The explanation behind the taboo behind rape/sexual assault versus acceptance of violence I'm new here, so I apologise if this question doesn't fit the parameters required for this site, but I couldn't find a more appropriate stackexchange site to post it.

In TV shows, films, news and other forms of media, there is a very big taboo against portraying rape be it fictional, or a footage of the event. I can understand the sensitivity regarding the latter, but when we instead consider violent scenes, or footage of violence - our tolerance seems much higher. News channels, for example, conveyed the footage of a soldier being burned alive by ISIS in a cage. But depicting a video of a man inappropriately touching a woman would invite a huge backlash. To a lesser extent, this issue also extends to violence against women being portrayed in media (taking hollywood as an example, it is very rare that they convey violence against women, and if they do it is far less severe than that against men). This last point referring to violence which is not necessarily sexual in nature against women is not the main point of my question, but rather an observation which may or may not be relevant for an answer.

To summarise, what are the psychological reasons for our 'acceptance' of very severe violence in media whilst there is a strong taboo against comparatively less severe sexual assaults. (e.g. in Game of Thrones, compare the torture of Theon Greyjoy to the criticism of the implied offscreen rape of Sansa).

Depiction of violence towards women triggers sadism in us much more effortlessly than other kinds of violence or torture. A recent study on correlation between violent videogames and violent attitude found no link between the two. But there are plenty of studies that show direct link between consumption of violent pornography and aggression towards women. Here is a meta study with tons of citations: http://aurora.umn.edu/pdf/ResearchOnPornography.pdf

Sadism is different from psychopathy. Psychopaths are apathetic, sadists are not. A recent study on sadism shows that sadists rated the pain experienced by the victim as more intense than the non-sadists did.

Inability to form emotional disconnection and higher awareness of the victim's suffering together can explain why we people triggered by sexual violence way more easily than non-sexual violence. From the famous Milgram experiment to very recent studies like this one:http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797613490749 clearly show us that everyday sadism is very common. However, I don't know why sexual violence triggers sadism in us more easily than non-sexual torture.


Can one neuron spike inhibit and excite at the same time? Is it possible to have a neuron that in some synapses releases inhibitory neurotransmitters and excitatory in others (everything triggered by the same spike) ?

The textbook convention is that neurons release only one type of chemical from their synaptic terminals. This is known as Dale's Principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale%27s_principle), and would exclude the possibility that neurons can release both inhibitory and excitatory neurotransmitters.

Examples have been found of neurons which co-release two types of neurotransmitters, such as Glutamate and Dopamine [1] or GABA and Dopamine [2]. The effect of Dopamine depends on the types of Dopamine receptors in the target neuron, is generally modulatory, and can not be classified as purely excitatory or inhibitory [3], which is what your question asked. There is no evidence for neurons which release purely inhibitory and excitatory neurotransmitters, such as GABA and glutamate respectively.

References:

[1] Sulzer, D., and S. Rayport. "Dale's principle and glutamate corelease from ventral midbrain dopamine neurons." Amino acids 19.1 (2000): 45-52.

[2] Tritsch, Nicolas X., Jun B. Ding, and Bernardo L. Sabatini.
"Dopaminergic neurons inhibit striatal output through non-canonical release of GABA." Nature 490.7419 (2012): 262-266.

[3] Romanelli RJ, Williams JT, Neve KA (2009). "Chapter 6: Dopamine receptor signalling: intracellular pathways to behavior". In Neve KA. The Dopamine Receptors. Springer. pp. 137–174. ISBN 1-60327-333-6.


Are there psychological explanations for people being drawn to neo-nazism or other bad ideologues? Are there psychological explanations for people being drawn to neo-nazism or other bad ideologues?

Since surely the people are not believing in them for no reason. But what is it that they try to achieve through such ideologues? Are these people "sane"?

Or perhaps e.g. their "superior race" beliefs mean that their ideologue is "rational" in the sense that they feel that they belong to the superior race and other races ought to be discarded in order for only the superior race to flourish?

There are a few questions here which are related:

How does people's sense of right and wrong affect their behavior?
Any research on brain's processes involved in evil actions?

I will try and put some time aside to build a more full answer with references, but to give a starter, there are a lot of studies on this subject starting with conformity studies such as the Milgram Experiment (here is a documentary on the experiment) and the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Philip Zimbardo who was in charge of the Stanford Prison Experiment wrote the book "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil" and led a talk on his research on the subject including other examples, but the biggest one for me was turned into a movie in Germany called Die Welle, and in English under the name The Wave.

The movie covered the true story of an experiment with a group of school children who wanted to understand the very same question you are asking, not believing it could happen today.  Things turned nasty and out of control.

Teacher, Ron Jones's "Third Wave" experiment, which took place at a Californian school in 1967 was put together to explain how the German population could accept the actions of the Nazi regime during the Second World War. He founded a totalitarian, strictly-organized "movement" with harsh punishments that was led by him autocratically. The intricate sense of community led to a wave of enthusiasm not only from his own students, but also from students from other classes who joined the program later. Jones later admitted to having enjoyed having his students as followers. To eliminate the upcoming momentum, Jones aborted the project on the fifth day and showed the students the parallels towards the Nazi youth movements.

Image: Cutting of Klink (1967)

All of these studies and experiments provide strong proof that the risk of full Nazi style regimes can return on a national level given the right circumstances.

References

Klink, B. (1967). 'Third Wave' presents inside look into Fascism. Catamount, 11(14), 3Retrieved at: http://www.cubberleycatamount.com/Content/66-67/Catamount%20Pages/V11No14

See Also

Lesson Plan MovieThe documentary by the students and teacher of “The Third Wave” (aka “The Wave”)(http://www.lessonplanmovie.com)

Teacher, Ron Jones' account of the experiment(http://libcom.org/history/the-third-wave-1967-account-ron-jones)


What is the role of traveling waves in circuit formation during cortical development? Propagating waves of activity have been characterized in various regions of the brain such as the visual cortex (Nauhaus et al., 2012). Recently they have been reported for the first time to occur transiently during the developing cerebellum (Watt et al., 2009).

I'm curious as to how they would be important during early development and why they are transient which I'm sure the authors have moved on to try and answer as well.

I've heard before about neuronal activity being important for pruning and forming correct connectivity within a network. For example waves of activity has been shown to be required for the development of precise retinotopic maps (Chang et al., 2005).

I'm not an expert and not familiar with the history or literature of neurodevelopment, so would like to ask if someone who may be more knowledgeable to describe what's known about wave activity during early brain development in other brain areas. How do waves help with proper circuit formation in these other regions? I am hoping this might provide insight to its role in the cerebellum.

