Which physical properties of a stimulus can a human attend to? I am not only curious about speech, but for concreteness in illustrating my question, I consider the case of speech perception. Assume a listener is presented with an acoustic waveform. The wave causes deviations from the atmospheric pressure at the listener's eardrum. Thus, the acoustic pressure as a function of time “comes for free”, so to speak. Mechanically so.

From sound pressure we can derive amplitude, and by the fourier transform, amplitude as a function of time is transformed to the frequency domain. That is, amplitude as a function of time becomes amplitude as a function of frequency. We use this transformation because it reveals properties of the wave which are perceptually relevant, e.g. formant frequencies.  Presumably, listeners can attend to properties of the waveform describable under this transformation.

But what about mathematical models of the acoustic wave which are not simply transformations on the wave, but which derive some richer structure from amplitude fluctuations over time. For instance, what about a model which constructs a higher dimensional representation of the wave from the one-dimensional pressure fluctuations? (Imagine that instead of amplitude being a point moving back and forth along the real number line, the wave is represented as a point moving around in, say, 3-dimensional space). Say that such a model revealed a perceptually relevant property P of the waveform. Would the listener be able to “hear” P directly, or would would she need to engage in some information processing task to recover P from pressure fluctuations over time?*

*I realize that human listeners don't actually manipulate equations in their heads. I use the mathematics just to describe the underlying neural computation.

I found a paper called Summary statistics in auditory perception (McDermott, Schemitsch & Simoncelli, 2013) that might be relevant to your question. If you can't access it in full, you can a great description of the paper here. Please note that I'm writing about it from memory and that some details might not be correct.

The authors had a task where participants had to judge whether two sound excerpts are same or different. These sound excerpts could, further, have similar or dissimilar summary statistics, meaning that some higher-order regularity was superimposed on the initially generated sounds (such as the somewhat regular pattern of the sound of sea waves crashing, or the wind picking up, or a fire crackling). So, the sounds could differ in a local way (which specific frequency was displayed at some moment) or in a global way (what were the higher-order regularities of these sounds). They then displayed these sounds in pairs for variable amounts of time.

They found that people were better at discriminating sounds from each other when the sounds lasted longer - which is logical - but this was only true if the complex sound textures were different from each other. When the textures were mutually similar, people actually got worse if they listened to the (potentially different) sounds for a longer time.

The interpretation the authors gave is that the auditory system first encodes simple features of sounds, but, once confronted with too much stimulation to keep track of, it instead extracts higher order regularities and relies on these for perception.

I do not have a technical background so I can't go into detail about what these higher order regularities represent, mathematically speaking. But the links come with some images with explanations, and you might be able to glean more information from them than I.

Here is the abstract:

  Sensory signals are transduced at high resolution, but their structure
  must be stored in a more compact format. Here we provide evidence that
  the auditory system summarizes the temporal details of sounds using
  time-averaged statistics. We measured discrimination of 'sound
  textures' that were characterized by particular statistical
  properties, as normally result from the superposition of many acoustic
  features in auditory scenes. When listeners discriminated examples of
  different textures, performance improved with excerpt duration. In
  contrast, when listeners discriminated different examples of the same
  texture, performance declined with duration, a paradoxical result
  given that the information available for discrimination grows with
  duration. These results indicate that once these sounds are of
  moderate length, the brain's representation is limited to
  time-averaged statistics, which, for different examples of the same
  texture, converge to the same values with increasing duration. Such
  statistical representations produce good categorical discrimination,
  but limit the ability to discern temporal detail.

edit: I found a link to the pdf of the second paper I mention.


What heuristic or bias is at play when drawing conclusions from headlines only? I'm wondering why many people just read headlines when they scroll through social media and make up their minds based on this? What bias or heuristic is at play? Why don't people read the article?
I have considered availability bias because people will use the information that is available to them but that doesn't seem to capture the whole phenomenon. Why don't people click on the article to read it and assume they know the whole story based on the few words contained in the headline?

If the headline confirms a strongly held prior belief, or is antithetical to prior beliefs, then no need to read.
Consider an article titled, 'the world is round' ... no need to read it as I already believe that.
An alternate title 'the world is flat' ... no need to read that either.
An article 'the world is changing' may pique my interest and cause me to read further.
I wonder whether any heuristic or bias is at play, or whether an evaluation mechanism that judges the perceived benefit of reading the article versus the time opportunity cost of engaging with it.


Is there time in dreams? Thanks to his studies on schizophrenic thoughts, Matte Blanco (The Unconscious as Infinite Sets. An essay in Bi-Logic, 1975) introduced an important modification of Freud's notion of the unconscious. He established that unconscious system is ruled by the symmetrical logic.

This logic rises from two principles: the principle of generalization and the principle of symmetry.

According to the Principle of symmetry : In the unconscious, the inverse relationship of each relationship is treated as if it was equal to the relationship. For example: if Juan is the father of Francisco, Francisco is the father of Juan.

A consequence of this principle is the absence of time in the unconscious (Matte Blanco, 1975) because a logical connection of nearness between parts of a whole, cannot exist.

Additionally, Freud (1900) said that the process of a dream is strictly ruled by the unconscious and said that many dreams neglect the temporal sequence of their contents, while others try to indicate the temporal sequence in a complete way. Accordingly, Freud said that there's an alternation of absence and presence of temporal sequences in the unconsciouss (and so in dreams).

Does this alternation of absence and presence of temporal sequences, involve different brain's processes?

Reference

Freud, S. (1900). The Interpretation of Dreams Third Edition Translated with Introduction by A.A. Brill, Ph.B., M.D. in 1913 New York:The Macmillan CompanyOriginal legally available to download from https://www.forgottenbooks.com/en/books/TheInterpretationofDreams_10056678

The simple answer to this question is "no". Dream state accesses state of consciousness where past/present/future are melted, which is why dreamer might be re-living experiences from the past, premonitions about the future -all intermixed, as well as an abundance of other experiences.

But there is a more complex answer which might hold much more value when approaching the issue of dreams in general - and in their particularities.

The Freudian or even Jungian approach to dreams is a passive one. That vastly diminishes the potential they hold. It is correct that dreams let us peek into the subconscious, which to a great extent influence and even drive the "conscious" behaviors and states.

The superior way to approach that phenomenon is however to take an active role in the dream - what is called lucid dreaming. By this, you will get now only be able to freely explore the content of your subconscious, but to fix issues existing there - being able to solve in one night, what the psychoanalysis would in years.

Familiarize yourself with works of Stephen LaBerge - he gives specific methods for achieving the capacity for lucid dreaming.

If you want to go even deeper (or higher) into understanding and accessing the subconscious, as well as supra-conscious, there is a handful of schools around the world, a bit challenging to recognize, teaching genuine techniques stemming from Kashmir Shaivism, which can enable you to truly see how deep the rabbit hole goes...


Is there a part of the human brain responsible for triggering imagination, fantasy and coming up with unusual stories? I'm trying to understand if there's a specific process or part of the human brain which, when activated, causes the person to daydream, engage in fantasy or come up with ideas that are far from common reality? In other words, what is the trigger that initiates imagination process?
Examples

Looking at the clouds and guessing their shapes - there's no animals, unicorns or majestic castles in the sky - there are clouds, but the brain still comes up with unusual explanations.
Thinking about "What would I do if I was teleported back in time" or "what if I had super powers". I'm interested in what causes this slip into daydreaming.
When a person in love is fantasizing about a romantic partner and attributes all kinds of traits to them. Once again, some kind of trigger modifies thinking pattern.

Question
The phenomenon I'm talking about might be related to when people suddenly start to think about all kinds of stuff, real or imaginary upon going to bed (which prevents them from falling asleep).
It seems to me that all of these share a common theme, and I'm trying to learn if they are bound by some physical process or part of the brain.
This question is related to this question about factors that trigger creative thought in humans

There is no known specific process or part of the human brain which, when activated, causes the person to daydream, engage in fantasy or come up with ideas that are far from common reality. Instead, imagination is a broad-based activity which involves and overlaps with many brain regions and cognitive processes.

The cognitive neuroscientific basis of imagination is believed to comprise a core network of brain regions, which seems to utilize parts of a vast and broad-based set of other regions for different purposes. There are too many of these to list, but the main activity seems to revolve around the frontal lobes, parietal lobes and the hippocampus. Interestingly, and consistent with the idea of memory as a generative process, the brain regions involved in imaginary events appear to be highly related to the regions involved in episodic memory retrieval for real events.

Hassabis, Kumaran and Maguire (2007) report relevant fMRI evidence on imaginary scene construction:

  Our results show that when subjects construct new fictitious scenes an extended brain network involving the hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus, retrosplenial cortices, posterior parietal cortices, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex is active. Critically, we show using a conjunction analysis that this network is not specific to the construction of new fictitious experiences, but is also engaged when subjects remember both previously imagined experiences as well as their own real personal experiences. The implication is, therefore, that this distributed network supports cognitive operations engaged in common during the three main conditions in our experiment, most likely the (re)construction, maintenance and visualization of complex scenes.

These are associations, however. The results should not be taken to support the idea that there exists any process/brain region or set of brain regions which, if stimulated, will cause a person to daydream or engage in fantasy, only that these regions are active when people do so. This is always true for neuroimaging studies, but this is doubly true when the results involve a dozen or more areas.

