., De Silva, P. R., & Bianchi-Berthouze, N. (2006).
  Cross-cultural differences in recognizing affect from body posture.
  Interact. Comput., 18(6), 1371-1389.

  Elfenbein, H. (2003). Universals and Cultural Differences in
  Recognizing Emotions. Current Directions in Psychological, 159-164.

  Sneddon, I., McKeown, G., McRorie, M., & Vukicevic, T. (2011).
  Cross-cultural patterns in dynamic ratings of positive and negative
  natural emotional behaviour. PloS one, 6(2).

Is there any (published) research that has been done on comparing cross cultural differences in the perception of emotions from body movement?

The following article PERCEPTION OF EMOTIONS
FROM FACES AND BODIES
AND THE INFLUENCE OF CONTEXT by Charlotte Sinke (I have quoted the aims and outline from) examines in depth interpretation of dynamic body language and cross cultural differences. It discusses the availability of studies with static images, facial expressions and voice and the relationship between these in perception and cross cultural differences. Although this doesn't examine a large range of cultures, it's interesting and provides a good resource of cited articles.

Research aims and thesis outline
Previous emotion research has mainly focused on the perception of facial expressions.
Only in recent years, bodily expressions are being studied. This has been done by
using pictures of isolated bodies. However, in our daily life, bodies are not static
and do not appear in isolation. Therefore, the stimuli used in Chapter 5 and 6 are
dynamic. There is reason to believe that the perception of faces and bodies might be
influenced by the context it is in. This can be the physical environment, the culture, or
other people. The question therefore is how a face or a body, being emotional or not,
is processed differently in specific contexts. Since everything that we do involves
in some way other people, it is interesting to find out how the brain responds to an
interaction between two people and whether it notices subtle differences in body
language that can indicate whether a threat is going on. A final question was how
attention can play a role in this perception.
Across cultures the expression of basic emotions is remarkably similar. However,
emotion perception can be influenced by other factors, like the (social) context.
Whether people from different cultures are differently influenced by this will be
discussed in Chapter 2. More specifically, Dutch and Chinese students were tested on
whether they show differences in the recognition of facial but also bodily expressions
and whether they are differently influenced by context. The studies described in this
chapter are purely behavioural.
Moving away from cultural differences, in Chapter 3 the influence of context on
face processing is investigated using fMRI. Chapter 4 elaborates on the data from
this study. Here, the activation of extrastriate body area is discussed in relation to its
response to threatening scenes specifically.
The study performed in Chapter 5 moves from static pictures to dynamic movies
of two people interacting. This interaction was either threatening or teasing. A
difference is made in whether participants actively try to guess what goes on in each
situation or perform an unrelated task. Chapter 6 expands on perceiving threatening
social interactions by using two different attention levels and letting the participant
focus on only one of the two protagonists (always one of them being angry at the
other) in each movie.
Finally, in Chapter 7, the insights gathered from the preceding chapters are
summarized.

Charlotte Sinke
PDF
Interesting quote:

“Every phase of movement, every small transference of weight, every single gesture
of any part of the body reveals some feature of … inner life.”
~ Rudolf Laban ~


Does knowing a word for an emotion cause a person to feel the emotion more frequently? I am aware of the Frequency Illusion which makes it more likely for us to notice a new word if we just heard about it recently, but I was wondering if this is true for emotions as well.

Logically, I assume it would be yes because you are more aware about your emotions and hence more likely to notice that you are experiencing the emotion. Have there been any conclusive studies done on this subject?

I don't know much about linguistics but if, say, a certain isolated tribe has not come up with a word for "happiness", would they ever feel happiness in the same way that we do, or feel it less frequently?

The answer would be no. To go along with the comments babies feel emotions however do not know words. As they grow adults help them organize their emotions for example a baby cries with frustration and anger because they may be hungry as you get older you have learned how to deal with that experience. As it is impossible to feel any emotion without having a thought first, emotions stem from what we are thinking which would be mostly concepts we don't think in random words. Therefore if we like to be happy we will think about things or do things that make us such. We are made to feel a wide range of emotions and they come and go. Knowing a word is not going to help someone know happiness better. Learning to control thoughts would be much more helpful. Just as a baby feels all emotions it does not yet understand them. What good would a huge vocabulary be if we could not put together concepts.


