Does dream recall disturb the processes of memory consolidation? Psychology in the time of Freud was occupied with dreams.  Relaying these to one's analyst was an important part of treatment.
Fast-forward to less than 100 years later, and we know so much about the importance of sleep in consolidating memories during REM [1][2] and slow-wave sleep [3] (among countless other references I have omitted).
Let us assume dreaming is largely relegated to REM (ignoring dreams experienced during stage 2 sleep). If we recall our dreams at a later time then is it detrimental to any subsequent process of memory consolidation?
If our dream represents a state through which our brain is passing to consolidate memory, what is the effect of recalling that intermediate state and potentially storing it back in long-term memory?

References

Ishikawa A, Kanayama Y., et al (2006). Selective rapid eye movement sleep deprivation impairs the maintenance of long-term potentiation in the rat hippocampus. Eur J Neurosci.,24 (1),243-8.

Louie K, Wilson MA. (2001). Temporally structured replay of awake hippocampal ensemble activity during rapid eye movement sleep. Neuron,29 (1),145-56. FREE PDF

Ji D, Wilson MA (2007) Coordinated memory replay in the visual cortex and hippocampus during sleep. Nat Neurosci, 10(1),100-7. FREE PDF

I am not aware of any study that specifically addresses dream recall, but there is a growing literature about "memory reconsolidation" or "post-reactivation plasticity", the idea that memory reactivation (recall) can temporarily return a memory to a state of high fragility and susceptibility to interference, after which a process similar to consolidation makes it more resistent again. Most  memory reconsolidation work has been with animals, but there are a few studies with human subjects [1][2]. [3] is an interesting paper about (re)consolidation of motor memory during slow-wave sleep. [4] and [5] are good reviews of the field.

[1] Hupbach, A., Gomez, R., Hardt, O., & Nadel, L. (2007). Reconsolidation of episodic memories: A subtle reminder triggers integration of new information. Learning & Memory, 14(1-2), 47 -53. doi:10.1101/lm.365707

[2] Forcato, C., Burgos, V. L., Argibay, P. F., Molina, V. A., Pedreira, M. E., & Maldonado, H. (2007). Reconsolidation of declarative memory in humans. Learning & Memory, 14(4), 295-303. doi:10.1101/lm.486107

[3] Walker, M. P., Brakefield, T., Hobson, J. A., & Stickgold, R. (2003). Dissociable stages of human memory consolidation and reconsolidation. Nature, 425(6958), 616–620. doi:10.1038/nature01930

[4] Nader, K., & Hardt, O. (2009). A single standard for memory: the case for reconsolidation. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10, 224–234. doi:10.1038/nrn2590

[5] Schiller, D., & Phelps, E. A. (2011). Does Reconsolidation Occur in Humans? Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 5. doi:10.3389/fnbeh.2011.00024


Why do we use relative signals and not absolute signals with EEG? Most EEG machines use a system based upon differential amplifiers to enhance the signal, a basic differential amplifier has 2 inputs and one output. the device takes 2 signals and outputs the difference between them (see this video). In short, the output is the difference between 2 signals and the differential amplifier discards the rest of the signal. But I think that possibly the current way of recording EEG could be encouraging loss of data due to ONLY looking for difference within EEG signals instead of analytical evaluation of absolute signals?
Why do we use relative signals and not absolute signals with EEG? Have there been any attempts to use absolute signals?

EEG measures voltage. By definition, voltage is an electric potential difference. There is no meaning of an "absolute" voltage, it's always a difference.
Yes, people "attempt" to measure a voltage with only one contact all the time, it happens whenever there is a broken channel or a failure of a ground wire. The result is an amplification of whatever other environmental signals can be picked up, dominated by AC current ("60/50-cycle noise"), radio waves, and other electromagnetic interference. A good ground wire is necessary to measure the small signals from the brain; something like an "Earth ground" would not be anywhere near sufficient.
You can get more local measures of voltage using electrodes in close proximity and measuring the potential between them rather than each against some other "ground". Usually these are depth electrodes in the brain.


What is the role of stress in the process of behaviour change (lifestyle)? Clarification: I am specifically looking at lifestyle behaviour change.

I suppose that stress can influence the process of behaviour change in many different ways. One would be just the changing of behaviour itself that will cause stress. However, stress may also cause behaviour change (say, one may initiate behaviour change because of the diagnosis of diabetes). In the end, the aim is to feel better with your new healthy lifestyle, which should result in lower stress levels.
This is my thinking based on a (non-literature-supported book) that I read, and now I am looking for scientific evidence for any of the influence stress may have in the process of behaviour change.
Also, any other theories as to how stress may play a role in the process of behaviour change?

If you suffer stress or anxiety, a chemical warfare gets underway within the body and if not dealt with effectively, everything starts to self-destruct.

Stress and anxiety will activate the Autonomic Nervous System and cause Cortisol levels to increase to get us ready for conflict and prevent wind-down, which in turn will lower Serotonin levels. The low levels of Serotonin will affect our ability to have a restful sleep and because Serotonin helps to relay messages from one area of the brain to another, the low levels will also affect the ability of your brain to act on information received as efficiently as it should. (WebMD 2015)

Noradrenalin is affected by stress and anxiety, and noradrenalin is another “feel good hormone”, which when imbalanced will affect many aspects of our system, one of which is energy levels causing us to feel lethargic and not wanting to bother with life.  Dopamine and endorphins are other happiness hormones which are affected by stress and anxiety affecting our ability to enjoy things, therefore it is no surprise that it can lead to depression.

Endorphins trigger a positive feeling in the body, similar to that of morphine. For example, the feeling that follows a run or workout is often described as "euphoric", which indicates the endorphine boosting effects of exercise. That feeling, known as a "runner's high," can be accompanied by a positive and energizing outlook on life.

As high levels of Cortisol and high levels of the "feel good hormones" cannot coincide together, the increase in endorphines will in turn lower Cortisol levels and therefore increase the Noradrenaline, Dopamine and Seratonin levels boosting the positive outlook on life.


What are "linear spatial weightings" and "specific temporal windows" in Philiastides & Sajda (2006)? I am undergraduate student in mathematics and a complete beginner in the field of neuroscience. I recently started a project in Mathematical biology which brought me to the above mentioned paper. I couldn't understand what is meant by the "linear spatial weightings" and "specific temporal windows" in the following passage :

  "We used a machine learning approach to identify linear spatial
  weightings of the EEG sensors for specific temporal windows which
  optimally discriminate between target (faces) and non-target (cars)
  trials."

I would really appreciate if someone could break these things down in simpler terms and if possible suggest me some sources to refer.
( I was wondering if the 'linear spatial weightings' here is similar to the concept of 'Center of mass' which can be said as 'linear spatial weightings' of mass; just a guess.And the 'specific temporal windows' is some continuous range in the 'time taken' (to respond to stimulus) axis. Again, only a guess.)

References

Philiastides, M. G., & Sajda, P. (2006). Temporal characterization of the neural correlates of perceptual decision making in the human brain. Cerebral Cortex, 16(4), 509-518.

I can make a guess, until someone who really knows the answer comes along :) I haven't read the paper and the answer I can give is probably not going to be formal enough for a math student. But I can tell you what I think.

The goal of the paper, I'm guessing, is to look at the pattern of activation recorded by EEG when viewing pictures of faces and cars, and to try to say if the two activity patterns differ. One way to so this is to show some faces and cars, look at EEG activity and tell your algorithm which is which. Then, after a training period, let your algorithm classify future input into faces and cars as well as it can. In the end, you want to see if it can classify above chance. If yes, then you can say with certainty that the pattern of neural activity between cars and faces differs.

You might then wonder how it differs. If this guesswork is correct, then temporal windows refers to moments in time when this pattern classification works best - for example, 150-200 milliseconds after the picture was displayed. This can tell you something about how much visual processing must happen before objects are seen as belonging to a certain category. If not done properly, though, you might just be detecting simple visual differences such as amount of information in a certain frequency band - not very exciting. A very early temporal window of best performance of your classifier algorithm would indicate that this is the case. In any case, you learn something from seeing where the best temporal window is.

Spatial weightings of the sensors refers to the difference in activity recorded in each of the individual EEG sensors. From that, you might infer that the difference between cars and faces is most prominent in, say,  frontal sensors, which gives you a hint about the possible brain areas involved in category classification. The linear I don't know what to make of unfortunately. It refers to the bit of the algorithm that decides how to classify these spatial patterns, perhaps by relying on how neural activity is spread over a distance (i.e. how activity originating at a certain place will be captured by the sensor just above it, and how by sensors further away), but to know what makes it linear, you would really need to see the algorithm.

Hope this helps!


Why is egocentrism bad? Let's say that there is a person. This person has a lot of good thoughts about themselves. Suppose this person never revealed these thoughts to anyone, such as "I'm better than you" in any manner of sort. But this person also happened to contribute to general society in some form.

Would it be a contradiction, then, to say this person is awful and immoral? Generally, narcissism is looked down upon, but here it seems to hold an evolutionary advantage.

It seems like a few distinctions are relevant here. First there is a distinction between morality and evolutionary adaptiveness. Overt displays of arrogance are often considered a character flaw and immoral. Whether being arrogant is beneficial from an evolutionary perspective is a very different question. Thus, it would not be a contradiction to say that something is both immoral and adaptive. At least it would not be a contradiction unless your morality was synonymous with whatever is evolutionarily adaptive. Similarly it is possible for someone to be immoral in some aspects of their life yet be functioning quite well and contributing something useful to society.