References

Hassabis, D., Kumaran, D., & Maguire, E. A. (2007). Using imagination to understand the neural basis of episodic memory. The Journal of neuroscience, 27(52), 14365-14374.


Other emotions relative to angry/happy base emotions In my layman's experience, I'm vaguely aware there are four base emotions: happy, sad, afraid/surprised, and angry/disgusted.1

Some background:  We're training an AI to learn the difference between happy voices and angry voices.  We've had some success, by showing it 200 angry audio clips, 200 happy audio clips, and 200 neutral.  It can now reasonably tell when we're talking pleasantly or confrontationally... but the accuracy could be better.

Our total training dataset is made up of these audio clips: Happy, angry, neutral, calm, sad, fearful, disgust, and surprised. I think we can be more accurate by including these emotions.

But this is the problem:

Happy/angry/neutral span opposite ends of a spectrum; like binary.  It's easy to say:

Happy     1
Neutral   0
Angry    -1

That's the shape of the data we need to train a neural network to recognize 'Happy'.

So the question would be, is there any 'right answer' on filling in these blanks?  I've given it my best guesses below, but I'm hoping for something more scientific....

Happy     1
Angry    -1
Neutral   0
Calm      X  (0.5?)
Sad       X  (-1?)
Fearful   X  (-0.5?)
Disgust   X  (-0.75?)
Surprised X  (0.75?)

1: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/02/new-research-says-there-are-only-four-emotions/283560/

As I mentioned in the comments, the tool we're using is pyAudioAnalysis.  The tool's author, Theodoros Giannakopoulos, also wrote an earlier paper "A dimensional approach to emotion recognition of speech from movies"

This "Emotion Wheel" from that paper appears to be exactly what I was looking for:

It's also worth mentioning, maybe, that this later paper seems to describe all the specific characteristics that pyAudioAnalysis analyzes: "signal energy, entropy of energy, zero  crossing  rate, spectral centroid, spectral flux, Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients, Chroma-based features, etc."


What would happen to the human brain after running out of memory? According to this answer humans have enough memory to store 300 years of TV shows. However, of course, it is disputable, as storage system would be completely different from storing TV shows (videos) on von Neumann-like computer. Probably, the resolution of human brain is higher as well. Therefore it's really hard to put an actual duration, but we know it's finite.

But is it known what would happen after running out of this memory? Does it just rewrites the old information? Does the brain really needs to be completely filled with information in order for this mechanism come into effect or is it happening constantly?

I’m not sure that there is an answer to this question in the literature, and I doubt that we’ve ever studied cases of “running out of memory”.  But it’s an interesting question, so I’ll venture to answer it.  However, my answer, at best, will be just an assumption based on current knowledge and based on similar situations in other cognitive functions. Yet, I hope that it will give some ideas regarding this question. Or, better yet, other people will provide more comments and ideas that improve this answer.
We may never have seen cases of “running out of memory”, but we all certainly have encountered situations that we run out of our abilities to do something, such as to break our own sport records, to learn to speak a foreign language, and to memorize as many digits as we can in a single glance. What does the brain do when it encounters situations that it runs out of its abilities? The answer is it adapts itself by the process called neuroplasticity (ref 1, ref 2). Although, generally, our abilities will improve to some degree, this neuroplastic adaptation takes time and does not guarantee that it will be successful (e.g., we may never be able to break the Olympic running records ourselves or to remember 1,000 digits in a single glance) because we all have biological limits. What does the brain do when it reaches those limits? From observations, I think it just accepts the limits and does nothing more.
From this, it is logical to think that if anyone really runs out of memory, the first thing that the brain does will probably be not rewriting the old memory but modifying its memory synapses  because it has the ability to form new memory form modifying its memory synapses (ref 3, ref 4, ref 5). But after some time, it may reach its ability to further modify its synapses for new memory, what happens then? Does it rewrite the old memory? I have no references to answer this question, but I doubt that it does. To rewrite the old memory means to destroy the previous structure of synapses that hold the old memory and build the new structure of synapses to hold the new memory. The brain will end up having the same amount of memory but wasting its resource to do that. Is it worth it? Also, there are technical issues such as which old memory to be erased, how to locate the scattered synapses that hold the to-be-erased memory, and how to dismantle those synapses. Perhaps it’s best to just accept its limits and do nothing more as in the other situations above.
References

Adult Neuroplasticity: More Than 40 Years of Research

“Today it is generally accepted that the adult brain is far from being fixed. A number of factors such as stress, adrenal and gonadal hormones, neurotransmitters, growth factors, certain drugs, environmental stimulation, learning, and aging change neuronal structures and functions. The processes that these factors may induce are morphological alterations in brain areas, changes in neuron morphology, network alterations including changes in neuronal connectivity, the generation of new neurons (neurogenesis), and neurobiochemical changes. Here we review several aspects of neuroplasticity and discuss the functional implications of the neuroplastic capacities of the adult and differentiated brain with reference to the history of their discovery.”

Changes in plasticity across the lifespan: Cause of disease and target for intervention

“We conceptualize brain plasticity as an intrinsic property of the nervous system enabling rapid adaptation in response to changes in an organism's internal and external environment. In prenatal and early postnatal development, plasticity allows for the formation of organized nervous system circuitry and the establishment of functional networks. As the individual is exposed to various sensory stimuli in the environment, brain plasticity allows for functional and structural adaptation and underlies learning and memory. We argue that the mechanisms of plasticity change over the lifespan with different slopes of change in different individuals.”

Synapses and Memory Storage

“We now understand in considerable molecular detail the mechanisms underlying long-term synaptic plasticity and the importance that such plastic changes play in memory storage, across a broad range of species and forms of memory. One surprising finding is the remarkable degree of conservation of memory mechanisms in different brain regions within a species and across species widely separated by evolution. However, although it is now clear that long-term synaptic plasticity is a key step in memory storage, it is important to note that a simple enhancement in the efficacy of a synapse is not sufficient to store a complex memory. Rather, changes in synaptic function must occur within the context of an ensemble of neurons to produce a specific alteration in information flow through a neural circuit.”

The Corticohippocampal Circuit, Synaptic Plasticity, and Memory
“Synaptic plasticity serves as a cellular substrate for information storage in the central nervous system. The entorhinal cortex (EC) and hippocampus are interconnected brain areas supporting basic cognitive functions important for the formation and retrieval of declarative memories. Here, we discuss how information flow in the EC–hippocampal loop is organized through circuit design. We highlight recently identified corticohippocampal and intrahippocampal connections and how these long-range and local microcircuits contribute to learning. This review also describes various forms of activity-dependent mechanisms that change the strength of corticohippocampal synaptic transmission. A key point to emerge from these studies is that patterned activity and interaction of coincident inputs gives rise to associational plasticity and long-term regulation of information flow. Finally, we offer insights about how learning-related synaptic plasticity within the corticohippocampal circuit during sensory experiences may enable adaptive behaviors for encoding spatial, episodic, social, and contextual memories.”

Learning to learn – intrinsic plasticity as a metaplasticity mechanism for memory formation

“Use it or lose it” is a popular adage often associated with use-dependent enhancement of cognitive abilities. Much research has focused on understanding exactly how the brain changes as a function of experience. Such experience-dependent plasticity involves both structural and functional alterations that contribute to adaptive behaviors, such as learning and memory, as well as maladaptive behaviors, including anxiety disorders, phobias, and posttraumatic stress disorder.”


What is the difference between attractor and recurrent network? How are attractor and recurrent networks related? Is attractor network is private case of recurrent? Is there a mathematical formalism that defines both rigorously as graphs?

Many recurrent networks have attractors. For example, the BAM (bidirectional associative network) is a recurrent network: one input is presented and the network cycles until no more changes are seen in the connection weights. The BAM can be understood as developing attractor states: Seen in n-dimensions (in which n is the number of units in the model), the state can be seen as a position. Whenever the same stimuli is presented, the state of the network will stabilize to the same position.

One reference is Chartier S, Boukadoum M. (2006) A bidirectional heteroassociative memory for binary and grey-level patterns. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, 17(2):385-96.


What is the source and real meaning of "provisional living " concept and is there an equivalent term? I found in this blog post the following definition :

  Psychologists have a concept they call “provisional living.” That’s
  the insistence, so often heard from people whose lives are stuck on a
  dysfunctional merry-go-round of self-inflicted crisis, that everything
  they don’t like about their lives will change just as soon as
  something else happens: as soon as they lose twenty pounds, get a
  divorce, quit their lousy job, or what have you. Of course the weight
  never goes away, the divorce papers never get filed, and so on,
  because the point of the exercise is to allow daydreams of an
  imaginary life in which they get everything they think they want take
  the place of the hard work and hard choices inseparable from personal
  change in the real world.

Searching on the web or in Google Books I didn't find a definition of provisional living.

I found on a blog a similar definition as the above in this blog post:

  Psychologists sometimes call this ‘provisional living’, whereby you
  tell yourself that you’ll truly come alive, truly be fulfilled and
  optimally creative when you’ve moved, married, divorced, retired or
  whatever. So much of our culture is based on it, it’s hard to resist.
  When the mortgage is paid then you’ll really be free, when you move to
  the country, when you no longer have to earn a living, when, when,
  when…and then of course you die.

