Is there some hierarchy of the human senses? What I mean by this is to ask if each of the sensory inputs can be quantified by the amount of information the brain is receiving: For example,

Brain says: currently receiving 10 packets of visual information, 3 packets of auditory info, 20 packets of somatosensory input etc...

Or maybe to put it in different terms, to measure the rate at which these sensory inputs are being recorded. For example:

Brain says: currently capturing visual info at 120 frames per second, hearing 20k cycles per second, somatosensory input at ...!?

And thereafter calculate the information content coming from each (per unit of time?) and thereby list them in some order.

Ultimately what I'm trying to understand/see is: if you had such a list (say, 1. visual, 2. touch, 3. hearing,....etc) and you began to remove modes of input from largest to smallest, would/might we begin to see weaker sensory inputs begin to enter the picture (sensory inputs that were being drowned out by the other senses)?

Now I think I have understood your mental model of human perception, I can give you an answer. Correct me if this is not what you meant to ask.

If I understood you, you think that the human brain functions like a robotic brain. A sensor captures an image, sends it to the brain (which is comparable to a central processing unit), then the next one, etc. The brain then processes each incoming image. And analogically for senses other than vision. And you are asking if, if we stopped sending signals form one sense, the brain will have free capacity to process more informaiton from the other senses.

The theory behind it

The problem is that you can't define it as neatly as that. On a very high level, this model is almost right, except for the part where the brain takes in one "captured frame" after the other and processes a frame as a whole. Technically, the eye really captures one frame (a fixation), does not see while it moves to a different viewpoint (a saccade), then it captures again. But from then on, the analogy breaks.

The captured light is not sent to a central perception-processing place in the brain as a package. Rather, there are many neurons on the first step of the visual processing (V1 area). And each of them is connected to a few retina cells, a few fellow neurons from the same area, and neurons from the next step of visual processing. No V1 neuron "sees" the whole frame. Each V1 neuron will fire when it is excited enough; but exciting and inhibiting signals come from all directions - retina cells, neighbour V1 neurons, hierarchically "higher" V2 neurons - which means that the input for the object we perceived is not just the light falling on the retina, but also what we have just perceived.

If you pick a single V1 neuron and count how often it fires, you can certainly count some kind of average rate, but it will not be much dependent on the rate at which eye fixations happen (which is actually a constant). It will have something to do with the amount of light  falling on the retina, and the rate at which this light changes, but these are only a few of the contributing factors - what the brain has already recognized is another factor, through the signals coming from the "higher" neurons. So, if you try measuring at the first stage of the brain - which is the V1 neurons for vision - you can't operationalise your measures.

Besides, at that stage, no consolidation has happened yet. The information output of the V1 neuron is not a recognized object, they do very low-level recognition of textures, contours and similar. Information coming from other senses - the classical five ones, but also ones not widely known in popular culture, and ones which are known but not categorized as senses (such as pain, body spatial orientation) - gets incorporated into the recognized object along the way.

But one thing to recognize here is that, if you are asking about the effect where the recognition process starts, then no, your idea won't work. The V1 neurons can't process information coming from the other senses. They are connected to the retina, not to the cochlea. If we amputate a person's eyes (good thing this is a thought experiment only), the V1 neurons won't start processing sound signals instead.

But you are probably aware that blind people can recognize more of their environment based on other senses like sound, than sighted people wearing eyecovers. This indicates that the brain has learned to use the information coming through the other channels more efficiently.

A speculation

I think it is reasonable to assume that in the "sense switched off" situation the brain will also recognize more of the information coming in from other channels. The brain does not recognize everything that comes in from the senses, but only what it is interested in at the current moment. If there is nothing coming in through vision, it might "decide" to recognize more details coming in through sound than it would have otherwise.

This means that the assumption you mentioned in the comments is true, if we start looking at the effect after recognition has happened - a person whose vision was "switched off" will extract more information out of the same amount of audio signals reaching the ear. But it is not really measurable, because we can only speculate how this information is represented within the brain. We don't have any metrics for "information as represented in the brain". Shannon found out how to measure informaiton which is stored somewhere accessible, as in a written word, but the information within the brain is not accessible, and its amount is only weakly correlated with the information available to the sensory organs.

Be aware that not only is the amount of the information in the brain not the one available to the sensory organs, but it is also created from a mix of sensory perceptions and knowledge. At that point, you can't hold apart what came from the senses and what didn't.

  When we look at something, perhaps 95% of what we consciously perceive is not what is "out there" but what is already in our heads in long-term memory. [Colin Ware]

Even if we could make measurements there, we wouldn't be just measuring the impact of the senses. We would have big trouble distinguishing it from the impact of memory.

So, can we have a hierarchy?

I explained why we can't have a hierarchy at the input-end of the recognition pathways. I speculated that we can have a hierarchy at the output-end - but even if my speculation is true, we can't measure anything at that end. So, the answer to the question as a whole is: if there is a hierarchy, we can't measure it in the way you propose.

I think there are experiments which try to make some rude sort of hierarchy, using observation of the kind "a person with covered eyes feels more disoriented than a person with stuffed ears". But this doesn't have the precision you are implying, does not answer to what extent the lower sense can be developed if the first one is missing permanently, and it can only be applied to the more prominent external senses like vision and hearing. (There are authors who argue that being certain of the truth of a statement is a sense - how do you turn that off?) Besides, experimentation with turning senses off can be dangerous, see research on sensory deprivation chambers for details.

I don't have formatted citations for that post here. The information on the functioning of the visual pathway can be read in the book "Visual thinking for design" by Colin Ware. The info on how well one sense can replace another is certainly available in peer-previewed literature, but the one case I remember vividly is described by a journalist, http://www.mensjournal.com/article/print-view/the-blind-man-who-taught-himself-to-see-20120504. The author who claims certainty is a sense is Robert Burton.


Why the brain region with less activity is not more responsible for some action? From my naive understanding, it seems that when people try to find correlations between a human action and a certain pattern of activity in the brain, they measure the brain activity with some device  designed for that while a group of people perform that action. It seems that it is usually deduced that the brain region that shows more activity is more responsible for the action under investigation.

What is the proof that the relation is not inversed? That is: Why the region with less activity is not actually more responsible for the action under investigation?

The thing neuroscientists do is look at the differences in brain activity. They thus don't see "a high activity in brain area X". Instead, they see, between condition A and B, a difference in activity in brain area X. These differences can be both positive and negative, and each may receive it's own explanation.

There must thus always be some kind of reference. This references can be done in different ways:

Brain activity during a task is compared to some resting state activity. Before or after the experiment the subject is asked to sit still, often look at a fixation cross and do nothing. The assumption is that, while doing nothing, the brain is in some sort of neutral state. Every difference in activity you then find, could be attributed to the brain processes necessary to perform the experimental task.
A control task is performed. In a study to emotional responses (Moser et al., 2006), for example, they show pictures. Some pictures contain emotion eliciting content, other pictures are perceived as emotional neutral. The reason a control task would be performed is to eliminate unknown variance in the data. If you are interested in an emotional response to pictures, and would compare that to a resting activity, as described above, you do not know for sure whether the difference in brain activity is caused by an emotional response, or by the fact that you presented a picture. By presenting emotion-full pictures and comparing brain activity with activity during presenting neutral pictures, the only difference is the emotional content in the picture. Not the type of task.
You could perform one task and make a distinction based on behavioral results you obtained. In the following fMRI study (Drummond et al., 2005), subjects performed a psychomotor vigilance task (a simple reaction time (RT) task). The long RT-trials were seperated from the short RT-trials, and then brain activity is compared. This way, everything is the same in the experiment, but the behavior of the subjects.

References

Drummond, S., Bischoff-Grethe, A., Dinges, D. F., Ayalon, L., Mednick, S. C., & Meloy, M. J. (2005). The neural basis of the psychomotor vigilance task. Sleep, 28(9), 1059-1068.

Moser, J. S., Hajcak, G., Bukay, E., & Simons, R. F. (2006). Intentional modulation of emotional responding to unpleasant pictures: an ERP study. Psychophysiology, 43(3), 292-296.


Do some people possess more or more active mirror neurons than others? Some people love watching people get hurt, they may find it humorous. Some people don't really like it but can watch it. Some, however, find it unbearable to watch. Why is this? Are the latter of the three categories of people listed have more mirror neurons than the average, or are they more dynamic, perhaps? Do the first type of people listed have less mirror neurons than most, similar to those with SM, who don't perceive fear, or are their mirror neurons less active? If we all have these mirror neurons hard-wired into us, as humans, why are the impacts of our mirror neurons so variant among differing individuals of the human race?

An inability to watch others in pain can be described as an empathetic reaction, which mirror neurons aren't necessarily responsible for. Mirror neurons are hypothesized to facilitate 'action understanding'. In other words, they are able to recognize the intentions of others' actions, thereby allowing them to anticipate their future actions. What may be happening is that stronger activation in the mirror system for emotions may be a contributing factor to empathy and moral thought.