Nauhaus, I., Busse, L., Ringach, D. L., and Carandini, M. (2012). Robustness of traveling waves in ongoing activity of visual cortex. The Journal of Neuroscience, 32(9):3088–3094. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5827-11.2012
Watt, A. J., Cuntz, H., Mori, M., Nusser, Z., Sjöström, P. J., and Häusser, M. (2009). Traveling waves in developing cerebellar cortex mediated by asymmetrical purkinje cell connectivity. Nature neuroscience, 12(4):463–473. doi:10.1038/nn.2285
Cang, J., Renterı́a, R. C., Kaneko, M., Liu, X., Copenhagen, D. R., and Stryker, M. P. (2005). Development of precise maps in visual cortex requires patterned spontaneous activity in the retina. Neuron, 48(5):797–809. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2005.09.015

Traveling waves are a developmental mechanism to "prime" neural circuits. In a mature adult, certain mechanisms allow the strengthening and weakening of synapses (LTP/LTP, dendritic spine growth, etc...). These same mechanisms are used during development to achieve initial connectivity. For these to work however, spiking activity must be present. Experience will later produce complex and meaningful patterns of activity between structures, that will in turn produce complex and meaningful patterns of connectivity. Until that point, the neural structures must be synaptically linked so that learning can begin after birth.

Certain cellular mechanisms guide axon growth, and this transient bursting activity "captures" the specificity of these growths as synapses. When this bursting activity is disrupted, the precise topographical connections are lost.

References

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0896627393901228
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.neuro.28.061604.135714?journalCode=neuro


Is modality-specific working memory capacity correlated within individuals? The multi-component model of working memory posits different processes for phonological and visual working memory storage.

Working memory capacity can be measured in a variety of ways (see: How to reliably measure working memory capacity?), and we know that there is reliable individual variation on working memory capacity.

Is there a strong correlation of working memory capacity in different modalities within an individual? Put another way: If I have measured working memory capacity for an individual using a visual working memory task (like a Matrix span task), how reliably can I predict performance on a verbal working memory task for that individual?

How working memory breaks down, or even whether it is a valid construct at all, is still somewhat controversial.  The evidence for domain-specific modalities is largely based on the (lack of otherwise expected) interference between them.  Another line of evidence that could be used to validate this model is checking the correlations between them: A high correlation would argue for a domain-general working memory, while a low correlation would support domain-specific modalities.  In practice, however, the value of examining correlations between working memory measures is confounded by a general capacity factor (eg, executive control), interaction with short-term memory, the possibility of any number of additional modalities (for example, visual vs. spatial), and the result of many years of assuming a unitary working memory construct resulting in a variety of measures that are validated against each other (ie, expected to correlate highly).

Nonetheless, just such a test was done by Alloway, Gathercole & Pickering (2006), who subjected over 700 primary school children to a battery of different working memory capacity measures.  As expected, correlations between many of the measures were statistically significant, but importantly, not commensurate with either a simple domain-specific model, or a simple general model with WM/STM split.  To answer your question, here is a table from the paper that summarizes some of the results (more detail here):

As you can see, the correlations, while nearly all significant at p>.001, vary considerably.  These results are consistent with similar studies that review several independent measures of working memory that nonetheless all tend to correlate well with cognitive factors such as general intelligence.


Antonym for apophenia I understand that apophenia is the standard term in psychology to describe the tendency to spot patterns where none exist (analogous to a Type I error - false positive).

Is there a standard term to describe the opposite phenomenon? The tendency to miss a pattern where one exists (analogous to a Type II error - false negative).

I wouldn't call this reference authoritative, but after a bit of research the first article in this journal (originally published in the Journal of Parapsychology) introduces the term "randomania" as "attributing chance probability to (apparently) related phenomenon." Note that this term is specifically defined in contrast to apophenia.

As an aside, this blog post discusses the history of the term apophenia (and potential modern misapplications of its current definition).


What is it called when a student tends to speak about what he knows? Sometimes, a student who has a lack of knowledge, tries to change the topic of a question so that it will be about what he knows and can speak about. Is this a known phenomenon in psychology?

Tom Boardman's suggestion in the question comments about the Law of the Instrument ("if all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail") seems to capture an important aspect of this, especially with respect to illustrating that it's not necessarily done out of malice.
The simplest theoretical explanation would cast this in terms of top-down processing and attention (Ward, 2008), combined with the availability heuristic (Schwarz et al., 1991). These two factors lead to a situation where whatever a student is knowledgeable about is more likely to come to mind in a discussion, and then whatever is on the student's mind is incorporated into the discussion. When the student encounters something that doesn't fit into what they know well, they might inadvertently change the subject to something that does, simply because that's what comes to mind and thus ends up being what shapes their thoughts.
References

Lawrence M. Ward (2008) Attention. Scholarpedia, 3(10):1538.
Schwarz, N., Bless, H., Strack, F., Klumpp, G., Rittenauer-Schatka, H., & Simons, A. (1991). Ease of retrieval as information: Another look at the availability heuristic. Journal of Personality and Social psychology, 61(2), 195-202.


So why might people post seemingly excessive concerns regarding the danger in their neighbourhood? Background: The reason for this post is that I have noticed that many people have a desire to make that which is pretty safe seem dangerous.  It is very perplexing to me.

Despite holding a master's degree my psychology education is limited to 101, yet I am still curious about a trend I am seeing.

My neighborhood facebook page, which can be very helpful, is also scattered with posts from a subset of people who want to make the neighborhood seem dangerous.  It is a bit large, 1300, homes and really very safe.  There was some vehicle "break-ins", which was really change and loose items being taken from cars that were unlocked.  My family locked our three cars and never had a problem.  That is really the extend of the crime.

One person recently posted:  "Large box truck pulling a trailer on Xxx Pkwy. No company name. Anyone expecting home builder maintenance?".  The street in question services all the homes an an elementary school.  About 5% of residents are actually on the facebook page.  It is a public street, not gated.  How would one reasonably expect this to get any "traction".  Turns out it was a crew painting fire hydrants.

Another example:  Guy posts a picture of a car stopped in front of his house.  "What are you doing in front of my house at 1:12 pm.  Be warned I will not be robbed."  Again this was just after lunch on a side street, but still public.  One person points out that the house across from him is for sale.  They were probably checking it out.  To my knowledge there have been no reported break ins, other then abandoned houses, in the last 8 years.

Question

So why might people post seemingly excessive concerns regarding the danger in their neighbourhood?

It seems counterproductive as it would tend to drive down property values.
My thought is that this behavior fulfils a particular need, but perhaps I am thinking about it wrong.

@what has a great point in wanting to know the the social context. Sounds to me simply like fear, but to know the origin of the fear we need more context. A lot more.