I found a reference of provisional living linking it with the passage ritual also in the book Close Relationships : Family, Friendship, Marriage Studies in
Jungian Psychology By Jungian Analysts by Bertine, Eleanor:

  To overcome the father and the mother is to take up the
  responsibilities of adulthood, to sacrifice provisional living. Then
  life will surely become harder and more problematic, but potentially
  more meaningful. It is a momentous step, so much so that primitive
  peoples, who are close to the unconscious and its eternal laws,
  celebrate the transition by the always serious and sometimes rather
  grim rites of initiation.

I was not able to find a definition in a psychology dictionary or anywhere.

What is the source of this concept? Is it used in psychology and is there a equivalent term that is more used?

The English Analytical Psychologist H. G. Baynes first described the provisional life in a chapter of his book "Analytical Psychology and the English Mind". For a good comprehensive description see http://web.archive.org/web/20150403145822/http://jungiancenter.org/essay/jung-provisional-life

  The Provisional Life. The dictionary defines “provisional” as “for the time being; temporary; conditional.” Something
  “provisional” is not lasting. It depends—on conditions, situations,
  people doing specific things. It is uncertain, more or less up in the
  air. Given a particular set of circumstances, a committee makes a
  “provisional” recommendation, in the understanding that things could
  change. A man undertakes a course of action, provided certain
  conditions are met. The essence of the word is transience.
              In Jungian psychology the concept of “provisional life” embodies the transient nature of “provisional.” The English Jungian
  analyst H.G. Baynes coined the term “provisional life,” and regarded
  it as a form of neurosis, for its resistance to living responsibly in
  temporal reality. The Jungian analyst, James Hollis, described the
  “provisional life” as an “…assemblage of behaviors, attitudes and
  reflexive strategies [that] constitutes our ‘false self,’…” Jung
  himself described the provisional life as “… the modern European
  disease of the merely imaginary life,…” Daryl Sharp provides a
  succinct definition in his C.G. Jung Lexicon: “A term used to describe
  an attitude toward life that is more or less imaginary, not rooted in
  the here and now, commonly associated with puer psychology.”


Is there a psychological term for finding your former partner sexually attractive? Is there a psychological term for finding your former partner sexually attractive, or for wanting to get back with your ex? How does science describe this condition?

FWIW, I've tried to find existing research on this and come up with next-to-nothing. Hypothetically speaking, I doubt it would be constructive to adopt new psychological jargon that even social and personality psychologists (like myself) have never heard of, given how little research there appears to be on this. The closest match I found was the following reference, which doesn't really discuss sexual attraction or infatuation:

Rubin, Z., Peplau, L. A., & Hill, C. T. (1981). Loving and leaving: Sex differences in romantic attachments. Sex Roles, 7(8), 821–835. Retrieved from http://www.peplaulab.ucla.edu/Peplau_Lab/Publications_files/Rubin_Peplau_Hill_81.pdf.

Anyway, if it's jargon you want, you might consider passion, lust (this has somewhat more negative connotation than I'd expect an author to desire, but at least one article uses it), limerence, or infatuated love. These don't connote the existence of a broken commitment, but infatuated love does connote a lack of commitment or intimacy by Sternberg's definition, and all connote sexual attraction.


Applying signal detection theory to single-stimulus presentations Normally, signal detection theory (SDT) is applied to data that involves giving two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) responses to pairs of stimuli, for instance saying whether stimulus B was the same or different from stimulus A.

I am wondering if SDT can also be applied to such judgements being made of single-stimulus presentations, particularly ones for which the "correct" answer is not necessarily objectively-determined, such as, for instance, seeing a visual stimulus and deciding whether it belongs to category A or category B.

There are a huge number of paradigms that SDT can be applied to. The simplest is probably the so-called yes/no paradigm. You present a single stimulus (typically noise alone or signal plus noise) and ask was the signal present. The subject if forced to respond with either yes or no. This type of paradigm typically leads to a response bias. In a 2-interval, 2-alterantive, Forced-Choice (2I-2AFC) paradigm both a noise alone stimulus and a signal plus noise stimulus are presented in random order. Subjects are then forced to to respond if the signal was in the first or second interval. The randomization tends to reduce (but not necessarily eliminate) the response bias linked to the stimulus (subjects may respond first more often than second, but they will be randomly allocated to noise and signal plus noise trials). One can both increase the number of intervals and/or the number of responses. For example a 1I-3AFC paradigm might involve responses of red, green, or blue. A typical 3I-AFC is the AXB paradigm. Confidence rating paradigms also fall within the scope of SDT.

Without objective definitions of the "noise" and "signal plus noise" categories, it is not possible to define a hit or a correct rejection. As hits and correct rejections are the basis of SDT, it is not clear if SDT will be useful.


Moral Foundations Theory and trigger word combinations Moral foundations theory splits morality into six categories. In his book, The Righteous Mind, Haidt mentioned that looking at church sermons of southern baptist vs less conservative christian Church sermons showed strong moral splits into "Conservative" and "Liberal" mindsets, defined by subsets of the six foundations, in particular those that triggered more often in the texts. Specifically, this was done using a predefined list such as this one and then doing a word count for each category, thereby binning the sermon into one of the two mindsets. Lets call such words "trigger words."

My question is the following: has there been any work done on looking at combinations of these trigger words from different categories? Let me be more specific. Lets take the sentence:

"Hurting a dog is one of the worst things a person can do."

One such trigger word here is "hurting" which is a vice of the Care foundation. This is something that appeals to the Care foundation and will, statistically speaking, be highly agreed with by the Liberal mindset. Also there will generally be less agreement with this from the Conservative mindset. Now, what if we write the sentence as:

"We must respect dogs."

Here, "respect" is a trigger word for the Conservative mindset. Moreover, consider the sentence:

"Hurting dogs is one of the worst things a person can do. We must respect all animals and those who harm them are evil, wicked and sick."

I've purposely overloaded the last sentence with Sanctity and Respect trigger words.

Question 1: If one overloads sentences as done above, will it trigger more positive reactions from the Conservative mindset?

Question 2: When asked to explain the above overloaded sentences, will both Liberal and Conservative mindsets agree on a similar meaning ("don't hurt dogs")?

Question 3: In other words, is there evidence for the ability to trigger low-priority foundations by invoking high-priority ones for a given mindset? I'm am relying here on the notion that words are generally ambiguous and context-dependent. As well, I am assuming reactions and parsing of meaning is instantaneous and the subject is not given time to reflect and analyze, i.e. intuition.

I'm grossly oversimplifying things here but I hope the general theme of these questions will lead to a nice discussion.

I am a research psychologist working with moral foundations theory and messaging and I haven't seen these particular questions addressed. But you maybe interested to see work that uses different framed messages with these 'trigger words' in different populations (e.g., by political orientation) and measures outcomes, e.g.,

  The Moral Roots of Environmental Attitudes - Feinberg & Willer
  journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797612449177


What differences of opinion led to the Kahneman-Gigerenzer feud? I have found many allusions to this feud, e.g. from http://nickdunbar.net/2012/05/23/thinking-fast-and-slow-by-daniel-kahneman/ and in Kahneman's trade book "Thinking, Fast and Slow". However, I have not found any concise explanation of what Kahneman and Gigerenzer actually disagreed on, other than that Gigerenzer felt that some of the Kahneman/Tversky biases were artefacts of their method and Kahneman/Tversky disagreed with this.

I have been quite astonished by this nonsensical yet lasting quarrel. You didn't find how they disagree because they don't disagree. The sole difference is that if asked "are human rational ?", Gigerenzer answers "yes", Kahneman answers "no".

However, their model of human reasoning are consistent with each other. They just don't use the word "rational" in the same way.

When asked whether humans are rational, Gigerenzer understands the question as "Are human cognitive mecanisms fitted to the environment ?", whereas Kahneman understands this question as "Are human taking decisions that maximize their utility function ?". Kahneman study decisions, and he finds that they are not good/not efficient (i.e., not rational). Gigerenzer study reasoning mechanisms (his heuristics), and he argues that those mechanisms are good/efficient (i.e, rational). Decisions and mechanisms are not the same thing.

If you ask Gigerenzer whether humans take decisions that maximize their utility function, he will happily answer "No". Indeed, Gigerenzer wants people to take better decisions, but he will not call those "more rational decisions".
If you ask Kahneman whether human cognitive mecanisms are adapted to the environment, he will happily answer "Obviously, because evolution is true". To me, Kahneman's definition of rationality makes much more sense.

For a more extended discussion, you can find the following paper which settles the question on google scholar : Samuels, R., Stich, S., & Bishop, M. (2012). Ending the Rationality Wars. Collected Papers, Volume 2: Knowledge, Rationality, and Morality, 1978-2010, 2, 191.


What term describes people that cannot feel pain? I remember a case study about a girl who could not feel pain due to lacking certain somatosensory receptors; she went on to burn herself on a radiator because she could not feel her flesh burning and suffered many other injuries due to the loss of the sense.

What term describes this deficit?

Analgesia is the term used for inability to feel pain.
Hypoalgesia is the term for low sensitivity to pain.

Hereditary sensory neuropathy and Congenital insensitivity to pain are two known syndromes that contain these deficits as their symptoms.


Where are scientific references for the claims made in "Thinking Fast and Slow" I am currently reading fast and slow and the author mentions the results of a lot of studies. However, these are not directly cited, although some can possibly be googled with the information given.

