Why do we procrastinate? As the title says. What is the cognitive reason for procrastination? I feel there is a component of uncertainty about the path to be taken. I feel like if I know exactly how to reach my goal and I want to reach it, I take the path and follow through until the end. On the other hand, if I have the feeling I don't know how to solve my problem, I get uninterested, lose track and never deliver.

Our brain is somehow always curious but also very lazy: if knowledge is at hand, it works. If not, it watches TV ;)

Procrastination is deep and complex subject and its not "Hey you are just lazy man" thing.

People procrastinate for wide variety of reasons here are few ideas:

Procrastination can be a symptom of deeper inner meaning problems or mindset problems.
Procrastination can be due to fear of failure, fear of success (!)
Procrastination can be due to be overwhelmed by size and nature of task.
Procrastination can be due to uncertainty and analysis paralysis.
ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) creates brain that is myopic to time perception, which in turn creates procrastination behavior.
People with ADD/ADHD often heavily discount the importance of an event if it's sufficiently far away from the current time. Only thing that gets done is events screaming "Your house is on fire, do it NOW". They live in perpetual now discounting the future, everything far away in time is simply a blur until it comes too close within their range of time perception which is 'now'.
Procrastination can be due to inability to focus and distraction issues.

The list is only partial, you can google out following terms to learn more:

Growth verses fixed mindset,
Distraction and Continuous Partial Attention,
ADHD Russell Barkley


How to install MARSBAR toolbox in SPM12? I am trying to install MARSBAR toolbox into SPM12, but I am running into different problems. Initially they were all related to directory ownership and permissions (using Ubuntu 14.04), which I managed to correct, but then matlab wouldn't find the script files (extension .m). I added them manually to the path, and that worked out.

Finally, and here is the point I can't go through, when I run marsbar in MATLAB I keep running into:

>> marsbar
MarsBaR analysis functions prepended to path
Undefined function or variable 'marmoire'.

Error in marsbar (line 125)
  o = marmoire;

Error in marsbar (line 57)
marsbar('on');

Even though the function marmoire that it is complaining about IS on the path and with proper permissions! <- Actually not, see below.

Googling the error took me to a lot of different complaints from users that had difficulties about running it on SPM12 1 2, however none were quite the same as the problem I've been facing.

Also, the documentation for the toolbox is quite outdated now, it seems.

Any light here would be greatly appreciated!

UPDATE 6.1.16
As per suggestion in the comments I added two lines before marsbar calls marmoire.

Now the error is:

>> marsbar
MarsBaR analysis functions prepended to path
Undefined function or variable 'marmoire'.

Error in marsbar (line 125)
  which marmoire

Error in marsbar (line 57)
marsbar('on');

Which means that marmoire is not actually in the proper path, however I copied it to the same directory as marsbar:

And the problem persists.

Thanks for the comments, @serk1. The answer to this question is that that is a bug, it seems.

I gave up editing the scripts myself and decided to reinstall Matlab and Marsbar, and it properly recognized the path and the permission for the files after that.

I will leave the question here, in case someone run into similar problems.


Is it possible for humans to conceive of being dead? I am reading Stephen Cave's book Immortality, and one of the claims he makes early on is that there is a "mortality paradox." This is the phenomenon that humans know that they will die (based on induction), but that "the one thing that these minds cannot imagine is that very state of nonexistence; it is literally inconceivable." I am interested in the second part of this paradox, that humans cannot conceive of death.

His evidence for this is:

Introspection: "Try it: you might get as far as an image of your own funeral, or perhaps a dark and empty void, but you are still there—the observer, the envisioning eye."
Quoting Freud, who said: "It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators."
Appeal to some recent psychology: "Research by the psychologist Jesse Bering has shown that even young children who have not yet been socialized into any particular religion or worldview believe that the mind survives bodily death. He and his colleagues argue that this is because the alternative—that the mind is extinguished—cannot be grasped. He concludes that we have “an innate sense of immortality” that stems from this cognitive quirk—that is, the seeming impossibility of our annihilation is hardwired into our brains."

My question is: Is the idea that death is inconceivable a consensus stance in cognitive psychology?

Surely it depends on how one defines a "conception", but it seems to me like it ought to be possible, at least for some subset of the population.

Sort of, think of what it's like when you're asleep, not dreaming. Or if you've ever been knocked-out via anesthesia. No-consciousness, just a gap in time.

The question can't really be answered though because it's asking how one might perceive a lack of consciousness, consciously.

Here's an interesting study on the transition from an unconscious to conscious state via the use of anesthetics:

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/32/14/4935.full


Is it ethically appropriate for a client to buy their psychologist a gift? I have been having free psychology therapy in my school for almost one year. Now the therapeutic relationship is coming to end. I want to give a small gift to my therapist to show my gratitude when my therapy is over.

Are psychologists forbidden from  receiving gift from clients by their ethical code?
Alternatively, under what circumstances would it be appropriate?

Here you can find an essay that discusses role of gifts in psychotherapy in great detail and from many different angles.

Focusing on US, Canadian, and Australian ethics codes of professional societies, the author concludes that

  Despite the prevalent belief to the contrary, there are no code of ethics or guidelines of major organizations that specifically ban gifts in therapy.

A synopsis of all the reviewed ethics codes can be found here.

In a summary of the ethical and therapeutical implications of gift giving during therapy he emphasizes that (small and appropriate) gifts may actually have a place in therapy and that therapists who rigidly decline them may endanger therapeutic success:

  Giving gifts is an ancient and common way to express gratitude, appreciation and love. Gifts in psychotherapy and counseling are very common and often take place around the holidays, in termination, at an important junction of therapy and with children-clients. Therapists have not only received gifts but have also been regularly engaged in gift giving to clients. Usually this involves symbolic gifts, greeting cards, transitional objects, souvenirs from vacations or educational material, such as books, audiotapes or CDs. While traditional psychoanalysis has frowned upon gift giving in therapy and many therapists are reluctant or afraid to talk about it, the fact is that most therapists practice it regularly and find it acceptable and helpful as long as the gifts are symbolic, nor too expensive and appropriate. Unlike commonly held beliefs, appropriate gift giving in therapy is neither unethical nor constitutes dual relationships. Uncritical and rigid across-the-board rejection of all gifts or putting in place "No gift policies" are likely to make clients feel rejected and humiliated, harm the therapeutic alliance and interfere with the therapeutic progress.


Is there evidence of a mechanism for transmission of instinct? DNA would seem to be the only candidate for propagating instinctual behavior, yet I find that not credible. DNA mainly codes for the production of protein structures (like enzymes) and is mainly about cellular mechanisms like respiration. It is said that we have 99% of our DNA in common with another primate (Chimpanzee? Do we behave much like them?) and that we have about 50% in common with plants (Carl Sagan said an Oak Tree) which would indicate that only cellular-level information is contained in DNA.

It is a mystery how tissues and systems arise, so it should be an even greater mystery how behavior could be somehow passed along in a mechanism for folding proteins. Is there any model that definitely links instincts to DNA, such that if the DNA is altered, the instinctual behavior changes? If not, are there any candidates for the actual mechanism of instinct transmission?

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/dec/12/japan.justinmccurry
Here they talk about scientist who shut down fear of cat in mice behavior. After genetic engineering the mouse isn't afraid of the cat smell. The conclusion of this study is that fear (at least in this case) is not learned through experience, but a consequence of genetic evolution. In the end, they even explain that mice are still afraid by the sound of the cat. So it's seems to be possible to modify a really precise reaction and not just a large class of behaviors.

Also, all the complex chemicals activities in our brain are coded by dna, so it's not surprising that our instincts are inherited.
For the 99% of dna in common with Chimpanzee, I have to say that 1% is still a big number of genes, and can make a huge difference. Also they might be some part of the dna that are not used anymore in the 99% (they are just relics of evolution).

Actually I found information (one from Carl Sagan) saying that big parts (sometimes 80% or 97%) of our dna are unused. I'm not sure about those numbers thought, and one has to be careful because the sources don't seems to be always reliable to me. (The best might be non-coding dna on wikipedia)

References

Kobayakawa, K., Kobayakawa, R., Matsumoto, H., Oka, Y., Imai, T., Ikawa, M., ... & Mori, K. (2007). Innate versus learned odour processing in the mouse olfactory bulb. Nature, 450(7169), 503. DOI: 10.1038/nature06281 PMID: 17989651 PDF: http://www.academia.edu/download/45075404/Innate_versus_learned_odour_processing_i20160425-21574-dycs42.pdf


Why do we see shadows in the following black-and-white optical illusion? How does neuroscience explain the following optical illusion? Look at tiles. You will see spots of shadow near all corners. The shadow will be missing from some corners very near the center of your attention.

So, the brain has ganglia that detect horizontal and vertical edges as well as more complex edges. They work best with high contrast edges. That's all I know right now that might be relevant. Thanks in advance.

Looks like these are variations on the Hermann grid illusion, wiki page here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_illusion

As the wiki page notes, the first-pass explanation of this was lateral inhibition, but this is not really 100% satisfactory.
There's a nice quick walk-through of the old explanation and the problems with it here: http://web.mit.edu/bcs/schillerlab/research/A-Vision/A15-2.htm
A journal paper version of this stuff from the same lab is:
Schiller, P. H., & Carvey, C. E. (2005). The Hermann grid illusion revisited. Perception, 34(11), 1375-1397.