My hypothesis is that something is giving the perception of danger to some people, either real or perceived, and they spread the mentality; some are more susceptible to it than others.

It can also be an effort to try to keep people away, like not wanting new people moving in. In a xenophobia (also a flavor of fear) fashion:

  An excessive and irrational fear of anything foreign. This fear is most often of foreign people, places or objects. People who are xenophobic may display fear or even anger toward others who are foreign.

Knowing how these people got this perception of fear is the blurry part. In a very safe neighborhood, these claims sound slightly paranoid. People can mix some story told from family or friends, plus some media, add a bit of cultural backing, mix up with a particularly fearful personality and bang, chaos ensured.

Given an incomplete scenario, like the tales above, our cognitive bias will fill out some details which we are missing, or we have trouble understanding, and we might have bad tendencies in what to fill. Negativity bias is a good example:

  The negativity bias refers to the notion that, even when of equal intensity, things of a more negative nature (e.g. unpleasant thoughts, emotions, or social interactions; harmful/traumatic events) have a greater effect on one's psychological state and processes than do neutral or positive things.

Suppose a crime happened in our very peaceful neighborhood some time ago. Not everyone is used to it. It is new, dangerous and provides a feeling of unsafeness:

I'm vulnerable at home
It represents danger to my possessions
It represents danger to my family
There will be invasions to the safeness of my property.
I don't know what it will bring, but it won't be good

This is an article from UK, but features some context-agnostic points when it comes to the fear of crimes:

  Many crimes have emotional effects on
  victims that include upset, fear and anger. They can also result in psychological
  problems where the crime involves the victim coming face to face with the
  offender, particularly when violence or the threat of violence occurs

  ...

  Robbery and its effects on victims may also
  affect the feelings and behaviour of non-victims, some of whom may be able to
  appreciate its effects at first hand.

  ...

  Street robbery is predominantly an urban phenomenon, with most robberies
  taking place in streets near the victims' home and close to transport access points
  (Barker et al., 1993; Mirlees-Black et al., 1996). Though not a seasonal crime,
  more attacks occur when it is dark, with violence used in approximately 44% of
  incidents (Barker et al., 1993) and weapons involved in about a third (Mayhew
  et al., 1992). Young people represent a substantial proportion of the victims of
  street robbery (e.g. Barker et al., 1993) and, though only slightly, males are more
  at risk (Mayhew et al., 1992)

This article, also from the UK, presents studies on risk perception in the fear of crime:

  Instead perhaps
  the strongest evidence relates to
  the importance of public concerns about neighbourhood disorder,
  social cohesion and collective efficacy (Ferra
  ro, 1995; Perkins & Taylor, 1996; Jackson, 2004;
  Wyant, 2008). The idea here is that the incidenc
  e and risk of crime has become coupled in the
  public mind with issues of social stability, mo
  ral consensus and the colle
  ctive informal control
  processes which underpin neighbourhood order (Ba
  nnister, 1993; Walklate, 1998; Girling, Loader,
  & Sparks, 2000; Jackson, 2006).

Forgive the below-average english.


Can placebo effect be increased by modifying the perception about prescription/intake setting? I've noticed the following pattern within my own thinking - multiple unrelated events "combine" to produce a certain action, particularly creativity and innovation. I'm trying to understand if this phenomenon is true or common among people. As a way to learn more about this, I thought that placebo effect would be a good place to start.

To clarify my question: imagine you are going to get a drug prescription. It will be a placebo, but you don't know that. Would combining factors like below increase the effectiveness of placebo?

clean doctors office
a traditional white coat doctor like on stock photos treating you
positive demeanor of staff
perception of privacy
thinking you are being prescribed a drug you have researched well and feel safe about
seeing a presentation about the advances of modern medicine within a week before

Contrast this with the following:

a dark, cramped waiting room
long wait and short consultation
a physician assistant or a nurse practitioner seeing you instead of MD
unknown drug you have never heard of
perceiving some negative news within last week

I'm trying to understand if a combination of unrelated events indeed does combine to affect the effectiveness of placebo? If so, is there the primary cause of change (like PA-C prescribing vs MD)?

I found the following on Wikipedia which makes me even more curious:

  The expectancy effect[of placebo] can be enhanced through factors such as the
  enthusiasm of the doctor, differences in size and color of placebo
  pills, or the use of other interventions such as injections. In one
  study, the response to a placebo increased from 44% to 62% when the
  doctor treated them with "warmth, attention, and confidence."[47]

Here is what I think the traditional expectation of a doctor is:

I think the field of persuasive communication is relevant for your answer, as well as research into the efficacy of psychotherapy.

Customers trust advertising if it is communicated by:

attractive persons
credible experts

Psychotherapy is more effective if:

the therapist believes that his methods are effective (!)
patient and therapist share the same world view and values
patient and therapist like each other

What constitutes attractiveness, expertise, common values, and sympathy, will differ among individuals. For some, expensive architecture makes a bank more trustworthy; for others it is a sign of waste and mismanagement. So you will have to identify the exact parameter value for each target group or, for perfect fit, even each individual person. But basically what you have here are moderators that affect the efficacy of a placebo.

What is noteworthy is that the belief of the person administering the placebo has an effect. So it's better they don't know it is a placebo, but have been given it by a person they in turn trust.

There is a lot of research into both areas; I give only one introductory source each (both of which respectively include what I quoted above):

Goldstein, N. J., Martin, S. J., & Cialdini, R. B. (2008). Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Wampold, Bruce E. (2001). The Great Psychotherapy Debate: Models, Methods and Findings. New York: Routledge.

Don't be fooled by the popular nature of the first book; Robert Cialdini is an eminent expert on persuasion. If you want, there are more scientific publications by this author.


Why are trans-women more common than trans-men? Before I begin, note I have no animosity nor prejudice against anyone. Please keep the answers scientifically motivated.
Various surveys on trans populations have shown male to female transitions are 2-4x more likely than female to male (see here).  This is clearly statistically significant and not some anomaly.
I can only think of 2 possible solutions ... either a difference in psychological predisposition between the sexes (but if so what), or some genetic component.
That being said, what is the most likely reason for this?  Does the large discrepancy in numbers suggest such a genetic component?
For context, here is one of the stats I am basing the question on(the stats are similar for all countries for which there is data):
"The American Psychiatric Association, using GID criteria, suggested that MTFs had a 1 in 30,000 (.0077%) prevalence rate, while FTMs were 1 in 100,000 (.0029%)"

Exactly like you, I would like to begin by saying that I have no animosity nor prejudice against anyone. What I am saying below is not meant to be offensive to anyone, it is just an honest account of what the data in my region says.