I was wondering if there exists a version with all the references or an academic book which provides similar information and references. I don't have much knowledge on the subject, so I do not know the technical terms for some of the phenomena explained in the book, and thus I do not know how to look for the papers pertaining them. (A suggestion of how familiarize myself with such terms is also welcome).

Just found the book I used to study decision making. It's called Judgement and Decision Making and is written by Daniel and David Hardman. It is a perfect introductory book on the topic with references to pretty recent literature. It covers much of Tversky and Kahneman's work (the latter being the author of Thinking Fast and Slow), but also refer to literature of many other good research. I think this book may be the best scientific approximation of Thinking Fast and Slow.

Hardman, D. K. & Hardman, D., (2009). Judgment and decision making: Psychological perspectives (Vol. 11). John Wiley & Sons.


what causes this auditory persistence illusion? Related question: aftereffects of auditory adaptation

When the radio is turned off in the middle of a song, sometimes I can still hear the song playing very quietly for tens of seconds after the radio has been turned off. It happens for repetitive songs that I have heard many times before. A couple of friends said that they have never experienced this, so there are presumably considerable differences between individuals in susceptibility to this illusion.

What causes this illusion?

It sounds like you are describing an earworm, which is a piece of music that repeats in your head even though it is not actually playing. This is a rather common occurrence, and matches your experience of it happening only with songs you're familiar with, and especially so for repetitive songs. What makes songs get stuck in your head is not fully understood, but research has shown that has to do both with qualities of the song (certain melodic elements, intervals, tempos and repetitions are more likely to be earworms), as well as qualities of the listener (having a musical background, obsessive-compulsive tendencies, and being in a non-focused mental state increase likelihood of experiencing earworms).


What is the psychology of notification colour? After reading the question What is the impact of showing the amount of unattended notifications to the user, it occurred to me that many notifications (certainly not all) are red, two examples being inbox messages here (SE) and any notification on Facebook.  Whereas, some notifications on StackExchange are in light blue (eg for badges and edits).  Green is often associated with check-mark notifications (such as on my AVG virus scan and as the accepted answer here).

(Anecdotal side note: I sometimes get the feeling "oh what have I done this time" when the red notification shows here and a "oh goody!" when the blue shows up).

There are many examples of different colours being used for different types of notifications.  What is the psychological basis of these notification colours?

It is all about attention and reaction time: Information are coded in visual, aural and tactile channel. Here you have primer of visual coding. Visual coding could be signs or text.

You have shorter time of reaction to primary colors (red yellow blue) and there is some kind of international standard which determine meaning of colors ( red-stop, green - walk... etc...) That is the reason why red.

I recomend you that you read some text in visual sensory perception, measuring time reaction, and some book of ergonomics psychology.

EDIT: Literature:
http://hfs.sagepub.com/content/17/6/542.short

http://www.who.int/fctc/guidelines/ArtElevenWogalterNine.pdf

EDIT2: Here are lot about reaction time:
http://biae.clemson.edu/bpc/bp/lab/110/reaction.htm


Memory game - short or long-term memory? There is a game where "a suitcase is packed" and you have to remember all the words or objects that are packed into the suitcase.
Each participant adds a new word to the "chain of words" one after the other.
I wonder whether this information is stored in the "long-term memory" or whether it only remains in the "short-term memory".

Short-term memory capacity is very limited (How much can users hold in their short term memory), and that seems to be a fundamental property of short-term memory (Can working memory actually be improved?). So the longer this game progressed, the less likely it would be that players could keep the information in short-term memory. A few items would be fine. Ten items would be difficult, and items would start to drop out of short-term memory.
Memory experts use techniques like the method of loci to associate new information with an existing structure held in long-term memory. So they would have a significant advantage in this game.


can mushroom improve your memory? Mushrooms have several benefits. One of these is psychological. Can mushroom improve human memory?

Mushrooms contain psilocybin, which gets converted into psilocin. These act on serotonin receptors, which may play a role in memory. (Edits coming later)


What is the typical relationship between time and remembering details of events from the past? When I try to recall details for the past few days, I can recall today's events well, yesterday's events less well, and when it comes to the day before, things start to be fuzzy
and this is as fuzzy as I have carried out activities for this period.

In very simple words, is there a study for the threshold beyond which we start to forget things (so,the question is"when") and how can one recall more events from the past, as this can be helpful for all of us and especially students(so, the question is "how")?

The forgetting function

In this answer about the relationship between time and recall I discussed how research shows that the relationship is often characterised by a three parameter power or exponential function. The basic idea is that the recall is a monotonically decreasing and decelerating function of time since the event.

Forgetting as adaptive behavior

In general, I think that this is an adaptive feature of human memory. More recent events or more frequently recalled events are more likely to be useful to daily functioning.

Many theories (e.g. ACT-R) of cognition assume that cognitive activities come at a cost. Thus, storing information comes at a cost at some neural-biological level. Likewise, storing more information is likely to increase the time of access to that information. In both cases, forgetting more distant information is likely to be adaptive in some sense.

Remembering more

There are wide range of strategies for better recalling information. However, presumably you are not wanting recall all events and all information, but rather information relative to achieving some goal.

Some general strategies:

rehearsal of the information; or just using the information in some meaningful way
cognitive elaboration of the information (e.g., exploring relations, adding meaning, giving structure to the information)

One option, of course, is to externalise your memory such as by writing things down, or recording information in some other way.


Term for Trance During Violent Episodes I recently read the book,
Violent Mind, The 1976  Psychological Assessment of Ted Bundy" : Dr. Al Carlisle.

In the book Dr. Carlisle mentions that Ted
Bundy went into trance like states during his killing sprees. Bundy would later explain that he couldn't recall specific details of his killings and how he would feel instant remorse thereafter. Bundy went on say that even though he felt remorseful and disturbed for what he did, he would repeat the same violent patterns, killing more.

I found it fascinating how the brain can go into these trance like states for some of these killers, as if it overrides their cognitive empathy, guilt.

I am looking for a scientific term similar to "trance".

The hypothesis

The idea that

  Ted Bundy went into trance like states during his killing sprees

is an anecdotal observation which can be true or it may be false.  If we are to be considering it to be true, you could say that what is being described is a severe pathological form of dissociation or compartmentalisation.

I covered the idea of compartmentalisation in a totally unrelated question whereby;

  Compartmentalisation is often employed, for example, by people within the emergency services (fire officers, paramedics, police officers, coastguard etc.) in order for them to concentrate on the immediate task whilst temporarily isolating themselves from their emotions.

Compartmentalisation is a form of dissociation in a sense because dissociation is a psychological defence mechanism (Cardeña, 1994) which helps the person to get through the situation with as little harm as possible. The difference between compartmentalisation and dissociation is that when you are compartmentalising, you are very much aware of what you are doing.

So in conclusion

What is being described fits the description of dissociation but it would have to be a severe pathological form of dissociation.

If Ted Bundy did have real empathy, dissociation would have helped him to disconnect from conscious reasoning and empathy with what he was doing.  During the state of dissociation, you can appear to be in a trance because you are "throwing a switch on conscious awareness" so that you cannot connect with the event alone at any time after the event.

References

Cardeña, E. (1994) The domain of dissociation. In: Dissociation: Clinical and theoretical aspects, Edited by: Lynn, S. J. and Rhue, J. W. 5–31. New York, NY: Guildford Press.


Can humans keep track of two unrelated rhythms? Let's do an experiment. With your left hand start tapping out a regular (evenly-spaced) beat - say, 2 beats per second. With your right hand attempt to tap our a different regular beat, but tap at a rate that is "as unrelated as possible" to the first beat - something like 3.14159 beats per second. (Here "as unrelated as possible" is weakly defined. Basically, I mean to keep two rhythms that are both regular but will never be in sync.)

My question is this: Is it possible for a human to actually keep accurate track of both rhythms? Or will they interfere with one another so that the rhythm of one or both hands is lost?

My own (admittedly unjustified) model of neuronal behavior is that rhythmic action of the left hand must correspond to rhythmic patterns of neural activity in the brain with the same frequency. And similarly, rhythmic action of the right hand must correspond to rhythmic patterns with that frequency. Since, I suspect, the task of tapping out a rhythm requires coordination across several areas of the brain, then it seems that the a-periodic neuronal firing would likely interefere and cause one rhythm or the other to become dominant - or both rhythms to be lost entirely.

(Oh... and for the sake of this question, assume the corpus callosum is intact. Missing CC is cheating here.)

I never thought that my Bachelor Thesis would ever come in handy. Thank you for this question!

Short answer
No, you cannot keep up two unrelated rhythms in a stable coordinated fashion when tapping for your finger for instance.

Long Answer
Let us start with (and skip over) the oldest paper that I have about it. Haken, Kelso and Bunz (1985) described in a mathematical model how you would coordinate two rhythmic movements (tapping fingers) and how you change phases. In-phase means you tap at the same time, whereas anti-phase means you tap with one whilst going up with the other and vice versa. I will not describe these formula, but now you know they exist.

From now on, I will refer to "two agents" instead of fingers. I do this, because the coupling and rhythm is not limited to body parts. Even different people start to get synchronized during rhythmic movements. Richardson (2007) showed that people, without explicit instructions, started to synchronize their movements in a rocking chair. However, also during walking/running, people start to synchronize (Nessler, 2012).

What research over the years has shown that (stability of) rhythmic movements rely on three factors to be coordinated.