How to efficiently get a sense of the meaning of a score on a non-aptitude test that you encounter in a journal article? Context: When reading research articles in psychology, you often encounter new non-aptitude self-report psychological tests (e.g., measures of personality, well-being, psychopathology, learning style, stress, goal orientation, etc.). Most of these tests involve obtaining the sum or the mean of a set of items for one or more scales or subscales. Each item typically involves item text and a consistent set of response options (e.g., Likert-type response scales, yes-no response scales, etc.). There are thousands of such scales, some which are frequently used; others are used only once.

A lot has been written about how to assess test validity. However, here I wanted to focus particularly on how to assess what a particular individual or group score means. Specifically, I'm thinking of the situation where you are reading a journal article and you encounter a scale that you have not seen before, such as:

A 10-item measure of self-esteem on 1 to 5 scale; group mean is 3.2. Is the sample generally high, low, or moderate in self-esteem?
A 30-item check-list of good eating habits with a mean of 20.7. Does the sample have good eating habits?

For well developed tests, there is a test manual. Other times there is a website or key journal article with information. Finally, in some cases, very little information is readily available. In some cases useful information is given in the methods section, but typically, on its own, this is inadequate.
Thus, the process of trying to locate information such as item content and normative comparisons begin.

A lot has been said about normative and criterion referenced test interpretation.  If you are using a test in clinical practice or you are using a test in your own research, you should invest time in understanding what different scores on the test actually mean.   However, when casually reading a journal article you can encounter many tests.
In such cases, the article is one of many, and you might just want to get a quick sense of what a given score means.

Question

What is a good way to get both a normative and absolute understanding of the meaning of a group or individual non-aptitude test score?
What is an efficient way of obtaining the information required  to make such a judgement?

Note the use of the term "non-aptitude". I'd like to exclude discussion of intelligence testing, ability testing, and knowledge testing, and so on.

Update: To clarify, I didn't mean to imply in the question that item information was not available anywhere. I guess the question is referring to the general situation where there probably are previous uses of the measure in the literature, and there might be a key article that describes the measure somewhere. I guess I'm thinking of a good general strategy for securing relevant information and then using it to form an understanding of the scale properties.

Tough question.

I'm going to assume that the question pertains to measures which lack all the information you've outlined: test manual, validity studies, website and key articles, item content and normative comparisons. If these assumptions are correct, then what you are a describing is an insufficiently explained measure. I will argue that we necessarily cannot know what such a scale means in any scientific sense.

A scale is a measure. A scientific measure is a process which generates evidence, i.e., observations that discriminate between different possible answers to a specific question. (Data may constitute evidence with respect to one question and not another.) The outcome of this discrimination, or analysis, is what the scale "means", i.e., the logically sound interpretation we may make on the basis of analyzing the evidence.

To determine whether a method does, in fact, generate evidence, we need to be able to replicate it independently. But the premises imply that we don't have enough information to do so. Because we cannot independently verify which hypotheses the evidence generated by the method discriminates between, if any, there is no way to know what it means.


Chunking: more chunks or more items? I'm working on a game that's designed to exercise the player's short-term memory. In the core game loop, I present the user with a random set of items (anywhere from 3 to 30), and after they click start, ask them to regurgitate that set of items.

The items themselves are simple but arbitrary / semantically meaningless, eg. four colours (red/blue/green/yellow), or four arrows (up/down/left/right).

As I increase the game difficulty, what I want to know is: is it more difficult for humans to memorize more groups (eg. five groups of two items each), or smaller groups with more items (eg. two groups of five items each)?

I recall learning that short-term memory is generally seven items (plus or minus two, eg. 5-9 items) but I'm not sure how grouping/chunking affects that.

I think you're misunderstanding the concept of chunking. If the items are arbitrary with no connection to each other, chunking will do you no good since grouping them is meaningless and thus you're still memorizing the individual items in the groups instead of the groups themselves. This paper from Brady et al. goes into depth about the limits of working memory, I also recommend looking up the references mentioned. Here is a relevant passage about the definition of chunking from that paper:

  Cowan (2001) defined a chunk as a group of
  items where the intrachunk associations are greater than the interchunk
  associations. In other words, in the sequence FBICIA the letters
  F, B, and I are highly associated with each other and the letters C,
  I, and A are highly associated with each other, but the letters have
  fewer associations across the chunk boundaries. Thus, observers
  are able to recall the sequence using the chunks FBI and CIA,
  effectively taking up only two of the four chunks that people are
  able to store in memory (Cowan, 2001; Cowan, Chen, & Rouder,
  2004). By comparison, when the letters are random, say HSGABJ,
  they are more difficult to remember, since it is more difficult to
  chunk them into coherent, associated units.


Folding (wrinkles) in cortex: Why is surface area more important than volume? When we look at the cortex of the brain, it has a folded structure. It is said that this is because this enables a greater number of neurons to exist, which is obviously advantageous.

However, we could pack in the same amount of 'volume' into a smaller space without any folding, sacrificing that surface area it results in. Why does this lead to fewer neurons? Can neurons only exist near surfaces?

The key point is that the brain is not a uniform structure. The outer layer, known as grey matter, is a relatively uniform and flat structure. Underneath the grey matter is white matter. An overly-simple characterization of these two areas is that grey matter performs computations, and white matter lets different areas of grey matter talk to each other. Here's an image of a dissected brain from wikipedia where you can clearly see the ring of grey matter.

One reason for the folds might be that if you want to fit a flat structure (like grey matter) into a tight space, folding it is one way to fit more of it. Another aspect of this is that the folds bring different areas of grey matter closer together, which means less white matter is needed to connect the areas together.


Are there studies on the evasion of characterization? Sometimes I see people that perform some kind of activity, which could entitle something to them and when the entitlement is made, they refuse being called that way - they prefer to avoid characterization or to characterize themselves with a new word that does not carry the (usually) pejorative meaning of the previous one and that, in their opinion, better characterize their activity.

Although I speculate some answers for why this phenomena happens, like for example: We may want to perform such activity without the effects of the stigma. I don't know if it's certain nor know what is the full extent of the study of such phenomena (perhaps there are a lot more things than I couldn't think about).

Its a kind of non-conformity. Its caused by desires for uniqueness. It can be treated if it becomes abnormal or interferes with life or the lives of those who love.

  Conformity is the act of matching attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to group norms. Norms are implicit, unsaid rules, shared by a group of individuals, that guide their interactions with others. This tendency to conform occurs in small groups and/or society as a whole, and may result from subtle unconscious influences, or direct and overt social pressure. Conformity can occur in the presence of others, or when an individual is alone. For example, people tend to follow social norms when eating or watching television, even when alone.

-Wikipedia Conformity

  A high need for uniqueness undermines majority influence. Need for uniqueness (a) is a psychological state in which individuals feel indistinguishable from others and (b) motivates compensatory acts to reestablish a sense of uniqueness. Three studies demonstrate that a strive for uniqueness motivates individuals to resist majority influence. In Study 1, the need for uniqueness was measured, and it was found that individuals high in need for uniqueness yielded less to majority influence than those low in need for uniqueness. In Study 2, participants who received personality feedback undermining their feeling of uniqueness agreed less with a majority (vs. minority) position. Study 3 replicated this effect and additionally demonstrated the motivational nature of the assumed mechanism: An alternative means that allowed participants to regain a feeling of uniqueness canceled out the effect of high need for uniqueness on majority influence.

-What Motivates Nonconformity? Uniqueness Seeking Blocks Majority Influence


Neurological basis of selfishness? Is there a neurological component to selfishness?

Awhile back, I witnessed a mentally retarded person who was severely possessive of a water fountain, claiming it was "his".
I've also seen toddlers exhibit this same behavior.  Is this a form of arrested development?

I'm not sure how constructive it is to think of it in terms of "components", because there are so many that contribute to selfishness: for example, you only feel your body's pain.  Food and sex only feel good to you when you're the one experiencing them.

Instead, it might be more constructive to look for components of selflessness and altruism, them being the exception.  And that, according to some, lies in kin selection.


Are IQ tests "beatable"? I have been watching a lot of Jordan Peterson's videos on youtube recently. One of his themes is, that IQ is among the best studied metrics, with high predictability, validity and is generally believed to be a very real thing in psychology. He also mentions, that IQ can not be improved or trained.

My question is, whether I could improve my IQ (by that I mean the test score, not general intelligence), by simply studying for it, trying to learn about the different types of questions and how they are generally solved and by simply doing a bunch of tests and memorizing how to solve questions.

I have done a few IQ tests online and at the beginning, I was very confused about everything, like from which direction to read the boxes and stuff like that. After doing a couple and seeing how it is done and reading explanations about the different questions I feel, that I am doing a lot better now.

Similar to that, I was on a job interview once, where they asked riddles, presumably in order to assess IQ, without doing an IQ test.

I knew some of the riddles and simply answered some of them by sheer memory.

Isn't it possible to increase your test score of an IQ test by simply studying? And if you can, what makes the tests really valid? And finally, if IQ was such a high predictor of intelligence, wouldn't most job interviews be geared towards assessing your IQ in a legal manner?