You wrote:

  "I can only think of 2 possible solutions ... either a difference in
  psychological predisposition between the sexes (but if so what), or
  some genetic component."

But there is in fact a third factor, which is economics.

Where I live (Southeast Asia), there's quite a large number of many male -> female trans people that are prostitutes. I have lived in Indonesia, Philippines, and Thailand, which are all countries that appear lower than 80th in the list of countries by GDP per capita, and do have a large population of people living in poverty. If you go to the streets where most of the prostitutes advertise themselves (such as Jalan Jaksa in Jakarta, Indonesia) you will find these days that many of them (and in some areas, the majority of them!) are male -> female trans.

This may get quite controversial, so once again, I begin by saying that I have no animosity nor prejudice against anyone. I just want to point out, if I may, that for men, it is not as easy to make money as a prostitute as it is for women. Men statistically pay for sex more often than women do. I have not seen any homeless women in my city acting as "beggers" (I only see men doing this), but I see far more female prostitutes (in fact I have never in my life seen a male prostitute advertising themselves on a street!). Most of the trans-women I know in my city, started out as pre-operation trans people that made ends meet as escorts or prostitutes or "sugar babies" and many of them got the money for their operation by a "sugar daddy" or a wealthy client that developed a closer relationship with them.

I am not saying this is the only reason. I am just saying that there is at least one more reason in addition to the two that you have suggested as the only two you could think of. What I have written applies to my region of the world and may not apply to wealthier places such as Luxembourg where practically everyone (even the poorest people) are better off than the middle class here (and would less likely need to resort to prostitution).

It is also likely that the answer to the question depends heavily on the region in question, as is the case for sexual orientation demographics.

Let me start with the opening sentence to the Wikipedia article on "Demographics of Sexual Orientation":

  "The demographics of sexual orientation vary significantly, and
  estimates for the LGBT population are subject to controversy and
  ensuing debates."

For example, the same page has this:

It shows that males are more likely to be gay than females in every city in Brazil except for Manaus which is in the Amazon. We cannot rule out the possibility that in Manaus, there might be cultural or societal reasons why 10% of the women have become attracted to women more than the men. I am not saying that the men of Manaus are bad people, I am just saying that genetics and psychology are not the only factors and that culture and society can affect what type of people a population finds attractive (in a misogynistic society women might start to find men less appealing, for example, so it is not just genetics and psychology).

Interestingly, in USA the statistics are the opposite of in Brazil (women are more likely to be gay than men):

I suspect that just as the demographics of LGBT people "vary significantly, and estimates for the LGBT population are subject to controversy and ensuing debates", the same may be true for trans people (in fact trans is the T in LGBT, so already there's at least one other place that says that statistics will vary significantly and be hard to generalize).

I am  not saying that psychology and genetics don't play any role at all, but I do think we also have to consider other factors that would lead to more males becoming trans than females such as geography (are we in a place where it's acceptable for men to transform but not women? are we in a place where more women are in demand for certain jobs? are we in a place where more women are in demand for sex?) and in some cases even economy. Because of this added complication (which gets into "soft" sciences of sociology and economics which are harder describe in a more mathematical or clinical manner than "hard" sciences like neurology), it might be very difficult to get a straight answer regarding psychology and genetics, especially since all the data is also relatively new and people haven't been studying the topic for long enough yet!


Looking for text books comparing animal and human brain Are there any papers or textbooks comparing animal nervous system and human's ?
I'm most interested in "higher" animals such as mammals(Chimps, dogs etc.)

I believe what your looking for is a book on Comparative Neuroanatomy the only text book I could find in the field was:
Comparative Vertebrate Neuroanatomy: Evolution and Adaptation but you will find a number of web pages via google.

Comparative Neuroanatomy


Can stress be detected by an fMRI? How does stress damage the brain (if at all)? Is it akin to taking drugs, heavy drinking, or a minor stroke?

Would an fMRI of a stressed person present evidence of stress?

There is little evidence that stress affects structural MRI (reduction in the volume of the hippocampus). The review article (Effects of stress throughout the lifespan on the brain, behaviour and cognition Lupien et al., 2009) synthesizes the current knowledge in the field. Another article might be of interest (MRI measurement of hippocampal volume in post-traumatic stress disorder: A meta-analysis).

If you are interested in functional MRI and day-to-day stress, even less is known. The study  (Perfusion functional MRI reveals cerebral blood flow pattern under psychological stress) shows that ventral RPFC (right prefrontal cortex) activation is specifically associated with psychological stress, and this activity persists even beyond the stress-task period.


Does monism imply that computers can have consciousness? According to The Basic Theory of the Mind, the mind is not a different entity from the brain, but an emergent property of the brain.  Based on this assertion, can it be concluded that computers and any other information processors have or can have consciousness and mind?

Note: While "The Basic Theory of the Mind" may potentially be well researched and possibly accurate, it is (as far as I know) a self-published discourse by a non-researcher, that is not peer-reviewed.  As such, I will not address it specifically.

Monism, the view that the brain and mind are one entity, is often associated with a family of philosophy of mind viewpoints called functionalism - the idea that mental states are defined solely by their functional role.  A related approach is computationalism - the idea that mental states are defined by their information processing function.

Thus, computationalism's answer to the hard problem of consciousness (the question of how the brain gives rise to the mind under monism), is that the mind is an emergent phenomenon due to information processing in the brain.  A well-known theory that supports this particular view with evidence is Integrated Information Theory (IIT).  While this is a popular view, it is not the only one, and hence it is not fair to say that monism implies computationalism.

A list of monistic alternatives to computationalism can be found on Wikipedia.  A couple of interesting examples:

Physicalism: The physical properties of the brain also matter (ie, not just its information processing properties).  This implies that a brain made of silicon, performing the exact same information processing as a brain made of carbon, may not share the same conscious experience, because they are physically different.

Eliminative materialism: Conscious experience does not exist.  That is, people's common-sense understanding of the mind is incorrect, and the mind is essentially reducible to the biological properties of the brain.

Wikipedia also mentions functionalism, behaviourism, type physicalism, and emergentism.  Other alternatives worth mentioning:

Representationalism: The mind is an internal representation of the brain - ie, not a physical phenomenon, but an interpretation of physical phenomena.

Philosophical zombies: The conceivability of a zombie, physically indistinguishable from a human being, but having no conscious experience (no mind), suggests that computationalism is incorrect.

Idealism: We are making a mistake trying to determine how the mind arises from the brain, because it is the other way around - the mind is the fundamental reality from which all else arises.

Cognitive Closure: We simply lack the intellectual capacity to understand the brain-mind relationship.


Emotions and reflexes - difference It seems to be the obvious for many psychologists, but on what grounds emotions are considered to be different than reflexes?