Second, there are a range of constructs that you are touching on including, self-esteem, arrogance, narcissism, and ego-cenrtricism. Self-esteem is generally seen as both a morally good thing and as an adaptive thing. Self-esteem is assumed to protect you from life's set backs and is often associated with more positive life behaviours. However, arrogance is different to self-esteem because arrogance is generally predicated on feeling that you are superior than someone else. Furthermore, I think that with arrogance and narcissism the assessment often extends to a deeper level, that not only does the person think they are more competent than someone else, but that they might even be a "better person" on some level.
Narcissism is often thought of as an unstable sense of superiority that can be threatened by others which in turn can lead to abusive behaviours by the narcissist. Ego-centricism is also complex in that it relates to a pre-occupation with one's own self with the concept grounded a lot in developmental processes from childhood, to adolescence, and then to adult hood of forming a better appreciation of private and public, and building a better representation of the external world.

In general scientific psychology does not directly concern itself with the morality of behaviour. You could apply moral principles to judge behaviour, but this would largely be a process of philosophical reasoning. By most moralities, treating others as less human than oneself would  be considered immoral. But more generally moralities differ in whether beliefs that never manifest in action are subject to moral judgement.

That said, scientific psychology is concerned with adaptiveness. So for example, ample research supports the idea that higher self-esteem is associated with greater adaptiveness. Similarly much evolutionary psychology speaks to the balancing of self-interest with effective social functioning. Thus, it make sense that a degree of self-interest may be adaptive, but when it gets to the narcissistic end of the spectrum, I would assume that this would be more inclined to interfere with effective social and life functioning. If anything, the need to feel superior to others may even imply a sense of inferiority.


How can fear be a positive emotion? Fear is something we all feel, and we typically experience it as negative.  It seems difficult to treat it as a positive emotion or find any satisfaction in overcoming it.

So my question is: Can people learn how to have positive experiences with being afraid?

So this may be long-winded, but I gotta get through some theoretical background first!

Conceptual Act Theory

If we take from the Conceptual Act Theory (CAT) of emotions (Barrett, 2014), then we can consider emotions like fear to be what are called "situated conceptualizations." This means that we feel an emotion when we make meaning out of our situated affective experiences (what CAT calls a "conceptual act").

For example, I'm making a conceptual act when I interpret (conceptualize) as fear my high arousal and negative affect in the context of anticipating a snake bite.  What this means is that I'm automatically categorizing my experience using an emotion concept (i.e. fear) that I've learned.

As Condon, Wilson-Mendenhall, & Barrett (2014) point out:

  Emotion concepts make affective changes in the body meaningful, guide action, allow communication about one’s state to another, and influence another’s mental state and actions.

So categorizing my experience as "fear" is just like categorizing a big gray moving thing with a trunk as an "elephant."  The elephant categorization makes meaning of the moving gray mass, allows me to compare it to other objects, communicate what I saw, guides my actions, etc.

Emotion Variability and Pleasant Fear

What's interesting about CAT is that it predicts tremendous variability in emotional experience. The ways in which we can conceptualize our situated affective experiences are vast.  In this sense, CAT might predict something like pleasant fear. I've shown you this image before (from Condon et al., 2014), but it's even more relevant here:

As you can see, our prototypical fear concept involves negative feelings.  We are very familiar with this negative fear concept, and so we can easily and automatically apply it to our affective experiences.

On the other hand, we never really talk about what it might mean to experience pleasant fear.  The pleasant fear concept is not in our folk taxonomy of emotions. We're unfamiliar with it. Thus, we'll have greater difficulties activating that concept and applying it to our experiences.

Conceptual Learning

So, can we learn to experience pleasant fear?  Yes!

But at the moment there's little empirical research on learning emotion concepts (in adulthood).  We can probably draw from the literature on emotion socialization in children (e.g., Widen & Russell, 2010), but I'm not personally convinced that we can make an easy parallel.

There is potentially some indirect evidence that there is rapid conceptual learning when exposing remote tribes to Western emotion concepts (Sauter, Eisner, Ekman & Scott, 2015, and a response by Gendron, Roberson, & Barrett, 2015).

Also, there's some emerging evidence (Kashdan, Barrett, & McKnight, 2015) that we can improve people's levels of "emotion granularity."  High emotion granularity means you label your affective experiences using many different emotion words (happy, sad, surprised, angry, remorseful, contemptuous, etc.).  Low granularity means less diverse labeling (happy, sad, good, bad).

So if we can teach people to make more fine-grained conceptualizations of their affective experiences (i.e., improve granularity), you can probably learn to experience pleasant fear.

Conclusion

This is a new and growing area of research, so you'll have to stay tuned for more direct evidence.  But overall, you can learn new emotion concepts like pleasant fear, and you can get better at using them with practice.

Emotion Utility (Edit)

It's also possible to treat negative fear as having positive utility (see Maya Tamir's work, e.g., here).  That is, even though fear might feel unpleasant, you might learn to view it as serving some adaptive function within certain contexts, e.g., facilitating quick withdrawal from danger.


Why does a British accent sound smarter to Americans? This question has to do with how people perceive other accents. It seems that having a British accent makes someone seem more intelligent, even though that isn’t always true.
As funny as it is, I think someone with a British accent could approach me and start talking about dogs sniffing each other’s butts and I would still think, “man, this guy really does knows what he’s talking about.”
I have done some searching, but it seems there isn’t a definite answer answer for why a British accent makes someone appear sophisticated.
The top answer here suggests that maybe the association has to do with people’s original perception of those people to begin with. If you thought British people were smart and you heard someone with what you thought was a British accent you may be quick to think that person is smart.
This suggests the theory that the association could come from countries historical dominance.
What explains why (a lot of Americans for sure) think someone with a British accent must be smart?
Note: I’m not sure about good tags for this question

Short answer: This is still debated, but it might be due at least partly to social stereotypes.
Attitudes:
There are many British accents, but the one most likely to be used in comparisons to say, American, Australian, or New Zealand accents is called RP, or the Queen's English.  Other accents used include MLE and Estuary, which are more common in modern times.  American accents also vary, and the one most commonly used in regional comparisons is called Standard American English, or GenAm, or Network English.  Much like RP, the Standard accent is most common in broadcast media.
Subject perceptions of accents are tested using the matched-guise and similar verbal-guise paradigms, in which speakers read the same content in different accents, while listeners, unaware of the manipulation, are asked to rate the speakers on various traits.  A common finding in matched-guise research is that people in general prefer standard accents over foreign accents, presumably due to in-group bias.  However, can exceptions be made for native speakers of non-standard accents, such as the way Americans rate British accents?
An early study by Stewart, Ryan, & Giles (1985) suggested that Americans indeed perceive British speakers as higher status than own-accent speakers.  However, in a later study by Bayard et al (2001), Americans rated the American accent higher than British on many traits, including intelligence and class.  Had attitudes changed in the intervening years?  Or is the difference due to changes in method used?  Results of other studies (eg, Scott, Green, & Rosewarne, 1997; Anderson et al, 2007; Gill, 2009; Wang et al, 2009) also question Americans' preference for the British accent.  Even if a preference for the British accent exists among Americans, it may only reflect the RP accent (eg, Trudgill, 1983).
Reasons:
Several hypotheses have been proposed for why listeners might have preferences for some accents over others:

The inherent value hypothesis is favored by many lay people - when asked about their preferences, they often claim that certain accents just "sound better".

The imposed norm hypothesis suggests that certain accents are "standard" in a given culture, and consequently preferred over non-standard accents.

The social connotation hypothesis is a variation that suggests that traits are associated with accents through social stereotypes, influenced by media.

An interesting way to test these hypotheses is to compare listener preferences when they don't recognize the accents that they are asked to rate.  To this end, Giles et al (1974) asked Brits to rate Greek accents, and Giles, Bourhis, & Davis (1979) asked Welsh to rate French accents.  Native speakers of the rated accents report clear preferences for one accent over another; however in both studies, listeners with no knowledge of the rated languages were unable to discern the accents and gave speakers similar ratings.  This result challenges the inherent value hypothesis.
Furthermore, native speaker ratings do not correlate well with how similar accents are to the "standard" accents, challenging the imposed norm hypothesis.  A study reported by Trudgill (1983) also demonstrated that native English speakers that can discern British accents give accents different ratings depending on which region or country the listener is from, contrary to both the inherent value and imposed norm hypotheses.  Finally, ratings can differ significantly depending on what trait is measured (eg, intelligence, class, solidarity, success).  Consequently, the social connotation hypothesis tends to be the dominant theory in current scholarship.
Controversy:
However, while some later studies (eg, Leemanna, Kollyb, & Nolan, 2015) corroborate the social connotation hypothesis, others lend support to the inherent value hypothesis (eg, Ladegaard, 1998; Hiraga, 2005; Gooskens, Hilton, & Schüppert, 2016; Wadas, 2020).  It is also possible that accent cannot always reliably be separated from other differences in speech, or that subjects unable to discern accents have nonetheless developed implicit associations through media exposure.  Additionally, accent preferences don't always align well with media stereotypes as reported by subjects.  More research is needed.
If the social connotation hypothesis is correct, then preference for the British accent may be the result of American Anglophilia - basically, the British have done a good job of branding themselves overseas.  Indeed, subjects from many countries (eg, Spain, Norway, Japan) prefer the British accent, but others (eg, Iran, Korea, Denmark, New Zealand, and Australia) seem to prefer the American accent - attributed to Pax Americana, or the USA doing a good job of branding themselves in those countries.


Why do we talk unconsciously while sleeping Somniloquy is very fascinating.
It is unclear what are the causes, but most of the time it is not seen as a medical condition.