How can I run a placebo medication pills study? Practical advice needed I am a lab manager looking to design a placebo experiment in a behavioral lab with a medical doctor. I believe our study needs to be credible and professional. I'd appreciate any recommendations on details of placebo manufacturer or retailer, type of pill bottle to use, how to create brochures of information about the purported effect of the placebo pill. Info on points of methodology is also appreciated.

Ethical procedures are specific to your country and even differ between universities and sometimes even per department. Of course you know everything about the Declaration of Helsinki, being immersed in the city of its origins (you seem to (have) be(en) affiliated to the University of Helsinki). You seem to be located in NY now, but I'm unsure to your affiliation. So I started wandering on the sites of the uni of Helsinki and the New York University for some information. But note you should look into the local requirements yourself (although your study has likely long since started :-)

First, you need to find out the IRB (or here for NY) you will be dealing with, often operating under a university, or affiliated hospital. These folks can tell you anything you need to know. Here is a site of the IRB with all the specifics you need to submit an IRB proposal to NY Uni. Note that the best thing is for specifics such as pill bottles and placebos is to talk to the IRB, or try to find investigators that have done such a thing recently in your neighborhood.  For example, there's a study from Segal et al (2017):

Randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial with azithromycin selects for anti-inflammatory microbial metabolites in the emphysematous lung,

that was conducted by the New York University School of Medicine and by the looks of it it is exactly the thing you are planning to do. These guys can likely help you out, and reading the papers and related ones may help you as well. For example the linked paper says in the Methods:

  Both placebo and AZM were prepared in an opaque capsule by the NYU pharmacy...

Hence, the NYU pharmacy, apparently, assists in these kinds of matters - the place to go!

Reference
- Segal et al., Thorax (2017); 72 :13-22


Does not consistently providing a reward strengthen operant conditioning? When learning about Operant Conditioning, I remember being taught that not consistently rewarding the desired behavior could (seemingly counterintuitively) actually increase the strength of learning the conditioned behavior. Is this correct?

If this is correct, is it more effective to begin providing a reward at or near 100% of the time the conditioned behavior is performed, and then slowly reduce the amount to a lower percentage? Or is it more effective to simply start with a lower percentage?

What you're thinking of is called an Intermittent Reinforcement Schedule. Different Reinforcement schedules have different effects, variable ratio in particular seems to be what you're getting at:

  a reinforcement schedule in which the number of responses necessary to produce reinforcement varies from trial to trial

What's important is the behavior is reinforced intermittently but regularly enough to be "worth" it. This produces a powerful effect; I don't immediately have any sources but I do believe B.F. Skinner ran a number of such trials. where the subject will repeatedly perform the behavior in an attempt to get more rewards.

An explanation I've heard is that with a predictable reward schedule (fixed ratio) your participant knows they can except a reward, so there's no reason to mindlessly perform the task over and over; compare a Slot Machine (variable ratio) to a machine that gives out money on a fixed number of tries (fixed ratio). A subject knows with the fixed ratio machine they can always get their reward at any time. With the slot machine you have to keep playing and playing to get that big next reward.

Remember that for proper Shaping you should start with a high percentage (100%) initially to condition the response otherwise the participant might not be conditioned at all. Going back to the gambling example, it's much more effective if you give your participant a taste of winning when they play the slots or they'll quickly quit as it seems there's no reward to be had at all.

Shaping involves immediate rewarding behaviors approaching the desired behavior, it's certainly more important to start with a high % of rewarding, especially with non-human subjects when getting them to perform the wanted task can be problematic to begin with.


Could human decision making have evolved from food finding? One of the things human's do (and possibly other animals) is consider various options, imagine what they would be like, and then make a choice. This is called a "tree search". For example, "should I take the job offer A or B"?

Now, I wonder if this abstract decision making, may have evolved from food finding. And what is the smallest animal that does this sort of thing?

For example, imagine a small monkey or squirrel climbing a tree. When it gets to a branch it has a choice of taking the left branch or the right branch. It has to guess which branch is likely to lead to the best crop of fruit.

Once it has got fruit from one branch it may have to retrace its steps to get to the next branch.