Short answer:
Yes, but it does not matter

Long answer:
Each question has some inner mechanism that you either know or you don't. Usually you should know how to do it, but you don't know, that you should do it that way. Once you know the right method, next puzzle you would solve much faster - most IQ tests are like this. If you don't know the mechanism, it could be very hard to solve - IQ tests should be like this.
For example this one - once you know, that there are 4 squares all the time, next puzzle of this kind will be much easier. Most puzzles use Subtraction and Addition - once you try this two things, you will solve lots of IQ tests. You are expected to know this methods, and that it will be used in test.
Problem with IQ tests is insufficient number of respondents - since it needs lots of people to create norm.
For example I created test with possible score 0-100, and 50% of people reached 80 points. When you take the test and had 80 score, your IQ should be 100. But when (because of better education for example) most scores begin to be above 80, norm will change and for 100IQ you would have to score 82 or more.

So yes, you can study for it, but when more and more people do it (and knows about using subtraction, 4 squares all the time and so), norm will change and tests would be harder for everyone anyway, since there will be always exactly 50% of people that could reach at least 100IQ. ( = take some online tests, since most people do it, otherwise it would put you into disadvantage.)

Sources:
Flynn effect  - raise in IQ due to education and also health (notice not genes).
More about norm
Tests commonly used - in it you can hide math operations without using numbers.


Is there any study on the effectiveness of taking notes in a lecture vs taking notes on written materials? In many lectures I heard, I basically copied the lecture notes of the professor from the board into my notebook (I study mathematics). For me those lectures are comparable with going into the library, taking a textbook and making a handwritten copy from it.

The question I asked myself today: Is there a study investigating what is more effective? Going to lectures where I copy the professor's lecture notes from the board or making a handwritten copy from the lecture notes by myself?

(I assume here that the lecture notes are available, e.g. from the lecture's homepage)

On the one hand the professor might give additional comments in the lecture. On the other hand one can take the time he needs to understand a complicated paragraph when he works by himself and is not in the lecture. One also can skip easily understandable parts when he works by himself...

The primary value of taking notes by hand is not the record that you create, but that the act of taking notes causes your brain to engage more deeply with the material.  You might never look at your notes again, but taking them has a strong positive effect on your ability to understand and remember the material that you are taking the notes about.

As such, you could potentially get similar value not by copying but by summarizing a text by hand.  Taking notes in lecture gives at least one additional benefit: it provides a focused block of time in which distractions are less available to you.  With a good lecturer, you get a second benefit: a lecturer is often much better than a text at directing your attention to the most important concepts in material.


Name of the bias where someone really needs something after they find out it exists I'm looking for the name of the cognitive bias that is expressed in the following story.

A fellow coworker was instrumental in getting a 75 gallon fish tank installed in the lobby of the company that we work at a couple of weeks ago. The water needs to cycle for a while before fish can be introduced. The other day he was testing the water when someone walked by and asked when we would be getting fish. He said probably a week or so. The person was appalled that it would take so long to get fish.

The company had been without a fish tank for 20 years and now they've had one for a couple weeks and this person thought one or two more weeks was way too long to wait. What is the name of this bias?

It's not a bias. It is natural human nature. At least the 2 year old's case is.

It's just like how you would not have thought of going to Six Flags (An amusement park) unless it was mentioned to you.

When the 2 year old hears ice cream, the kid thinks of the sweet taste, or the pleasure ice cream brings. In the kid's case, the case is impatience or inability to defer gratification.

For the employee, it is simply that he thinks the cycling of the tank and fish delivery would take less longer than a week or two.

The two examples are both different things. I am positive that the 2 year old's case is NOT a bias. The employee's case may simply be surprise.


Does learning too much useless information weaken my memory? From what I understand, since we receive a lot of information every day, our brains are tasked with remembering the few important bits and ignoring (or forgetting) everything else. I also know of habituation, how we become ignorant of stimuli that repeat often and are irrelevant. I also know of the "learning pyramid". This is what I'm interested in: the internet, especially some parts (reddit, facebook, 9gag and so on), constantly bombards us with various "facts" - generally useless information. Is it possible that our brains, as a reaction to extensive internet usage, learn to ignore information that is only heard or read (we go two/three steps up on the learning pyramid)?

I ask this because I think it was a lot easier for me to remember things a few years back (I'm 17 now), when I wasn't using the internet as much, or at all. I know you learn easier when you are younger, but I don't think I'm that old yet.

Current evidence suggests that internet access is not weakening memory, but changing what information is prioritized.  This study referenced below suggests that when people expect to have future access to information, they are less likely to remember the information itself and more likely to remember where or how that information can be found.

Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips
Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, Daniel M. Wegner Science 5 August 2011: Vol. 333 no. 6043 pp. 776-778.

DOI: 10.1126/science.1207745


Can drawing a duck define a person's hemispheric dominance? When I was on 7th grade, our math teacher asked every one of us to draw a duck. In the class of 34 students, a large portion of the students drew a left-facing duck.

The teacher said that it’s a simple test to figure out if a person is either right or left-brain dominant. So the people who drew a duck facing to left is a right-brainer, and vice versa. Apparently this Duck-test was quite popular in middle school.

Some even say, people who often draw a duck who faces left side is a left brain (instead of right). Although some says it's just muscle memory/ tendency.

My question is- is this mini test legit?
Can you get a glimpse of someone's brain dominance by drawing a duck?

What is the dominant hemisphere in the first place? I found the following definition (source: Medical Dictionary):

  [The] dominant hemisphere [is] [t]he left half of the brain in almost all right-handed people and 85% of left-handed people. This is the hemisphere concerned with language and logical thought and containing the motor areas for voluntary use of the right side of the body. In 15% of left-handed people, the right hemisphere is dominant and subserves speech.

Now, your ducks facing left or right hardly seem to reflect either language, logic, motor lateralization or handedness. Instead, often questionnaires or inventories are used, for example to tease out whether a person is logical, rational and verbal (left-sided); or emotional, manipulative/spatial and creative (right-sided). However, the meaning, relevance, and possible use of hemispheric dominance is debated.

Note that brain lateralization is certainly true for a number of functions, including speech and motor control, but the more dramatic examples of brain lateralization should be interpreted with caution, and I quote from Corballis (1980):

  Since ancient times, right and left have been associated with different fundamental classifications, including male and female, good and evil, day
  and night, straight and crooked. [...] Interpretations of cerebral asymmetry that emphasize a fundamental duality in cognitive processing between the two sides of the brain, or that locate consciousness in the left side only, are probably modern manifestations of the age-old mythology of left and right.

Reference
- Corballis, American Psychologist (1980); 35(3): 284-95


Can hate to same gender parent cause homosexualism? I know a girl who is (or claims to be) lesbian.
I also know that big part of her childhood (12-now years) she hated her mother.
Her father left family when she was infant (1-2 years). I dont know what she thinks about her father.
She is 17 now.

I wonder, is it possible that by not-accepting her mother, she does not accept her own gender? Or is it more likely that not having a father, influenced her sexual orientation?
Was any documented research conducted, that would confirm/reject that?
Any other thoughts on that?

EDIT

I should have mention about it earlier but somehow I forgot about that.
I know that she had experiance when she got home earlier one day, and saw her mother with her lover having sex. She told it my sister. More or less after that, she started to dress like a man and (I think) she lost this 'little girl/child' identity. She become more serious and her marks at school rised very high. She is the best in class now but before that experience she was one of the worst.

I dont know if this is relevant, but she consider herself as a loner and watches a lot of anime now. I think this is all what I know about her.

I feel confused. I always thought that only small percent of people are really homosexual (because of chromosome mutation), and the rest just believes (because many possible reasons) that they are.

Gender is not, despite what others might say, a social construct, and neither is sexuality, just google David Rimmer to see what happens when researchers have messed with these. While we don't understand what causes homo-sexuality fully, typically speaking sexuality seems to be influenced by hormone exposure in the womb, when a human is a foetus. Although studies have found that roughly 5-10% of people have had same-sex sexual experiences, this appears to be relatively common in adolescence although it does happen later in life too. Speculatively its possible that this partly comes from people learning about themselves and their sexuality. However despite people having these same-sex experiences only 1-3% of people identify as homo or bisexual. Why do people have these experiences? There are a a multitude of reasons, some people are homosexual, while some may be curious or undecided, or perhaps some other reason.

Ignoring the sexuality side and looking at group identification: people have all sorts of reasons for identifying with particular groups or demographics. While relationships with parents are certainly cause for being rebelliousness, its not going to turn anyone homosexual who isn't already inclined. There seems to be no recent evidence about parenting style and sexuality, apart from on religious websites that have no place here, although stonewall say that there is no relationship. However the research linking the two is absent, which usually suggests either it hasn't been researcher properly or, more likely, that there is no relationship at all.


Dreams and sleep phases, and duration of dreams Supposedly, people mainly dream during REM sleep, and dreams last up to 20 minutes (see for example the first paragraphs of the Wikipedia article on Dreams).

My subjective experience differs:

No matter at what time I awake, I always awake from a dream.
And since I often awake not on my own (during phases of light sleep) but because I'm disturbed by outside noises (the crying baby of our neighbors, car doors slamming), and often feel groggy and disoriented upon awakening, I probably often awake from deep phases of non-REM sleep. Still, I always awake from a dream.
When I wake up I often remember an unbroken storyline from the last thoughts before I fell asleep until the moment of awakening.So obviously my dreams must have continued for hours – either in an unbroken stream or by taking up after a break where the story was "paused" before it.