"Sleep talking usually occurs by itself and is most often harmless.
However, in some cases, it might be a sign of a more serious sleep
disorder or health condition."
http://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/excessive-sleepiness-10/talking-in-your-sleep

Here is a brief descriptive testimony of someone having this condition:

This is what happened to me for about one year: almost every night, I talk unconsciously while sleeping (of course I don't know, but my room mate told me that). I dream almost every night and I consciously perceive that I'm dreaming, that I'm talking to someone, that what is happening in my dream.
Why does this happen? Is it a kind of mental disorder? Is it because my brain is too active and I keep thinking too much about one thing, so that it keeps obsessing me, even in my dream?

In other words, I understand that Bringing dreams to conscious awareness is possible, but why are facial muscles sometimes activated when talking in dreams? Are there correlations with other types of sleep disorders?

Brief periods of sleep-talking (somniloquy), mostly gibberish, are quite common, particularly in children.  It is not typically useful to call something a "disorder" unless it is causing a problem.  Aside from disturbing others, sleep-talking is rarely problematic by itself, but in combination with other parasomnias (behaviours that indicate arousal during sleep) may be symptomatic of a more concerning sleep disorder.

Sleep-talking while dreaming is most often associated with REM sleep.  However, note that not all sleep-talking happens while dreaming, and both dreaming and sleep-talking may also occur during transitions from non-REM sleep to waking state (partial arousal).

REM sleep normally involves a loss of voluntary muscle movement, referred to as REM sleep atonia, that prevents dreamers from physically interacting with their dreams:

  When the body shifts into REM sleep, motor neurons throughout the body
  undergo a process called hyperpolarization: their already-negative
  membrane potential decreases by another 2–10 millivolts, thereby
  raising the threshold which a stimulus must overcome to excite them.
  Muscle inhibition may result from unavailability of monoamine
  neurotransmitters (restraining the abundance of acetylcholine in the
  brainstem) and perhaps from mechanisms used in waking muscle
  inhibition.

The process involved with REM sleep motor inhibition is complex and not fully understood, but presumably, a deviation from or malfunction in this process may result in temporary partial loss of atonia, or partial arousal during non-REM sleep, that can trigger sleep-talking.  Causes of such anomalies include medication, alcohol and drugs, illness, genetics, mental disorders, and stress.  Of course, partial arousal can also be triggered by external stimuli.

When associated with more complete loss of atonia, and occurring nightly or even multiple times a night, sleep-talking while dreaming is a common symptom of RBD, a sleep disorder in which patients act out their dreams.  As RBD is itself potentially a symptom of a degenerative neurological disorder, significant chronic loss of atonia, including vivid sleep-talking, particularly in the elderly, would be more concerning than sleep-talking on its own.


Question about perceived stubborn behavior patterns Is there a relative diagnosis for someone who can't simply adapt to and/or use something that is already established?  This type of personality would also need to have their own idea to validate their selection/alternative for peer acceptance.  It could be either severe (I'm guessing this would be narcissistic personality disorder) or mild.

Is this common or categorized in some way?  And are there ways of dealing with this type of personality/behavior?

As noted, this is a duplicate and was asked due to the complexity of wording my search terms in a way that related to what I outlined.

Confirmation Bias


Is there any research showing we only like to see/read information on themes/topics/ideas we like? I have been thinking about how using social networks (like Facebook, Twitter and etc) have been changing the way we think. For example, Facebook feed is tailored on the basis of what we like. On Twitter, I usually follow people whose ideas I adhere to. So we are being introduced to information we like more and more thereby making us biased towards ideas that we like.

My question is: can you kindly point me to research studies that show we like to see/read information on themes/topics/ideas that we like?

Can you kindly give me some pointers on that? Thanks in advance.

What you describe is known as Selective Exposure to Information.

  Selective exposure is a theory within the practice of psychology,
  often used in media and communication research, that historically
  refers to individuals’ tendency to favor information which reinforces
  their pre-existing views while avoiding contradictory information.

Below find extracts from this article about selective exposure:

  The researchers found that people are about twice as likely to select
  information that supports their own point of view (67 percent) as to
  consider an opposing idea (33 percent). Certain individuals, those
  with close-minded personalities, are even more reluctant to expose
  themselves to differing perspectives
  ...
  Perhaps more surprisingly, people who have little confidence in their
  own beliefs are less likely to expose themselves to contrary views
  than people who are very confident in their own ideas   ...
  The researchers also found, not surprisingly, that people are more
  resistant to new points of view when their own ideas are associated
  with political, religious or ethical values.

The above article is based on this research article.

A very related theory is the confirmation bias.

  Confirmation bias, also called confirmatory bias or myside bias, is
  the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information
  in a way that confirms one's beliefs or hypotheses, while giving
  disproportionately less consideration to alternative possibilities.

In my opinion the reasons why we employ selective exposure are:

Preserve and form identity
Belongingness
The need for certainty. We need to have firm theories that do not change whenever we encounter dis-confirming evidence.
Competence. The need to have good skills  i.e. fishers forum


Is Trauma‐Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy applicable to adults? Can Trauma‐Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF CBT) be used for adults? I've been told that it is applicable to adults but the literature I've found is all focused on children. Has anyone found this used in connection with adults?
Reference
Deblinger, E., Mannarino, A.P., Cohen, J.A., Runyon, M.K. and Steer, R.A. (2011), Trauma‐focused cognitive behavioral therapy for children: impact of the trauma narrative and treatment length. Depress. Anxiety, 28: 67-75. https://doi.org/10.1002/da.20744

While there are major issues surrounding CBT in general, and the clinical studies (see my answer to Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Limitations), the UK charity Mind, points out (Mind, n.d.) that:

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) – the organisation that produces guidelines on best practice in health care – currently recommends [in guideline CG26] two types of talking treatment for PTSD [Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder]

One of them being trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapy (TF-CBT):

This is a form of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) specifically adapted for PTSD. NICE recommends that you are offered 8–12 regular sessions of around 60–90 minutes, seeing the same therapist at least once a week.

For the studies on weekly therapy, see Why is almost all therapy done as one-hour sessions weekly?
The American Psychological Association (APA) has a write-up on how CBT can supposedly be used to treat PTSD (APA, n.d.) and they reference a book CBT for anxiety disorders: A practitioner book with a section on the subject of TF-CBT (Ehlers, 2013)
While a lot of studies on TF-CBT have been focused on supporting child sufferers of PTSD, it reportedly is effective for adults too (Forbes et al., 2007) - Free PDF available from The Pennsylvania State University

[W]hile psychoeducation, AM [Anxiety Management] and SIT [Stress Inoculation Training] were not as effective as trauma focused CBT or EMDR [Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing] as stand-alone interventions, elements of these interventions may well have a role as part of a broader trauma-focused treatment. While models of brief trauma-focused psychodynamic therapy have been developed, they have not been sufficiently tested in controlled studies to derive practice recommendations. Supportive counselling and hypnotherapy have not been found to be effective as stand-alone interventions when compared to trauma-focused CBT or EMDR.

References
APA (n.d.). Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/treatments/cognitive-behavioral-therapy
Ehlers, A. (2013). Trauma-focused cognitive behavior therapy for posttraumatic stress disorder and acute stress disorder. In Simos, G., & Hofmann, S. G. (eds). CBT for anxiety disorders: A practitioner book (pp. 161-190). New York, NY: Wiley. http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470975520.html
Forbes, D., Creamer, M., Phelps, A., Bryant, R., McFarlane, A., Devilly, G. J., ... & Newton, S. (2007). Australian guidelines for the treatment of adults with acute stress disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 41(8), 637-648. https://doi.org/10.1080%2F00048670701449161
Mind (n.d.). Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/types-of-mental-health-problems/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd-and-complex-ptsd/treatment/


Pupillometry: how long needs the pupil to respond towards an cognitive stimuli? I would like to know if somebody could give me some references on the latency of the pupil response after a cognitive stimulus.

I know that the light reflex is quite fast compared to cognitive stimulation, but I could not find more information than this. Does anyone know how long it takes the pupil to react toward a cognitive task? Or a good reference where I could read it on my own?

What are you trying to do?  If you're trying to leverage pupil-dilation data from an eye-tracker, there are ways to deconvolute the timeseries if you can make a strong inference as to exactly when the stimulus of interest took place.

I think you'll find everything you're looking for here.


Does empathy extend to animals? I've read that humans are able to empathize with other humans, to feel as another person does, through mirror neurons. I'm guessing that they're able to empathize with primates too, as they share similar brains, have similar limbs, faces, etc. So, when someone watches a monkey or child drink juice, they can empathize some of the joy of drinking juice.

But what about a human empathizing with less humanoid animals? Can a person who has developed a personal bond with say, a horse, 'feel' the same way as the horse does? Can one understand the joy of a cat eating its favorite food?

Do mirror neurons apply between humans and animals as well?

But what about a human empathizing with less humanoid animals?

Empathic responding towards humans is generalized to other species. The greater the similarity of the species towards humans, the larger is the empathic response. The findings support the notion that there is a relationship between human empathy directed towards other humans and human empathy directed towards non-human animals. via

  Can one understand the joy of a cat eating its favorite food?

It depend on person. Problem is that we actually do not know how animals feel. And our empathy based on assumption that they feel like us. So it is one more proof of involving of mirror neurons in empathy.

  Empathy toward non conspecifics has different neural representation
  among individuals with different feeding habits, perhaps reflecting
  different motivational factors and beliefs. via

Also look at  Anthrozoos: A Multidisciplinary Journal of The Interactions of People & Animals


Why does Jung suggest that we need to defend our psyche from original religious experience? I am reading "Psychology and Religion" which is a transcribed lecture by Carl Jung. In this lecture he mentions several times how the psyche uses dogma and ritual to defend again original religious experience or as a substitute.  I understand why we might want to substitute for original religious experience, but I don't see where he talks about why we would defend against it. What is Jung's opinion on why we need to defend against original religious experience?