So I would suggest that this sort of "tree search" would probably have evolved in mammals brain before humans repurposed these brain pathways to do more abstract decision making involving language.

I am trying to think of other animals that this would apply to. For example a rabbit may have a choice between branching tunnels.

A bear might have a choice of paths up a mountain and so on.

Rats are good maze finder so they must have this ability to make choices.

I wonder what other animals do this sort of thing? Rather than making a choice at random? It would have to be an animal at least as advanced enough to have a memory.

C. elegans is the simplest model organism whose nervous system has been studied extensively. C. elegans certainly makes decisions; I would feel pretty confident in saying that decision making is an ubiquitous feature in the nervous system of freely moving animals.

It is also non-controversial to consider more complex behaviors as having evolved from more simple ones (finding food/evading predation/mating). You can even reduce a lot of complex behaviors directly to those simple ones, and certainly neural mechanisms for grouping and distinguishing between different patterns (an essential component of language but also many other behaviors) are conserved across domains.

However, it is not correct to refer to all decision making as a tree search: a tree search is a particular family of algorithms and not what you describe. Even tree-like problems need not be solved with a tree search. Specifically, tree search is a computational algorithm that works well in the serial processing environment of computer science. Analogies between brains and computers often break down at the level of algorithms, because brains are massively parallel. That doesn't mean tree search-like algorithms are absent from the brain, but you should not take such a narrow view a priori.

Christiansen, M. H., & Kirby, S. (2003). Language evolution: Consensus and controversies. Trends in cognitive sciences, 7(7), 300-307.

Faumont, S., Lindsay, T. H., & Lockery, S. R. (2012). Neuronal microcircuits for decision making in C. elegans. Current opinion in neurobiology, 22(4), 580-591.

Fitch, W. T. (2005). The evolution of language: a comparative review. Biology and philosophy, 20(2-3), 193-203.


How do humans optimize noisy multi-variable functions in experimental settings? Imagine an experiment like this:

A participant is asked to optimize an unknown function (let's say minimize) .
On each trial the participant provides several input values, and receives an output value.
Now also imagine that the output is noisy, in that the same inputs lead to an output plus a  random component.

To think of but one of many possible specific examples imagine the following function

$$Y = (X -3)^2 + (Z-2)^2 + (W-4)^2 + e,$$

where $e$ is normally distributed, mean = 0, sd = 3.

On each trial, the participant would provide a value for $X$, $Z$, and $W$.
And they would obtain a $Y$ value based on this underlying function. Their aim would be to minimise the value of $Y$.
They have not been told the underlying functional form.
They only know that there is a global minimum and that there is a random component.

I'm interested in reading about the strategies used by humans to do this task in experimental settings. Note I'm not directly interested in how computers do the task or how programmers and mathematicians might complete this task.

Questions

What are some good references for learning about the literature on how humans learn to optimize noisy multi-variable functions?
What are some of the key findings on how humans optimize noisy multi-variable functions?

This is a bit of a tangential answer, but hopefully still useful.
When we give humans noisy data, we can basically think of them as some sort of Bayesian inference machines that try to figure out what the function that data came from looks like. The important thing we then need to know, is how strong of a bias (prior) humans have towards expecting certain relationships.
Unfortunately, it seems that humans are extremely biased towards positive linear relationships. I think this will make it very hard for them to optimize data presented as in your question, because they will constantly assume it comes from a straight line. This is really well captured by the following figure from Kalish et al. (2007):

The experiment that generated the above picture is rather different from the one you describe, but we can think of it is a very particular type of noise. A person at stage $n$ is given 25 $(x,y)$ pairs from the function at stage $n - 1$. The person is then tested by being given an x value and asked for a y, 25 times. The results of this are passed on to the person at trial $n + 1$ as the training data. Thus, we could think of the errors of person at stage n as noise/errors (although systematic errors) for the person at stage $n + 1$. As you can see, it doesn't take much of this noise to lose all structure of the function you started with and revert to the natural bias of a positive linear relationship. In fact, in condition 1 participants are already completely confused about the U-shaped function after strage $n = 1$ (so the first participant, with no error already has a hard time understanding the function from $(x,y)$ pairs).
References
Kalish, M. L., Griffiths, T. L., & Lewandowsky, S. (2007). Iterated learning: Intergenerational knowledge transmission reveals inductive biases. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 14(M), 288-294. [pdf]


Which morals are universal across the species? This is the first of a series of three questions about morality:

There are sets of moral standards within any given society. What one society deems as acceptable may be deemed as abhorrent in another. This concept lends itself to the idea that some aspects of morality are learnt and not innate within an individual.