In a simplified example, a tennis player's eyes see the tennis ball's movements, and is working with the brain to track the speed and trajectory.  The brain is then reacting to these cues along with all other available cues, to send signals to the nerves responsible for moving the body in the required way to respond to these cues.

If however, something happens externally to the tennis game, which is then interpreted by the amygdalae and hypothalamus as a threat to the host's wellbeing, the brain's attention is immediately moved from the tennis game to the threat in order for it to react in the best way possible to protect the body from the perceived impending danger.

Now, the brain may not be immediately conscious of the threat in a psychological sense as it may not have time to think about the threat in a psychological way, but nevertheless, the brain will be conscious of the impending danger and will respond accordingly in the most efficient way possible.

This is reflex reaction.

Emotional reactions are psychological reactions to stimulae which the brain receives, whereas reflex reactions are reactions which result from stimulae which the brain currently doesn't have time to process psychologically.


Is a desire for a certain food related to the nutritional need for that food? It appears that, from time to time, everybody has a strong desire for some specific food.

I want to know whether this is the feedback of the body needing certain nutrients or whether it's purely related other influences such as emotions.

Q: To what extent are such cravings influenced by current nutrient levels1 in the body?

1: When you're dying of thirst you'll definitely want some water. I'm rather talking about "Damn, I really want an orange." (lack of citric acid and vitamin C).

I think this question may be better asked at biology.SE.
I have to cite popular science press here, but nevertheless, clearly the answer seems to be: no.

Scientific American:

  Peter Pressman of the Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Beverly Hills, Calif. and Roger Clemens of the University of Southern California School of Pharmacy explain. Food craving, defined as an intense desire to eat a specific foodstuff, is a common occurrence across all cultures and societies. These yearnings (...) are not linked to any obvious nutrient insufficiency.

From a more comprehensive take on this from the WSJ:

  For decades, researchers surmised that food cravings were the body's subconscious effort to correct nutritional deficiencies. Longing for steak could indicate a need for protein or iron, according to this theory. Chocoholics might be low on magnesium or other mood-altering chemicals that chocolate contains, including phenylethylamine, a compound humans produce when they're in love.
  But a growing body of research casts doubt on the nutritional-deficiency notion. After all, few people crave vitamin-rich green leafy vegetables and many other foods contain more phenylalanine than chocolate—including salami and cheddar cheese.

So the more cogsci.SE related questions might be about the complex cultural, affective, cognitive and neuropsychological factors (such as stress and social norms) that foster cravings for certain foods.


Starting academic textbook/survey article for the field of persuasive communication? I am quite interested in this topic and trying to find rigorous academic sources. The Wikipedia link of persuasive speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persuasive_speech is not relevant to this academic field.
I am not sure if the Wikipedia page of "persuasion" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persuasion is about the field of "persuasive communication". What text/article can I start to read in order to get a big picture of the organization of this field and some recent advances?

I would like to suggest the classic and pioneer book in the field of communication and pursuasion by Daniel H. Pink.
To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others
The book not only contains the basics of pursuasions but also explains in detail, why and how things work. Its a master piece!
Hope you would enjoy it.


Is there any scientific literature on the "shower principle" (i.e., taking a break from a task leads to unexpected insights)? Folk cognitive psychology has it that doing activities that remove you from your intellectual work (such as taking a shower or, like Einstein is reported to have done when it a rut, playing the violin) increases your chances of having unexpected insights. Is there a name for this phenomenon and a dedicated scientific literature for it?

That moment is often called the "aha moment", the Eureka effect, or more generally, insight.  There is literature on it, but as you might expect, it is a pretty difficult thing to produce in a lab.

Some references:
The AHA! experience: Creativity through emergent binding in neural networks.
Thagard, Paul; Stewart, Terrence C.. Cognitive Science35.1 (Jan-Feb 2011): 1-33.

Gaining insight into the "aha" experience.
Topolinski, Sascha Reber, Rolf. Current Directions in Psychological Science19.6(Dec 2010): 402-405.

The aha! Moment: The cognitive neuroscience of insight.
Kounios, John; Beeman, Mark. Current Directions in Psychological Science18.4(Aug 2009): 210-216.

Neural correlates of the “aha” experiences: Evidence from an fMRI study of insight problem solving.
Qiu, JiangView Profile; Li, Hong; Jou, JerwenView Profile; Liu, Jia; Luo, Yuejia; et al. Cortex: A Journal Devoted to the Study of the Nervous System and Behavior46.3 (Mar 2010): 397-403.


Is it possible to master two different typing keyboard layouts? I am a good typist with qwerty keyboard, I came across other keyboard layouts (eg: Dvorak keyboard). I believe I will never be able to master these two typing layouts simultaneously.

Am I right? or is it possible to learn both and become a good typist (i.e type with decent speed without looking the keyboard).

The example in itself is trivial to me (I am happy with qwerty keyboards) but I wanted to understand what will happen when there is a serious overlap and contradiction with two methods and can human mind handle it or is it once set it's really set in situations like this?

If my mind can learn only one method when two contradicting and interfering methods are present, then I believe it's implications are very interesting.

There are real life examples which are similar to the keyboard example.
They all have the following attributes.
a) Two are more conflicting solutions for same problem
b) Decisions must be automatic or made under tight time constraint (no time to think).

Observational points:
It would be straightforward to point to a person who has mastered more than one keyboard layout (e.g., some of the people here). So, yes, it is possible. From my own personal experience, I can point to my use of both Vim keyboard shortcuts for editing and regular OSX/Windows keyboard shortcuts. This is certainly possible.

But I'd prefer to focus on the scientific principles that underly such a capacity.

Scientific principles:

There are a number of scientific principles operating in this context.

Negative and positive transfer
Principles of task consistency and complexity

In general transfer of skill from one domain to another depends on the degree of consistency between the two skills. This is a broad concept. Certainly the mapping between inputs and outputs is a big part of this (i.e., key press and letter). But it could also include a range of broader conceptual and psychomotor routines.
Thus, positive transfer occurs when you can take the skill on one task to improve your performance in another. Negative transfer occurs when your performance on one task suffers as a result of learning a different task. In general positive transfer is much more powerful than negative transfer.

Applying these principles to converting from QWERTY to DVORAK

Let's say that you have a person who has learnt the QWERTY keyboard layout and can type 80 words per minute. They decide that they want to learn DVORAK. What would we expect from a skill acquisition perspective?

The new keyboard layout (DVORAK) shares many consistent cognitive and psychomotor elements with the original layout (QWERTY). The basic motor actions of pressing individual keys are identical. Many other cognitive skills around the concept of typing are also the same. However, the actual specific key-to-letter mappings will be new. Furthermore, learning to type involves building up specific motor patterns around common sequences of letters and some of these will also be new.