For a really quick and clear understanding of why sometimes it is better to stay in the container of dogma read Edward Edinger's Moby Dick.
Jung's position is that religious energy must only sometimes be defended against. The entire process of Jungian Analysis does, in fact, consist of a process of contacting one's own religious experience in a first-hand, non-dogmatic (responsible, discriminated) way. This process is what Jung developed and described in the Red Book and consists of analyzing one's dreams (which are essentially products of religious experience) active imagination, and discovering the religious energies in one's own, individual psyche.  However, Jung said in many places that Analysis was not for everybody, and if you can stay in the "container" of dogma contentedly, do so. He advocated Analysis only when your religious container was broken and neurotic symptoms where beginning to appear. I.e., those for whom the old dogmas would no longer work.
To understand the power of the psyche's religious function, consider St. Paul's experience on the road to Damascus. He was knocked off his horse and went temporarily blind from having a religious experience (i.e., moving from persecuting Christians, to suddenly being converted to a Christian.) Similarly, think of Islamic religious fundamentalism; here is an example of religious energy coming up in raw form. It's not that that energy is "bad;" it is that it has not been reflected upon by the ego, the conscious mind, in a modern way, and the energy coming from the religious function is not "channeled," or "well-contained."
Consider also the numerous cults gone awry: Jamestown, Nazism, etc. The appendix in Edinger's book The New God Image is worth studying here. If that's the best you can do with your religious energy, better to stay in dogma. . . .
Jung frequently establishes his point of view by reviewing what others have thought and done in history. He does this to show that there is a psychological necessity and historical precedent for what he is saying. The repression or suppression of the individual religious experience has been the historical position of much organized religion, particularly Christianity, for millennia.  The Catholic position has been that all believing Catholics need to "adopt the official dogma" (only Jesus and a few saints get to have a first-hand, non-dogmatic experience.) So Jung is just saying that throughout history, the need to contain religious energy in something has been found to be a necessity. (Esther Harding's Psychic Energy: It's Source and Transformation is particularly clear on this.)
See also Edward Edinger's many other books on this topic, for instance

The Psyche in
Antiquity.,

Transformation of the God
Image,

Transformation of
Libido
and

The Christian
Archetype.

Lawrence Jaffe's Celebrating
Soul
might also be useful.


Are there axioms in the mind? While studying artificial neural networks, I stumbled upon the following question:

Are there any hard-wired axioms in the brain that must exist equally in every conscious mind?

I could imagine that, since neuron can't change their principal behavior, simple signal-modulating functions should always work the same way.

By axioms I don't necessarily mean the axioms known from math, but functional units that do not rely on further microscopic elements. Like if you say neurons functioning is also influenced by proteins - ok than turn to protein level. At some point there should be a level reached where things (neurons, proteins, atoms) should always work the same.

But of course the mathematical axioms are a good way to prove that some functions evaluate to the same result in different brains.

For example if you teach addition to a child then you would first show the child  one apple then two, then three, etc. Although abstract logical rules like the commutative property possibly reside in more complex structures, nobody needs to be taught in counting.

This possibly also fits in philosophy - I wasn't quite sure.

I think we should first clarify the difference between simple mathematical operators and a complete formal axiomatic system. I think it is very clear that exponentiation, square root or multiplication operations are taught. They represent a higher level cognitive ability than simple addition and subtraction.

In the level of more innate abilities, we can still claim that some numeric tendencies do exist in the human infant. Moreover, these are shown to exist in primates, and even rodents (for instance, see Brannon & Terrace, 1998). It is argued that in infants, numbers are represented in two distinct systems; one is responsible for small numbers and their relations, and the second responsible for mass amounts of items (have a look at Feigenson, Dehaene, Spelke, 2004). Briefly speaking, infants can differentiate 2 items from 3 items or 1 item; on the other hand they can distinguish 40 items from 80 items better than they could 60 or 70 items. So this second system operates on a relatively macro level. Moreover, first system not only provides a comparison operator, but addition also. So, infants can understand that two individual objects make 2 objects. For instance, suppose you have a box and three dolls in it. If you remove two of them, they can understand that there is still one more in it. To summarize, numeric abilities at least partially seem to have innate roots.

This is not surprising at all. In evolutionary terms, it is not hard to see that counting objects can be essential, up to a certain point. For instance, it is very important that prey should recognize whether there is a single hunter or two of them. As another example, it is equally important to recognize whether there are 100 or 200 footsteps on the ground, but not that important whether there is 100 or 105 footsteps. There are surely cognitive abilities with innate roots; one other such ability is human face recognition for example. Infants can detect an upright human face right after they are born.

How is such information represented? It does not have to be in an axiomatic fashion. Neurons have a very simple structure themselves, but networks of neurons are capable of great things. They can be represented in states of a dynamical system, like associative memory. Or they can be represented by simple feedforward structures. It is very hard to distinguish that. My primitive claim is that assuming innate formal axiomatic systems is against the rule of parsimony.


How would the blind experience a hallucinogen like LSD? I have heard that LSD allows you to see ridiculous things. But they are things that you have seen, or can imagine to see. If you've never seen before (like a blind person), what effect will LSD have on you? Articles on google do not go into the specifics of the brain functionality when the drug is taken. I'm looking for a more detailed explanation

Short answer
Based on a dated and small study, early-blind individuals do not experience drug-induced hallucinations, while the late-blind can, but not necessarily do so.

Background
Krill et al. (1963) investigated the effects of LSD on totally blind people (i.e., no residual vision) and they report visual hallucinations in 13 out of 24 subjects. This study shortly reviews three other studies in this field (LSD and mescalin administered to blind people) and the consensus the authors reach is that blind folks do experience visual hallucinations.

However, as @JoeBathelt very rightfully notes, it is important to acknowledge the difference between congenitally blind and late blind people that lost vision later in life. Late-blind individuals often experience visual imagery, while congenitally blind do not and cannot. In the Krill et al. study linked, they included four congenitally blind subjects. The remainder were acquired blind that had lost their eye sight later in life. The congenitally blind group had lost their vision at, or before the age of two (which I would call early blind, but that's debatable). None of these 4 subjects experienced hallucinations. Given that half of their study group experienced hallucinations, one would expect two of these four to have experienced hallucinations. Although the congenitally (i.e., early-blind) group was small, it leads me hence to believe that prior visual experience at least early in life is a prerequisite for visual hallucinations to occur. However, not many studies have been published on the topic and I am most curious to see more answers to this most interesting question.

Reference
- Krill et al., Arch Ophthal (1963); 6: 180-5


What's the name of this visual search task? I recall a visual search task where participants would search for a single item with either one or two distinct features. For example one would look for an X in a set of Os as "one feature" or instead they would look for a red X in a set of red Os, blue Os and blue Xes. The results indicated it was significantly harder to locate an item with two distinct features (a red X) while finding a single feature (an X) was almost instantaneous.

I'm sure I could find the studies on my own but I don't know the name of the search task. I recently saw a simplistic version on Facebook (this is not from a specific published article):

This version is the same basic idea of the single feature search. What's the name of this sort of visual search for distinct features?

Aren't you just looking for a conjunction search task?

Normally it works like this: objects are described in terms of their features (e.g., colour, shape, etc.). If you tell people to search for a target with a given colour AND shape, then this is a conjunction of features, and is termed a conjunction task.

Note that there are complex dynamics in terms of how this works, and the second link below discusses this at length.

Here's some links on this type of thing:

http://www.mendeley.com/research/guided-search-an-alternative-to-the-feature-integration-model-for-visual-search/

http://www.mendeley.com/research/visual-search-stimulus-similarity-2/

Here are examples of Feature Search vs Conjunction Search from Wikipedia:
Feature Search:

Conjunction search:


How do psychologists measure malicious behaviour? How do psychologists measure malicious behaviour in humans? Is there a definitive definition of what constitutes malicious behaviour? Are there varying scales of malicious behaviour? Is it possible do conduct experiments where malicious behaviour can be reliably observed? E.g. is cheating in a competition against other humans considered malicious? If malicious behaviour is much further along the spectrum than this example, then how can you conduct such an experiment that remains ethical?

The Dark Triad maybe what you are seeking.
You have described the behaviours as "malicious", where as the Dark Triad uses the word "malevolent". The Oxford Dictionary advises that these two words are synonyms.
Reference
Jones, D. N., & Paulhus, D. L. (2014). Introducing the Short Dark Triad (SD3): A Brief Measure of Dark Personality Traits. Assessment, 21(1), 28–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/1073191113514105


What is the effect of imagining doing an exercise on muscle growth? I recently read a study by Yue, G et al. (1992) which I found incredibly interesting. I have no background in physiology and I was hoping that someone who does can clear things up.

If I understood it right, the study had two groups of people who trained their Hypothenar eminence (pinky) muscles. One of the groups did so by doing the actual exercise and a second did so by imagining themselves doing the same exercise. The group that did the exercise improved by 30% and the group that imagined themselves doing it improved by 22%.

Did those who imagined themselves doing the exercise have a muscle increase in their muscle or did the improvement come from the brain having better control of that muscle? Also, what should I expect if I imagine myself lifting a dumbbell all day?

Yue, G., & Cole, K. J. (1992). Strength increases from the motor program: comparison of training with maximal voluntary and imagined muscle contractions. Journal of Neurophysiology, 67(5), 1114-1123.

The article by Ranganathan et al (2004) provides some relevant information.
The authors discuss how it can be increased by two main factors, neural adaptation and muscle growth. They note how the motor skill acquisition literature supports the use of visualisation as an adjunct to actual practice as a means of improving performance:

  Research on motor skill acquisition has demonstrated clearly that
  mental practice leads to improved performance (Corbin, 1972; Feltz &
  Landers, 1983). Thus, the neural events controlling the muscle
  parameters for performance (e.g., amplitude, timing) can be improved
  through mental practice.