The VMPFC (ventromedial prefrontal cortex) is sometimes considered the 'moral network' of the brain, and mediates the automatic reactions which occur when one must face moral decisions [1]. Patients with emotion-related damage in the VMPFC have been shown to express more utilitarian judgments than average, which judges not based on the perceived harm of the individual but rather the negative objective impact on the world at large, and thus may be less readily affected emotionally by suffering, particularly at the individual level. [2] Other studies have shown that rational processes mediated by the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) can override the moral network [1] and lead to utilitarian judgments.

Sources:

[1] Marazziti, Donatella, et al. "The neurobiology of moral sense: facts or hypotheses?." Annals of general psychiatry 12.6 (2013).

[2] Moll J, de Oliveira-Souza R: "Moral judgments, emotions and the utilitarian brain." Trends Cogn Sci 2007, 11(8):319-321


Are there any free online questionnaire/survey sites that also measure the time it takes for participants to answer each question? I'm doing a research experiment where I'm trying to measure the time it takes for participants to answer certain questions in an online questionnaire/survey. More specifically, I will be asking participants to examine a graphic image and answer a question about it. An important part of this research is recording how long it takes participants to respond. Any suggestions are welcome, thanks!

Here are a couple of suggestions:

Inquisit records the timing of each response and can be run online.
If you care about timing a lot and you need to run the study online, then this is quite a good option.
Qualtrics can record various features of survey delivery time. In particular, you can record time spent on each survey page. If you have one question per page, this can approximate time to respond to the item. This can be useful if you want to identify participants who are not reading items. However, I wouldn't use Qualtrics for cognitive reaction time based experiments. Note also that in order to record item response times you need to manually set this for each survey page.


Should I look at the data of an experiment before the dataset is complete? For a research internship I am running psychological experiments online. As it takes a while until the experiment is done (meaning that enough people participated, so that a sufficient sample size is reached), I could already look at the data and run a few analyses with that incomplete data set. This way I could already see a trend in what the final result might be.

Are there any methodological reasons that would speak against that? For example, am I biasing myself in this way? Or is there any other reason this could be considered bad research practice?

Short answer
From an ethical standpoint, not including interim evaluations may be bad practice.

Background
I will start off with a more extreme case than in your question example, just for illustrative purposes, namely that of a clinical intervention study. If it appears that the treatment group (say, experimental medicine Y, instead of the standard of care treatment X) features substantially, if not significantly, more cases of serious adverse advents, or even deaths, that may (or may not) be related to treatment Y, the ethical best thing to do is put the study on hold until things are sorted out. This, to prevent any possibility of further physical harm caused by the experimental treatment. This happens quite regularly and should be followed by a report paper stating the results and a discussion on the best way to proceed this research, if applicable.

In a more experimental setting it may also be ethically best practice to evaluate preliminary data, as possible experimental design flaws, unexpected results (weird outcomes or artifacts in, say, left-handed people) or confounding factors may become apparent, and timely adjustments to the experimental protocol can be made. Why is this ethically correct? Because you may be subjecting people to a flawed experimental paradigm and wasting many hours of otherwise more productive time.

The case provided by the other answerer, where the experiment is stopped, while prior statistical power analysis was done, that is malpractice. Conversely, adding more subjects post hoc based on 'near-significance' is also questionable practice. But this is more related to what you do with the experimental interim data. In my opinion, they should be critically evaluated, but not so much on effect size, but rather on feasibility, correctness and validity - basically to sanity-check the study proceedings.


Is it possible for a human to feel no emotion? I have heard that there are some people who don't feel emotions. Is that really true? Is it really possible for someone to feel no emotions?

It is a physical possibility but you need, at the bare minimum, to feel for your self to survive; like the need to eat. If you don't want to call hunger and similar things for feelings it would be a problem anyway because discus is what make you avoiding eating bad or toxic food and fear to avid getting eaten etc.

scorce: http://atlasofemotions.org/#continents/disgust

What you most likely have heard is that psychopaths don't feel anything and that is not true. They do care abut them self and others in self interest but would not start crying for anyone from feeling empathy.  (I don't have a source for the later part but you can test it with a mind experiment with a psychopath and a smaller guy that tries to piss of the psychopath. Per definition the psychopath don't care if he kills the other dude but if he do he will end up in jail) http://www.dictionary.com/browse/psychopath

(Sorry for the horrible English, was a while since I last wrote anything)


Conscious basis for gender identification What conscious experiences lead a transgender person to identify with the opposite sex?

Physiology is clearly not determining.
Sexual orientation is not determining (homosexuality).
Clothing preference is not determining (cross-dressing).

To put it more simply: how does someone know that they were born as the wrong gender?

A conscious basis for gender identification?

There is currently no evidence to suggest that conscious experiences are a factor in leading a transgender person to identify with the opposite sex. Additionally, there is mounting evidence that transgender children are statistically indistinguishable from children of the gender with which they identify, meaning the process is set as early as five years old in humans (Olson, Key and Eaton, 2015). This suggests a predominantly biological basis. Because we cannot, for good reasons, conduct the appropriate experiments on humans, it is difficult to collect direct experimental evidence for any biological hypothesis, however.

Mammalian gender and sexual behavior

Rather than resulting from experience, the direction in which any mammal's sexual behavior will develop generally appears to be set sometime during the prenatal period, long before humans start having or remembering conscious experiences. In some sense, it appears that gender may be more biological and less psychological than traditionally believed.

The subject was covered in a recent Nature article, where researchers concluded that DNA methylation plays a primary role in the determination of gender and sexual behavior (Nugent et al., 2015). In their experiment, the researchers manipulated developing rats' exposure to gonadal steroids by gene manipulation and pharmacological means, and thereby induced or inhibited masculinized sexual behavior.

  Pharmacological inhibition of Dnmts mimicked gonadal steroids, resulting in masculinized neuronal markers and male sexual behavior in female rats. Conditional knockout of the de novo Dnmt isoform, Dnmt3a, also masculinized sexual behavior in female mice. RNA sequencing revealed gene and isoform variants modulated by methylation that may underlie the divergent reproductive behaviors of males versus females. Our data show that brain feminization is maintained by the active suppression of masculinization via DNA methylation.

One should be careful to generalize from rats to humans, but the proposed developmental dynamic of gender is highly consistent with the way mammalian sex is believed to be determined, and the ability to induce and inhibit masculinized sexual behavior at will provides substantial evidence for the DNA methylation dynamics hypothesis.

Concluding remarks

We ultimately do not yet fully understand the basis for human sexual behavior. What we can say is that we have no evidence for the idea that conscious experiences are in any way a factor in the development of gender or sexual behavior, and that already by five years old, the direction of sexual behavior development has been set for long enough to render the transgender child statistically indistinguishable from a cisgender child of the gender they identify with. A possible candidate theory for an underlying biological mechanism is prenatal DNA methylation dynamics.

References

Nugent, B. M., Wright, C. L., Shetty, A. C., Hodes, G. E., Lenz, K. M., Mahurkar, A., ... & McCarthy, M. M. (2015). Brain feminization requires active repression of masculinization via DNA methylation. Nature neuroscience.
Olson, K. R., Key, A. C., & Eaton, N. R. (2015). Gender Cognition in Transgender Children. Psychological science, 0956797614568156.


Why does human mind tend to understand everything in terms of duality or binary states rather than continuum of states? We can understand things much quickly when things are defined as a duality. Like good and bad, happy and sad, positive and negative, slow and fast etc. When two things are distinguishable distinctly the human mind tends to grasp it more easily versus defining it on continuum scale or having more than two states.
Duality is the most easily understood phenomenon of human mind. That's why most classification happens on these lines despite the existence of a continuum of states.

There are many reasons why people tend to understand things in dualistic ways, but I'll mention two:

In the realm of inference (e.g., judging what is true, forming predictions), having mature schema for each end of a spectrum (e.g., one for introverts and one for extroverts) allows you to infer what positions between the two extremes might look like with adequate levels of accuracy. So, if you have developed schema for the ends of the extroversion spectrum, you can infer what a moderately extroverted person would be like without actually needing to store a third schema for a moderately extroverted person in memory. In other words, a dualistic understanding allows you to form schema for points between the extremes on the fly when you need it (sometimes called interpolation). It isn't a system that's free of the risk of error, but its easy to see how it is extremely efficient from a computational perspective in a world where agents don't need perfect mental models.

In the realm of decision-making, its important to consider the nature of what a decision actually is. While information and judgments might rest on spectra (e.g., the degree of attraction felt for a dating partner, strength of a preference for a political candidate) the actual decisions that are informed by these judgments are often discrete. For example, you can't "kinda" marry or "kinda" vote for someone. You either choose him/her or you don't. You can only express one behavior at a time. What this means is that information and judgments which fall on spectra often need to be converted into yes/no decisions. For example, when choosing which of five schools to attend for college, you're actually trying to convert a plethora of continuous information (e.g., benefits and costs of each school) into five yes/no values (specifically, one "yes" and four "nos").

This is such a ubiquitous phenomenon in decision-making that I don't think its surprising that people naturally tend to use binary language to speak about things which exist on continua. That said, its important to point out that people don't always reduce topics they care about to binary categories. In many cases, people will share their ambiguity or ambivalence with trusted friends when they are having a hard time converting continuous information into discrete decisions. Pay attention the next time a friend opens up about something difficult and you'll notice that their language often demonstrates nuance and awareness of grey areas.