Which morals are universal across the species?

The second question: What is the psychology of morality?

The third question: How is individual morality linked to psychological profiling?

This is a partial answer to your question.

According to "Only Humans Have Morality, Not Animals", (Guldberg, 2011), claims that morality is something unique to humans.  Basically the author concludes with:

  Human beings are not perfect and never will be, but we are special and unique among the animal kingdom. We are capable of making judgements about our own and other people's behaviour, and have the capacity consciously to change the way we behave and society as whole.

A key argument made in the article is that there is a great difference between instinctual connections and actions and human empathy and morality.

Further, according to the article "Is Morality Innate?" (Prinz), proposes that:

  Morality is a byproduct—accidental or invented—of faculties that evolved for other
  purposes.

and proposes a somewhat negative, yet true conclusion:

  Nonhuman animals are often
  violent, but their potential for bad behavior may be lower than ours. Because we can
  reason, there is a great risk that human beings will recognize countless opportunities to
  take advantage of our fellows.

Essentially, it seems that perhaps morality is unique to humans owing to our abilities to reflect, reason as well as react.


Does Spaun's serial memory exhibit proactive interference and serial searching Xuan Choo recentely created a model of serial working memory for Spaun. Does this model of working memory exhibit the effects of proactive interference (as well as changing data types yielding freedom from proactive interference)? Additionally, does this model show signs of exhaustive serial search (the time for answering questions increases as the list gets longer)? If not, what future areas of investigation might yield this result or is it impossible?

References

Choo, F. X. (2010). The ordinal serial encoding model: serial memory in spiking neurons. http://compneuro.uwaterloo.ca/files/publications/choo.2010.pdf
Eliasmith, C., Stewart, T. C., Choo, X., Bekolay, T., DeWolf, T., Tang, Y., & Rasmussen, D. (2012). A large-scale model of the functioning brain. science, 338(6111), 1202-1205. http://compneuro.uwaterloo.ca/files/publications/eliasmith.2012.pdf

Choo's OSE model paper does not present evidence that would allow us to say whether or not the model exhibits proactive interference or set size effects. Presumably, this is because it is specifically a model of primacy and recency effects, not a general model of working memory. The thesis scope is given on page two:

Two major behavioural effects are often observed when analyzing recall performance data. The first is known as the primacy effect, which is generally seen in most serial recall tasks. The primacy effect describes the tendency for items near the start of a sequence to be more accurately recalled than other items in the sequence. The second effects is the recency effect, which describes the opposite of the primacy effect.
[...]
Identifying the mechanisms in serial memory that are responsible for this behaviour [primacy and recency effects in serial memory] and developing a model that is able to capture this behaviour while maintaining biological plausibility is the primary motivation of the research behind this thesis.

All results are reported with respect to serial position, because the scope of the thesis is relatively narrow. Without also modeling response time and semantic categories, I'm not sure how or why the particular model would be adapted to investigate either of these effects. That's just not what it does.
Developing a model of proactive interference with Spaun seems improbable, because the framework doesn't appear to have any way to model semantic or declarative memory, and you need that to show proactive interference effects. There is no reason the Spaun framework/NEF could not be used as a basis for memory models which exhibit set-size effects, however. Spaun's input is visual and image-based, so that should be no problem.
For proactive interference, something like ACT-R, or another biologically plausible cognitive architecture which already features declarative memory, would be more apt. There are a number of papers on modeling proactive interference with ACT-R on the publications page (click on "Interference").


Can the neuronal firing rate be increased through medication/diet? My rudimentary understanding of the neuronal firing rate is that it varies person to person, and neuron to neuron. So any specific number for a firing rate would be specific to the test subject and type of neuron etc. However aside from this I'm interested to find out if any medication or specific dietary constituents have been shown to increase neuronal firing rate in average test subjects. To be clear I understand that some medication has been shown to help suffers of diseases such as Alzheimer's, but I'm interested in the typical human brain.