They mention studies that have found no effect  of visualisation on strength (e.g., Herbert et al 1998).

However, in their study they did find an effect of visualisation on strength. They attribute this gain to neural adaptation rather than muscle growth.

  The key ﬁndings of this study were that mental training increases
  voluntary strength of both distal and proximal muscles of human upper
  extremities and the strength improvements accompanied elevations of
  time-locked (to MVC trials) cortical potential (MRCP). Based on the
  MRCP data (Figs. 3–5), we are conﬁdent that the primary mechanism
  underlying the strength increase is a mental training-induced
  enhancement in the central command to muscle. The data suggest that
  repetitive mental attempts of maximal muscle activation trained and
  enabled the brain to generate stronger signals to muscle.
  ...
  greater strength is a consequence of stronger brain activity. A
  stronger central command could recruit the motor units that were
  otherwise inactive in an untrained state and/or drive the active motor
  units to higher intensity (higher discharge rate), leading to greater
  muscle force

References

Corbin, C. B. (1972). Mental practice. In W. P. Morgan (Ed.), Ergogenic
aids and muscular performance (pp. 93–118). New York: Academic
Press.
Feltz, D. L., & Landers, D. M. (1983). The effects of mental practice
on motor skill learning and performance: A meta-analysis. Journal of
Sports Psychology, 5, 25–27.
Herbert, R. D., Dean, C., & Gandevia, S. C. (1998). Effects of real
and imagined training on voluntary muscle activation during maximal
isometric contractions. Acta Physiologica Scandinavica, 163, 361–368.
Ranganathan, V. K., Siemionow, V., Liu, J. Z., Sahgal, V., & Yue, G. H. (2004). From mental power to muscle power—gaining strength by using the mind. Neuropsychologia, 42(7), 944-956. PDF


Can a person remember so much details as the guy in the Camus' Stranger? In the book, while in prison, he lives his days by his memories, thinking of his room, his furniture, the beach, each time recalling more details, imagining walking past it and this recalling took a big enough part of the day to keep him busy.

  "And the more I thought about it, the more I dug out my memory things
  I had overlooked or forgotten. I realized then that a man who had
  lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He
  would have enough memories to keep him from being bored."

I also read something saying that a person in a state of sensory deprivation, for example locked in dark, quite room, can remember a lot of things.

So how much truth is in the Camus's description and how much detail can a person generally remember about something he has seen a couple of times not really paying attention? If Camus was correct, if you do remember more than you can usually recall, then how do I recall at least half as much without being put in prison?

Yes it is possible, it is possible in theory at least, but almost no one can do it.

When we see some things, we might not notice everything in front of us, but our subconsciousness usually does withtake these things which is how you can remember a scene and notice things you didn't notice before. However there is another version of this which is that our brains are master tools for filling in the gaps, so it's very easy to remember things wrongly, and see things in your memories that were never actually there, sort of like dreaming. You think it and it shows.

As far as I know there are two things required for this to be feasible.

Super efficient memory for remembering visuals, auditory experiences, and text/numbers/symbols. These can all be trained to an extent in individuals that aren't born with it as a natural talent. (look up memory competition champions, some of them have written books on effective memorization, like Dominic O'Brien for one, these things really work.)
Vivid visual imagination, you need your daydreams to be as real as your sleeping dreams, the only way I've even heard of to train this kind of skill is meditation, but even then there's no guarantee you will ever be able to do this if you can't already. There is a phenomena known as lucid dreaming, and to be able to vividly remember scenery on-demand, you need to be in that sort of state, it can be achieved through meditation, but not even every meditation master can do it.

But notice how I said vivid visual imagination and lucid dreaming state (or alternatively, hypnagogia). Becuase you are in such a state when you are vividly remembering things, it is highly likely that your brain will accidentally put things in your memories that weren't there before, and you can also do this at will just like in a lucid dream.

So is it possible? Yes, it technically is, but our memories, even the most efficient ones aren't 100%, every time we remember something, we're only remembering the last time we remembered it which is how information is lost over time, information which your brain can, and will replace with falsehoods to "fill in the gaps". Which is why two people who saw the same thing at the same time can remember it differently a few months or years after the event.

But as a sort of ironic twist, the more vivid your imagination is (and by vivid I don't just mean in the form of visual information, but also auditory, touch, smell, even taste) the more likely you are to have or be able to easily develop extremely good memory, so the two things I described are necessary for the kind of memory you described are interconnected.

But well, if you want such a great memory (which is completely off topic for this site, it's a personal productivity question) then like I said earlier, look up books written by memory champions like Dominic O'Brien, and you will find what you seek.


How are positions and counts of higher concepts encoded in sparse representations? I understand that levels in the sensorimotor hierarchy of the brain learn recurring features of their input streams. The results are activation patterns with single neurons firing for the existence of specific higher level patterns. Those sparse representations are passed upward to the next higher layer.

For example, there is a neuron firing whenever there is a face in the scene. On this higher level, neurons are not restricted to a small window of our field of view anymore. My question is how those high level sparse representations still retain information about positions and counts of objects.

One bad explanation would be that there are neurons representing counts in general. If "three" and "face" are both active, there are three faces in the scene. But this doesn't hold for two kinds of objects at the same time since it's not clear which count is for which object. And what if both have the same count.

Two ideas on this so far:

I think we have neurons representing multiple occurrences of a given feature, for example one neuron for "one face", one for "two faces", etc. At some number it doesn't really make a big difference anymore, so there is just a neuron for "group of faces". This would explain why we can recognize small number of objects in a glimpse but have to count for larger amount. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
In his 2014 talk at MIT, Prof. Hinton explains how the brain might find equivariant features instead of invariant features. Basically, in addition to existence of a feature, neurons in the same cortical cell might output the properties of this feature. In vision, those properties would be position and rotation, for example.


Why do participants prefer to give input values that are "round numbers"? Background

I have just been analysing some data where participants attempt to control a dynamic system with integer numeric inputs between 0 and 100. I've noticed that there is a general tendency for participants to give responses that are divisible by 10 (e.g., 0, 10, 20, 30, etc.). After that participants' second favourite input values are those divisible by 5 but not by 10 ( e.g., 5, 15, 25, 35, etc.). After that excluding some general patterns in the data, all the other input numbers appear about equally common (e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, etc.).

Perhaps in a related way, I can also remember from market research that when you ask people how often they do certain things, as the number gets larger, they will often show a similar tendency to approximate and use numbers divisible by 10 or 100 and so on.  I also seem to remember reading research where people report number of sexual partners, where a similar tendency was observed.

Thus, this tendency is consistent with a preference for what are informally referred to as "round numbers", where as in Wikipedia it is argued that "a number ending in 5 might be considered in a way more "round" than one ending in neither 0 nor 5. "

Question

What explains people's general tendency to prefer certain input values when trying to control a system (e.g., numbers divisible by 10 or 5)?
Is there any specific research that has quantified this effect in another system control task?
Does a similar mechanism underlie the popularity of such numbers in a system control task as does in a frequency estimation task?

The effect you are referring to is called heaping. Unfortunately, I am not aware of a source discussing the psychological aspect of this phenomenon, but I found an article about a statistical approach to heaped data.

  Roberts JM, Brewer DD. (2001) Measures and tests of heaping in
  discrete quantitative distributions. Journal of Applied Statistics
  28(7), 887-896. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02664760120074960

  Abstract   Heaping is often found in discrete quantitative data based on subject responses to open-ended interview questions or
  observer assessments. Heaping occurs when subjects or observers prefer
  some set of numbers as responses (e.g. multiples of 5) simply because
  of the features of this set. Although heaping represents a common type
  of measurement error, apparently no prior general measure of heaping
  exists. We present simple measures and tests of heaping in discrete
  quantitative data, illustrate them with data from an epidemiologic
  study, and evaluate the bias of these statistics. These techniques
  permit formal measurement of heaping and facilitate comparisons of the
  degree of heaping in data from different samples, substantive domains,
  and data collection methods.


Can the Hodgkin-Huxley neuron incorporate desensitization? I'm studying a neuron in an organism that has the following properties:

The neuron's output voltage is dependent on the strength of the stimulus, if that stimulus is applied and removed without any further stimuli.
If there is another stimulus that follows the first, then the magnitude of the voltage is reduced by a factor dependent on the time between the two stimuli, even if the strength of the two stimuli is the same.

I know approximately the function that governs this reduction in magnitude as a function of time between stimuli.

Is the Hodgkin-Huxley model sufficient to model the behaviour of this neuron?  Is there another model that is more appropriate?

The Hodgkin-Huxley model does have the ability to accurately reflect adaptation processes in a neuron (e.g., Awiszus, (1989));
A perfect integrator model is also suitable (Goldman et al., 2007);
A leaky integrator model is often used to model spiking behavior as well (Mihalas & Niebur, 2009).

References
- Awiszus, Biol Cybern (1988); 59(4-5): 295-302
- Goldman et al., New Encycopedia of Neuroscience (2007)
- Mihalas & Niebur, Neural Comput (2009); 21(3): 704–18


What are the effects of visual deprivation on mental health and the other senses? How do blind people who haven't always been visually impaired deal with their day-to-day lives? I've heard rumors (very, very unreliable rumors) that once you stay in the dark for too long you'll start to go insane, but I haven't met one "insane" blind person yet, nor have I ever heard of one.

However, it's proven that low levels of dopamine result in depression, anxiety, etc. And low levels of dopamine just means a lack of production or intake by the dopaminergic receptors. If the lack of happiness results in disorders such as depression, what would a lack of light do?