The paper cited below is an excellent discussion of the relationship between continuous information and discrete judgments and the reference section is packed full of papers that go into much more detail than I'm able to accomplish here.

Luan, S., Schooler, L. J., & Gigerenzer, G. (2014). From perception to preference and on to inference: An approach–avoidance analysis of thresholds. Psychological Review, 121(3), 501. (link to PDF)


How does the brain create original thoughts? Since the generation of thoughts requires the coordination of various parts of the brain, how does the brain know which parts to activate to develop unique ideas? Does the brain randomly activate its various regions until it happens upon a unique thought?

Is the creation of unique, original, and creative ideas a function of the brain alone, or does the brain require an outside stimulus to engender creative or unique thinking?

There are many instances of great thinkers arriving at groundbreaking ideas from mere observation of nature and society. For example, Einstein developed his equivalence principle by thinking about elevators (mundane, everyday machines).

So, in summary, does the brain need outside stimulation to think imaginatively, and how does the brain coordinate its different parts to generate unique ideas?

To understand how the brain "knows" what to do, we can look at how children learn language.

At first, children randomly create all kinds of sounds, including those that aren't part of the language(s) spoken in their environment. Parents and other people react to these sounds, repeating them, speaking their language, smiling, etc., and the children in turn react to these reactions to their sounds, learning which sound elicit which reactions (e.g. which sounds lead to a smile, which sounds are ignored, etc.), until they slowly begin to build a repertoire of sound and "pre-words" which give the most pleasurable results.

With time, children learn to recognize parts of the language spoken in their environment and begin to emulate these sounds, learning their first words, and eventually to speak.

So what we have here is a brain creating random behavior (in this case with the speaking apparatus), and learning from the effects this behavior elicits in the environment which behavior leads to the desired results. Whatever happens in the brain when a desired result is achieved, is stored as the "internal behavior of the brain" to do to achive that result, e.g. what to say to get that ball.


Decrease in d' with concurrent increase of criterion I was reading about an experimental condition where subjects d' (sensitivity) decreases, while at the same time their criterion is increasing (a shift to the right). The authors were arguing with a decrease in the hit rates.

I was wondering how this is possible: An increase of criterion should decrease hit rates as well as false alarm rates (the subject becomes more conservative). As these are both proportionally decreased, sensitivity, defined as

$′=_−_$

should remain constant, or not?

Source: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-015-0903-8

Within the classical signal detection framework, the effect of bias is studied by keeping the signal and signal plus noise stimuli identical, which should keep d' constant, and manipulating the instructions to the subjects or the payoff/cost matrix to change the bias. Under these conditions, we expect d' to remain constant since it is defined by the signal and signal plus noise distributions. Changing the instructions or payoff/cost matrix can change the underlying distributions even if the stimuli are fixed because forcing someone to use an unnatural criterion could add additional noise. This will cause a decrease in d'. For fixed distributions, changing the criterion can only change d' (as defined by ZD−ZF and not mu2-mu1/sigma) if the distributions are not Gaussian.

The attached graphic looks like the experiments manipulated the stimuli/paradigm by changing the inter-stimulus interval (ISI). This seems to have changed the underlying signal and signal plus noise distributions and causes d' to increase as the bias decreases. Potentially the longer ISI gives the subject more processing time leading to an increased d'. Depending on how bias is calculated (cf. Two different values for criterion in signal detection theory?), the criterion could be staying constant relative to the noise alone stimuli, but the bias could be changing.


Measuring changes in hemispheric dominance over time I've recently started using my trackball left-handed after being right-handed my whole life. The motivation is partly to balance out wrist strain, and partly to see how much my brain rejects the idea.

Since I am at the computer for a good portion of the day, this is a fundamental change. I started to wonder whether it might actually have some measurable impact on hemispheric dominance, and found (unsurprisingly) that Google had some links which posed the same question. To this point I have only my own admitted ignorance combined with unsubstantiated claims on the Internet.

Is there a reasonably reliable and convenient way to measure changes in hemispheric dominance over time?

Edit: As I mentioned, I did some Googling around about the potential connection between dominant mouse hand and hemispheric dominance. The only tools I discovered along the way were simple questionnaires. I took 3-4 of them in the absence of any better ideas, and will repeat them over the next few months. I suspect that using Brain Age-style games or Lumosity might be more useful than a questionnaire, but wonder if results would change more due to practice than anything else. I was hoping that I overlooked something that more directly targets hemispheric dominance.

I would first like to discuss the concept of lateralization and clear up a common misconception about hemispheric dominance.

  "A brain is considered to be asymmetrical (or lateralized) if one side (hemisphere or other brain region) is structurally different from the other and/or performs a different set of functions." (Bisazza et al., 1998).

A good example is the lateralization of language which relates to handedness. It has been widely accepted that a majority of people are left dominant for language, although right dominance increases with the degree of left handedness (Knecht et al., 2000).

Lateralization and behavioural asymmetries are neither restricted to language or humans (Bisazza et al., 1998). In the scientific community, hemispheric dominance is usually discussed in the context of a specific function. However, there is a common misconception by those who have an incomplete understanding of brain lateralization, particularly worsened by the spread of popular science articles and pseudoscientific tests (such as the one linked to in the comments) that wrongly assumes there is an overall dominance of one side of the brain (with left corresponding to logical and analytical thinking and right corresponding to emotional and creative thinking), that determines your personality trends. This is an incorrect oversimplification that is explained in a good article by RationalWiki.

Thus, your question is misguided in focusing on changes in hemispheric dominance. Even if you focused on change of lateralization for a specific function, this is unlikely as it requires substantial reorganization of the brain that is really only observed during development and to a much smaller extent following brain injury. However it is still good to question what changes there may be due to using a non-dominant hand more often! In fact (Teixeira and Teixeira, 2007) looks at how practice with the non-preferred hand alters manual preference for a specific task, and suggests this generalizes to other related motor tasks (Teixeria and Okazaki, 2007). The task used in their 2007 study involves sequentially touching the thumb with (in order) the ring, middle, little, and index fingers. The goal is to complete 5 cycles without interruption in the shortest time possible. They assess this before, after, and 30 days following practice, observing a noticeable shift in those that are allowed to practice compared to controls. You can choose a similar task and/or something different (for example, score in a quick video game that requires pointing with the trackball) and measure how you improve in comparison to a friend who doesn't practice with the left hand.

Ironically, they discuss how the left premotor cortex is dominant for learning sequential tasks (whether performed with right or left hand) and so might limit the observable shifts. For this reason it might be good to try their task to compare with that study and also your own task for personal interest.  If you are really interested in how performance and practice (especially long term) can affect the brain, there is lots of existing literature and imaging studies on the differences in brains of musicians compared to non-musicians or amateurs. Due to years of practice, professional musicians often have differences in and sometimes larger motor areas (Schlaug, 2006), increased cerebellar volume (Hutchinson et al., 2003), increased auditory cortical representation (Pantev et al., 1998) and increased assymetries such as in the planum temporale (Schlaug et al., 1995).


Is there terminology for perceptual illusions at the moment that figure-ground reversal occurs? I'm looking for a term in the perception / cognition area of research.

I recently saw this visual illusion that 'flips' what is negative-space and what is positive-space.  This is known in the arts as "figure-ground reversal"

I am looking for a word / term that addresses when the thing we are observing changes, such that the parts that signify the 'figure' and 'ground' are themselves switched.  Is there a word for this?  Does Ecological Psychology have a way that it organizes such stimuli?

I would think there may be a term that address when our perception 'flips' the perception of a static image, and afterward we are biased to perceive the 'ground' differently.  This happens when we see a vase instead of faces.

But I don't know that word, nor do I know if it applies to the occurrence of when a thing/image/perceptual-field changes, in order to action the figure-ground reversal.

There are many such illusions. It mostly belongs to pattern-recognition and gestalt psychology. From German it means "shape", "form", "essence". To answer your question, I think, here there are illusory contours (when you watch and understand an illusion) and lateral inhibition (when you have got new understanding of the picture and compare it with previous form).

Enjoy more pictures ;)


Why aren't sleep measures consistently measured as mediators/moderators of cognitive performance? Knowing that sleep quantity and quality affects cognitive performance across many domains, why aren't pre-test sleep measures or intra-test measures of arousal a standard part of all cognitive test paradigms?

Measures of arousal surely do play a role in subject performance on a wide variety of cognitive tasks. Generally, scientists can safely ignore this factor as it is assumed to introduce random noise between participants. From a hypothesis testing perspective, scientists are much more worried about factors that introduce systematic bias, or factors that skew performance in one condition but not another.

As an example, consider a psychologist that is testing whether some intervention has an effect on performance. If we assume that arousal levels throughout the sample are randomly distributed, it should not affect our ability to detect an effect of our independent variable. In fact, there are potentially infinitely other factors that may affect performance on a cognitive task. To name a few: prior experience, mood, fatigue, cognitive load, intelligence, or attention. Each one of these factors in turn is the result of numerous other incidental variables (for instance, my mood may be affected by the weather, or how long it's been since I've eaten).