You've received a few great comments from our neuroscience-savvy users that indicate ways in which this question can be construed as particularly challenging or maybe even unanswerable. However, I think there's a much more basic and limited understanding of your question that takes into account your self-professed unfamiliarity with neuropharmacology and permits a perfectly good intro-level answer. I don't specialize in this – I'm a psychologist, but more of a dabbler in neuroscience – but I'll take a crack at it anyway.

Agonists activate cellular receptors.
Excitatory receptors produce excitatory postsynaptic potentials (EPSPs); i.e., they encourage neurons (of which they are components) to "fire". Hence the simple answer: any agonist of a neuron's excitatory receptors increases its firing rate by definition.

Glutamate is an excitatory neurotransmitter. It binds to glutamate receptors, which increase the likelihood or frequency of action potentials (i.e., firing events) in their neurons when activated. NMDA receptors (a type of glutamate receptor) play a role in long-term potentiation (effectively increasing the probability of firing and other criteria of synaptic strength), so the effects of glutamate sometimes outlast its direct activity.

Wikipedia lists several NMDA agonists, some of which are prescribed as ingested drugs. D-Cycloserine  has applications in anxiety and addiction treatments. However, there is a balance to maintain, and the objective of medication is generally to restore a normative balance given some abnormality or damage.

  Excitotoxicity due to excessive glutamate release and impaired uptake occurs as part of the ischemic cascade and is associated with stroke,[4] autism, some forms of intellectual disability, and diseases like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, lathyrism, and Alzheimer's disease.[4][14]

Evidently treating Alzheimer's isn't as simple as increasing EPSPs – that might even be a move in the wrong direction. Nicotine may help with Alzheimer's, but the mechanism is more complex:

  While tobacco smoking is associated with an increased risk of Alzheimer's disease,[85] there is evidence that nicotine itself has the potential to prevent and treat Alzheimer's disease.[86]...A study has shown a protective effect of nicotine itself on neurons due to nicotine activation of α7-nAChR and the PI3K/Akt pathway which inhibits apoptosis-inducing factor release and mitochondrial translocation, cytochrome c release and caspase 3 activation.[90]

It would seem nicotine's direct action is agonistic, but its mediated effect is antagonistic, and that's the effect that matters for Alzheimer's outcomes. Another wrinkle to nicotine's pharmacology is its agonistic role with acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter that plays excitatory and inhibitory roles for different purposes. This demonstrates the practical complexity of action potentials' causes and consequences.

References
4. Sapolsky, R. (2005). Biology and human behavior: The neurological origins of individuality (2nd ed.) The Teaching Company. "see pages 19 and 20 of Guide Book"
14. Hynd, M., Scott, H. L., & Dodd, P. R. (2004). Glutamate-mediated excitotoxicity and neurodegeneration in Alzheimer's disease. Neurochemistry International, 45(5), 583–595. DOI:10.1016/j.neuint.2004.03.007. PMID 15234100.
85. Peters, R., Poulter, R., Warner, J., Beckett, N., Burch, L., & Bulpitt, C. (2008). Smoking, dementia and cognitive decline in the elderly, a systematic review. BMC Geriatr 8(36). DOI:10.1186/1471-2318-8-36. PMC 2642819.
86. Henningfield, J.E., & Zeller, M. (2009). Nicotine psychopharmacology: Policy and regulatory. Handbook of Experimental Pharmacology, 192, 511–34. DOI:10.1007/978-3-540-69248-5_18. ISBN 978-3-540-69246-1. PMID 19184661.
90. Yu, W., Mechawar, N., Krantic, S., & Quirion, R. (2011, November). α7 nicotinic receptor activation reduces β-amyloid-induced apoptosis by inhibiting caspase-independent death through phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase signaling. J. Neurochem. 119(4), 848–58. DOI:10.1111/j.1471-4159.2011.07466.x. PMID 21884524.


How is the relationship between hypothalamus and homeostasis & fear and how does it evolve across human development stages? This is my claim, or what I [mis?]understood:

Hypothalamus is well-known for its role in homeostasis (self-regulation including, but not limited to, temperature/energy) and also reactions / stimuli like fear, fighting, hunger (which we could refer as the primitive needs, say), and it aims to appear (prosencephalon needs more divisions) in the 5th week of pregnancy (in the neural tube).