The net result will be that learning to efficiently use DVORAK should take a fair bit of time. However, the learning curve should be massively faster than learning how to touch type the first time. Thus, in a basic sense, the main limitation to learning to type using two keyboard layouts is that it just takes more time than to learn one layout. And generally, you will be better at one layout than the other, so why bother learning two layouts unless perhaps you are transitioning to a new layout for the long term.

Based on general principles of cognitive transfer, generally knowing QWERTY will make DVORAK easier to learn. So most of the transfer will be positive. It is likely that there will be some accidental applications of QWERTY when you are in DVORAK and vice versa. Such errors can be minimised if you can create stimuli in your task environment that clearly communicates the appropriate mapping (e.g., use it on particular computers). The general concept in skill acquisition is that a single stimulus-response pairing is easier to manage, but over time you will learn to apply contextual cues to choose the correct stimulus-response options.

Another general principle for psychomotor skills is that forgetting is slower and relearning is quicker than for a lot of cognitive skills (Rosenbaum et al, 2001). Thus, people are likely to be able to retain and get back up to speed on a previously learnt keyboard layout after a period of using a newer layout.

References

If you're interested in reading more, you might want to check out some of Philip Ackerman's early work on skill acquisition where he talks about consistency and complexity.

There's also a large literature that has studied the cognitive psychology of learning to touch type.

Ackerman, P. L. (1989). Within-task intercorrelations of skilled performance: Implications for predicting individual differences? A comment on Henry & Hulin, 1987.
Ackerman, P. L. (1988). Determinants of individual differences during skill acquisition: cognitive abilities and information processing. Journal of experimental psychology: General, 117(3), 288.
Rosenbaum, D. A., Carlson, R. A., & Gilmore, R. O. (2001). Acquisition of intellectual and perceptual-motor skills. Annual review of psychology, 52(1), 453-470.
Yechiam, E., Erev, I., Yehene, V., and Gopher, D. (2004). Melioration and the transition from touch-typing training to everyday use. Human Factors, 45, 671-684.


How is motivation influenced by chance of reward? Sometimes, I work on a project where there is a chance that the whole project will become irrelevant before it is finished. I have noticed that even though I believe that the risk of this happening is small, it will significantly influence my motivation sometimes, though not on every project where there is such risk. On the other hand, when gambling, one is willing to do things, when the chance of reward is practically neglectable.

Are there any psychological experiments that can shed some light on why we react irrationally in these situations?

Our subjective estimation of probability is affected by many irrational factors, one of which is the accessibility of exemplars (Availability Heuristic). Since we usually hear about lottery winners, and not so much about those who didn't win, we over-estimate the probability of winning. It may be similar with your estimation of the probability of the project becoming irrelevant - it is affected by how easy it is for you to imagine the project failing, something that can be affected by lots of irrational factors (like how self-confident the project leader is, or even worse, how much you like him/her).

Dan Gilbert has a nice TED talk mentioning the Availability Heuristic in lottery and other similar biases in estimating gains and probabilities.


What are ways to explore metamathematics from a cognitive science/neuroscience lens? What are ways to explore metamathematics from a cognitive science/neuroscience lens to understand the evolution of mathematics based on structural and perceptual processing biases introduced due to our cognition?

What kind of work has been done/can be done to inform metamathematics from cognitive science? Who are some leading researchers and/or important works to read?

Assumption: Mathematics is invented, not discovered; so it is not Platonic.

You'll be interested in Where Mathematics Comes From, by George Lakoff and Rafael E. Núñez. Lakoff & Núñez argue that all of our mathematical concepts are based on some kind of conceptual metaphor, where we take the rules of a domain that we understand intuitively and apply them into a new, mathematical context. For example, the concept of "motion along a path" gives us the concept of a number line, which in turn provides a natural way to think about negative numbers:

Moreover, this metaphor provides a natural extension to negative numbers - let the origin be somewhere on a pathway extending indefinitely in both directions. The negative numbers will be the point-locations on the other side of zero from the positive numbers along the same path. This extension was explicitly made by Rafael Bombelli in the second half of the sixteenth century. In Bombelli's extension of the point-location metaphor for numbers, positive numbers, zero, and negative numbers are all point-locations on a line. This made it commonplace for European mathematicians to think and speak of the concept of a number lying between two other numbers - as in zero lies between minus one and one. Conceptualizing all (real) numbers metaphorically as point-locations on the same line was crucial to providing a uniform understanding of number. These days, it is hard to imagine that there was ever a time when such a metaphor was not commonly accepted by mathematicians! (Lakoff & Núñez, p. 73)

Lakoff & Núñez explicitly argue that all of human mathematics is created by the application of human-specific cognitive machinery and culture, and that the mathematics of an alien species might look very different.
The following references might or might not be useful for purposes of metamathematics, but mentioning them anyway since I happen to have them at hand from a course on number cognition that I took some years back: Piazza et al. (2007) and Brannon (2006) on how numbers are represented in the brain, Carey (2004) on how children come to learn the concept of integers, Frank et al. (2008) on numbers as a cognitive technology, and Gallistel et al. (2006) for an argument that real numbers rather than integers are what the brain represents.
Personally I also think that an extraordinarily interesting paper is Dehaene & Cohen (2007), which argues that the existence of specialized neuronal circuitry for purposes such as arithmetic and reading is possible because our culture has managed to "hijack" pre-existing circuits which originally evolved for other purposes:

The neuronal recycling hypothesis consists of the following postulates:

Human brain organization is subject to strong anatomical and connectional constraints inherited from evolution. Organized neural maps are present early on in infancy and bias subsequent learning.

Cultural acquisitions (e.g., reading) must find their “neuronal niche,” a set of circuits that are sufficiently close to the required function and sufficiently plastic as to reorient a significant fraction of their neural resources to this novel use.

As cortical territories dedicated to evolutionarily older functions are invaded by novel cultural objects, their prior organization is never entirely erased. Thus, prior neural constraints exert a powerful influence on cultural acquisition and adult organization.