Also, why do their other senses strengthen? I read a question earlier about how someone trained themselves to write and read upside down, but then had trouble writing b's, p's and q's, apparently this was due to a process called "negative transfer", does this have anything to do with it? Less energy used meaning more available to enlarge the other's capabilities?

People that loose their eye sight do not go insane. They do tend to develop depression more often than sighted people (Koenes & Karshmer, 2000) and suicide rates are increased in the blind population (De Leo et al., 1999).

The reason why blind people tend to have enhanced functionality of the other senses (e.g., touch and hearing) is generally referred to as sensory compensation. In blind people, it has been shown that the brain undergoes a massive restructuring through the process of cortical plasticity (e.g., Cohen, 1997). The deafferented visual cortex is thought to loose its integrity due to a lack of synaptic input and therefore becomes prone to be taken over by other sensory modalities such as touch and hearing (Lee et al., 2014). Although it is tempting to speculate that this cross-modal plasticity is the neurophysiological correlate of compensation, much of the evidence to date points to the fact that blind people 'simply' train the other senses more intensively compared to their sighted peers. No solid evidence exists that cortical cross-modal changes in the blind improve their performance on, e.g., Braille reading or the use of other sensory substitution approaches like the BrainPort device. The BrainPort converts visual images to tactile sensations presented to the tongue. Studies using the BrainPort and comparing a blind group and sighted controls on their performance with this assistive technology consistently find that sighted people perform as well with the device and are not outperformed by the blind, as long as they receive equal amounts of training. This, despite the fact that gross cross-modal changes occur in the blind after device training, but not in sighted controls. These same findings generally hold for studies using other approaches like Braille reading or acoustic sensory substitution (reviewed in Stronks et al., 2015).

References
- Cohen, Nature (1997); 389: 180-3
- De Leo et al., Psychosomatics (1999); 40(4): 339–44
- Koenes & Karshmer, Issues Ment Health Nurs (2000); 21(3): 269-79
- Lee et al., Front Hum Neurosci (2014)
- Stronks et al., Brain Res (2015); 1624: 140–52


How to use Mechanical Turk for longer studies (i.e., 30 minutes+)? I'm interested in using Mechanical Turk as a means of recruiting participants for online psychology studies. I have never used it for any research. However, many of my studies take around 30 minutes to an hour to complete. A typical study might involving answering a set of questionnaires using Inquisit. My impression is that Mechanical Turk works best with short studies (i.e., one to five minutes).

Is it possible to use Mechanical Turk for longer studies?
Are there any important tips for effectively using Mechanical Turk for longer studies?
Are there any tutorials or case studies which document successful methods for using Mechanical Turk for longer studies?
Or alternatively are there better systems for recruiting paid participants for longer online studies?

In general I appreciate that longer studies would require much more remuneration probably more than just a multiple of the amount of time.
I also imagine that there would be additional issues of quality control.

I've just started reading up on Mechanical Turk. This is a summary of some of the tips that I've found. Admittedly, most of it applies generally to psychological experiments, and not specifically to longer ones.

David Sharek discusses his workflow which explicitly includes studies in the 30 minute range. Thus, this post is one of the most relevant for dealing with the issue of longer studies.

Assorted resources

Here are some  other assorted resources; see also the references at the bottom.

Interoperating Inquisit with other tools
TurkGate is an open source tool to facilitate the use of Mechanical Turk with external psychology experiments.
Mason and Suri (2012) review the potential benefits, implementation, and ethics of Mechanical Turk.
Michael Buhrmester has a guide for social scientists. He provides an outline of his workflow when running studies.

Assorted blogs relevant to Mechanical Turk mentioned by Buhrmester

http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com.
http://experimentalturk.wordpress.com.
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/deneme.
http://blog.crowdflower.com.

Configuring external surveys

The general model seems to be to have a link to an external site (make sure it opens in a new tab or window) where the survey is delivered and a box for the completion code to be entered.

Buhrmester discusses various completion code systems and  opted for the relatively low tech option of getting participants to make up a 4 or 5 digit number and enter it both into the survey and into the mturk. He then uses time stamp data to verify the original completer.

Payment

Mason and Suri state

  However, recent research on the behavior of workers (Chilton et al.,
  2010) demonstrated that workers had a reservation wage (the least
  amount of pay for which they would do the task) of only \$1.38 per
  hour, with an average effective hourly wage of $4.80 for workers
  (Ipeirotis, 2010a).

In terms of the relationship between payment and quality of worker they cite studies suggesting that there is an initial positive relationship that levels off at a certain point such that at a certain point additional payment does not improve performance.
Masson and Suri then suggest:

  Consequently, it is often advisable to start by paying less than the
  expected reservation wage, and then increasing the wage if the rate of
  completed work is too low.

Similarly wages up to a point should increase the speed of data collection.

Rejection of hits

Regarding rejecting hits, Michael has simply accepted all hits. This may be simpler than trying to work out which hits are legitimate. This also made sense given that he was often only paying 10 cents per participant for 10 minute experiments. It also has the benefit of not damaging your reputation.

Quality assurance

There are two issues here. Did the participant complete the study at all? And did they complete the study in an appropriate manner (e.g., trying on performance task; reading instructions properly; etc.)?

A general approach is to incorporate additional means to usual for detecting dodgy data.
If it's simple to filter out such participants then they don't corrupt the final dataset.

A few ideas:

item level reaction time measures
response patterns to negative and positively worded items
repeat items which should yield identical responses
performance measures
Include very simple true-false questions (e.g., 2+2; Who is the president of the United States); Mason and Suri mention that in 500 responses only six got it wrong and three didn't answer.

Buhrmester makes the causal observation that the quality of responses may vary based on the country of responders, so for example limited participation to US participants is one coarse means of filtering for quality.

Managing reputation as a requester

Buhrmester mentions accepting all hits both for simplicity and managing reptuation.

Mason and Suri (2012) discuss how reputation is discussed and monitored on external sites.

  Turkopticon is a site that allows workers to rate requesters along four
  axes: communicativity, generosity, fairness, and promptness. Turker
  Nation is an online bulletin board where workers routinely comment on
  requesters and communicate about individual HITs. It is strongly
  encouraged that new requesters “introduce” them- selves to the
  Mechanical Turk community by first posting to Turker Nation before
  putting up HITs.

References

Rand, D. G. (2012). The promise of Mechanical Turk: How online labor markets can help theorists run behavioral experiments. Journal of theoretical biology, 299, 172-179.
Buhrmester, M., Kwang, T., & Gosling, S.D. (2011). Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: A New Source of Inexpensive, Yet High-Quality, Data? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(1), 3-5.
Mason, W., & Suri, S. (2012). Conducting behavioral research on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Behavior research methods, 44(1), 1-23.
Berinsky, A. J., Huber, G. A., & Lenz, G. S. (2011). Using Mechanical Turk as a subject recruitment tool for experimental research. Submitted for review.
Berinsky, A. J., Huber, G. A., & Lenz, G. S. (2012). Evaluating online labor markets for experimental research: Amazon. com's mechanical turk. Political Analysis, 20(3), 351-368.


Escapism in the Hierarchy of Needs I've been pondering Maslow's famous hierarchy of needs and wondered where escapism fits in.

It's more of a personal need than a type of social connection, but it doesn't really align itself with esteem/significance. So it appears to me that it could merit its own category.

Can anyone give me a general idea of the importance of escapism based on studies? Am I correct in classifying it as a "need," and that depriving a person of their fantasies or other forms of escapism would have a significant impact?

After doing more research and based on another discussion(s) on this forum, I'll attempt to answer this question.

It sounds like escapism doesn't rank really high on most psychologists' radar. In addition, the hierarchy of needs has largely fallen out of favor, making my question irrelevant for some. There's also the problem of defining "escapism" in the first place.

One could include the need for privacy under escapism. The rigors of prison include a dehumanizing lack of privacy. In the case of torture (e.g. Guantanamo), prisoners' minds can be further manipulated to prevent other forms of escapism.

If one wanted to create a more comprehensive hierarchy of needs than Maslow's, escapism could certainly deserve its own spot alongside social connections and esteem. Or perhaps escapism and esteem could be grouped together as "individual needs," as opposed to social connections.

Though people can obviously survive and even thrive in the absence of social connections, escapism is something we all carry with us. For example, most people daydream, which could be considered a form of escapism.

I see privacy as the polar corollary of social connections - everyone needs a balance of social influences and privacy. I see escapism as a separate phenomenon that largely overlaps with privacy.


Simulating Hudgkin Huxley neural network I'm starting work on a computational neuroscience project where I want to create my own model of a spiking Hodgkin-Huxley neuron and connect many instances (about 400) of this model through synapses. Is there a generally accepted way to do this? I have experience in Python and Matlab but I'm wondering if there are any good packages or other software to create neurons and connecting them into a network?

I am old and my experience with this area is 20 years out of date, but I would still go with https://neuron.yale.edu/neuron/


If one is flexing a muscle, for any given motoneuron involved, how many action potentials occur per second to keep the muscle flexed? Also, will the axon terminals in a given motoneuron ever run out of neurotransmitters to release if they are constantly undergoing action potentials (say in the situation outlined above where a muscle is being kept flexed)? Or is there always enough reuptake to ensure that this could never happen?

Second question: won't happen in the healthy individual/inapplicable.
Anatomically speaking, muscles don't flex, they contract. Joints flex. And muscles never fully relax to the point of zero contraction/zero firing. (The flexion of a joint can be achieved passively, even when the animal is dead.)
Even at rest, muscle is kept in a constant state of at least slight tension, the basic tonus. Skeletal muscles are usually set up in antagonistic pairs, with one flexing and one extending a joint. A specific balance of agonist and antagonist tonus implements a stable position of the joint, and stable positions can be achieved near-permanently.