Are there recent theories or research findings that explain this subjective experience?

I don't think what you're describing is that unusual. I read about dreams and dreaming in Jaak Panksepp's "Affective Neuroscience" some years ago, and here is what I remember:

First, it is not entirely accurate to say that dreams happen only during REM sleep. What is unique to REM dreams is visual imagery. NREM sleep, also called slow wave sleep, also contains dreams, but they are just a series of thoughts - not very different from when you think about things while awake.

Second, even if you are describing visual dreams: REM sleep is more shallow than slow wave sleep, i.e. outside noises will wake you up more easily than during the other sleep stages.

Third, it's very standard to dream about things that are currently going on in your life.

Fourth, dreams are extremely fragile, they evaporate from memory very quickly unless you actively do something mental with them, and it is easy confabulate some new details into them while trying to keep them from slipping away. It could be that you are reconstructing the content or duration of your dreams a little bit while you are trying to compare them to your thoughts before sleep.


The psychology of patriotism, dying for one's own country There was an old Latin motto, "Dulce et decorum est, pro partria morii," which roughly translates into: "It is a sweet and beautiful thing to die for one's country." I used to think that this was a piece of misguided patriotism.

That is, until the other night when a friend of mine said, "I would rather be a dead American than a live Ethiopian." (He was referring to the fact that the American standard of living is 100 times better than the Ethiopian.)

That got me to thinking, could the Roman proverb mean that Rome stood like a Colossus over her (Mediterranean world), so that a person would rationally choose death (or maybe take a 50-50 chance of death) as a Roman, than to be a live, and probably enslaved Carthaginian/Gaul/Greek/"pick your poison").

Examining the notion of patriotism a little deeper.

Can the notion of being willing to die for one's country, be construed as a person's
 desire to choose death under regime A over a chance to live under regime B, just because the disparity in standards of living was too great to bear?

The quote "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" is from one of Horace's Odes (III.2.13), and it translates as: "it is sweet and honorable to die for one's fatherland".

It is assumed that Horace did not glorify the death of a soldier in this poem but allude to the two predominant philosophical doctrines of his time, epicureism and stoa, and their perspective on the summum bonum, the greatest good. For epicureism this is lust ("sweet" in the quote), for the stoa it is virtue ("honorable").

From Horace's point of view, dying for your home country contradicts neither the epicureic nor the stoic ideal, as it implies both. Both philosophical doctrines were sceptical of a service to the state, and Horace says that serving your country is in tune with both doctrines.

Death for your country is glorified in a quote from Horace's Greek source, a verse by Tyrtaios  (Fragment 6D) about the service of the Spartans:

"The most beautiful death of all is when a warrior fights for his fatherland and dies for it."

Source:

Common internet knowledge ;-)


Study about how position of head influences thoughts I'm wondering if there are any studies on how (or if) the position of the head changes our thoughts or dreams. Mainly I mean when lying down, as I experienced it is hard to keep the thoughts that where there moments ago when I turn from one side to another in bed. I guess this can be explained by how the blood flows in our brains, that one side gets more blood than the other when lying on your side. But does that mean you could influence your dreams by your sleeping position? Would you react differently to outside influences depending on what your head position is?

I have to mention I have no knowledge at all in these kind of stuff and I'm just asking out of curiosity. Does anyone know about something like this?

Hue,

It sounds like you are interested in a field of research known as embodied cognitive science. It is a fascinating field that looks at how we use our bodies and environments in conjunction with or instead of our brains to complete some cognitive task.

I suggest you start by reading Risko & Gilbert (2016) for a recent review of a phenomenon known as "cognitive offloading" which I think will give you some interesting insights to some of the questions you posed. Evan Risko has done some interesting work on the effects of head tilts on cognition which I think you'll find interesting.  If you can't access the article due to the paywall, let me know, and I can send it to you.

Unfortunately, I do not know any research on dreams and such.


Computational models of early learning in children What are currently used biologically plausible computational models/frameworks of early learning in children?

Personally, I have used cascade correlation neural nets to model pronoun acquisition in children, but in hindsight, I consider this framework to be not neurobiologically plausible.
Are there existing computational frameworks that have been used for early-learning and development in children that have a reasonable biologically justification? For example: just being a neural net model is not a reasonable justification, but a neural net model witch has local update rules (like Hebbian learning) and models neurons more realistically (instead of just saying they are a sigmoid function without any further biological justification) would be fine. General non-connectionist frameworks with empirical justification are also of interest, even if they don't have a solid reductionist account.
Notes
I have asked an alternate version of this question on Linguistics.SE that focuses on language acquisition instead of general learning, but considers both children and adults.

Here's something I dug up for language: a Computer Science Thesis from Boulder:

The Sensorimotor Foundations of Phonology: A Computational Model of Early Childhood Articulatory and Phonetic Development (1994)

it discusses what it calls HABLAR (Hierarchical Articulatory Based Language
Acquisition by Reinforcement learning).

From the reductionist/biology side, developing brains have a much higher population of gap junctions.  I would speculate that this would create a much more analog brain, as gap junctions are modeled diffusively, unlike synaptic connections, which can be modeled in a more binary way.  I would speculate that the analog driving of the environmental and genetic signals leads to the formation and orgnaization of the synaptic connectivity.

I wonder if one could find a correlation between plasticity and gap junctions.  They are found to connect axons laterally in hippocampal cells (a region of brain that remains plastic through adulthood)


Why does a higher post-synaptic cell resistance lead to a higher voltage change when current is applied? In the "Principles of Neural Science" 5th edition in the discussion about electrical synapses it says:

  During excitatory synaptic transmission at an electrical synapse, voltage-gated ion channels in the presynaptic cell generate the current that depolarizes the postsynaptic cell. Thus these channels not only depolarize the presynaptic cell above the threshold for an action potential but also generate sufficient ionic current to produce a change in potential in the postsynaptic cell.

  To generate such a large current, the presynaptic terminal must be big enough for its membrane to contain many ion channels. At the same time, the postsynaptic cell must be relatively small. This is because a small cell has a higher input resistance (Rin) than a large cell and, according to Ohm's law (V = I x Rin), undergoes a greater voltage change in response to a given presynaptic current (I).

I get that Ohm's law states this, but what is really going on? Why should the resistance encountered by charge as it is moving through gap-junctions from the presynaptic to the postsynaptic cell affect the voltage (electrical potential) across the membrane of the postsynaptic cell with its environment. Once the charge gets to the postsynaptic cell, it seems like it should no longer be affected by the resistance it encountered along the way.

If you consider the electrical synapse a simple series RC circuit, with the resistance in the synapse and the capacitor as the postsynaptic cell, then you are correct that the value of R only changes the charge time for the capacitor (from a DC source, but not it's final voltage (at t = infinity).

($\tau = RC$)

On the other hand, this model is too simplistic for the electrical synapse because you also have losses (discharge) to the outside of the cells. Image from the book:

And a more realistic circuit is created with extra (parallel) resistors below for the extracellular discharge. Note what happens when the 2nd resistor (discharge of postsynaptic cell to inter-cellular space) is introduced in the circuit (switch closed): the voltage charge on capacitor drops significantly.

You basically have to "beat" or minimize this voltage drop, and one way to do this is to have a lower series resistor (another is of course a higher isolation [i.e. resistor] from the intercellular space). When the synapse resistance is 10 times lower than in the previous circuit, the voltage drop on the synapse is much lower, and so the voltage on the capacitor is higher, even with the switch closed:

You can play with the circuit here; it's set for the first set of resistor values; you need to right-click on a resistor and pick "edit" to change it's value; I could have added another switch and resistor to achieve that change for the synapse... but I didn't want to complicate the circuit conceptually.


How much can users hold in their short term memory I recently undertook a questionnaire and was asked a question about short term memory. One that I just can't find an answer to at all as it seems to be so contradictory.

This got me curious. How much can a user generally remember when viewing a website? There are various research papers on this including Heyer and Barrett (1974) and Shulman (1970).

The question was:

Research has shown that short-term memory is fragile. Which of the statements below is more accurate in describing how much information we can remember and for how long?

The amount you can remember is equal to about what you can say in 20 seconds, you will be able to hold this remembered amount in short-term memory for about 40 seconds.
The amount you can remember is equal to about what you can say in 30 seconds, you will be able to hold this remembered amount in short-term memory for about 20 seconds.
The amount you can remember is equal to about what you can say in 20 seconds, you will be able to hold this remembered amount in short-term memory for about 10 seconds.
The amount you can remember is equal to about what you can say in 20 seconds, you will be able to hold this remembered amount in short-term memory for about 20 seconds.

Does anybody know the definitive answer to this or, like me,

This is a very simple question with no single answer, I'm afraid. The other classic paper quoted in this context is Miller's "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two" (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two). In the case of a user using a website, memory will also be affected by:

Familiarity with the subject. Is the website about a topic the user is intimately familiar with, or something completely new (unlikely) or somewhere in between?
Available contextual information. Can the user quickly get to supporting information? In which case, the load on memory may effectively be reduced
The extent to which the information presented on the site is related. The key message of Miller's paper is that people group ('chunk') information in order to reduce memory load

Not sure if your question relates to a specific problem, or if it's a general query, but things like memory limits are hard to define absolutely, hence testing should always take place in as realistic a context as possible.