If you accepted these postulates, then arguably the neural constraints of the older circuits might considerably bias the way that human mathematics is carried out.
References
Brannon, E.M. (2006) The representation of numerical magnitude. Curr Opin Neurobiol. Apr 2006; 16(2): 222–229. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1626588/
Carey, S. (2004) Bootstrapping & the origin of concepts. Daedalus, Winter 2004. http://hum.uchicago.edu/ck0/kennedy/classes/s09/experimentalsemantics/carey04.pdf
Dehaene, S. & Cohen, L. (2007) Cultural Recycling of Cortical Maps. Neuron, Volume 56, Issue 2, Pages 384–398. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627307007593
Frank, M.C. & Everett, D.L. & Fedorenko, E. & Gibson, E. (2008) Number as a cognitive technology: Evidence from Pirahã language and cognition. Cognition 108, 819-824. http://www.letras.ufrj.br/poslinguistica/recursion/papers/18-frank-et-al.pdf
Gallistel, C.R. & Gelman, R. & Cordes, S. (2006) The Cultural and Evolutionary History of the Real Numbers. Culture and evolution. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. http://hum.uchicago.edu/ck0/kennedy/classes/s09/experimentalsemantics/gallistel-etal05.pdf
Lakoff, G. & Núñez, R.E. (2001) Where Mathematics Come From: How The Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics Into Being. Basic Books.
Piazza, M. & Pinel, P. & Bihan, D.L. & Dehaene, S. (2007) A Magnitude Code Common
to Numerosities and Number Symbols in Human Intraparietal Cortex. Neuron 53, 293–305. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627306009895


What is the role of non-synaptic plasticity in learning and memory? Is non-synaptic plasticity (e.g. changes in the spike threshold) believed to play a large role in learning and memory? If so, which roles are these effects believed to play?

The answer is yes. Non-synaptic plasticity exists as you can read in "Non-synaptic neuronal mechanisms of learning and memory in gastropod molluscs" by Benjamin et al. and "Compartmentalization of Non-Synaptic Plasticity
in Neurons at the Subcellular Level" by Nikitin and Balaban.

But the effect of hormones such as cortisol may also have an effect.

Non-synaptic mechanisms of regulation and plasticity play a very important role in the brain and its ability to learn in many aspects and at different scales.

A single cell can suffer internal modification that will modify eletrophysiological properties.

Variations of concentration of elements in the CSF also have an effect.

Glia also plays an important role.

So, the brain is a very complex system with a lot of interdependent mechanisms of adaptation, regulation and plasticity. Synapse is just one aspect of it.


Are there first person accounts of monothematic delusions? Monothematic delusions are delusions that concern a single topic (Davies et al. 2001). They are often the result of acquired brain damage and include the Delusional Misidentification Syndromes, such as Capgras delusion (which involves the conviction that a close relative or spouse has been replaced by an impostor), as well as Cotard delusion (which may involve the conviction that one is dead) and somatoparaphrenia (which involves the conviction that a limb or an entire side of one's body is not one's own).

While there are untold numbers of first person (experiential) accounts of schizophrenia and, therefore, schizophrenic delusions (which usually present as polythematic), from Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903) to Elyn Saks's The Center Cannot Hold (2007) and various accounts published in Schizophrenia Bulletin, I have not come across first person accounts of any monothematic delusions so far.

Since asking the question, I was able to locate a first-person account of monothematic delusion, namely, of denial of ownership of one's own limbs (somatoparaphrenia/asomatognosia). It is due to the neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks, who in his fourth book A Leg to Stand On (1984) described his recovery after a fall in a remote region of Norway in which he injured his leg. Following surgery to reattach his quadriceps muscle, he experienced an emotional period in which his leg no longer felt a part of his body. He describes his confusion, seeing the “disowned” plastered limb (Sacks 1984: 45,49, 49–50):

  I had felt the leg in front of me . . . but now I could see it wasn’t
  there at all but had got shifted and rotated. . . . I had a
  sudden sense of mismatch, of profound incongruity –
  between what I imagined I felt and what I actually saw,
  between what I had “thought” and what I now found. I felt, for
  a dizzying, vertiginous moment, that I have been profoundly
  deceived. . . .

The experience of touching the leg was “inconceivably shocking and uncanny”:

  I seemed to have lost “my leg” – which was absurd, for there it
  was, inside the case, safe and sound – a “fact.” How could
  there be any doubt in the matter? And yet there was. On this very matter of “having” or “possessing” a leg, I was
  profoundly doubtful, fundamentally unsure.

This alarming state of uncertainty later resolves itself into
what seems closer to a fully delusional state:

  [the leg] became a foreign, inconceivable thing, which I looked
  at, and touched, without any sense whatever of recognition or
  relation. It was only then that I gazed at it, and felt I don’t
  know you, you’re not part of me, and, further, I don’t know this
  “thing,” it’s not part of anything. I had lost my leg. Again and
  again I came back to these five words: words which expressed
  a central truth for me, however preposterous they might
  sound to anyone else. In some sense, then, I had lost my leg.
  It had vanished; it had gone; it had been cut off at the top. I
  was now an amputee.

EDIT: I have found a first-person account of Cotard delusion in this blog post, thanks to Vaughan Bell who found it through Keith Frankish (both authors working extensively with delusions).


Can calmness happen during the fight-flight response? In the question How do certain individuals, like Quang Duc, develop the ability to remain calm when enduring significant nociceptive pain?, one answer says that it was the high level of cortisol that numbing his pain. But that's numb, not calm. I don't think calmness can happen during stressful situations.

So to check that answer, can calmness happens during the fight-flight response?

With looking at the possibility of calmness during stress and trauma, you only have to look at the situation with rape victims and soldiers witnessing severe traumatic events who dissociate (Ellert, et al. 2011)(Waller, et al. 2001) during the event.

Dissociation is a psychological defence mechanism (Cardeña, 1994) which helps the person to get through the situation with as little harm as possible.  Think about it like throwing a switch on conscious awareness.

Whilst some define dissociation as a combination of 2 distinct psychological mechanisms (Brown, 2006), the psychobiological mechanism of dissociation is little understood; but, when someone is dissociated from the event, the detachment of conscious awareness from the event can make the person appear very calm.

References

Brown, R. J. (2006). Different types of “dissociation” have different psychological mechanisms. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 7(4), 7-28.DOI: 10.1300/J229v07n04_02

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.

Ellert R. S. Nijenhuis PhD & Onno van der Hart PhD (2011) Dissociation in Trauma: A New Definition and Comparison with Previous Formulations, Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 12(4), 416-445.DOI: 10.1080/15299732.2011.570592

Waller, G., Hamilton, K., Elliott, P., Lewendon, J., Stopa, L., Waters, A., ... & Hargreaves, I. (2001). Somatoform dissociation, psychological dissociation, and specific forms of trauma. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 1(4), 81-98.DOI: 10.1300/J229v01n04_05


What factors affect the g factor? Is / are there any scientific studies on factors which affect the general intelligence (g) factor?

I did a Google search, but could not find any academic papers on the topic.

So you're basically asking what are the causes of interpersonal differences in intelligence as typically measured by standardised psychometric tests. This question forms the basis for a large proportion of the literature on intelligence. For example see a journal like Intelligence.