As I read from several scattered sources in the www, like this one, this one regarding pregnancy, and wikipedia.

This is what I'm asking for:

I would like a reference telling, if any, relationships and evolution between the primitive/embryonic process of homeostasis and the fears / survival instinct we experience when we... fear something considering, if available, different degrees of responses since the 5th week of pregnancy AND... say, the first months (or first year) of already-born baby.

I'd expect here:

That my claim is wrong, undecidable, irrelevant, or with few elements there being true, and WHY / to what extent.
Reliable source(s) describing this evolution.

TLDR: the hypothalamus is involved in fear processing, but not in the way you think.
Wikipedia has a decently sourced article on the hypothalamus and it does play some role in fear processing:

Fear processing
The medial zone of hypothalamus is part of a circuitry that controls motivated behaviors, like defensive behaviors.[29] Analyses of Fos-labeling showed that a series of nuclei in the "behavioral control column" is important in regulating the expression of innate and conditioned defensive behaviors.[30]
Antipredatory defensive behavior
Exposure to a predator (such as a cat) elicits defensive behaviors in laboratory rodents, even when the animal has never been exposed to a cat.[31] In the hypothalamus, this exposure causes an increase in Fos-labeled cells in the anterior hypothalamic nucleus, the dorsomedial part of the ventromedial nucleus, and in the ventrolateral part of the premammillary nucleus (PMDvl).[32] The premammillary nucleus has an important role in expression of defensive behaviors towards a predator, since lesions in this nucleus abolish defensive behaviors, like freezing and flight.[32][33] The PMD does not modulate defensive behavior in other situations, as lesions of this nucleus had minimal effects on post-shock freezing scores.[33] The PMD has important connections to the dorsal periaqueductal gray, an important structure in fear expression.[34][35] In addition, animals display risk assessment behaviors to the environment previously associated with the cat. Fos-labeled cell analysis showed that the PMDvl is the most activated structure in the hypothalamus, and inactivation with muscimol prior to exposure to the context abolishes the defensive behavior.[32] Therefore, the hypothalamus, mainly the PMDvl, has an important role in expression of innate and conditioned defensive behaviors to a predator.
Social defeat
Likewise, the hypothalamus has a role in social defeat: Nuclei in medial zone are also mobilized during an encounter with an aggressive conspecific. The defeated animal has an increase in Fos levels in sexually dimorphic structures, such as the medial pre-optic nucleus, the ventrolateral part of ventromedial nucleus, and the ventral premammilary nucleus.[36] Such structures are important in other social behaviors, such as sexual and aggressive behaviors. Moreover, the premammillary nucleus also is mobilized, the dorsomedial part but not the ventrolateral part.[36] Lesions in this nucleus abolish passive defensive behavior, like freezing and the "on-the-back" posture.[36]

Just based on that it's easy overemphasize the importance of the hypothalamus in fear processing; it's actually not that central. If you want the popsci version, then the amygdala gets the center stage in regulating fear. From a review of the "Neuronal circuits for fear and anxiety":

I don't see why the homeostasis circuitry would be involved in fear processing (as you propose), and as far as I can tell, it isn't.


How to use a QUEST staircase in 2-AFC? Firstly, I need to declare that I am not psychologyst, however I am currently working on visual recognition research. To be precise, I working on face recognition deficits in Autism Spectrum Disorder. I am in charge of doing an experiment but I feel I come to a dead end even though I didn't even start with it.

As I mentioned above, I investigate face recognition deficits in ASD. I will use faces and objects. For this task I will use 2-AFC match-to-sample task. I need to morph faces and objects and for this purpose I need to use a QUEST staircase for measure morph distance at which participants could discriminate between items with 75% accuracy.

Here is the problem: I don't know how to use a QUEST staircase. Or better say, I don't know how can I decide how many trials should I have, which morph distance should I use between items, how should I know which morph distracter should I use, should I use in the beginning easy test pairs and what exactly does it  means, is 85%-morph distracter is an easy pair, etc.? As you can see I don't know to do an experiment, it is almost completely new field for me.