Why are people inclined to praise or fear the unknown? Human beings are inclined to "praise" the unknown, and are often afraid of the unknown. This inclination has led to the creation of mythology and many gods. To this date we are still carrying this habit on our daily lives.

"Oh, look at these crop circles, aliens must have created them!"
"Oh, he can bend the spoon! He must have psychic power!"
"Nah, earth must be standing over the oxen horns, otherwise it would fall down!"
"It makes sense! You adjust your balance with the wrist band exerting bioenergy! Here I come!"
"I can gain 6 pack with this Nano-Ultra-Mega-AB-Shaper. It has "nano", so it must be working, no?"
"Since we are surrounded by energy, some chosen ones might bend it right? We call it reiki!"
"Since you have a BS degree. You must be a heck of a genius! Now can you please answer this question of geography/history/so on?" (I usually encounter such questions from ignorant people. They regard me as Mr. Know it all, as they don't know what university infact is.)
and most striking example of all is God of the Gaps.

To further exemplify my claim, Wikipedia quotes God of the Gaps as a variant of argument from ignorance.

  The term God-of-the-gaps argument can refer to a position that assumes
  an act of God as the explanation for an unknown phenomenon, which is a
  variant of an argument from ignorance.[9][10] Such an argument is
  sometimes reduced to the following form:

  There is a gap in understanding of some aspect of the natural world.
  Therefore the cause must be supernatural.

  One example of such an argument, which uses God as an explanation of
  one of the current gaps in biological science, is as follows: "Because
  current science can't figure out exactly how life started, it must be
  God who caused life to start."

But this answer is rather specific and not satisfying for me. I think there lies a cognitive bias that drives human beings to prefer to praise/fear the unknown over showing reasoning and critical thinking when we are faced to the unknown.

Update: This scene from The Gods Must Be Crazy is spot on! Don't miss it :)

Questions

Does scientific research support the claims made above about the importance of this tendency to praise or fear the unknown?
Is there an exact term for this tendency? Is Occam's Razor the right term for this?
What does scientific research tell us about why humans have this tendency?

In the book "Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief", Wolpert (2007) discusses the evolutionary origins of belief.

Although I haven't read it yet, abc news reviewed the book.

  Wolpert argues that our wide range of beliefs, some of which are
  clearly false, grew out of a uniquely human trait. Alone in the animal
  world, humans understand cause and effect, and that, he says, led
  ultimately to the invention of tools, the rapid rise of sophisticated
  technology, and of course, beliefs. Even the earliest humans
  understood that many events that shaped their lives resulted from
  specific causes. Therefore, there must be a cause behind every event.

  ...

  We want to believe there is a reason for it all, and that leaves
  us predisposed to believe in some things for which there is little or
  no evidence. If a certain belief makes sense out of an otherwise
  senseless event, then it must be true, right?


Can anxiety cause a heart attack, black-out or insanity? David Burns in his self-help book about overcoming depression, anxiety and interpersonal problems called The Feeling Good Handbook¹ states:

  ...neurotic anxiety results from distorted thoughts that have little to no basis in reality. If you are having a panic attack, you may believe that something terrible will happen if you let your anxiety get out of hand. You might think you'll pass out from a stroke or have a heart attack or go crazy. Although these fears seem legitimate, they're quite unrealistic because: (1) Anxiety never causes strokes or heart attacks. (2) Most people who are afraid of passing out during a panic attack have never once passed out when in a state of panic. In fact, you cannot pass out during a panic attack because your heart is beating rapidly and pumping extra blood to the brain. (3) Panic attacks never lead to insanity or loss of control. You are worrying about something that's blatantly unrealistic.

This is a revelation to me. Is it true that it is impossible for a panic attack to cause heart attacks? black-outs? insanity? If there are exceptions, how are they explained? Does this extend to all forms of anxiety, fears and phobias, not only panic attacks?

¹ Part III “Feeling confident: how to conquer anxiety, fears, and phobias”, Chapter 11: “Understanding anxiety”, page 212.

Recently we had and interesting symposium on stres, anxiety and psychoimunology.
Guest were psychologists from UCLA stresslab
In this website: http://www.uclastresslab.org/
you can find a bunch of researches which conect various human mental conditions (including anxiety) with interkulin 6 and cortisol. Those two supstances are conected to hearth attack and other diseases.
I hope this helps.


Is it usually worthwhile to argue to try to convince someone? I find from personal life experience that arguing with someone is hardly a good way to try to convince someone of something. You might end up getting whatever you'd like from the person you are trying to convince, but not because you have convinced him or her; it's more likely he ends up doing what you want because he or she is tired from arguing or fed up with it.

I think this can be seen easily in discussion forums on the internet where there are some things that are repeated over... and over... and over... And very few people seem to be convinced by what the other people say, so it's unlikely to be a good way to try to convince someone.

Is there any study of these problems?

Plenty. The elaboration likelihood model compares the efficacy of persuasive argument under various conditions – this wouldn't be worthwhile if its efficacy were zero. Attention plays an important role: if an audience is inattentive, the semantic content of an argument may matter less than other factors involved in persuasion.

Reactance is also relevant in that arguing with a particularly resistant audience may result in even less compliance and more opposition. This has been studied empirically. It is also not universal; reactance varies with personality and other developmental factors. Thus both compliance and resistance exhibit variation empirically – enough to make persuasive argumentation viable with some people some of the time. This conclusion is also the corollary of a popular (if unscientific) aphorism:

  You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. — Paraphrased from Jacques Abbadie


When a group of people laugh, people will instinctively look at the person they feel closest to in that group Many people online seem to claim that:

  When a group of people laugh, people will instinctively look at the person they feel closest to in that group.

You can find the claim in 31 Psychological Life Hacks That You Can Exploit To Give Yourself An Advantage In Social Settings by thoughtcatalog.com.

Thoughtcatalog.com wrote under the claim:

  Read: wanna know who wants to bone who? Look at who they look at when everyone laughs.

It seems they were referring to a book, but I couldn't find it online.
The claim is also found by distracity in a post showing psychological life hacks that'll make you more successful.

The claim is widely and internationaly believed, a simple google query will show you.

Is it true? If so, I'm looking for a reference or some explanation for this.

I suspect the claims were distorted versions of what was found in the study below. It supports a weaker form of the above claims: the idea that a person would often look at someone they are socially close to when laughing in a group setting, but not necessarily at the socially closest person.

From McAdams, et. al. (1984):

  [High scores on] intimacy motivation was positively associated with
  greater levels of laughter, smiling, and eye contact.

  Along with non verbal behaviors [...], looking, laughter, and smiling have been classified as cues of [...] "intimacy".

  Harper et al. (1978) conclude: "With some exceptions and qualifications, the research to date shows a direct relationship between looking and positive interpersonal sentiment" (p. 189)

  Rubin (1970) found that the amount of time in which the couple engaged in mutual eye contact during a laboratory session was positively correlated with their score on a questionnaire measure of love intensity.

  Observing adults interacting in dyads, Rosenfeld (1966) found that the frequency of smiling significantly differentiated between those subjects instructed to seek approval and those instructed to avoid approval from the other.

Anecdotally, it would seem very strange that in a group setting with multiple acquaintances (for example at a dinner table with friends/family), two people would only look at each other every time a joke is made. In settings where social closeness disparity is larger (e.g. at a comedy club show) it seems obvious that two people who went to the show together would look at each other when a joke is made.

The larger point is the usefulness of the laughter-eye-contact response. The response would be useful to gauge more general "who knows who" information, but would probably not be specific to any previous or desired sexual encounters.


Why do some people refuse to wear their seat belt while being aware of the risks? I have multiple friends that simply refuse to wear their seat belt whenever they ride in a car. I make them wear it when in my car, but in any other situation they choose to go without it. They are all aware of the risks of not wearing their seat belt and the implications of even the smallest car accident, so a lack of knowledge is not the problem. Also, I consider them all quite intelligent people, so the ignorance of such a simple task that can be life saving blows my mind.

I cannot see it a denial of evidence because they agree with my side of reasoning, and my question is not specific to my friends, so I am asking why would anyone who knows all the facts still proceed without a seat belt?

I think this is a rather difficult question to answer. Psychology Today sums up some interesting reasons why people totally aware of the risks involved in not wearing a seat belt (or in smoking tobacco products, alcohol abuse, dangerous driving...), still choose not to wear one (light up another cigarette etc.):

Justification of risky behavior may be re-enforced by unreliable anecdotes that "show" how safe it is. For example, a friend or relative never wears a seat belt and smokes every day. People can use this as 'evidence' that not buckling up or smoking are perfectly safe. The dreaded remark comes to mind that "My grampa smokes three packs a day and is in his nineties - now ciggies can't be that bad...".
In that same line, personal anecdotes can reinforce risky behavior. If it hasn't happened yet, it will never happen. When people have never worn a seat belt for the last five years, they may start assuming that it is safe, because nothing has happened. They believe in the pattern, rather than considering that that luck may well be running out. I never use a seat belt may be used as an argument to conclude that the absence of a bad outcome is evidence that one is somehow 'immune' to the danger involved.
The small statistical chances involved may be used consciously or subconsciously as excuse. When we think about taking another smoke, overeating, drinking yet another beer, or not wearing a seat-belt we often think There's very little chance that the next time it will kill me. This is all too true. The next cigarette may not, and in fact very likely will not, kill you. But what if this is your continual belief for the next 350,000 cigarettes during your lifetime? It may not be that the next cigarette will kill you, but it may be true that holding onto this belief will kill you, eventually.