First question: depends on effort.
Muscle firing during increased, active contraction is a function of effort, as muscle contraction is increased via rate coding. The stronger a muscle is supposed to contract, the higher the motor unit's firing rate has to become. (I should probably mention the size principle here...)
Motor neurons are reported to reach firing rates of a few tens (up to 50) of hz during high effort.

A question you're possibly interested in: for how long can extremely high firing rates be sustained? Or: is muscle failure under sustained extreme effort, corresponding to high firing rates, sometimes a result of motor neuron drop-out rather rather than e.g. ATP depletion at the muscle itself?
Note first that muscle force is greater for eccentric and isometric activity (ie., release under control or static tension); voluntary contraction is a bit weaker. From another perspective, if a muscle is electrically stimulated externally, it is still able to exert force far beyond the point where the subject cannot voluntarily uphold the tension. This means short-term fatigue following high tension is primarily neural.
I do not know what precisely causes this fatigue (nor do I think the experts have uncovered it yet), but the limiting aspect does not seem to be neurotransmitter re-uptake, or even metabolic processes in general. As Gandevia writes:

  intrinsic moto neuronal properties, reflex inhibition and disfacilitation, Renshaw cell inhibition, and insufficient drive from supraspinal sites may all contribute to the decline in moto unit firing rate in fatigue

Also see this.


How do Terence Tao's "three stages of rigorousness" relate to cognitive science? This is an excerpt from There’s more to mathematics than rigour and proofs of Terrence Tao:

The “pre-rigorous” stage, in which mathematics is taught in an informal, intuitive manner, based on examples, fuzzy notions, and hand-waving. The emphasis is more on computation than on theory. This stage generally lasts until the early undergraduate years.

The “rigorous” stage, in which one is now taught that in order to do maths “properly”, one needs to work and think in a much more precise and formal manner. The emphasis is now primarily on theory; and one is expected to be able to comfortably manipulate abstract mathematical objects without focusing too much on what such objects actually “mean”. This stage usually occupies the later undergraduate and early graduate years.

The “post-rigorous” stage, in which one has grown comfortable with all the rigorous foundations of one’s chosen field, and is now ready to revisit and refine one’s pre-rigorous intuition on the subject, but this time with the intuition solidly buttressed by rigorous theory. The emphasis is now on applications, intuition, and the “big picture”. This stage usually occupies the late graduate years and beyond.

Does this have any stance in the context of cognitive science? A comment in Mathematics Education says that this idea can't be broaden in other fields/jobs in any level of academic, since:

Tao is using the word rigor in a way that's fairly narrow and specific to math. Namely, rigor means proving every statement one makes or uses, in full detail, from some list of axioms. One cannot rigorously work on cars, any more than one can rigorously eat one's dinner. It also does not make sense to talk about "post-rigorous" in the context of solving geometry exercises, because "rigorous" doesn't mean being good at something.

But I still don't understand this. Sure, it does not make sense to say "eat dinner rigorously", but it is possible for a good cook to know the hidden ingredients, the recipe or the taste of it by just looking and smelling the food, and I think this is equivalent to "proving every statement one makes or uses, in full detail, from some list of axioms".
So how is this phenomenon described rigorously in cognitive science?

Mathematics is the

  abstract science of number, quantity, and space, either as abstract concepts (pure mathematics), or as applied to other disciplines such as physics and engineering (applied mathematics)

Cognitive sciences are

  the interdisciplinary, scientific studies of the mind and its processes

I think that mathematics is a way to achieve something, to put it bluntly, it's a tool. A tool to, for example, model certain brain processes. Further,  math is an abstract tool; cognitive sciences is an applied science. Cognitive sciences can use math to accomplish its goals. By contrast, math can never use Cognitive Sciences to prove anything.

Now you say that rigor means

  [an] emphasis [on] theory; comfortably manipulat[ing] abstract mathematical objects without focusing too much on what such objects actually “mean"

I don't think one can study the mind without focusing on what it means. Instead, studying the mind is often done exactly to try to find out how it works and what certain findings mean! Now -

Scientific rigor in general means

  the quality of being believable or trustworthy

While in maths it has a specific meaning:

  logical validity or accuracy

So in terms of semantics the answer is that it is indeed a matter of meaning. Rigor can mean a lot of things, which is different across disciplines.


Difficulty of having profound scientific discussions with more than 2 or 3 people? I am a physicist and the other day, a friend of mine pointed out something that I had never noted explicitly before. This is an empirical observation, but it seems true to me, and it may raise a lot of questions about the current organization of research. I wonder whether this has already been documented and studied, either from the sociological or psychological points of view.

The observation is that fundamental discussions on physics (i.e. implying non-standard physics and epistemology) often occur in discussions involving at most 2 or 3 good friends (all being physicists). The more people you involve (5 or 6 good friends), the harder it is to speak about these subjects. It is not "explicit"; it is just a personal feeling that a kind of "social pressure" appears and tends to bring the discussion closer to "standard discussion subjects". And it seems to occur even if all possible subgroups of 2 or 3 people among the global group of 5 or 6 people are OK with having fundamental discussions on physics when they are isolated from each other.

My questions are:

Is this a well-known effect? (Any links to studies?)
What is its origin?
How to avoid it?

It seems to be related to a kind of "Peer pressure".

This is due the change of the context. A profound discussion is regarded as confidential talk and you will notice that the voice volume is lower than a discussion with many people.

But why is a profound discussion regarded as confidential?

Maybe because you could touch scientific taboos. Every time you touch the foundation of a world view you will confront all participants with their fears. The world view represents a aspect of security. Exposing lacks in a world view will expose the fears of them too. Then it's much more difficult to find a common ground for a solution. Not everybody is willed to accept the implication of a certain insight.

A discussion with more people will tend to go towards superficial topics, cars, home, family, weather and so on.

But it depends on who initiate the talk and if this person is keen enough to enforce this topic. And I think that Keegan is right, sometimes we just want to be polite and we want the discussion to be more open ... maybe more open to the "general context" of the situation itself.


What intelligence theory is being taught? What's the current scientific and schooled (university or alike) consens as far as Intelligence theories are concerned?
Which theory / model is currently (broadly) being taught? Please be specific and link corresponding sources.
I wasn't able to find anything besides a quote from Gottfredson, 1997 and Sternberg, 2003: "Virtually all psychologists now believe that there is a generalized intelligence factor, g" ... so is Spearman's two factor theory the current basis? Or in general that a general factor exists, which rules out a few theories like Thurstones or Gardners, but doesn't specify which to "follow".

My impression is that the Cattell-Horn-Carroll model is the most established and well respected framework. I.e., the closest thing that we have to something like the "Big Five" in personality.
It incorporates the importance of g, which is arguably one of the most fundamental ideas in intelligence research.
But it also focuses quite a bit on the distinction between fluid and crystalised intelligence. It is a very developed taxonomy based on a lot of theoretical and empirical work.
Sternberg's model of practical intelligence and Gardner's model of multiple intelligences often seem to get mentioned in entry-level textbooks but I don't think they enjoy mainstream support in the intelligence community.


Informative texts on psychoanalysis? I'm not looking for anything all-inclusive, as I am aware that such a list would be impossible. Perhaps some introductory books on psychoanalysis (such as works by Freud) would be good, as well as any compilation of case studies, etc.

I believe you're looking for this:

https://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf


How to analyze event-related fMRI data with missing fMRI trigger in logfile? I have the following problem: we conducted an event-related fMRI experiment using Presentation software to display the experiment. Usually each fMRI pulse/scan is logged in the presentation log file so the times for event-related analysis can be derived later on. Unfortunately, for about half of the subjects these triggers in the log files are missing, so I don't know when the experimental events occurred relative to the first scan.

Do you have any ideas how I might still try to analyze that part of the data? All suggestions are welcome.

I can see one case in which you still might analyze the data.

This only works under three conditions:

your paradigm has no variable durations of either stimulus presentations or breaks or others (or you can determine all the times retrospectively) AND
all your fmri scans have timestamps in their header information (which I think is always the case, at least in the raw
file) AND
the pulse sequences and the presentation were always
started at the same time (or the logfile has at least a starting time and the difference between both starts was consistent).

I guess you can answer immediately whether the first condition is met. For the second one, any appropriate software for opening the raw files should be able to show you the timestamps if they exist. For dicom files there are timestamps for study time, series time and acquisition time where the acquisition time is different for every single file (according to this help site from the AFNI program). The third one you might also immediately know but if not you could look into the timestamps of the subjects where you do have the triggers in the logfile and compare it with the starting time of the logfile (if that exists). If you calculate that difference for all subjects and it's always the same you are lucky and can calculate the trigger times for the subjects where they are missing.


Neurophysiological indications of focus and motivation Is there any way to detect a subject being focused or highly motivated (assuming that these two states are essentially the same) using any sort of external detection, such as fMRI or EEG? How would the accuracy of these measurements be compared? I have a hard time imagining what the "ground-truth" of these measurements might be.

Focus and motives are very different cognitive processes. Essentially focus would be attention, while motivation is a complex neurocognitive process, such as hunger or thirst, which drives attentional orientation.

I'm going to have to break this down a bit further because motivation is largely considered two processes 'wanting' and 'liking'. 'Wanting' is the drive to obtain a motivational object, such as food. While 'Liking' is the assessment of the motivational object. So if a digestive tract is empty of food it will typically send chemical signals telling the brain its empty, amongst a whole host of other factors but lets not get into that. As a result we will 'want' food, and this alters the hedonic value of food, which ultimately influences its salience (how much it grabs your attention). And its representation in the brain, all of this is done to draw your attention towards the motivational target, or make us seek it out. Once the target i.e. food, is obtained it is consumed, this is the point at which it is assessed for how much we 'like' it. All of this is done by a neural system, often referred to as the reward circuit. The reward circuit is made up of a number of brain areas (nuclei), so many it would take an dissertation to write about them all however the main constituents are: Nucleus Accumbens, Ventral Tegmented area and the parabracial nucleus. Changes in these structures appear to influence activity in the cingulate cortex (likely to do affective assessment and memory) and orbitofrontal cortex (attention, inhibition, hedonic value, etc). As you can see this is just gross anatomy, these structures are involved in a variety of cognitive processes.