First, you need to be coupled, i.e. you must be able to see/feel the other agent's rhythm. When you don't perceive a rhythm, their is nothing to adapt to (See also Richardson, 2007; Nessler, 2012; Meerhof & De Poel, 2014).
Second, the phase of the movements: Moving in-phase is very easy and you can do that from low frequencies up to very high frequencies. Moving in anti-phase is a little more difficult. The agents will be stably coordinated at low frequencies, however, as you increase the frequency it will be more and more difficult to keep it up, ultimately leading to a synchronization period, after which you'll move in an in-phase pattern (try it out; Meerhof & De Poel, 2014).
Third, as I already said just now: The frequency of movements. At low frequencies movements are easier to coordinate in a stable fashion than higher frequencies (Konvalinka, 2011)

In this last study, two participants in different rooms listened to a beat (of either 96, 120, 150 Hz, which could differ between participant) for eight seconds, after which they had to continue that beat by tapping their index-finger. Following, depending on the condition, they (1) kept hearing the computer-generated beat, (2) listened to their own generated beat, (3) listened to the beat of the other subject while the other heard his own generated beat, or (4) the two participants hear the beats generated by the second participant. There were many many results given all these conditions. What it all came down to was that the participants' own beat-frequency moved toward the other's, and that the rhythm became less stable, when they listened to the beat of the other participant. When the participants heard each other, the frequencies moved to each other and ultimately produced a very stable beat (they synchronized).

This paper thus showed that, whenever you are coupled (which fingers always are, it's called proprioception) you tend to synchronize. It is thus impossible to keep rhythm when you perceive a completely unrelated beat.


What are the psychological mechanisms for compulsive talkers? What are the psychological mechanisms for people who can't seem to help frequently "talking too much"?

Specifically, I am referring to those that recognise cues to when someone is busy, disinterested or distracted, but are compelled to continue talking.

Compulsive talking appears to be linked with the inability to manage social anxiety. Whether the anxiety is brought about from the uncomfortability of the interaction or from the avoidance of deep seated feelings within the individual.

  People who score beyond two standard deviations above the mean on the
  scale are labeled as “talkaholics,”

as cited by James C. McCroskey & Virginia P. Richmond

  The most common and basic cause of any compulsive behavior is anxiety.
  A person engages in compulsive behavior not because he particularly
  wants to, but because he’s so anxious that he has to do something to
  get his mind off that anxiety. Until the compulsive talker comes to
  grips with whatever he or she doesn’t want to think about, the talking
  will continue.

  The root of this anxiety varies from individual to individual. But it
  often stems from deep-seated emotions of insecurity and
  inadequacy.../...

  For the compulsive talker, silence and reflection are simply
  unacceptable. A pause in conversation is an emotional abyss into which
  they simply cannot help but throw themselves.

written by Dr Hurd

Compulsive talking could be confused with Pressure of Speech. Which can be associated with mania and attention deficit disorder. Pressured speech is marked by speaking rapidly, with a sense of urgency and, frequently, with no social awareness.

Logorrhea is another condition, which causes the person to talk endlessly, but, usually, in an incoherent, rambling fashion.

Identifying compulsive communicators: The talkaholic scale
James C. McCroskey & Virginia P. Richmond
Communication Research Reports
Volume 10, Issue 2, 1993

Talking too much can have deep-seated roots
Dr Hurd
Private Practice of Psychotherapy and Solution-Focused Consultation since 1988.
Multiple published works.


Cognitive (neuro)science and related mailing lists I am looking for cognitive neuroscience (and related) mailing lists. For some time I have been subscribed to Visionlist and found it to be a tremendous source of information about conferences, PhD and postdoc opportunities.
Does anybody else know any similar, good sources?
Thanks!

The Visionlist is indeed extremely helpful. It's not quite the same, but I found the mailing lists of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) and of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) quite useful.


How is sample size determined in animal research? In human research, we define our universe and estimate the effect size we expect to observe, then we can draw the a sample of a given size.

How is sample size determined for experiments in the animal research field?

Determining sample size for an animal experiment is no different than in research with human subjects. What you need to know is the effect size, the significance level and the power (which is the probability that the test detects a significant effect assuming that there is one). The tricky part is getting the effect size (for an interesting discussion have a look at this thread). The other two things are chosen by you as the experimenter. An overview paper on power analysis was written by Cohen (1992).

References

Cohen, J. (1992). A power primer. Psychological Bulletin, 112(1), 155. PDF


Environmental cleanliness: what is cognitively fresh? The concept of freshness has developed over the last century to involve a range of sensations and responses to tastes, smells and feelings associated with foods, the environment and cleaning products. But what is it that contributes or tells us that something is fresh from a neurocognitive perspective? It seems unlikely that freshness be merely the absence of negative stimuli that promote a disgust response, as freshness is often associated as a positive response.

I know this is a wide ranging question, however there is surprisingly little research on a concept that advertisers use daily, to promote cleaning products. Its unusual that such a important perception and its associated behaviour has so little academic research. Funny how merely watching the adverts between TV shows can make you curious!

EDIT:

The exact questions are...

What are the cognitive factors that make humans or animals perceive something to be fresh/clean?
What are the neurocognitve mechanisms underlying these processes?

Freshness is a term which is widely used to identify odors. The olfactive stimuli which is trigerred by fragrant materials like citruses, aromatics( lavender, rosemary), peppermints or green materials (like leafs or grass) these are more volatile groups they are light molecules and usually refer to freshness. But the cool or fresh sensation not just come from the olfactive perception or identification it is because of the trigeminal nerve fibers which are responsible of sensing temperature and irritating substances. It is both temperature and the identification why there is a common freshness perception.

EDIT: All the cleansing products which are perfumed, tested durig the wet and dry stages to examine power and hedonic scales. So perfumes inside the product need to be percieved during wet and dry stages and fragrant materials need to diffuse quickly to create a first impression: here something is about to be all clean. These kind of diffusion only obtained with the volatilest chemicals which are mostly triggered trigeminal nerves and creating a fresh or cool sensation.

Doty RL. Intranasal trigeminal detection of chemical vapors by humans.

Interactions between Olfaction and the Trigeminal System: What Can Be Learned from Olfactory Loss


Difference between valence and sentiment Can someone please clarify for me the difference between valence and sentiment? I am from a computer science background. In our literature they seem to be used in the same sense.

Currently I am doing some natural language processing where I estimate both valence and sentiment using two separately established lexicon data sets. Surprisingly, for my data, the valence and sentiment scores are very different. Are they really the same?

The definition of valence as given here seems very similar to sentiment (intuitively). Here valence is defined as one aspect of sentiment (referring to a publication by Russell, 1979).

Basically, in the context of this research, "sentiment" can mean the same thing as "valence" if the analysis is unidimensional; that is "valence" is the usual "sentiment" analyzed. Otherwise "sentiment" can have a broader meaning, with "valence" being just one dimension of "sentiment".

As for why the two lexicons come with different valence values, that's a methodological question for the natural language processing community (e.g. https://ai.stackexchange.com) or even better, the author of the papers. What is obvious to me just from the web page is that the first "sentiment" lexicon has

  Association scores: binary (associated or not)

whereas the 3-dimensional one with valence as one dimension has scores between 0 and 1.

In the context you have it, "sentiment" just refers to sentiment analysis, an endeavour in NLP (natural language processing) that most psychologists are probably completely oblivious to.

The previously linked Wikipedia page explains that "sentiment analysis" is an umbrella term for a fairly broad class of analyses:

  Generally speaking, sentiment analysis aims to determine the attitude of a speaker, writer, or other subject with respect to some topic or the overall contextual polarity or emotional reaction to a document, interaction, or event. The attitude may be a judgment or evaluation (see appraisal theory), affective state (that is to say, the emotional state of the author or speaker), or the intended emotional communication (that is to say, the emotional effect intended by the author or interlocutor).

A paper accopmpanying the data you mentioned defines it as:

  Sentiment Analysis involves determining the evaluative nature of a piece of text. For example, a product review can express a positive, negative, or neutral sentiment (or polarity).

Which is the most common instance of "sentiment analysis" in my experience.

As far as the psychology of "sentiments" goes, general terms used in psychology (and psychiatry) in this area are: mood, affect, emotion and (sometimes) feeling. I will not detail these here, because it's not what you are asking for (they all have Wikipedia pages). Only the first two (mood affect) have somewhat more scientific definitions but there's still a great deal of confusion over them.

If I were to propose a cross-field linkage, "sentiment analysis" tries to infer affect (and sometimes perhaps even mood) from text. In fact there is a notion in psychology of affect display, which is basically just the manifestation of affect that can be seen or read.

As for "valence", it is indeed a specific concept as used in that data page you link in a comment. From a companion paper they wrote

  Russell (1980, 2003) showed
  through similar analyses of emotion words that
  the three primary independent dimensions of
  emotions are valence or pleasure (positiveness–
  negativeness/pleasure–displeasure), arousal
  (active–passive), and dominance (dominant–
  submissive). He argues that individual emotions
  such as joy, anger, and fear are points in a
  three-dimensional space of valence, arousal, and
  dominance. It is worth noting that even though
  the names given by Osgood et al. (1957) and
  Russell (1980) are different, they describe similar
  dimensions (Bakker et al., 2014).