All of these risks involve a sort of "near-sightedness". We focus on the next one-not on the long string of behaviors. We tend to think that the "next time I go out driving without my seat-belt, there is a very low probability that I will get killed". This is true, but each time increases the probability.

The underlying problem is that our primitive brains battles itself over short-term rewards versus long-term goals. As a regular quitter of smoking (I've stopped so, so many times) I know this more than anyone. The short-term reward is more important than the long run. Impulsive choices or preferences for short-term rewards result from the emotion-related parts of the brain winning out over the abstract-reasoning parts. Psychological factors other than pure reasoning often drive people's decisions, for example the small nuisance of the seat belt or the dangers of long-term smoking loose over the improved comfort of driving without a seat belt and activating the dopamine release in our limbic system when smoking a ciggie.

Our evolutionary more ancient emotional limbic brain has a hard time imagining the future, even though our logical, evolutionary more recent neocortical brain (Fig. 1) clearly sees the future consequences of our current actions. Our emotional brain wants to max out that credit card, order dessert and smoke a cigarette. Our logical brain knows we should save for retirement, go for a jog and quit smoking. Quite apparently, the primitive emotional brain often tips the balance and defeats the newer evolved logical brain.

Fig. 1. The three brain areas. source: Big Commerce


If the instructions of a group intelligence test are misunderstood, are the results of that test invalid? For example, a researcher is investigating synonyms and prepares a test.  A participant undertaking the test incorrectly interprets the instructions, and understands the test to relate to antonyms rather than synonyms.
Does this then make the test results invalid?

Kelley (1927) constructed test validity as:

The problem of validity is that of whether a test really measures what it purports to measure, while the question of reliability is that of how accurately a test measures the thing which it does measure.

In the example provided, the test purports to measure some aspect of synonyms.  The test actually (due to the misinterpretation) measures antonyms.  Therefore, in the example provided, the test is not valid.  If it were to argued that it was a valid test of synonyms, then you would also have to admit that it was not reliable and/or accurate.
Kelley's construction of validity remains in common use and adequate for the example provided.  For a more complete view of validity, see Boag (2015).
References
Kelley, T. L. (1927). Interpretation of educational measurements. World Book. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.$b239527
Boag, S. (2015). Personality assessment,‘construct validity’, and the significance of theory. Personality and Individual Differences, 84, 36-44. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2014.12.039


How long does a spiking signal last? It is surprisingly hard to find information about the timing of neurons, in particular how long an action potential can contribute to the summation of a neuron. Is it on the order of milliseconds or seconds, i.e. for a neuron to fire, do many of the presynaptic neurons fire about at the same time?

Many of the neurons in the auditory system have voltage-gated low threshold potassium channels which allow neurons to maintain high firing rates and high temporal acuity. This makes the auditory system a good candidate for finding "fast" neurons. McGineley and Oertel (2006) looked at temporal integration in the ventral cochlear nucleus of the auditory system and found that the integration window was as low as 1.4 ms for octopus cells and of "unlimited" duration for T stellate cells.

I think, but I do not know how to calculate an integration window, that the cells of the Medial Superior Olive are even faster. These cells need to encode differences in timing between the ears on the order of 10s of microseconds.


Does studying flashcards, both front to back and back to front, decrease retention opposed to only memorizing one way? From this spaced repetition type flashcard user manual one can,
"create cards that go in both directions (e.g., both “ookii”→“big” and “big”→“ookii”)."

In other words, would studying two flashcards (both with the same content but in reverse order, lessen the benefits of studying right at the periphery (i.e., spaced repetition)?

Here is a related question: Are spaced flashcards effective for learning?

Any comments with relevant studies is welcome--along with help. Feel free to edit or add to any idea to make the question less unclear.

No, it just makes the intervals suboptimal. Either bury the card if the opposite side came recently or change the card to the direction it will usually appear. (Sometimes it will be the description first.) The forgetting curve, memorizing right at the periphery, will still go back up:

There is also the study done by Glenberg Smith & Green about this...

Anki is programmed to deal with similar "sibling" cards
The algorithm will bury them--except when learning...

https://www.quora.com/topic/Spaced-Repetition
https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/
https://anki.tenderapp.com/


How many synapses in the average human brain? Knowing there are 100,000,000,000 neurons in an average human brain, and 7,000 dendrites in each neuron, and neurons are connected to each other by dendrites and axon terminals, how many synapses are there in an average human brain? (I don't know how many axon terminals per neuron there are on average.)

The human neocortex contains approximately 1.5x10^14 synapses, connecting its 19–23 billion neurons.

Source: Pakkenberg, B., Pelvig, D., Marner, L., Bundgaard, M. J., Gundersen, H. J. G., Nyengaard, J. R., & Regeur, L. (2003). Aging and the human neocortex. Experimental Gerontology, 38(1-2), 95-99. doi:10.1016/S0531-5565(02)00151-1


NEO-FFI $t$-score calculation I am a CS student who has to do an analysis on the NEO-FFI test. I have the results of the questionnaire, however, I couldn't find how to calculate t-scores or raw scores. There are lots of academic papers, but no one has the calculations in them.

There is an example from McCrae's paper.
Like in this example, I have the answers, but can't calculate the scores.

NEO FFI Scoring

The test manual describes how to calculate raw scores for the NEO-FFI. If you have been asked to do an analysis of the NEO-FFI then you should be given access to relevant details in the test manual. If you don't have access, you may wish to contact your local psychology department. They will often have a test library with the NEO-FFI manual. Alternatively, you can contact a test distributor, although there are often educational requirements in order to be allowed to purchase such a manual.

This website seems to provide a web description of how to obtain raw scores for the NEO FFI. For norm referenced scores such as t-scores, presumably you would need access to norm tables supplied in the test manual. One exception would be where you are using your own sample norms as the distribution. In this case of t-scores, you would convert raw scores to z-scores and then multiply by 10 and then add 50. See for example this article on standard scores.

General scoring advice

In general, when scoring psychological tests, the most common approach is to use a unit weighted sum or mean of items after item reversal. I have a post that describes this in more detail with reference to SPSS and R. So, you simply need to know which items belong to which scales and which items need reversing.


How does psychoanalytic theory explain the way in which projection works? According to psychoanalytic theory, people sometimes defend against their own unwanted motives, conflicts, and behavioral tendencies by identifying them and decrying them in other people. This has been called projection.

I don't understand the reasoning behind  Projection as a Defense Mechanism. I mean, why tell someone they lie when you are the one prone to lying? Why accuse other people of something they haven't done but what you most likely would do if you were in their position? In what way does this tendency help to deal with inner conflicts according to psychoanalytic theory?

Short answer:

Interestingly, even though the notion of projection has been intuitively appealing and plausible to many, the psychoanalytic explanation of how projection works has always been vague.

Long answer:

Sigmund Freud (1915) defined the "mechanism of projection" by explaining that engaging in it, the "ego" of a person "expels whatever within itself becomes a cause of unpleasure" (p. 136).

In a similar way, Anna Freud, who later worked on clarifying various defense mechanisms further, thought that projection allows people to get rid of painful thoughts: "The effect of the mechanism of projection is to break the connection between the ideational representatives of dangerous instinctual impulses and the ego" (p. 122).

Critics have noted that psychoanalytic writings have never explicated how exactly (by which process) projecting negative thoughts to others helps them in disconnecting these thoughts from the self.

Pointing to these criticisms and noting that empirical evidence in support of defensive projection has been scarce, Baumeister, Dale, and Sommer (1998, p. 1091), summarize

  In retrospect, it was never clear how seeing another person as dishonest (for example) would enable the individual to avoid recognizing his or her own dishonesty. The notion that projection would effectively mask one’s own bad traits was perhaps incoherent.

Newman, Duff, and Baumeister (1997) propose and test an alternative, social-cognitive account of defensive projection. They posit that people often try hard to suppress unwanted thoughts. However, ironically, doing so makes such tthoughts all the more accessible (because when you try not to think about something, you constantly think about it). These accessible thoughts can then also color people's impression of others. This would then just be a by-product of trying to suppress unwanted thoughts about the self and not the core of a defense mechanism.

In addition, it is important to note that the term projection is also used in a more general sense, to describe people's tendency to overestimate the presence of their own characteristics, beliefs, and attitudes in others. This tendency results, for example, in the false consensus effect (see this earlier question), for which there is ample evidence. This general notion of projection is different from the Freudian one in that it is not limited to negative attributes but happens also for positive attributes the self. Various cognitive and motivational mechanisms have been proposed for this more general phenomenon (see Baumeister, et al., 1998, for example, for some pointers).