Going by your question I imagine you are interested in the drive to behaviour or determination. The nucleus Accumbent shell is considered responsible for this, although I think thats like saying wembley is responsible for one of two teams winning a football match. The resolution in functional signals has a long way to go. Anyhow endocannabinoids are thought to be responsible for modulating the increase in eating or rather 'wanting' to eat, they do this by increasing the hedonic-value of the motivational target. Hence cannabis give people the 'munchies' and can make them feel sexually aroused.

So to answer your question can we measure this? Yes and no. fMRI can detect motivation-related activity in NA shell, but there is alot going on in that area so there is bond to be noise that must be controlled for in any design. But essentially you can show someone images of food before and after eating and measure their neural responses. However I must stress that the NA is not the only area involved in this motivational process.

As for EEG, research is a bit inconsistent and I would feel uneasy recommending anything from this area. This is mostly because motivational processing is largely conducted in subcortical structures, which EEG isn't really the best method of investigation for. However it can be used for detecting arousal, but cognitive arousal can occur as a result of merely interesting or treating stimuli.

Another method are implicit cognitive measures and eye tracking, this is a growing field. Measures include, visual-search tasks, dot-probe, stroop, go/n-go, attentional blink tasks etc. What this area tends to show is that people are more attentive to motivationally-relevant stimuli i.e. more attentive to food when they are hungry. Although some research shows that people attend to such stimuli regardless of motivational state, the methods here are constantly being updated as they are still relatively new methods.

Finally and importantly do any measures discriminate between levels of motivation? No, not any of the neural or cognitive measures I know of anyway, most are lucky to detect differences between fasted and fed states. There is work going on in this area, but so far differences in levels of motivational state are only collected on explicit measures such as VAS scales asking someone what there level of motivation is.

Sorry for lack of references SE only allows you two references on the first post in a new area of SE.


What's the relationship between priming and anchoring? I've recently been dabbling in the behavioral literature, reading about cognitive biases such an anchoring, when one of my friends asked me how this phenomenon differed from the classical cognitive psychology construct of priming. It struck me as odd that I couldn't form an explanation that convincingly tweezed them apart: both appear to be about prior exposure to a stimulus changing the reaction to subsequent stimuli. All I can come up with is that anchoring is generally used in a more narrow context while priming seems more like an umbrella term. That, or they could just be field specific terms for the same underlying cognitive processes. Is there some consensus as to how anchoring and priming are related?

One relevant paper I've found suggests that priming (along with hypothesis testing) constitute the underlying mechanisms that operate within the anchoring paradigm. However, this is just one (rather old) paper, so I think question as to the consensus viewpoint is still valid.

Priming: Stimulus A influences perception/processing of stimulus B. E.g. you walk past an Italian restaurant and smell pizza. When you enter the supermarket and consider what you want to make for dinner, you might be more strongly inclined to bake a pizza, then when you hadn't smelled the delectable pizza from the restaurant.

Anchoring: The first information in a series if informations influences your processing of the whole of this information. E.g. if you are asked to guess (not calculate) the result of 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 you might guess a higher number compared to your guess of the result for 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 x 8, because the first number in that calculation (1 versus 8) influences your judgment.

So the theoretical difference is that while in priming one stimulus influences the processing of another, later stimulus, in anchoring the form of the beginning of the information influences the processing of the whole information.

Nevertheless it has been suggested that anchoring is caused by an underlying priming (Mussweiler & Strack, 1999; from the abstract):

  Results of four studies support the notion that anchoring effects are mediated by
  mechanisms of hypothesis-consistent testing and semantic priming. ... Study 4 suggests that self-generation of knowledge contributes to the robustness of the effect, thus resolving the seeming inconsistency that anchoring effects are at the same time remarkably robust and mediated by typically fragile semantic priming mechanisms.

Sources:

Mussweiler, T. & Strack, F. (1999). Hypothesis-consistent testing and semantic priming in the anchoring paradigm: A selective accessibility model. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 35, 136-164. doi:10.1006/jesp.1998.1364 Available online at http://www.communicationcache.com/uploads/1/0/8/8/10887248/hypothesis-consistent_testing_and_semantic_priming_in_the_anchoring_paradigm-_a_selective_accessibility_model.pdf


What is the relationship between mathematical ability and autism? There have been studies [1],[2] investigating the relationship between autism spectrum conditions (ASCs) and mathematical or scientific ability. In the first study, Baron-Cohen et al (2007) examined 378 undergraduate mathematics students with 414 students from other disciplines (medicine, law, social science). There was a ninefold increase in the rates of autism in the mathematics group compared to the control group (seven cases of autism 1.85% in the math group vs one case of autism 0.24% in the control group).

There is some evidence that seem to indicate that individuals with higher mathematical ability might have more autistic traits. Baron-Cohen has suggested that there is an empathizing–systemizing difference where empathy is mutually exclusive to systematizing or conceptualization but this is hotly contested [3].

So what is the relationship between mathematical ability and autism?

(The distinction between postgrad and undergrad maths is discussed in another question - Is there any evidence for the distinction between undergrad and postgrad mathematics?)

References

  [1] Baron-Cohen, Simon, Sally Wheelwright, Amy Burtenshaw, and Esther Hobson. "Mathematical talent is linked to autism." Human nature 18, no. 2 (2007): 125-131.

  [2] Baron-Cohen, Simon, Sally Wheelwright, Richard Skinner, Joanne Martin, and Emma Clubley. "The autism-spectrum quotient (AQ): Evidence from Asperger syndrome/high-functioning autism, males and females, scientists and mathematicians." Journal of autism and developmental disorders 31, no. 1 (2001): 5-17.

  [3] Baron-Cohen, S. (2009). The empathising-systemising theory of autism: Implications for education. Tizard Learning Disability Review, 14, 4–13. https://doi.org/10.1108/13595474200900022

It can range from savant-like skills to extreme dyscalculia, some are very mean or average.

The savant stereotype is caused mostly by many Western films which is applicable only for a small fraction of ASD population; for the others in ASD spectrum it is misleading  and unhelpful.


Is the ordering of Brodmann areas arbitrary? A single Brodmann area is defined based off cellular composition. Are the Brodmann areas ordinal, and if so for what reason? (e.g. is there something that makes Brodmann area 1 the "first one", and area 2 the "second one"?)

The place to find this answer is of course Brodmann's original 1909 manuscript Vergleichende Lokalisationslehre der Großhirnrinde: in ihren Prinzipien dargestellt auf Grund des Zellenbaues  available here in German  or here in English (Brodmann's Localisation in the Cerebral Cortex: The Principles of Comparative Localisation in the Cerebral Cortex Based on Cytoarchitectonics).

The English version is unfortunately not open access (and I don't have the inclination to pay US$90 for it) and the German version is a scanned copy of the original printing, so there's no easy way to search the text without reading all of it. However, skimming through it, I see that the description of the areas (which he calls Felder, lit. 'fields') begins in Kapitel IV (Chapter 4), page 130. He mentions that this work is largely an extension of his previous 1907 work, but beyond that there doesn't appear to be any mention of why he choose his numbering, at least not that I could find with a quick skim. It appears though that he choose a more or less arbitrary starting point and worked more or less counter clockwise from there, with a few small exceptions.

Elsewhere in the manuscript, Brodmann discusses the division of the cortex into larger homologous regions in both humans and other mammals (p. 129), and it's clear from the description of the areas that they are not divided up based on any study of homology. For example, he mentions that the regio postcentralis (lat. "post central region") is divided up into the cytoarchitectural areas 1, 2, 3 and 43 (pp. 130--132). The regions appear to correspond loosely with our modern notion of "lobes", but tend to be somewhat smaller (for example, there are additional subdivisions near the central sulcus).


What are the definitions of 'multi-channel coding' and 'opponent channel coding'? I am looking for the definitions of

Multi-channel coding
Opponent-channel coding

And specifically in the context of visual adaptation. I have searched for information on the web and in books, but I am unable to find accurate definitions.

Short answer

Multi-channel coding in color vision refers to the different photoreceptors in the retina.
Opponent-channel coding refers to the opposing color pairs: the red-green and yellow-blue axes.

Background

I think you are referring to terminologies often used in color vision.

Multi-channel coding generally refers to different types of photoreceptors in the retina, namely rods and cones. In terms of color vision, it is the cones doing the work. In trichromatic species, such as humans, there are three types of cones in normally sighted people, namely red, green and blue cones. So humans have a 3-channel color system, the same as your computer screen you are looking at now, namely R, G, and B channels.
Opponent-channel coding refers to the opponent theory of color vision as proposed originally by Hering. It basically states that our RGB color system defines color space by 3 opponent processes, namely a black-white, a red-green and a blue-yellow opponent system (Fig. 1). Basically it is theorized that red opposes green, yellow opposes blue and white opposes black (and vice versa). This means that colors are mixed between these channels (e.g. a reddish blue equals purple), but that colors within channels are mutually exclusive (e.g. there exists no such thing as a yellowish blue).

Fig. 1. Hering model of color vivion. source: University of Calgary

Reference
- Gouras, Color Vision. In: Kolb et al (eds), Webvision. The Organization of the Retina and Visual System. Utah University