It would be infeasible to test for all of these factors, but again, if we assume that each measure is randomly distributed throughout a sample, it won't make a big difference-- in fact, it's somewhat statistically convenient:

Many psychological measures are normally distributed, which allow us to run statistical tests that assume normality (e.g., t-tests!) The reason this is so is because what we are measuring is actually the sum of many independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) variables-- such as arousal, experience, attention, etc. The Central Limit Theorem tells us that the sum of all of these factors lead to a normally distributed measure.

It is still important to know when and how sleep measures may affect performance. In knowing that information, scientists can watch out for situations in which arousal may cause systematic bias between conditions, a potential confound. But in general, it often just doesn't really matter for the tests we are conducting.


Do users of pictographically represented languages users have the same rates of dyslexia and dysgraphia? I was wondering, given that a number represents a concept, unlike a letter that represents sound (that changes with context) - Do pictographic language users have similar rates of dyslexia and dysgraphia?

Short answer: Perhaps, but it is difficult to measure because the functional accounts of dyslexia and dysgraphia differ between alphabetic and non-alphabetic languages.

Longer answer: It has been argued that oral reading in Chinese can proceed via (at least) two pathways: the lexical semantic pathway (which supports reading for meaning), and the nonsemantic pathway (which connects representations of strokes, radicals, and characters to their phonological representations). [1][2]

From Yin et. al. [2]:

  "...The patterns of acquired dyslexia and dysgraphia observed in Chinese cannot be identical to the patterns observed in alphabetic languages. This is because certain properties of the Chinese script do not allow direct comparisons between the disorders. For example, nonlexical stimuli in alphabetic scripts...cannot be constructed in Chinese. Thus, it will not be possible to replicate the pattern of preserved nonword processing in surface dyslexia and dysgraphia observed in English and Spanish."

The article stresses that the patterns of dyslexia and dysgraphia in Chinese are determined by the language 'environment', or the spatial characteristics of the script, and not the language itself. Since the language is spatial in nature, it is hypothesized that speakers use orthographic information from the character in order to determine the character's meaning. This means that if access to the semantics of a word is partially damaged, then surface level dyslexia can be observed in Chinese -- though, again, since the nature of the languages is different, it is not an exact 'replica' of lexographic dyslexia in alphabetic languages.

Thus, it is more common in non-alphabet languages for dyslexia and dysgraphia to be associated with oral or phonological deficits. Some studies have shown that Chinese may demonstrate 'tonal dyslexia' by providing the wrong tonal stress on a syllable, or by providing the wrong monosyllable for the word.

  "One view of phonological representations of Chinese words is that they have a non-linear structure containing separate syllabic, segmental (onset and rime) and supra-segmental layers...Tonal reading and writing errors result from impairment to the tonal tier or association between tonal and segmental tiers which leads to a dissociation between segmental and suprasegmental units, thus revealing the structure of the phonological lexicon."

Overall, given that there is no "universal" model of reading and writing, there is evidence that these dysfunctions in language processing arise within languages, not in spite of them, and thus take on different characteristics within each language. [3]

For individual characteristics among other non-alphabetic languages, feel free to look at the source material below.

Source used: Acquired Dyslexia and Dysgraphia Across Scripts

[1] To understand this within the context of alphetic languages, the dual-route theory of reading aloud describes observable potential deficits in lexical understanding and in phonological understanding when reading words aloud.

[2] W. Yin et al. / Acquired dyslexia and dysgraphia in Chinese (p. 163-165)

[3] B.S. Weekes / Acquired disorders of reading and writing: Cross-script comparisons (p. 53)


What correlation is there between breath control and personal self confidence? In yoga, the instructor mentioned that controlled deep breathing can increase self-confidence. (Next time, I will ask him why he believes that but I doubt he has any references...)

Furthermore, there are certain times when I do notice increased levels of self confidence after controlled deep breathing.

Note: This is different than using deep breathing to prevent or calm down from a panic or anxiety attack.

The scope of the question is focused on a natural baseline level of confidence, increased via controlled deep breathing.

Some reference in general turned up as well:

  For example, controlled breathing can be used to increase
  self-confidence,...
  http://www.khyf.net/khyf/articleview.aspx?spage=A&DParticleid=44&icategorylist=

Are there any studies that prove this and if so, why? Any point in the right direction is greatly appreciated. Thank you.

I am not aware of any neuroscience papers that link breathing and self-confidence. One review that touched on breathing in yoga was Jerath et al. (2006). They discuss how deep breathing increases parasympathetic autonomic activity. This can change the physiological state of the body, leading to changes in affective state.

One area of the brain that may be relevant is a patch of cortex called the insula. The posterior insula receives afferent information from the body and creates the initial sensory representation of body state (Craig, 2000). From there, the mid insula begins to integrate body state with other sensory modalities, such as visual and auditory information. This progression continues, until you have a highly integrated, abstract representation of interoceptive and emotional state in the anterior insula (Craig, 2009).

Activity in the anterior insula has been related to a wide array of higher cognitive functions, including self-recognition, emotional awareness, risk prediction, conscious awareness of sensory stimuli, temporal perception, attention, perceptual decision making, performance monitoring, and more. We know that relaxation techniques can influence activity in this area of the insula (Critchley et al., 2002).

It is well supported that controlled breathing changes the state of your body and activity in the brain, including the insula. These changes can also directly influence our cognitive state and cognitive ability.  Changes in self-confidence may be a part of that, depending on how you might define self-confidence.

Craig AD, Chen K, Bandy D, Reiman EM. (2000) Thermosensory activation of insular cortex. Nature Neuroscience. 3, 184-190. PMID: 10649575.
Craig AD. (2009). How do you feel-now? The anterior insula and human awareness. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. 10(1), 59-70.
Critchley HD, Melmed RN, Featherstone E, Mathias CJ, and Dolan RJ. (2002). Volitional control of autonomic arousal: a functional magnetic resonance study. NeuroImage. 16(4), 909-919. PMID: 12202079.
Jerath R, Edry JW, Barnes VA, and Jerath V. (2006). Physiology of long pranayamic breathing: Neural respiratory elements may provide a mechanism that explains how slow deep breathing shifts the autonomic nervous system. Medical Hypotheses. 67, 566-571. PMID: 16624497.


Is there a psychological model or theory that describes strangers in the vicinity unknowingly causing discomfort? The closest thing I found to this is social anxiety or agoraphobia, which is a fear of socializing or a fear of public places, respectively.  However, I think the idea that strangers can cause discomfort by default is more a symptom of avoidance personality disorder.  What is the difference between agoraphobia and avoidance personality I wonder.

Agoraphobia seems more like avoidance personality disorder than social anxiety disorder, and yet more often agoraphobia is confused with social anxiety disorder than vice versa.  At least, if you go to Wikipedia, more information is found about social anxiety disorder than avoidance personality disorder.

My curiosity stems from the fact that a huge part of having avoidance personality disorder must involve seeking treatment, yet I read in a lot of places that people who suffer from it fail to seek treatment.  Since treatment of avoidance personality disorder seems to be so ubiquitous, it would be very easy for somebody with the disease to find somebody to help.  So what's the reason that it's not diagnosed more and if perhaps it is diagnosed more often and I just don't know about it, what explains why there is no widely understood treatment?

I think the answer to that question can be teased out if one knows the reason why the presence of or noticing strangers in the vicinity leads to feelings of discomfort.

What do you mean by "in the vicinity"?

Social psychologists have studied what is called proxemics. If we simplify it, one can say that they study the concept of "personal space". Mostly focused on two people interacting with each other, but there is also research on what is called cognitive spatial mapping.

I can think of multiple "diagnoses" that can be tossed around and played with. Schizoid personality disorder. Schizotypal personality disorder. A mild form or some pervasive developmental disorder (Asperger syndrome, for example). If the discomfort is not rooted in a fear of embarrassment or feelings of social ineptitude, it is harder to proximate the root of the discomfort, harder to put a label on it.

On a tangential note, going back to the topic of proxemics, people tend to have social conventions on what the appropriate distances away from others are; given the environment, closeness of the relationship, distance between or amongst people and yourself, etc. It is interesting to note that the same phenomenon (uh, exaggerated word) occurs in social interaction in a virtual world sort of setting. A well-known example is the study of proxemics in Social Life. When someone does not follow convention or simply violates another's personal space, even in Social Life, it generates discomfort. But I digress. Sorry, tangential ramble.


Training for the corpus callosum? Since reading is done in the left hemisphere of the brain, does reading text in the left visual field train the corpus callosum? For instance, I am interested in knowing whether training may lead to an increased size of the corpus callosum (e.g. more fibers), and whether this translates into some cognitive benefit (e.g. faster response times or comprehension of text in the left visual field).

I think so because I recently saw a document where it was reported that a guy who had his corpus callosum damaged by a bolt couldn't read words on the left anymore. The reason for that is/was that words in the left visual field go to the right hemisphere of the brain. To be read the information is then transported via the corpus callosum to the left hemisphere.