So "valence" is indeed referring to Russel's core affect framework as you suggest. However, looking at Bakker et al. as well as Russel's own paper, he doesn't seem to use the word "valence", preferring "pleasure" instead. I'm not sure who came up with "valence" for "pleasure"; from Bakker, I see not even Osgood used that term.

Also Russell's (2003) conceptualization seems two dimensional. In his own words:

  Core affect is a pre-conceptual primitive process, a neurophysiological state,
  accessible to consciousness as a simple non-reflective feeling: feeling good or
  bad, feeling lethargic or energised. There is something it is like to feel core
  affect. Its presence in consciousness varies from being focal to peripheral to
  out of sight. A structural description of core affect is an empirical matter,
  and I have proposed a circumplex with the two underlying dimensions
  of pleasuredispleasure and activationdeactivation (Russell, 1980, 2005;
  Yik, Russell, & Steiger, 2008). Although two-dimensional, core affect is,
  subjectively, a single feeling. That is, the two dimensions combine in an
  integral fashion to form one unified feeling. Pleasure and arousal combine to
  form the single feeling of ecstasy, for example. An analogy is the sensation of
  a specific colour, such as the red of the autumn leaf outside my window. The
  dimensions of hue, saturation, and brightness combine in an integral fashion
  to form one unified sensation of any particular colour.

From Bakker's illustration of that:

I looks like the 3rd dimension (dominance, not shown aboce) came from Mehrabian.

Also "valence" has a somewhat broader meaning in psychology that is reasonably close to the way it is used above by the author of those NLP lexicon studies:

  Valence, as used in psychology, especially in discussing emotions, means the intrinsic attractiveness/"good"-ness (positive valence) or averseness/"bad"-ness (negative valence) of an event, object, or situation. The term also characterizes and categorizes specific emotions. For example, emotions popularly referred to as "negative", such as anger and fear, have negative valence. Joy has positive valence. Positively valenced emotions are evoked by positively valenced events, objects, or situations. The term is also used to describe the hedonic tone of feelings, affect, certain behaviors (for example, approach and avoidance), goal attainment or nonattainment, and conformity with or violation of norms. Ambivalence can be viewed as conflict between positive and negative valence-carriers.

Having said this, it looks like few(er) psychology researchers actually use this term. The definition quoted right above originates in a book by Dutch psychologist Nico Frijda.


Are there mental reflexes? Similar to knee-jerk or withdrawal, are there any innate reflexes in cognition? Are they based on personality, or are there any that are universal?

There are 2 common definitions of "reflex":

The technical definition of "reflex" is an action that is not voluntary - ie, not mediated by cognition.  From Wikipedia:

  ... sensory neurons do not pass directly into the brain, but synapse
  in the spinal cord. This characteristic allows reflex actions to occur
  relatively quickly by activating spinal motor neurons without the
  delay of routing signals through the brain ...

So asking if there are any mental or cognitive reflexes is like asking if there are any behaviours that go through the brain that don't go through the brain.

The colloquial definition of "reflex" is an automatic or involuntary action, like the way an experienced tennis player reacts to the ball without thinking.  In cognitive psychology, this is typically referred to as "unconscious" (rather than reflex) action.  Some authors have compared conscious to unconscious using the iceberg metaphor, so if you prefer the lay definition, then the number of mental reflexes far outweighs voluntary actions.  The entire field of perception (just as a simple example) would be included.


Model for the Un/Conscious Mind As far as modern psychology is concerned, is there currently a standard scientific model for the conscious and unconscious mind, as well as conscious experience/perception? If so, are there any recommended resources (scientific books/articles) that detail this model?

I am currently reading The Mind Illuminated by John Yates, and while the book itself is tremendously helpful in the study and practice of mindfulness, I wanted to do some fact checking and research on the information presented in the book.

In the book John Yates describes all conscious perception, that is,
visual, auditory, somatosensory, gustatory, olfactory, and mind sense (thoughts, memories, emotions)
as taking on one of two qualities:

Attention: The cognitive ability to select and analyze specific information (sensory input, thoughts, memories, emotions, etc.) and ignore other information arising from a vast field of internal and external stimuli

Awareness: A general cognizance of sensory information; mental objects like thoughts, memories, and feelings; and the overall state and activity of the mind. Unlike attention which isolates and analyzes specific objects, peripheral awareness is inclusive holistic, and only minimally conceptual.

For example, in vision, objects of attention result in focused and sharper visual perception, whereas object of awareness form our periphery and are more blurry.

In the Mind-System model, Yates describes the mind as having a structure depicted in this image

Where the mind is divided into Unconscious and Conscious, and the Unconscious Mind is composed of the Sensory and Discriminating Mind.

My question to academics: does this information sound consistent with what is presented in modern day psychology & cognitive science? And where may find more academic explanation of these types of models.

I only know of one Cognitive Model dividing the unconscious and conscious mind is presented by Paul Thaghard in "Two theories of consciousness: Semantic pointer competition vs. information integration". I explain this model in layman's terms in my blog post. In this answer, I'll compare Thaghard's model to Yate's model you've presented above.

Yate's model is based on the ideas of Global Workspace Theory (GWB). GWB posits that unconscious processes compete for the spotlight of attention so that they can enter consciousness. This seems to be what Yate's is suggesting in this diagram and would tie in nicely with mindfulness meditation.

GWB isn't a bad model. It makes a few predictions and describes a lot of phenomena (comas, certain types of blindness). However, it's not easily testable or disprovable. How do these unconscious processes interact? What type of representation would unconscious processes use and how does this relate to neurons? Can I build a computation model of consciousness based off this specification? These are the things that Paul's model worries about and specifies. Paul's model is essentially a more specified version of the Yate's model. It defines a representation (Semantic Pointers) which relates to neurons and makes testable claims.

To summarize and get back to your question, Yate's model is vaguely consistent with Cognitive Science, but it is under-specified. For further reading on more specific models, check the links in this answer.


Can someone not feel i.e. neglect pain sensation? Ronda Rousey (UFC Women's Bantamweight Champion) once said on a talk show (Conan) that she can take a punch and not feel pain, she added that she knows what pain is and she can just simply neglect them without feeling it

Can anyone without Analgesia, Hypoalgesia or any other syndrome can neglect the feeling of pain with any training?

Totally neglect pain? Probably not, but mediate pain sensation? Definetly!

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0304395989902303

  Results revealed that, in general, cognitive coping strategies are more effective in alleviating pain as compared to either no-treatment or expectancy controls. Each individual class of strategies significantly attenuates pain although the imagery methods are the most effective whereas pain acknowledging is the least effective.

Further reading:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661308001575
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304395903002975


Is it possible to become addicted to sleep deprivation? Background: After staying awake for an entire night without sleeping medication, some individuals report feeling tired while others report feeling euphoric and at some point begin to hallucinate with funny noises endlessly repeating.

Questions:

What neural or psychological mechanisms could make an individual want to experience the effects of sleep deprivation?
Is sleep deprivation addictive?
Does sleep deprivation count as a drug?
Is enjoying sleep deprivation related to having Asperger's Syndrome?

Assuming there's not a neurological dysfunction underlying sleep deprivation (which is even more possible with Aspergers as sleep dysfunction is a typical comorbidity) it can simply be a learned behavior.  The more you do something (whether you particularly "enjoy" it or not) the more likely you are to build it up as a habit.  Procedural memory is always at work.

So in this regard, it can be addictive behavior in the same way a "bad habit" can.

I wouldn't call it a drug.  Pharmaceutical drugs are defined as the intentional delivery of a substance from externally to inside the body: most commonly acting as an allosteric modulator on neural receptors.

About 73% of children with Asperger's experience problems with sleep according to the Asperger's Association of New England.


While spoting a liar, whether observing the verbal cue or observing the non-verbal cue helps? While spotting a liar,is it paying attention to verbal cues such as
pauses in speech and speech disturbances, including "ahs," stutters, and incomplete sentences that weighs more or
is it paying attention to non-verbal cues such as
inconsistent eye contact, increased degree of eye contact, blink frequency, chin movement that weighs more

It is not entirely clear whether you are asking how much weight should we place on different cues (if we want to spot liars) or how much people actually do use these cues. There is a big literature on lie detection though. Here is a recent paper that discusses some of this work and will give you a start.

Some of the salient points are:

People are actually pretty bad at guessing truths and lies, though it is hard to do experiments on.
Although there are some cues that give people away, these are faint and unreliable. The most reliable ones are actually just the things that they say (the facts).
Non-verbal cues and speech disturbances are actually pretty poor cues even though people think they are good ones. They are also pretty easy to fake.


Why has behaviourism fallen out of favour? The reasons for behaviourism as a philosophy and school of psychology to have fallen out of favour are well known and documented.  However, when Newton's view of gravity was replaced by general relativity, his entire works were not then tossed aside as if discredited.  But this is, practically speaking, what has happened to behaviourism.

Beahviourism has always focused on learning-based mechanisms (eg, conditioning, role modelling, enculturation) that are highly evidence-based, repeatable, and generalizable.  Today, cognitive / computational-model theories dominate many fields, but their explanatory approach rarely considers learning-based theories traditionally associated with behaviourism.  Why is that?  More specifically, my question is:

Have there been any surveys or studies asking cognitive psychology researchers whether or not they incorporate learning mechanisms in their theories, and why or why not?

A nice article I ran across suggests some reasons why cognitive research may not consider learning mechanisms, but it is purely speculative, with no data to back anything up.