I am trying to find my answers in: Psychophysics: A Practical Introduction by   Kingdom & Prins; Experimental Design by Cunningham & Wallraven; Visual Psychophysics by Lu & Dosher just to mention a few. However, I wish to find some book or article where I can see an example step by step how to make a similar experiment, i.e. AFC. I know there is bunch of information but I am just overwhelmed and lost.

What literature/ web sites/ blogs etc. can you suggest to me? How/ where to start?

There is a lot going on in your question. QUEST, as well as many other adaptive procedures, is well suited for a task like estimating morph distance in a 2-AFC paradigm. There are, however, a couple of points in your question, that make me think QUEST is not a good paradigm.

The QUEST paradigm is designed around setting the signal level to find the the "sweet point" of the psychometric function (something like the signal level that maximizes the Fisher Information). I am not aware of any psychometric function that has a sweet point of 75% correct (most are 90+ percent correct).

The second issue, is you mention a fixed number of trials. Typically, QUEST is used with a stopping rule that specifies the expected variance of the estimate (i.e., you run enough trials until the CI on the estimated threshold is small enough).

The easiest way to run these types of experiments is to use software written by someone else (that you trust). Pelli was involved in the early development of both the QUEST procedure and the Psych Toolbox for MATLAB/Octave. The Python based PsychoPy also provides the QUEST procedure and is commonly used.


What happens to brain during meditation? Meditation has many benefits.For example it helps to relax, reduce stress, etc. But how it is working? What exactly happens to our brains during meditation?

I'm not sure about what happens in the brain while someone is actually meditating (i.e., the state effect of meditation), but a meta-analysis from last year (Fox et al., 2014) looked carefully at what long term brain changes result from meditation. This is from the abstract:

  Anatomical likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis found eight brain regions consistently altered in meditators, including areas key to meta-awareness (frontopolar cortex/BA 10), exteroceptive and interoceptive body awareness (sensory cortices and insula), memory consolidation and reconsolidation (hippocampus), self and emotion regulation (anterior and mid cingulate; orbitofrontal cortex), and intra- and interhemispheric communication (superior longitudinal fasciculus; corpus callosum).

The paper is available online here: http://www.christofflab.ca/pdfs/Fox2014-MeditationMorphometry.pdf


Connections between different theories of personality There are a several theories on personality: the Big Five personality traits, Watson en Clark's extraversion en neuroticism, Grey's Behavioural Inhibition & Behavioural Activation (BIS/BAS), Eysecks Psychotocism, Extraversion and Neuroticism (PEN) model, the Socionics & Information Metabolism theory discussed in this related question, the list goes on.

But are there any theories proposing 'translations' from a personality described according to one theory, to the same personality described according to one of the others?

I would expect that this translation would be mediated through latent variables.
However i have not found any research that does this, while there are papers on the relatioships between test-results. That is, there is empirical research that describes the correlations between the scores on questionnaires that are designed to measure personality according to different theories.

For example: From BIS/BAS to the big five - Smits and Boeck - European Journal of Personality Vol 20, no 4, 255–270

The reason i ask, is because i have a dataset of some 460 subjects who took several personality questionnaires (big 5 as well as BIS/BAS), in addition they completed the Adjective Check List (ACL). Test subjects also did tests which measure impulsiveness: a Response Inhibition task, a Reversal Learning task and the Balloon Analogue Risk Task.

I think it would be interesting to compare a model based on literature to the correlations found in this dataset.
Specifically i would try to predict certain approach/avoidance measurements (test-subjects also completed an approach-avoidance task) from the rest of the test data and the theoretical connections between the different factors that are supposed to underlie the measurements.

Other related questions:

What is the support for a global personality factor?

What is understood about interactions between personality types or traits?

It's unclear if the idea of 'translation' from one personality framework to another is a meaningful concept. A score on any given personality factor represents some weighted combination of measures - usually endorsement of questionnaire items like "I am the life of the party", etc.

As such, every factor score is a unique variable that probably doesn't reflect some underlying property of the human brain, but is a scientifically convenient construct

Though personality theories are usually based on how different trait scores factor analyse, and so they often have a lot of overlap. Eysenck's Neuroticism and Extroversion factors are very similar to the Big Five N and E factors, because those emerge very strongly when you look at the common clusters of human traits. But they aren't identical, because they're comprised of different items and exist in a different multidimensional test structure with different cross-loadings.