References

Baumeister, R. F., Dale, K., & Sommer, K. L. (1998). Freudian defense mechanisms and empirical findings in modern social psychology: Reaction formation, projection, displacement, undoing, isolation, sublimation, and denial. Journal of Personality, Defense mechanisms in contemporary personality research, 66, 1081–1124. doi:10.1111/1467-6494.00043

Freud, A. (1936/1992). The ego and the mechanisms of defence. London: Karnac Books.

Freud, S. (1915). Instincts and their Vicissitudes. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, 109-140

Newman, L. S., Duff, K. J., & Baumeister, R. F. (1997). A new look at defensive projection: Thought suppression, accessibility, and biased person perception. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72, 980–1001. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.72.5.980


Why does injury cause brief unconsciousness? I suppose I'm thinking specifically about head injuries, though this question applies to any injury that causes unconsciousness for, say, a few minutes. If you would revive so soon, why would you fall unconscious in the first place? What exactly is happening physiologically during brief unconsciousness? Is it a sort of healing process? Once you're unconscious in cases like this, what causes revival? Also, is such unconsciousness on the same spectrum as coma, physiologically, or do they have different causes and/or mechanisms?

Loss of consciousness is usually caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain - in the case of injury it could be directly cause by the injury or it may be because they are shocked or scared - this is called vasovagal syncope. Basically, severe emotional stress leads to a burst of activity in particular nerves that lead to reduced heart rate and dilation of vessels throughout the body, reducing blood pressure suddenly. The effect is temporarily reduced blood flow to the brain, which causes temporary loss of consciousness.

Wiki


Why so few subjects in psychophysics? Why is it that most psychophysics experiments only use a handful of subjects (typically around five, but sometimes even four, three or two), whereas the "norm" for experimental psychology (assuming a medium effect size) is around N=25? Is the motivation to reduce sampling error and increase external validity not the same for psychophysics as it is for e.g. decision-making experiments? Or is it the case that individual differences are smaller in perception than they are in cognition?

It is partly as you already guessed, because the phenomena that are studied don't vary as much between individuals. This doesn't necessarily mean that individual differences in perception are smaller, it means that individual differences in those aspects of perception that are studied in psychophysics are smaller.

Another reason is that it is customary in psychophysics to instead use large numbers of stimuli - sometimes thousands - thus making sure that the estimate per individual is very precise. In that sense the more cognitive topics are much more underpowered, often employing groups of several tens of stimuli to generalize about entire classes of objects.


What are the IQ correlations between relatives? Bouchard and McGue (1981) wrote a review article (linked here) that summarized the correlations between relatives.

McGue asserted in a recent talk (that I'm not able to link) that he's not aware of any more recent work that has updated these figures.

However, I suspect that during the last 25 years something must have been done.

I am most interested in the figures for genetically related reared-together relatives, although data on genetically unrelated people reared-together and genetically related reared-apart relatives would also be welcome.

Here are the 1981 correlations for genetically related reared-together relatives.

Bouchard, T. J., & McGue, M. (1981). Familial studies of intelligence: A review. Science, 212(4498), 1055-1059.

Recent studies on this topic deal with more detailed questions, that are analysed using structural equation models (Deary et al., 2006). A main goal has been the identification of specific genes. No single genes have been found until today and Sternberg (2012) also points out that the concept of heritability itself is indirect and maybe inappropriate if measured as ratio of genetic variation, because of neglection of cultural factors.

But yes, there has been a meta-analysis since Bouchard and McGue: Daniels et al. (1997) argue for maternal womb effects, that explain "20% of covariance between twins and 5% between siblings". E. g. the IQ correlation for monozygotic twins being raised together is reported as r=.85. Correlations for dizygotic twins raised together are reported as from r=.46 to .60, siblings IQ values correlate from .44 to .46, depending on the statistical model used. In regard to correlations, the findings seem very comparable to Bouchard and McGue's.

And of course, occasionally there have been studies on this fundamental topic, e.g Van Leeuwen (2008), Pujol et al. (2007).

Literature

Daniels, M., Devlin, B., & Roeder, K. (1997). The heritability of IQ. In Nature (Bd. 388, S. 468–471). LONDON: MACMILLAN MAGAZINES LTD. doi:10.1038/41319
Nichols, R. C. (1965). The national merit twin study. Methods and goals in human behavior genetic, 231-244.
Van Leeuwen, M., van den Berg, S. M., & Boomsma, D. I. (2008). A twin-family study of general IQ. In Learning and Individual Differences (Bd. 18, S. 76–88). AMSTERDAM: Elsevier Inc. doi:10.1016/j.lindif.2007.04.006
David Gallardo Pujol, Uwe Kramp, Carlos García-Forero, Albert Maydeu-Olivares, und Antonio Andrés-Pueyo. (2007). IQ heritability estimation: Analyzing genetically-informative datawith structural equation models. In Psicothema. Universidad de Oviedo.
Wahlsten, D. (1994). The intelligence of heritability. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie canadienne, 35(3), 244.
Sternberg, R. J. (2012). Intelligence. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 3(5), 501-511.


Why is music more addictive than film? From my personal experience and from the (anecdotal) evidence it seems like music is way more addictive (for the lack of a better word) than film (movies).
For instance, when a new record from my favorite singer or band is released, I can listen to it a few times a day for several days or maybe even weeks. And then the frequency slowly tapers off, but I can still listen to it every week or month for many many years.
For film it is completely different story. Even the movies that I consider absolute masterpieces, I would rewatch it maybe once every 6 months / year.
Why is it the case? Is it because visual media is more... intense, rich, contains more "meaning" per unit of display?
But even if that's the case, I would doubt it would explain such dramatic difference in watching / listening frequencies - once per 6 months and hundreds of times.

You guessed it.
Listening to music is a passive activity. It causes no mental burden or stimuli to your thoughts. It is just allowing sound frequencies manipulate your brain and evoke whatever feelings they do in your mind. Whereas for watching movies, you need focus, to follow the story, and make sure you don't miss details. Human characters are involved, evoking love, happiness, disappointment, anger, stress, uncertainty, jealousy, envy, et; a huge emotional and mental burden. Very different from the relax "la-la land" world of music.


Schwartz Value Survey (SVS) I am looking for the Schwartz Value Survey (SVS; Schwartz, 1992). I seem to have found a copy here in the appendix of this paper but I'm not quite sure if it is okay to use it the way it is presented, or if I need permission to use this scale in my research. I would appreciate any help; thanks in advance.

The first Schwartz Value Survey (SVS) was published in 1992 which consisted of 56 items. Since then, it has gone through a couple changes. A current version employs 57 items. The SVS56 and SVS57 are different, with one item changed and one item added in the SVS57. Schwartz & Sagiv (1995) is the first article using the SVS57.

A 'face' item was added in 2004, the final survey consisting of 58 items.

The SVS57 is available here with a short scoring key included as well. However, I recommend going through the full manual with additional resources, available here.


What's the function of the clean-up memory in SPA? When I read about cognitive models that use the Semantic Pointer Architecture (SPA), such as a model for general intelligence, I often see a component called the "clean-up memory"? What's the function of this component and how does it function vary from SPA model to SPA model?

SPA is used (among other things) for combining (binding) and extracting (unbinding) knowledge representations for processing. This is a (purposely) lossy compression. In the "Learning Rule Generation for Induction" case, the clean-up memory is used to convert a general transformation that is being learned (lots of different transformations convolved together) into a transformation that is already known. So basically it's associating the in-progress transformation to a known transformation.

This is why the "clean-up memory" is also called the "associative memory" in other SPA models and in Nengo 2.0.


How could siblings rivalry / jealousy be useful to human evolution? It looks like a useless burden and a waste of energy, why it evolved?

First, it must be understood that not all traits in an animal are evolved or selected traits – some are only variations. Some of these variations may be selected by some evolutionary pressure in the future and then become evolved or selected traits.

For example, each of the various hair colors (black, brown, blond, red, white, etc.) is not an evolved or selected trait – all of them are only variations in hair colors. For now, there is no evolutionary pressure to select any of them, so present-day people have various hair colors. But suppose there is a strange disease that gradually kills off people who do not have blond hair; then the blond hair will be selected by this evolutionary pressure. And after some time, there will be only people (or the majority of people) with blond hair. At this stage, the blond hair will become a selected trait. These also happened to the variation of the finch’s beaks in Galapagos, some of which were selected by evolutionary pressure in some specific ecological niches. This pressure led to speciation that resulted in various kinds of finches that Darwin found in various niches. So were true for variations in appendages, which at first were in in-complete forms but later were selected by evolutionary pressure in various ecological niches and evolved into arms, wings, and fins.

How do we know that a trait is an evolved/selected trait or a variation of a trait? One important characteristic is that, if it’s an evolved/selected trait, it will appear in all or in the majority of that species. So, for example, the human hand, the bird wing, and the fish gill appear in all humans, birds, and fish – these are evolved/selected traits.

Yet, not all traits that are present in all/the majority of a species always are evolved/selected traits. Some may be just vestigial traits or just results of genetic drifts (see Evolution’s Useless Traits). But these are exceptions rather than the general rules.

The general rules of evolution are variations in traits, competition, differential production/survival among different traits, and heritability of (some) traits (Natural selection, Natural Selection – Wikipedia).