Today, behaviourism continues to thrive in the form of behaviour analysis, and its history is regularly taught as part of introductory psychology courses.  However, while other branches of cognitive science often collaborate (as for example cognitive psychology and neuroscience forming cognitive neuroscience), behaviourism's learning models are rarely incorporated into other works.  The founding ideologies of the radical version of this school of psychology have long been discredited, but ignoring over a century of highly productive research into an influential branch of cognitive science seems to me like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Note: Questions like this tend to attract opinion-based answers, that are discouraged on this forum.  Despite the catchy title, I am interested in evidence-based answers, and the bolded question suggests the kind of evidence that could be pertinent.

Note: Examples of well-established cognitive theories with evidence of learning but yet fail to incorporate learning mechanisms in their explanatory approach include: Cognitive dissonance, emotion, self-serving bias, and metacognition.

There is a lot of research here so there is a lot to cover.  Please bear with me.

There are what is known as 3 forces of psychology

  Behavioural Theory (First Force) – (Short & Thomas, 2014, p. 203)
  Psychodynamic Theory (Second Force) – (Short & Thomas, 2014, p. 139)
  Humanistic Theory (Third Force) – (Short & Thomas, 2014, p. 79)

Although there is now talk of a possible fourth force such as Multicultural Psychology or Transpersonal Psychology

Short & Thomas (2014) also stated on page 203, that

  Psychology was initially defined as the study of the human mind and linked to work in medicine and philosophy, however, animal research in the early 1900s produced results that could be generalised to human behaviour. (Thorndike, 1898; Pavlov, 1928) This led to psychology being redefined as the study of human behaviour.Tabula rasaBehavioural approach focuses exclusively on observable and measurable behaviour [and] emphasises the importance of nurture. Humans are born as a tabula rasa or blank slate on which experience writes the patterns of their future behaviour.

On page 205, the book then states

  Popularity of behaviourism decreased in the 1960s to 1980s

This is my speculation, but I strongly believe this could be due to the work of Sigmund Freud's daughter, Anna Freud, and the popularisation of the works of

Melanie Klein with her work on child psychology and contemporary psychoanalysis,
John Bowlby with his work on Attachment Theory,
Eric Berne with his work on Transactional Analysis, and
Erik Erikson with his theory of personality.

  Cognitive revolution redirected psychological research away from the study of behaviour to focus on theoretical models about the nature of the mind

  Radical behaviourism softened into behaviour analysis

  Behaviourism that refused to accept the existence of cognitive states was rejected in favour of a less extreme version which focused on analysing behaviour as an external (measurable) evidence of cognitive states
  Staats (1996) argued that radical behaviourism failed as an approach in psychology because it did not incorporate other known phenomena, such as cognition.  Psychological behaviourism should aim to unify all elements of psychology (biology, environment, cognition, emotion, etc.) into a single grand theory
  Behaviour analysis adopts an interdisciplinary approach. Theories include elements from other approaches such as cognitive, humanistic, etc.

  The UK Society for Behaviour Analysis describes it as the science of learning.

  [The] experimental branch is the experimental analysis of behaviour and this aims to conduct research on how humans learn new behaviours
  [The] applied branch is applied behaviour analysis (ABA) and this aims to promote behaviour change by analysing behaviours and developing interventions to modify these behaviours in a positive direction for individuals and society

As my first link indicates, Behaviourism hasn't completely fallen out of favour.  Due to the work of Carl Rogers (1902-1987) there has been some shift, although not a complete shift, away from the rigidity of the Psychodynamic approach towards the Humanistic approach to therapy and Behaviourism has also started to gain more of the spotlight again.

There is a prolific use of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) within health organisations such as the NHS and I know of a fair few people who have been referred for CBT by NHS staff for various problems.  One thing I would like to point out though is that CBT isn't without its criticisms. Some believe that CBT is not a 'cure all' that some believe, and is not effective in helping PTSD sufferers, whilst there is some data which could back this claim up

References

Pavlov, I.P. (1928) Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes: Twenty-Five Years of Objective Study of the Higher Nervous Activity Behavior of Animals. New York: Liverwright Publishing Corporation.

Short, F. & Thomas, P. (2015) Core Approaches in Counselling and Psychotherapy. Hove: Routledge.

Staats, A.W. (1996) Behavior and Personality: Psychological Behaviorism. New York: Springer.

Thorndike, E.L. (1898) Animal intelligence: an experimental study of the associative processes in animals. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 2, 4.


Why is it common for people to default to a single causal source to explain new phenomena? I am constantly bombarded by allegations that almost every relatively unusual event is the result/proof of some conspiracy/plan set by a specific powerful entity.

The typical reasoning behind such claims follows:

"X happened because there is Y beneath it, and this event is the very proof of this fact!"

Here are some examples:

" Homosexual marriages are quite common today, because armageddon is
approaching!" "
" Our country can't develop further, because USA,
China and other developed countries are afraid of us!"
" 9/11! Whom else might have done this? of course the Saddam/Usama Bin
Laden/Iran/Pakistan/etc!"
" Oh Have you recognized the verses  on this song when you play it backwards? This is the     proof of Satanists!"
" Oh look at these cards published in 1995. This is the exact
life we are living in today. Damn you illuminati!"
" Omg I can see it, Here is the proof that Jesus was real. How else a face would
appear on a toast? What is that you are holding? A Tortilla. May
I look at that a bit closer? Ohhh, again!"

What is the name of this attitude of over-reductionism everything to some specific thing? A cognitive bias? Defense Mechanism? Straw man? Reduction ad Absurdum? Even maybe Chewbacca Defense [ This question encompasses the title of the question as well.]

Secondly, is there any term for "that specific thing" people reduces everything to? I want to be able to say "you associates everything to illuminati, because illuminati is your X" What term may I use here for X?

UPDATE: Other question of mine sounds related to this one. If you are intrigued by this question, check that one as well: Why are people inclined to praise or fear the unknown?

I don't quite know an agreed upon word for this type of thing, but I do know what you're talking about.

At a very basic level, we use previous beliefs to interpret new information. In a way, it's at the core of how we perceive at all. I don't necessarily see these types of fallacious thinking as exceptions. Their belief about the order of the world is different, and so they interpret individual events differently. The examples you listed seem like instances of this happening.

If anything, it's just simplistic thinking, or a tendency to over-synthesize information. Illuminati type conspirators need to bring a bunch of disparate information into a model that makes sense, so they form connections between things that don't really connect. It probably doesn't help that they expose themselves to a lot of information presented in a way that strongly suggests some sort of Illuminati presence.

But don't forget that we do the same thing. Many times, the difference is that those around us also agree with the assumptions we make, so we don't even notice.


How is the effect of current vote scores on people's votes interpreted in psychology? On a site that people can vote on others' posts (like Stack Exchange sites), I believe people tend to be affected by the current vote score (and for Stack Exchange, if the user has enough reputation, the current vote counts as well) before they cast a vote, or even more, before they decide to whether cast a vote. A typical case is illustrated by this Reddit post,

  I tend to upvote people who have been downvoted out of sympathy.

The linked Reddit post already contains part of the answer but it's more like a subjective discussion so I am not satisfied with it.

Can somebody elaborate on what effects can take place in this process? What is effect on the final vote count/score if we consider it as a whole? Are there any known terminology or models to describe this behavior?

I am new to psychology so any hint will be helpful.

Related: Why do people make rants on Meta Stack Exchange sites?

I think you can find an answer from the field of social psychology. The most relevant theory is the social proof, the tendency to immitate the behavior of other people.

  Social proof (also known as informational social influence) is a
  psychological and social phenomenon where people assume the actions of
  others in an attempt to reflect correct behavior in a given situation.

  ...

  Social proof is one type of conformity. When a person is in a
  situation where they are unsure of the correct way to behave, they
  will often look to others for clues concerning the correct behavior.
  When "we conform because we believe that others' interpretation of an
  ambiguous situation is more accurate than ours and will help us choose
  an appropriate course of action", it is informational social
  influence.


Why do colors affect emotion? The paper "Color Psychology: Effects of Perceiving Color on Psychological Functioning in Humans" by Andrew J. Elliot and Markus A. Maier shows color effects emotion, but what property of them cause this effect? Does light blue make you feel peaceful because it is the color of the sky, or because the wavelength causes something in the brain to feel peaceful? Basically, are the color emotions controlled by association or something else?

Our emotional responses to colors is based on two factors : innate behavior and acquired behavior (aslo known as nature and nurture).

Innate behavior is build in our genes, it is instinctive and performed without being based upon prior experience (that is, in the absence of learning), and is therefore an expression of innate biological factors. This innate behavior is formed through evolution. The evolutionary aesthetics can explain the innate factor of emotional response to colors.

  Evolutionary aesthetics refers to evolutionary psychology theories in
  which the basic aesthetic preferences of Homo sapiens are argued to
  have evolved in order to enhance survival and reproductive success.

  Based on this theory, things like color preference, preferred mate
  body ratios, shapes, emotional ties with objects, and many other
  aspects of the aesthetic experience can be explained with reference to
  human evolution.

Acquired behavior is formed through our exepriences with the world. Our day to day interactions with our enviroment creates emotional responses and some of these responses are associated to certain colors. Also the culture has a great influence on how we interpret and subsequently emotionaly response to colors.

examples of cultural color associations:

  Take France, for example, where yellow signifies jealously, betrayal,
  weakness, and contradiction. In the 10th century, the French painted
  the doors of traitors and criminals yellow.