It's been known that Increased Corpus Callosum size was found in musicians who began music training before age 7 and that Training working memory leads to growth in Corpus Callosum.  As for how to train working memory, that's a diverse subject.  There have been a lot of experiments involving Training working memory for ADHD patients, however a meta-analysis has revealed that most of the training from these ADHD-centered programs only leads to short-term gains, not long-term or generalisable gains.

To speculate some, I think taking on new tasks and challenging yourself repeatedly in a wide context (as opposed to isolated tasks "designed" for working memory) is your best bet.  Learn a new instrument, learn to program in a new language, learn new regions (spatial mapping is associated at least with hippocampal cell growth as long as you use spatial strategies, not procedural ones).


Why is cultural understanding often wrong? One common set of beliefs that I time and time again find wrong are the 'cultural norms' that are taught to people as if to make them more educated about differences in behaviors across cultures.

In Asia, it is often believed by Western-educated individuals that averting eye gaze is a show of respect. On the contrary, it is naturally a human instinct that eye contact will serve to establish emotional bonds between people. Without eye contact, people will lose a lot of the natural opportunity to connect between people. In this sense, eye contact is inherently not differently understood depending on culture, but rather a common language hard-wired into our neurological anatomy. It is also wrong how people think prolonged eye gazes are rude in Asia only -- it is rude in America as well. Nobody likes to get stared at, whatever the intentions.
So it follows that if an adequate eye gaze is indeed understood as an affront, then it is the necessity to preserve hierarchy that is preventing meaningful connections being made between persons of differing hierarchies. In my country, South Korea, there is a lot of discussion of how the society as a whole lacks communication -- between political factions and individuals in the family. No wonder! Compounding the problem is the fact that hierarchy and language are also correlated -- the honorific system is extremely complicated compared to any other Western language.
In the same way, Asian hierarchical culture is not a difference, but more often than not a problem. It is a genuine hindrance to democratic ways of life. When often western modes of behavior, like the fact that it is okay to walk out of a lecture hall, or put legs atop of a college style desk-chair combo, or to address professors by their name, are arguably examples of when liberty goes too far, there is in Asia, the contrasting draconian rules on the other side of the spectrum. Ageism -- the belief that age translates to authority, is one of them. Most companies prize experience over education -- unless the experienced are also well-educated. An attachment to external validations, like credentials, are super important.
To refer to the book "The Geography of Thought", therein the author makes a distinction between the 'weak dialectic' versus the 'linear logic' that Westerners use. I think this is less a cultural difference as it is the result of the Enlightenment and the formal logic developed by specific Enlightenment figures. The book argues that Asians who are expatriates or who have a PhD use linear logic more heavily. This already serves to prove that logic is borne out of a different intellectual history, rather than simply being a product of culture. In other words, intellectual styles are the result of a specific process that was unique to the Western world.

I have a little difficulty understanding your question. are you asking why do we percieve slightly different behaviors as culturally different? I would say that for me cultural difference is a continuum or degree rather than difference. For example, as you wrote, prolonged eye contact is rude everywhere, but how much is acceptable might be different. Also for me the source of difference doesn't make it not culturally different. Every cultural difference comes from a source, socio-economic, geographic, historical etc. The different intellectual developments led to some cultural differences at least that's my opinion. Of course we can discuss if we should focus on differences or similarities among human groups. I would say should we choose between. I hope that was what you were asking.
P.C: to be honest, I was thinking about my own experiences and observations but when you think about one of the most popular theories about culture, Hofstede's four dementional theory, sees cultures in a continuem of four dementions (tolerence for uncertainty, individuality-collectivity, masculanity-feminaty, power of distance)(Hofstede, 1983).  It is not some cultures avoid uncertainty or seek it, but that some cultures/social groups avoid uncertainty or seek it more than other cultures/social groups for example.
Hofstede, G. (1983). National cultures in four dimensions: A research-based theory of cultural differences among nations. International Studies of Management & Organization, 13(1-2), 46-74.


Why do solutions to problems feel simple (or obvious) once we are given them? I was watching a video about one of the hardest maths problems even examined in the IMO (International Math Olympiad). And once I was walked through the solution, it seemed so obvious to me, as I'm sure it did for most people. It had a two step solution and was explained very intuitively.

Another example of this is whenever I watch a movie and replay the story line in my head afterwards, it always feels that the story line is predictable. Almost as if I could write it myself. When in essence it's not doubt difficult and I couldn't never predict it's plot line without seeing the entire film.

Given any outcome to an event (such the answer to a mathematical problem or the plot of a movie (or anything really), why do we feel as if it was so obvious?

Besides the throw-away answer of 'cockiness or 'arrogance', is there a physiological phenomenon for this sense of confidence/ know-how one may experience after being told the solution/end to something.

The closest one that comes to mind is called the Hindsight Bias. Basically this means that things seem to be "more obvious" than it actually is--usually after the event had just happened.

Definition:

Hindsight bias is a term used in psychology to explain the tendency of people to overestimate their ability to have predicted an outcome that could not possibly have been predicted. In essence, the hindsight bias is sort of like saying "I knew it!" when an outcome (either expected or unexpected) occurs - and the belief that one actually predicted it correctly.

Usually coming up with the idea is difficult, for instance solving a math problem. The challenge is finding the right mental model to approach the problem, but once the solution or approach is presented to you, it may be easy to accomplish and you'd feel it was obvious.

Or it could be really just that predictable or that you're natural/good at the subject (e.g. Math) to begin with and it is easy for you.


What research has been done on attachment types in other primates? The most canonical experimental paradigm for studying human attachment styles is the Strange Situation leading to classifications such as Secure, Insecure-avoidant, and so on.

What are the equivalent methodologies, classifications, findings and longtitudinal variability in studies of other primates?

I should add that I'm vaguely aware of, say, Harlow's work, but as far as I understand it, it seems to be about the existence of, rather than the variability of, attachment behaviour in animals.

Jaak Panksepp, in Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions, describes seven brain systems, "raw feels", that are shared among human and non-human primates. One of these systems is PANIC (he capitalizes the systems' name to differentiate them from the similar terms used in speaking about emotions). He says, "a separation distress PANIC system is important in the elaboration of social-emotional processes related to attachment".


What theory discusses modes of "Being" vs. that of "Happening"? Is there a theory (Perhaps Freudian) concerning that of "Being" and that of "Happening"? I vaguely recall learning about it many years ago in H.S. Psych, but of course any search for either of these keywords results in non-relevant returns as both being and happening are common words.

The question is, if there is a theory concerning these concepts - what is the gist? But as importantly, what are keywords that I could use to find useful results?

I believe you are referring to Erich Fromm's work on the "having" (not "happening") and "being" modes. See here


Can alter-personas of a person with MPD/DID have mental diseases of their own that other 'alters' don't have Context: We are making a short film on different mental disorders.

The Question: If it is realistically feasible for a 'alter-persona' of a person with Multiple Personality Disorder to have different mental disorders of their own such as schizophrenia and depression.

Yes.  For example, people suffering from DID can also suffer from depression.

See DID

Since, by definition "dissociative identity disorder is characterized by the presence of two or more distinct or split identities or personality states that continually have power over the person's behavior. ... ", then the other disorder (e.g. depression) can be unique to a persona.


Open-source software for analyzing Electrodermal activity Electrodermal activity (EDA) is a measure of the sympathetic activity, typically caused by stress or an emotional state. Analysis not a straightforward process like analysing reaction times. It requires some sophisticated algorithms to distinguish tonic activity (Galvanic Skin Level; GSL) and phasic activity (Galvanic Skin Responses; GSRs; see Figure 5). For a more elaborate explanation of EDA and how to analyze it, please see Bouscein (2012).

BioPac (Braithwaite, 2013) and Movisens provide software toolboxes for analyzing this data, but these are costly packages. Ledalab and PsPM are open-source Matlab toolboxes that are also able to pre-process and quantify GSL and GSRs. Unfortunately, Matlab itself is not open-source and quite expensive.
Are there other free solutions that allow you to analyse EDA data, such as Python or R packages?

Bouscein, W., Roth, W. T., Dawson, M. E., & Filion, D. L. (2012). Publication recommendations for electrodermal measurements. Psychophysiology, 49, 1017-1034.

I have found a list of Python and Matlab packages. I'll summarize them over here. As soon as I have gone through the packages, I'll provide some additional details.
Online

edaExplorer: Also in Python.*
EdaExplorer is a tool that is able to detect noisy data from clean data. Five second epochs are made which will be categorized by a model that is the result of a supervised machine learning algorithm (a support vector machine). The data can be marked binary (clean vs noisy) or multiclass (clean, doubtfull or noisy). The noisy data can subsequently be removed. Moreover, edaExplorer is able to find peaks (GSRs) and you can label epochs by walking through the data.

Python

*edaExplorer:
cvxEDA: Also in Matlab.**
cvxEDA uses a convex optimization procedure to separate the data into three components: (1) a tonic component, (2) a phasic component and (3) a noise term. The noise term is simply a sequence of zero-averaged Gaussian random variables with variance $\sigma^{2}$. The phasic component is determined by the convolution of sudomotor nerve pulses. The tonic component is all that is left, slow varying changes in conductivity. The function is physiologically plausibly and has shown to outperform the continuous deconvolution analysis (CDA), as implemented in Ledalab.
PyPsy 0.1.1 or PyPsy 0.1.5:
...