For the case in question, siblings jealousy/rivalry that is strong or destructive does not seem to be an evolved/selected trait because it does not occur in all humans and not in the majority of human families. It’s probably just a variation trait in some families. And minor jealousy/rivalry is not an evolved/selected trait either. It is probably just one emotion of several emotions that the versatile amygdala (and other emotion-creating neural centers) can produce (to flag various kinds of stimuli that an animal encounters). The amygdala is the evolved/selected trait; any of the various emotions (including sibling jealousy/rivalry) that it can produce is not.


Analysis of psychology/sociology of fashion? I'm looking for some good place to start read about sociology of fashion. I guess there are some researches about why people "invented" fashion and is it some natural for human as a biological species or it is accidentally happened social phenomenon.

Is there some social functions of fashion? I suppose that from the anti-capitalism point of view fashion cult is a just a consequence of consumer society, but maybe there some scientific studies of psychology and sociology of fashion and it's social functions?

Mair, C. (2019). Speaking of Psychology: Psychology of Fashion. Retrieved August 25, 2020, from https://www.apa.org/research/action/speaking-of-psychology/fashion


How do you denoise and extract features from EEG data with Python? I have EEG data with 5 columns (1 per each electrode) and I need to denoise it and extract features from it using Python. I tried to find relevant packages but my search kept leading me to MNE which takes as input data in a format that I don't have. My data is in a pandas dataframe.

my questions are:

How do you denoise such dataset?
How do you do feature extraction for it?

Thanks :)

you can convert your data frame to numpy array using

data=df.to_numpy()

If your data is single trial meanining two dimensional dataset, you can use

channel_names=df.columns.tolist()
channel_types=len(channel_names)*['eeg']
sfreq = 1000  # in Hertz
montage = 'standard_1005'
info = mne.create_info(channel_names, sfreq, channel_types, montage)
raw = mne.io.RawArray(data, info)

If you have multitrials dataset

channel_names=df.columns.tolist()
channel_types=len(channel_names)*['eeg']
sfreq = 1000  # in Hertz
montage = 'standard_1005'
info = mne.create_info(channel_names, sfreq, channel_types, montage)
data=data.reshape(len(channel_names),-1,sfreq*time)
data=np.swapaxes(data,0,1)
epochs = mne.EpochsArray(sub, info)

Once you convert your dataset to mne structure, you can use mne filters and mne features


Why does repeating one word over and over again sound weird to us after some time? This effect seems to be observed with almost any word. I would say this phenomenon 'works' for longer and complex words better.

When we repeat a word over and over again, it starts to sound very weird and become only a bunch of repeating sounds. You don't even need to repeat it quickly.

Why does a word repeated many times lose its meaning and the brain can't recognize it properly any more?

This is called semantic saturation, or semantic satiation; studies of event-related potentials (brain waves) suggest that it is negatively correlated with N400 amplitude (the subjective experience of satiation increases as the N400 amplitude decreases) without any change to upstream sensory components.  As N400 amplitude indexes initial lexical integration--that is, understanding the word at hand in relation to the words that preceded it--this sugggests that semantic satiation is in fact due to some kind of habituation in the semantic processes, and not in upstream sensory processing.

Citations:
Wikipedia on Semantic saturation

Kounios, J., Kotz, S. A., & Holcomb, P. J. (2000). On the locus of the semantic satiation effect: Evidence from event-related brain potentials. Memory & cognition, 28(8), 1366-1377.


Does knowledge of tests like Iowa Gambling and Wisconsin Card-Sorting task enable a person to fake the test? I am interested in tests like the Iowa gambling test and the Wisconsin card-sorting test.
If a patient understands how such a test works and the goals of the test, does this bias the measure obtained? What test-taker can fake via higher cognitive function that might be intact, and what will be impossible to fake?

I imagine that the speed of taking a test might be a limiting factor. So  if the rate of card picking is high, a patient may perform in a default way and be unable to apply higher cognitive control. Or if the patient tries to beat the test using knowledge about it, this will be evident in that the patient will take more time.

Yes, knowing they are under an Iowa (or Wisconsin) test will change their behavior---and most likely create all sorts of biases in the results.

And you're probably right; time constraints will most likely place subjects into system1 thinking.

Subjects' having knowledge about an experiment may generally ruin it, for it can make testability collapse (how will others reproduce the results?).  There are, moreover, all sorts of confounding factors that may directly influence subjects' behavior. Also, one cannot argue that 'they were concentrated on the task at hand', as they knew what was expected.  One of the basis of empiricism is to not intervene (as in the Milgram Authority experiment, for instance). In most experiments, subjects will either hear a fairytale story of what they are being asked to do, or are simply told no background story.  For example, experiments on priming with money generally hide the goals from subjects  (See also Bargh and colleagues experiments on priming, which follow the same route, and were considered extremely controversial by psychologists until the last years).

Of course, this is not a straightjacket rule.  One can do psychological experiments in which the subjects know what they must do and they should only "respond truthfully".  Perhaps the most famous example of those was Ariely's "adult" experiment (It's quite a read).  I have also conducted experiments in which subjects knew the goals completely, but one (control) group could not achieve it (low-skill group versus high-skill group, such as chess grandmasters). Ideally, however, subjects should be blind to the actual objective of the test conducted.


Is it possible to raise the complexity of what you can mentally process? I know that I can solve some simple systems of linear equations in my head by visualizing the terms and moving them. But if I don't concentrate enough, it gets blurry quite fast.
In the same way, I can remember some structure of an algorithm, a mathematical proof or a speech, but not with details. In the same way, I tend to forget the first elements if I add new ones.

I feel that, by saying that, I mix at least two things:

what I have heard as a "mind limit", around 3 or 4 elements anyone can process at the sale time, or recognize visually without counting them
memory, which you can theoretically train to store large amounts of elements

What can be trained, and how, to be able to process more elements at the same time? Even if there's a hard mind limit, is it possible to make playing mentally with N elements much clearer, and how?

I think the answer you are looking for is chunking.

  A chunk is defined as a familiar collection of more elementary units
  that have been inter-associated and stored in memory repeatedly and
  act as a coherent, integrated group when retrieved (Tulving & Craik,
  2000). It is believed that individuals create higher order cognitive
  representations of the items on the list that are more easily
  remembered as a group than as individual items themselves.

The repeated exposure unconsiously creates chunks of many elements that are stored in long term memory, which are retreived as whole units in the working memory. In this case the limit is 3-4 chunks, each composed of many elements.

It is sometimes possible though, if needed, to consiously decompose the chunk into its elements in working memory, but in this case only 3-4 items of the decomposed chunk can be active in the working memory.


Do persons with autism have a bigger genetic predisposition to psychosis/schizophrenia? Do people with autism or Asperger's syndrome have a higher genetic predisposition to psychosis or schizophrenia than that of healthy people?

Generally speaking, yes; it's relatively more common for psychosis to be comorbid with or present after diagnosed Autism.

For a good overview of this topic read Autism and Schizophrenia (Yael Dvir, MD and Jean A. Frazier, MD).

  COS (Child Onset Schizophrenia)—the onset of psychosis before age 13 years—is considered a rare and severe form of schizophrenia. Systematic studies of COS show high rates of the disorder being either preceded by or comorbid with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD).7

Note however that the similar (but not identical) features between COS and Autism:

  Although the disorders are distinct, they have shared clinical features. Social withdrawal, communication impairment, and poor eye contact seen in ASD are similar to the negative symptoms seen in youths with schizophrenia.11 When higher-functioning individuals with autism are stressed, they become highly anxious and at times may appear thought-disordered and paranoid, particularly when they are asked to shift set (such as being asked to change a topic of conversation or to stop an activity that they are engaged in and begin a new activity).12 A subset of children (28%) in the ongoing NIMH study of COS have been reported to have comorbid COS and ASD.7

There's also likely a bit of sample bias going on; children presenting severe symptoms of either Autism or COS are logically much more likely to be seen by medical professionals than neurotypical children or those who may have Autism but present less significant external symptoms. So take the specific percentages with a grain of salt, but the two certainly seem to be related.


Does gender as a factor always make my experiment quasi-experimental? I remember reading in a lot of introductory psychology texts that since there can be no random assignment of gender as a factor, the experiment can only be seen as a quasi-experiment. How does this work? Does gender as a factor always make my experiment quasi-experimental?

If your experiment is preselecting and assigning participants non-randomly, such as using sex as the main factor to partition participant groups and responses, then yes it is quasi-experimental design. If the participant partitioning is random then this is not a quasi-experimental. However many studies may investigate sex differences as part of an exploratory analysis. You may investigate sex differences as a byproduct of a between-, within- or mixed-experimental designs to see if there are any sex differences influencing the data outside of the experimental manipulations. This does not make the design quasi, but is important to investigate because there are often differences between males and females in cognitive task performance e.g. working memory tasks, and neural activity. The examples I have given are easily found in papers on the areas I'm personally investigating at the moment (working memory) which are quasi-experimatal designs because sex was the main grouping factor, but differences can be found in a great many papers which were not looking at sex differences specifically.

Essentially the quasi design basically just means non-random assignment, and is useful in many study types not just for investigating sex differences. To summerise, quasi-design if preselected non-random assignment. Not quasi if used as part of exploratory analysis of a study using random group assignment to the experimental conditions.