The different theories are different because they cannot be translated to one another, though similarities can always be drawn.


How can I use gamification to encourage people to complete workplace training? I am looking for ways to improve the likelihood people will perform mundane but required workplace training. I am looking into gamification techniques.

My organisation requires that employees complete short online learning courses (think Health and Safety, Security Awareness, Risk Management, Company culture). We often find it a struggle to ensure everyone completes the required courses on schedule.

Admittedly the courses themselves can be a little dry. I can't change that yet. However I want to find some ways to improve the rate at which people complete the tasks.

I am familiar with gamification techniques and concepts.

What specific techniques and concepts of gamification might work in increasing training compliance?
what do I need to keep in mind when implementing them?

For applied purposes, gamification can be captured within a self-determination theoretical framework. Self-Determination Theory (SDT) is an influential theory of motivation which grew out of research on intrinsic/extrinsic rewards in the 1970's, and which has been applied to virtually every learning setting. The main proponents of SDT include Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, who in and of themselves have a lot of publications you may want to sift through.
Self-Determination Theory
SDT holds that people become motivated to engage in work based on three properties: autonomy, competence and relatedness. Autonomy refers to a desire to experience feelings of individual freedom in how and when to perform the task; Competence refers to a desire to experience feelings of control and mastery from performing a task; Relatedness refers to a desire to experience feelings of connection to others from performing the task.
Further, SDT also makes a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (Ryan and Deci, 2000). In more complex settings, this distinction becomes extremely important. However, for the purpose of encouraging participation in "mundane, required workplace training," it is likely not necessary to consider intrinsic motivation. An analysis of the degree to which any external rewards employed in implemented gamification techniques may reduce intrinsic motivation to engage in mundane workplace training seems to me like shooting birds with cannonballs.
Evaluating Gamification
Following Aparacio et al. (2000), gamification techniques can be evaluated in terms of their motivational autonomy, competence and relatedness properties. A brief summary of their recommendations for evaluating gamification techniques follows.

Identify the main objective.
Identify one or more underlying objectives that are interesting to people.
Select game mechanics that match the objectives and support autonomy, competence and relation.
Analysis of the effectiveness gamification based on fun, quality indicators, satisfaction, and service quality.

References

Aparicio, A. F., Vela, F. L. G., Sánchez, J. L. G., & Montes, J. L. I. (2012, October). Analysis and application of gamification. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Interacción Persona-Ordenador (p. 17). ACM.
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations: Classic definitions and new directions. Contemporary educational psychology, 25(1), 54-67.


Does explaining a visual guidance system affect visual attention distribution? I'm working on a driving simulator that uses an eyetracker to monitor the users gaze behavior. Based on a study I modeled an optimal scanpath that the users should follow in order to best maneuver through curves. If the users gaze hasn't hit certain AoIs in time, a visual cue is being shown to manipulate the user to include this point in his scanpath.

My question is, should I explain the meaning of the cues and the system behind them to the testers? Wouldn't that bias their scanning behavior?

Whether you tell them is going to depend on what you are trying to accomplish. What is the nature of the cues? If they capture strictly exogenous attention, what you tell won't affect how they allocate their attention because orienting is completely involuntary. However, if the cues involve your participants having to decide to redirect their attention, explaining it to them will affect how they allocate their attention and will likely lead to them relying more on your cues.


Does the use of cannabis affect the ability to recall dreams? Will cannabis be a negative factor in the ability to recall dreams from waking up.

How do the cannabinoids affect you when in a dreaming state?

Current research tells us that yes, cannabis will affect the ability to recall dreams. As for the negative - positive outcomes, it seems to be subjective.

One of the few researchers in this field, Hans Hamburger says:

  “By smoking weed, you suppress the REM sleep, and with that you also
  suppress a lot of important functions of that REM sleep. One of those
  functions is reliving the things you have experienced and coming to
  terms with them, as it were. Processing all kinds of psychological
  influences is something you do in REM sleep.

  You also anticipate the things that will happen the next day or the
  days after that. While you’re sleeping, you already consider those and
  make decisions in advance.” – Hamburger

You can find more of his publications here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Hans%20Hamburger