R

...

Java

...

Matlab

**cvxEDA:

edaSleep:

EDA:

Ledalab

PsPM

Most packages came from http://affect.media.mit.edu/software.php. The website provides tools for analyzing several other stuff, such as facial recognition. Definitely worth taking a look.

References
edaExplorer: Taylor, S., Jaques, N., Chen, W., Fedor, S., Sano, A., & Picard, R. Automatic identification of artifacts in electrodermal activity data. In Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference. 2015.
cvxEDA: A Greco, G Valenza, A Lanata, EP Scilingo, and L Citi. cvxEDA: a Convex Optimization Approach to Electrodermal Activity Processing,
IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, 2015. DOI: 10.1109/TBME.2015.2474131
edaSleep: Akane Sano, Rosalind W. Picard, Toward a Taxonomy of Autonomic Sleep Patterns with Electrodermal Activity, IEEE EMBC 2011, Boston, USA, August 2011


Is there a word or phrase that describes emotional self harm? Is psychologically/mentally self harming yourself on purpose possible, where you look for things that trigger you (trigger your anxiety, stress or PTSD), not to desensitise yourself but to hurt yourself? Is there a word for it?

When it comes to self-harm, there is not a lot of information available about the emotional form, but there is a lot about the physical forms of self-harm such as self-flagellation (as a punishment and not for religious rituals), cutting, burning etc.

According to the mental health charity, Mind, self-harm is

  when you hurt yourself as a way of dealing with very difficult feelings, painful memories or overwhelming situations and experiences.

The NHS states that

  Self-harm is when somebody intentionally damages or injures their body.

Wikipedia expands on this by stating

  Self-harm (SH), also known as self-injury, is defined as the intentional, direct injuring of body tissue, done without suicidal intentions.(Laye-Gindhu & Schonert-Reichl, 2005; Klonsky, 2007; Muehlenkamp, 2005) These terms are used in the more recent literature in an attempt to reach a more neutral terminology. The older literature, especially that which predates the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), almost exclusively refers to self-mutilation.

The APA states

  Also known as non-suicidal self-injury, or NSSI, the condition is classified in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (2013) as a "new disorder in need of further study,"

The definition in Wikipedia and used by the NHS and the APA has generally been used, but it is becoming increasingly recognised that self-harm can take on the form of emotional harm to the self.  Emotional self-harm can be conscious or unconscious, and self-blame comes into this category.

As "itsrory" said in 7 Cups of Tea

  Self-harm is often thought of as only physical (i.e., cutting, burning, etc.), but self-harm can also be emotional. Self-harm is just that, harming the self. Anything you do to intentionally make yourself hurt for reasons that are not socially acceptable, can be viewed as self-harm. Some emotional things people do that may be classified as self-harm are: staying in an emotionally-unstable relationship and purposefully doing things that you know may make you feel sad, upset, or depressed.

What I would add to the end of this quote is that you need to bear in mind that purposefully revisiting painful memories can come into this category, however if you are revisiting them in a therapeutic environment in order to deal with them, it is not emotional self-harm.

What is different between physical and emotional self-harm is that the physical, such as cutting and burning, is usually employed for emotional release, and not necessarily to punish; whereas the emotional self-harm punishes the person committing it.  What makes this complicated is that exceptions to this include the fact that self-flagellation can be either punishment or emotional release, and revisiting painful memories can also be done for both.  For example, someone who is not feeling anything may deliberately make themselves "feel" by revisiting painful memories in order to release the emotions trapped inside.

The only term I can come up with for emotional self-harm is self-deprecation

References

Klonsky, D. (2007), "The functions of deliberate self-injury: A review of the evidence", Clinical Psychological Review, 27(2): pp. 226—239PMID: 17014942, DOI: 10.1016/j.cpr.2006.08.002

Laye-Gindhu, A. & Schonert-Reichl, K. A. (2005), Nonsuicidal Self-Harm Among Community Adolescents: Understanding the "Whats" and "Whys" of Self-Harm, Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 34(5): pp. 447—457DOI: 10.1007/s10964-005-7262-z

Muehlenkamp, J. J. (2005), Self-Injurious Behavior as a Separate Clinical Syndrome, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 75 (2): pp. 324—333PMID: 15839768, doi: 10.1037/0002-9432.75.2.324


What causes behavioural inhibition? There are obvious consequences that prevent people from behaving anti-socially or criminally. However there are many behaviours that are within the bounds of social norms, yet there seems to be some "invisible" force preventing people from letting go of inhibitions and acting spontaneously.

What stops a person from doing something when they have the urge to do something spontaneous and random?

 I was in the process of answering another question when it was deleted; so decided to write my own question

The most common theory to date is that behavioural inhibition is developed from negative reinforcement.

Gray's biopsychological theory of personality

  the Behavioural Inhibition System (BIS) and the Behavioural Activation
  System (BAS)  ../..  The BIS is thought to be related to sensitivity
  to punishment as well as avoidance motivation, while the BAS is
  thought to be related to sensitivity to reward as well as approach
  motivation.

There is some research that suggests that the BIS scale is better correlated with neuroticism and negative affectivity, rather than anxiety.

  The BIS scale was less correlated with anxiety and depression symptoms
  than are neuroticism and negative affectivity scales, probably because
  it is designed to measure predisposition to anxiety rather than the
  experience of anxiety. BIS scores were higher in females,...1

Brain Functions: Behavioral Inhibition, Behavioral Flexibility, and Cognitive Control

Discusses how we modify our behaviour and suggests that some behaviour is inhibited in an "auto-pilot" manner by the prefrontal cortex to free up our brain for more complex thought processes.

  We can inhibit our actions and behaviors while they are in progress,
  and we can also inhibit our emotions and memories. Different parts of
  the prefrontal cortex, at the very front of the brain, are used to
  interrupt these various types of behaviors or thoughts. Some theories
  even suggest that the role of the prefrontal cortex is to stop all
  ill-suited actions or thoughts, to leave room for more appropriate
  actions.

Overall, there are numerous studies showing a  link between anxiety and  experience of a fear based reward system  with behavioural inhibition.2

1 Using the BIS/BAS scales to measure behavioural inhibition and behavioural activation: Factor structure, validity and norms in a large community sample
A.F JormCorresponding author contact information, H Christensen, A.S Henderson, P.A Jacomb, A.E Korten, B Rodgers
NHMRC Psychiatric Epidemiology Research Centre, The Australian National University, Canberra 0200, Australia
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0191-8869(98)00143-3

2 J Child Fam Stud. 2011 April; 20(2): 157–170.
Published online 2010 March 17. doi:  10.1007/s10826-010-9365-8
PMCID: PMC3048305
Behavioral Inhibition as a Risk Factor for the Development of Childhood Anxiety Disorders: A Longitudinal Study
Peter Muris,corresponding author1 Anna M. L. van Brakel,2 Arnoud Arntz,2 and Erik Schouten2


What degree of control do we have on eye movements? When something "new" and "interesting" enters our visual field it can usually happen that our eyes move toward the new target. How "intentional" and "controllable" are these movements? What degree of control do we have over this event? Since the movement is amazingly quick (maybe 0.3 seconds), it seems unlikely that a complex decision has been made, so can it be considered involuntary or beyond our control?

Short answer
We have a lot of control over our eye movements, including saccades. We can suppress saccades and make an anti-saccade instead. So can monkeys, our close cousins. Children have a lot more difficulty with the anti-saccade task, however.
Background
Saccades are fast eye movements, as opposed to the slower smooth-pursuit responses of the eye (Purves, 2001). Saccades are generally initiated when a visual target appears suddenly in our field of view. They can be made either voluntarily, or involuntarily. Once initiated, a saccade cannot be interrupted (source: Brown University). However, a saccade can be suppressed before it is executed. This can be investigated with the anti-saccade task (Munoz & Everling, 2004). In this task, the subject is instructed to look away from a suddenly appearing target and make an eye movement to the opposite side. This is difficult. However, humans can do it, and even monkeys can be trained on the task, although kids are reported to have a lot of difficulty with it. Anti-saccades have a longer delay than saccades, and have a larger margin of error in terms of the accuracy of putting the 'anti-target' on the fovea of the retina. Many of the anti-saccades are preceded by an (unintentionally initiated) pro-saccade, where the subject focuses on the target first, before making the intended eye movement to the opposite side.
References
- Munoz & Everling, Nature Rev Neurosci (2004); 5: 218–28
- Purves et al. (eds). Neuroscience 2nd ed. Sunderland (MA): Sinauer Associates (2001). Types of Eye Movements and Their Functions


Is a person who believe that their depression is curable more likely to overcome it? According to the idea of the growth mindset a person is more likely to successfully change, when they believe that change is possible.

To what extend does that apply to depression? Is a person who believes that it's possible to overcome their depression more likely to overcome it then a person who believes that there's no hope overcoming their depression?