  In Japanese culture, yellow has represented bravery, wealth, and
  refinement since the War of Dynasties in 1357. During this time,
  warriors wore yellow chrysanthemums—which represent the emperor in
  Japan and royal family—as a pledge of courage.

some addtional articles:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_psychology

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-new-brain/201104/why-we-prefer-certain-colors


Papers/Resources on the source/process of shame and empathy I am an economist, and almost all work on shame (very little work has been done on empathy in economics, we typically just jump to some form of altruism) has simply been on observed outcomes. That being said, I was wondering if there are any good reference text or papers (big researcher names are welcome) on more of the nature of such emotions.

Empathy is a topic that has been addressed extensively by Frans de Waal; he has been studying primates intensively and draws parallels between them and us. Especially the differences and commonalities between humans, bonobos and chimps is interesting. Check him out.

Scientific American (a non-peer reviewed scientific journal I'm reading a lot), had a special issue recently (Sci Am, September 2018) on why humans set themselves apart from other animal species. Tomasello has an interesting contribution there on the evolution of empathy and its role in the domination of mankind. An interesting read for sure.


Extra-classical receptive fields are surprising, but retinal ganglion receptive fields are not. Why? Rao and Ballard (1999) start their paper by stating that extra-classical receptive fields, which exhibit the phenomenon of end-stopping are difficult to explain. They show that in an idealized predictive coding model trained on natural images, the "neurons" at a higher level in the model have a receptive field that exhibits end-stopping; therefore, if neurons in the brain are implementing predictive coding, they would exhibit this phenomenon.

What I don't understand is this - why is it difficult to explain extra-classical receptive fields? After all, retinal ganglion neurons that are on-center will also exhibit "end-stopping" if a stimulus extends outside of the center, and the explanation for that receptive field is straightforward: the photoreceptors at the periphery hyperpolarize the ganglion cell, whereas those at the center depolarize it. Why can't a similar story be told about cortical neurons? Why was the predictive coding framework needed to explain end-stopping?

The difference is that ganglion neurons are responding directly to phenomena in their receptive field. That is, the on-center, off-surround ganglion cells are directly connected to the photoreceptors at the center and in the surround. The explanation for off-surround is that photoreceptors at the periphery will directly hyperpolarize the ganglion cell.

Extraclassical receptive field effects are about explaining how a neuron (e.g., in V1) responds to phenomena outside its receptive field. That is, it is possible to map the entire portion of the visual field that it is hooked up to, e.g., by passing a stimulus across the visual field and noting all regions where spike trains are evoked by the stimulus. This portion of the visual field is known as the classical receptive field. It turns out that V1 neurons can be influenced by stimuli outside their classical receptive field. Unlike "end-stopping" in retinal ganglion neurons, this cannot be explained by hyperpolarizing input at the periphery of the receptive field, because the stimulus causing the end stopping is not in its receptive field in the first place.


What are some of the drawbacks to probabilistic models of cognition? Probabilistic approaches to modelling cognition are increasing in popularity and being encouraged within the field (Chater, Tanenbaum, & Yuille, 2006).

What are some of the arguments against or drawbacks (other than scalability/intractability) to using this approach?

Probabilistic approaches of this sort are usually referred to more specifically as the bayesian approach and Chater and Tanenbaum are definitely bayesians (I have not read much by Yuille and can't comment). Bayesianism is more than just increasing in popularity and being encouraged; it is considered one of the big-4 approaches to cognitive-modeling, with the other 3 being: connectionism, rule-based, and dynamic systems. The bayesian approach has many positives and produced many great results, but since your question is about the drawbacks I will focus exclusively on that. Two major drawbacks are: neural grounding and rationality.

Neural grounding is a weakness that plagues all of the big-4 and cognitive science in general. The idea is that as we build models of the mind, we want to eventually ground them in the brain; this is a standard feature of reductionism. The bayesian approach is often summarized as "probabilities over rules", and suffers from the same difficulty of neural grounding as the rule-based approach did. It is often not clear how the brain implements this sophisticated bayesian inference (but the field is well aware of this problem, and works hard to resolve it). Is this a game killer? Not really, connectionism is often considered the more 'biologically-plausible' alternative, but most popular connectionist models can be just as easily questioned on their biological viability. The issue can also be sidestepped completely by saying that we do wish to address cognition at a different level that biological implementation (sort of how thermodynamics can have laws without the specific grounding provided by statistical mechanics). An example of this on our site is looking for behaviorist interpretations of models (note that decision field theory falls more into the dynamic systems approach, so it isn't a perfect example).

For me, the much more prominent weakness is rationality. Bayes rule is inherently rational -- humans are not; a bayesian has to use various hacks to account for human irrationality. Connectionism does not suffer from this drawback, and neither do some exotic approaches like Busemeyer's quantum cognition (I provide a sketch in this answer). If you want to see why models based on classical probability have a difficulty explaining aspects of human irrationality, take a look at Busemeyer, J. R., Wang, Z., & Townsend, J. T. (2006).


Assuming a neuron does not reach activation, what is the rate of repolarization in the absence of new stimulus? How long does it take for a neuron to return to it's resting state, due to absence of further stimulus?

Neurons (either the neuron as a whole, or segments such as a length of dendrite) can be modeled as an RC circuit. This is because the membrane acts as both a resistor and capacitor.

RC circuits have a time constant tau, equal to R * C. This time constant describes how long it takes to passively discharge the membrane capacitor.

In the context of neurons, this is referred to as the "membrane time constant" and like other exponential decay constants it refers to the amount of time that passes before the voltage has gone ~63.2% of the way towards rest.

In exponential decay, equilibrium is never truly reached, but after ~2-3 time constants it is likely decayed to within measurement precision given other sources of noise.

To answer your question "how long" the only answer is "it depends" - neurons with different functions have very different time constants. Time constants also aren't perfectly static, because the membrane resistance is not constant due to channels gated by voltage or signalling molecules. Typical values are from milliseconds to tens of milliseconds.


What's the difference between projecting and mirroring? In Psychology 101, I learned about Projecting and Mirroring... I know one is where an individual sees his own problems in other people... I always forget the other concept and/or confuse the two. What's the difference between projecting and mirroring?

Mirroring is when one acts like others one is in the presence of. For example, an individual may pick up inflections, wording, or mannerisms of others they spend time with. From Wikipedia:

  Mirroring is common in conversation. The listeners will typically smile or frown along with the speaker. If one person throws in sports metaphors, the other will likely parry along similar ideas. Since people usually accept their mirror image with ease, mirroring the person with whom one is speaking generally makes them feel more relaxed and encourages them to open up.

Projection is a defense mechanism whereby an individual "projects" their own views, issues, or thoughts over someone else, preventing the individual from getting an accurate view of the other person and believing the thoughts come from the other individual rather than oneself. Again, from Wikipedia:

  Psychological projection or projection bias is a psychological defense mechanism where a person subconsciously denies his or her own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world, usually to other people. Thus, projection involves imagining or projecting the belief that others originate those feelings [...]

  An example of this behavior might be blaming another for self failure. The mind may avoid the discomfort of consciously admitting personal faults by keeping those feelings unconscious, and by redirecting libidinal satisfaction by attaching, or "projecting," those same faults onto another person or object

Projection may be easily confused with Mirroring because with Projection, an individual sees their own traits in another, but the proper term can be remembered because the individual who is projecting "blanks out" others like a blank movie screen, and "projects" their own image, seeing what they are projecting instead of what is really there. WIth Mirroring, an individual is like a mirror themselves, as opposed to Projecting, when the individual is like a movie projector.


What is the subjective wellbeing instrument that is used by Science of Happiness for check-ins? I am doing some work with students on happiness and thought it would be useful for us to have a look at their subjective well-being.

The EdX Science of Happiness course made use of weekly checkins like this one:
https://ucbpsych.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_aVt9kWutzGlImwJ

The test is 6 questions, each one you are shown a drawing of a face with an emotion (3 positive, 3 negative) and you are asked to rate "To what extent does the character above match how you've been feeling lately?"

I'd like to learn more about this instrument. Like what research has been done to determine the validity of the measure, the origins of it, considerations when applying it.

I can't find any information on it, there doesn't seem to be a reference on the course page as to where it came from.

Does anyone have any ideas?

The background of the measure can be found here.
The article implies that it is an ad-hoc measure of emotions created for this study:

Every week, we checked in with our students to see how they were feeling. We showed them a sequence of six cartoon faces created by Pixar artist Matt Jones to convey fear, enthusiasm, anger, affection, sadness, and amusement (below). Under each, we asked them to rate, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much each face matched how they’d been feeling lately.  Then we transformed their collective weekly ratings into a single score.

The result? For students who responded at least 8 out of 10 times—suggesting that they were fully participating in the course—positive feelings went up, and up, and up. They felt progressively less sadness, anger, and fear, while at the same time experiencing more and more amusement, enthusiasm, and affection.
We also invited students to fill out a brief battery of research-validated questionnaires that are regularly used to assess feelings like happiness, stress, flourishing, or satisfaction with life.

The last sentence suggests the ad-hoc nature of the measure (as compared to validated scales). Also, I couldn't track down any published research with this measure. The icons themselves stem from a collaboration of Dacher Keltner with Facebook, as described here, for example.