Is a person who believes that it's possible to overcome their depression more likely to overcome it then a person who believes that there's no hope overcoming their depression?

The answer depends on many factors; and if therapy is received, as with all mental health conditions, it also depends on the form of therapy the depressed client receives and the rapport between client and the therapist.

CBT is often the go to form of therapy within IAPT services advocating for therapies which they can easily measure outcomes.  However, as pointed out in my answer on the limitations of CBT,

  There are a fair few factors which can prevent CBT from becoming effective, and a trained and certified CBT practitioner will be able to assess the suitability of CBT. If they operate ethically, they will not go ahead with providing CBT to someone who it would not benefit.

  One of the biggest factors which doesn't allow CBT to work is that if the client is not willing or able to challenge their thoughts and behaviours, then CBT will not be effective.

There are articles covering the effect of positive expectations creating positive outcomes.  Scheier & Carver (1993) pointed out that

  People who see desired outcomes as attainable continue to strive for those outcomes, even when progress is slow or difficult.  When outcomes seem significantly unattainable, people withdraw their effort and disengage themselves from their goals.  Thus, people's expectations provide a basis for engaging in one or two very different classes of behavior; continued striving versus giving up.

Belief that your depression can be cured will help by a considerable margin.

  There is evidence consistent with the suggestion of the cognitive model of depression that certain negative cognitions can produce and maintain the state of depression. There is also good evidence that depressed mood affects the relative accessibility of positive and negative cognitions. Thus, negative cognitions appear to produce depression, and, conversely, depression increases the probability of just those cognitions which will cause further depression. This reciprocal relationship between depression and cognition may form the basis of a vicious cycle which will perpetuate and intensify depression. (Teasdale, 1983).

Owen Lightsey (1994) also looked at positive automatic thoughts (PATs) as a "stress buffer".

  Is it possible that positive automatic thoughts (PATs) may similarly protect against depression? Such a finding could have considerable clinical significance. Cognitive therapies tend to focus on elimination of negative cognitions and on replacing maladaptive beliefs with adaptive beliefs (e.g., Beck et al., 1979); there is little focus on PATs per se. If PATs are found to uniquely buffer the effects of stress, straightforward training in generation of PATs could help to confer resilience

Later in the article he pointed out that things can be a little complicated:

  Results for the overall sample confirmed the hypothesis that PATs predict future happiness: Higher frequency of pre-existing PATs was associated with greater future happiness. This finding suggests that PATs have an impact not only on immediate well-being, as suggested by Goodhart (1985), but also on future well-being. Contrary to hypotheses, however, the overall PATs x Stressful Event interaction did not predict either depression or happiness. Unexpectedly, a subtype of PATs — PATs about social self-worth — behaved in a manner consistent with a stress buffer role: The interaction of PATs about social self-worth with stressful events predicted unique variance in depression, above the variance accounted for by other Factor x Stress interactions.

It won't necessarily mean you are doomed if you feel there is no end to your mental health problems; it just means it will take longer to help you. All depression can be dealt with effectively and successfully given enough time and proper support.

References

Beck, A. T., Rush, A. J., Shaw, B. F., & Emery, G. (1979). Cognitive therapy of depression. New York: Guilford Press.

Goodhart, D. E. (1985). Some psychological effects associated with positive and negative thinking about stressful event outcomes: Was Pollyanna right?. Journal of personality and social psychology, 48(1), 216. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.48.1.216

Lightsey, O. R. (1994). " Thinking positive" as a stress buffer: The role of positive automatic cognitions in depression and happiness. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 41(3), 325. DOI: 10.1037/0022-0167.41.3.325

Scheier, M. F., & Carver, C. S. (1993). On the power of positive thinking: The benefits of being optimistic. Current directions in psychological science, 2(1), 26-30. DOI: 10.1111/1467-8721.ep10770572

Teasdale, J. D. (1983). Negative thinking in depression: Cause, effect, or reciprocal relationship?. Advances in Behaviour Research and Therapy, 5(1), 3-25.  DOI: 10.1016/0146-6402(83)90013-9


On a variation of Trolley's problem. How to explain the survey's results? It is not long since a friend of mine reported about an experiment they would do in their philosophy class, or rather, in their philosophy classes. At that time, his and the parallel class were dealing with the problems in regards to Utilitarianism.

The teacher then proposed in class A the following problem (see Trolley Problem)

  You see a runaway trolley moving toward four tied-up people lying on the main track. You are standing next to a lever that controls a switch. If you pull the lever, the trolley will be redirected onto a side track, and the four people on the main track will be saved. However, there is a single person lying on the sidetrack. You have two options:

    Do nothing and allow the trolley to kill the four people on the main track.
    Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person.
    Which is the more ethical option? Or, more simply: What is the right thing to do?

Sidenote: The only thing you know about these people is that they're all more or less the same age. Nothing else (so there are no criminals, murders or saints to be taken into consideration).

The teacher then asked the pupils what they would do. The results were

29 would pull the lever. They argued that, on equal terms, letting one person die is worth if you can save four lives (4>1).
1 claimed, he wouldn't do anything, because he believed in destiny.

Now the teacher proposed another problem in the parallel class B, which goes as follows

  One man enters a hospital - let's call him John - because he has injured his arm. Nothing dangerous, but it requires disinfection. Coincidentally, in the same hospital, four patients are about to die. They need (urgently) respectively these organs: a heart, a liver, two kidneys, and lungs.

  After some tests, it turns out, that John's organs aren't only in perfect conditions for a transplant but are also compatible with the four patients mentioned previously.

  Assume now that the hypothetical transplants would all succeed and that John is the only possibility for those four patients to survive. You have two options:

    Let John go home after disinfection and allow the four patients to die.
    Arrest John and take his organs in order to save the four patients' lives. John dies.

Sidenote: Again, the only thing you know about these people is that they're all more or less the same age. Nothing else (so there are no criminals, murders or saints to be taken into consideration).

Surprisingly, a survey revealed the following results

23 would let John go home, even if the four patients die. They argued that John should decide whether to sacrifice for the benefit of the other patients.
7 would remove John's organs - and therefore kill him - in order to save the other patients' lives. They believed that four lives are, on equal terms, more value than one.

The teacher then brought both classes together and let them compare their viewpoints regarding the respective situations. Most of them agreed with the decisions, their colleagues from the parallel class had taken until one student noticed

  "We are actually dealing with the same situation. It does not matter wheter railway tracks or a hospital: this is just the context and it should not influence the final decision. The problem reduces to deciding wheter for people should live or only one, but not both of them."

Last, but not least, my question: How can you explain psychologically that, even though the students had to address the same question, the answers were dramatically different?

The two problems might seem to be equivalent but they aren't - in the "John" scenario those advocating not to arrest John and harvest his delicious organs are pointing out that:

  that John should decide whether to sacrifice for the benefit of the other patients.

This is showing that the problems aren't equivalent because John has a choice to sacrifice himself - he could turn to the docs and say - "Right! Knock me out and cut me up!"

In the trolley problem however the one doesn't have the choice to sacrifice themselves for the many, when deciding between forcing John to be an organ donor and letting the others die the ethical dilemma is about removing John's agency. To make the problems equivalent you would have to modify the trolley problem such that the "one" person also had access to a lever to divert the trolley such that it would kill them (and the knowledge of what pulling that lever would do).

Essentially the "John" scenario could be considered similar to the "stranger on a footbridge" variant of the Trolley Problem:

  In another version of the problem, the trolley, as before, is about
  to kill five people. This time, however, you are not standing near the
  track, but on a footbridge above the track. You cannot divert the
  trolley. You consider jumping off the bridge, in front of the trolley,
  thus sacrificing yourself to save the imperiled people, but you realize
  that you are far too light to stop the trolley. Standing next to you,
  however, is a very large stranger. The only way you can stop the
  trolley killing five people is by pushing this large stranger off the
  footbridge, in front of the trolley. If you push the stranger off, he will
  be killed, but you will save the other five.

-Ethics and Intuitions, Peter Singer 2005

As with the "John" case the majority vote not to kill the poor fat stranger and instead allow the hapless majority to die.

As to why the two different problems provoke such different responses, Dr Joshua Greene examined this in his doctoral thesis The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth about Morality and
What to Do About it and proposed that the difference was driven by a difference in emotional response.

As he put it:

  Because people have a robust, negative emotional response to the personal violation proposed in the footbridge case they immediately say that it’s wrong... At the
  same time, people fail to have a strong negative emotional response to the relatively impersonal violation proposed in the original trolley case, and therefore revert to the most obvious moral principle, ‘‘minimize harm,’’ which in turn leads
  them to say that the action in the original case is permissible

Greene tested this theory using an fMRI in An fMRI Investigation of
Emotional Engagement in Moral
Judgment and the results seem to suggest that the initial response to the stranger-on-a-footbridge variant is indeed an emotional one (based on activity seen on the fMRI in different areas of the brain) and it is this that leads to the difference in responses:

  The trolley and footbridge dilemmas
  emerged as pieces of a puzzle for moral philosophers: Why is it acceptable to sacrifice one
  person to save five others in the trolley dilemma
  but not in the footbridge dilemma? Here we
  consider these dilemmas as pieces of a psychological puzzle: How do people manage to conclude that it is acceptable to sacrifice one for the
  sake of five in one case but not in the other? We
  maintain that emotional response is likely to be
  the crucial difference between these two cases.
  But this is an answer to the psychological puzzle, not the philosophical one.


What is the limit of human memory? I am currently a high school student and have grown curious at what the limitation of memory storage in the brain might be in humans.

Information is coded genetically and stored in the brain, but is there a limit to how much information a person can retain without forgetting?

In high school I have taken a broad courses in biology, chemistry, physics, calculus and more. I wonder if my desire to learn and keep moving forward will be hindered mentally by the intrinsic aspects of memory (if they do exist)?

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-memory-capacity/

https://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-physical-limit-to-human-memory-If-yes-can-it-or-has-it-been-measured

It's said that you store everything or nearly everything you experience in your subconscious mind.


Are there emotions that only some people can feel? Presumably, there are emotions that almost any person can feel, such as happiness, sadness, guilt, and embarrassment.

But are there emotions that only a small fraction of the population can feel?
How might it be established that an uncommon emotion existed?

There is strong evidence that there is indeed a interindividual differential distribution of emotional processes or capabilities.
For instance, Bartels and Pizzarro (2011) could show that some antipersonality traits connected to the lack of compassion and empathy towards others are varying among people. Those who endorsed a more pragmatic and "straight" (utilitarian) view of life scored lower in social (and hence empathic) questionnaire batteries.
When people are asked about their spiritual attitudes and habits and what emotions they connect to this, they respond very different. For example, mystical experiences - the strong feeling of oneness with the environment - are more likely to score on altruism and empathy (no reference ad hoc present). A more "realisitic", grounded person would deny having such feelings simply because his or her internal self-construction processes do not attach with the same strength to those emotions. They would have different emotional attachments.
A very simple, common and intuitive (needs not really a scientific approach) illustration is when you consider "self-confidence" as an internal state. This is obviously a dramatically varying emotional state in humans. Overconfidence evokes internal security about own capabilities and the feeling of "i can master that", in contrast to a lack of confidence.

So, people have different default emotional states and they evoke different feelings in themselves due to different interaction with the environment.

References

Bartels, D. M., & Pizarro, D. A. (2011) The mismeasure of morals: Antisocial personality traits predict utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas. Cogntion PDF


Adept noticing of microexpressions by autistic people A recent conversation article argued that microexpressions may be picked up at a high rate by a subset of people with autism.
Usually, autistic people are thought to be unable or inadept at social cues and social expressions.

Is there any evidence for this subset of adept microaggression assessors?

  Be aware that a subset of people with autism are highly adept at noticing micro expressions, the very quick expressions that flit across someone’s face before they “rearrange” into a socially acceptable reaction. The people able to perceive this, however, are often unaware that they are supposed to ignore those expressions and respond to the “public face” instead. This can lead to social awkwardness.

Clark et al, 2008 show impairment in ASD individuals for detection of the emotional content of microexpressions.

In general, ASD individuals have trouble discriminating the nuance of facial expressions (though some argue otherwise: see for example Ozonoff et al 1990), for example the differences between genuine smiles and posed smiles (for example, Boraston et al 2008); ASD individuals can learn/train to improve recognition of these cues, however (for example, Solomon et al 2004).

Tardif et al 2007 suggests that slowing down a discrimination task improves performance for ASD individuals, again suggesting that impairments may be worse for briefer displays like microexpressions. This result is also consistent with the idea that, for some ASD individuals, detecting emotions is more about learned rules rather than the more "automatic" emotional detection process for typically developing people.

Overall, I don't see evidence for the claim in the linked article. That said, ASD individuals are each unique humans, and there could certainly be specific individuals who are sensitive to or have learned to recognize microexpressions, but the article doesn't cite any reference. A general caution to be aware of and sympathetic to difficulties with social cues for ASD folks applying for jobs makes sense to me; connecting this to enhanced microexpression detection does not.

(I'd add, also, that the existence, nature, and ubiquity of microexpressions is a bit controversial: see Porter & ten Brinke 2008)

Boraston, Z. L., Corden, B., Miles, L. K., Skuse, D. H., & Blakemore, S. J. (2008). Brief report: Perception of genuine and posed smiles by individuals with autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 38(3), 574-580.

Clark, T. F., Winkielman, P., & McIntosh, D. N. (2008). Autism and the extraction of emotion from briefly presented facial expressions: stumbling at the first step of empathy. Emotion, 8(6), 803.

Porter, S., & ten Brinke, L. (2008). Reading between the lies: Identifying concealed and falsified emotions in universal facial expressions. Psychological science, 19(5), 508-514.

Ozonoff, S., Pennington, B. F., & Rogers, S. J. (1990). Are there emotion perception deficits in young autistic children?. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 31(3), 343-361.

Solomon, M., Goodlin-Jones, B. L., & Anders, T. F. (2004). A social adjustment enhancement intervention for high functioning autism, Asperger’s syndrome, and pervasive developmental disorder NOS. Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 34(6), 649-668.

Tardif, C., Lainé, F., Rodriguez, M., & Gepner, B. (2007). Slowing down presentation of facial movements and vocal sounds enhances facial expression recognition and induces facial–vocal imitation in children with autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 37(8), 1469-1484.

Winkielman, P., McIntosh, D. N., & Oberman, L. (2009). Embodied and disembodied emotion processing: Learning from and about typical and autistic individuals. Emotion Review, 1(2), 178-190.


EEG segmentation and denoising which one should done first? Because of EEG nature, in EEG analysis often researcher use Windowing/segmentation method.

As i currently work on sleep study, and in my study i need to analysis EEG data, i came to a problem.

My problem: should i filter and Denise my EEG signal and then segment it or no i should firstly segment my EEG and then filter and denoise each epoch separately?

And as extra question, is there any difference between these two in signal processing view?

Depending on whom you ask, you get both answers. That's mostly dependent on the denoising algorithm. If you're using an adaption of GST, you are segmenting first with an n-1 overlap.

If you're using S3P I'd recommend not segmenting, since (in my experience) there is a slight difference, with unsegmented data having slightly closer results to Fernandez and Li, 2003 and Frangakis and Hegerl, 2001.


What is known about the information that's passed upwards within the neocortex? The neocortex is likely to process sparse representations in a hierarchy with information close to the raw sensor input appearing in lower levels and abstract concepts being appearing in higher levels. However, I'm interested in the exact nature of information being passed upwards.

There are some gating mechanisms in the neocortex. I could imagine that they prevent obvious information from being passed up. For example, since it was already reported and didn't changed. Much like workers within corporate hierarchies only report the same status once.
Similarly, it would make sense to pass up information that a lower layer doesn't understand and can't handle itself. This would also be comparable to workers at a company who ask their managers for decision they can't make.
If planning happens within the hierarchy of the neocortex, higher layers might hand down high levels options for the lower levels to unroll and simulate. In that case, the result might be passed up afterwards.
Encoding continuous input streams, attractor patterns are likely to emerge within levels of the hierarchy. I could imagine that the type of information send upwards changes when a level settles in a stable pattern.

Is there any evidence for or against these guesses? What else know about the nature of information that's passed up within the neocortex?

Your guess 1 basically sounds like habituation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habituation

Per your clarification in your comment, 2 sounds like you are generally talking about the role of prediction error in learning. There's a lot of work on this. Neural network models generally learn by modifying the connection strengths in response to error. The most well-known algorithm for this is known as backpropagation. Although this is an error signal propagating down a network, not up it, as you proposed. There's also the Rescorla-Wagner model of learning, another example of error-driven learning.

3 sounds like top-down processing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-down_and_bottom-up_design#Neuroscience_and_psychology

Regarding 4, neural firing patterns definitely settle into attractors. This has been pretty extensively modeled:

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Attractor_network


Are topics experienced later in the day more likely to be present in dreams? Is there any evidence suggesting that thoughts or experiences from late in the day are more likely to be dreamed about the following night compared with similar experiences earlier in the day?

The probability of what you'll dream is really dependent on a ton of factors. Stress can harm your ability to remember, and process, your memories during sleep. If you are highly stressed due to hunger later in the day, you brain may be more likely to process the memories of events before hunger set in. However, the opposite may be true for others. schizophrenics for example, have problems with how they process memories. Our brains can accidentally be configured to process memories in an atypical/unhealthy way. Also, extreme time-dilation can affect us. Personally, while in basic training, we got a lot less sleep than I was used too. I started noticing that the days seemed to blend together, and time moved quicker. My dreams, during that period, never seemed to follow any pattern based on time that I can remember, and it's likely true for most people in similar situations.

This article talks about sleep deprivation and how it affects the dreaming process/length:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-less-sleep-means-more-dreams/

This article details the effects of memory processing during sleep:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC534695/

This study looked into how alcohol affects memory storage:
http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh27-2/186-196.htm

Obviously there are many things besides alcohol which can affect your ability to form and store memories, so taken together, all of these indicate that the order of the events of our day, processed in our dreams, is affected by how you formed those memories while actually experiencing them awake.