For a review you could read  Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns

A few quick observations include that

Genetics is a major cause
Environmental causes are often less well understood
Head start and related programs designed to increase intelligence typically lead to limited long term gains
Severe environmental factors will negatively affect intelligence


How are inherited instincts related to deprivation states? In Psychology and Life (Chapter 1, 18th edition), the authors (Gerrig and Zimbardo) write that

  According to the psychodynamic perspective, behavior is driven, or
  motivated, by powerful inner forces. In this view, human actions stem
  from inherited instincts, biological drives, and attempts to resolve
  conflicts between personal needs and society’s demands. Deprivation
  states, physiological arousal, and conflicts provide the power for
  behavior just as coal fuels a steam locomotive.

I'm wondering if these two lists "match up." In other words:

inherited instincts — deprivation states
biological drives — physiological arousal
attempts to resolve conflicts between personal needs and society’s demands — conflicts

By "match up, I mean are they related as elements are in the following example:

Freud's structural model of the psyche includes the id, the ego, and the superego, which relate to instinctual drives, the need to develop and maintain an organized and realistic perception of the world, and the internalization of cultural rules, respectively.

It's this "respectively" part I'm focused on. Did the authors write those sentences with that sort of relationship in mind?

Thanks.

No, not really. In the first quote, deprivation states are mentioned separately from physiological arousal because homeostatic and nonhomeostatic motives for behaviour are often discussed as separate forces:

  Homeostatic motives include hunger, thirst, respiration, and
  excretion. They work to keep the body in a balanced internal state.
  The term homeostasis refers to the body's tendency to maintain such a
  balanced internal state. Many homeostatic motives are set in motion
  either by bodily deficits or bodily excesses. When the body needs
  water, for example, changes occur that cause thirst and motivate the
  person to seek something to drink.

  Nonhomeostatic motives include sex, such activity as nest building,
  and curiosity about the environment. These motives are aroused by
  occasional forces. In the absence of such forces, nonhomeostatic
  motives may be inactive. In contrast, the needs for food, water, and
  air--homeostatic motives--have almost continuous influence.

The first quote thus just acknowledges this distinction without discussing it further. Here, deprivation states refer to homeostatic motives and physiological arousal to non-homeostatic ones. Freud does not make this distinction when he discusses instinctual drives.


Is prior experience necessary to perceive the Kanizsa triangle illusion? We know the Kanizsa Triangle.

Kanizsa Triangle

I was socialized in a "western" world, where I learned mathematics for about 13 years; I have designed products surrounding me using geometric forms and so forth.

I wonder if somebody would see the triangle who never or rarely saw a triangle before?

It's a difficult question to answer. My educated guess is that the appearance of the triangle, and illusionary contours in general, would persist, even in individuals who have never seen a triangle before in their lives. I think they would perceive the illusionary contours, but it might just not make sense to them, as the shapes may be unfamilair to them. In other words, they would not associate the form with something meaningful. The reason why I expect previous experience with geometrical shapes is unimportant for illusiuonary contours to be perceived is two-fold:

Illusionary contours are generated in the secondary visual cortex (V2), which is a low-level part of the visual system. It performs relatively simple processing such as the coding of orientations, contours and the perception of background and foreground (Anzai et al., 2007). Such low-level processing is, expectedly, largely innate.
The neural representations of illusionary contours have been shown in a variety of species. Admittedly, most electrophysiological evidence comes from primates (e.g., Heydt, 1984), but illusionary contours have even been shown to be recognized by cuttlefish (Zylinsk et al., 2012). Hence, given the fact that relatively uncomplicated species like cuttlefish are able to successfully perceive illusionary contours, I doubt that prior experience in the geometry of the illusionary contour is a critical factor in perceiving it.

References
- Anzal et al., Nature Neurosci (2007); 10: 1313 - 21
- Heydt, Science (1984); 224(4654): 1260-2
- Zylinsk et al., Proc Biol Sci (2012); 279(1737): 2386–90


How does evolution help in Minsky's theory of a resourceful mind? I've read Minsky's book The Emotion Machine, where he explains how the mind can be seen as a set of resources interacting and self-interacting based on several levels of change. The explanation is in fact a little deeper, but I won't be able to do the book justice in three sentences.

However, it seems to me that when it comes down to the why, Minsky backs himself up by saying "evolution did so", but hasn't provided tests or studies that verify such claims.

How does the evolutionary mechanisms help prove/disprove Minsky's theory?

Evolution does not help Minsky's theory of a resourceful mind. Although he tries to frame his discussion in loose evolutionary terms in the Emotion Machine and the book it is based on: Society of Mind (here is a good review/summary). As you noted during your reading:

  Minsky backs himself up by saying "evolution did so", but hasn't provided tests or studies that verify such claims

There are several reasons why he can't back himself up, and these are not unique to him but common throughout evolutionary psychology. The fundamental reason why Minsky (and other evolutionary psychologists) can't provide biologically convincing defenses for their evolutionary statements is because they are buildings theories of the mind, not the brain.

Biological evolution (at least in the modern synthesis) acts on genes. It is already hard enough to provide evolutionary descriptions on this level (see for instance issues surrounding the green-beard effect). However, biologists are sometimes able to go one step past this and start talking about basic physiology and the phenotypes and how selection acts on them. These are discussions about phenotypic traits. The traits that are most easily linked to the genes that express them are the ones that we can study effectively.

The brain is not easily linked to the genes that express it. Thus questions about the brain are already difficult enough to talk about from an evolutionary perspective (although some try). The mind is one more level of description higher up. Thus, in order to have a precise evolutionary statements about the mind we would need to solve the whole chain: genes --> protein expression --> physiology of the brain --> function of the brain --> function of the mind. We haven't solved any of these arrows, so it is not surprising that Minsky does not have hard evidence to support himself.

Lastly, when you read Minsky (and other evolutionary psychologists) be wary of teleological arguments. For us to have some trait doesn't mean that the trait needs to have been selected for at some point (in fact, some make a whole ruckus over what it even means to 'select for a trait'). Especially when you are considering such epiphenomena as the basic agents (or resources in the new book) of the mind. Take a look at genetic drift and genetic hitchhiking as starting point.


Why is it easier to fall asleep in the dark? I'm curious if there is any neurological mechanism that explains why falling asleep is easier in the dark.

I recognize that this isn't true universally -- a phobia of darkness might make it easier to sleep with the lights on -- but it seems to be true for most people.

I'm particularly curious if there is a general explanation that might explain why it is easier to fall asleep in the absence of much sensory stimulation (i.e., a quiet environment versus a noisy one, or if darkness is a special case due to our circadian rhythms).

It's probably more accurate to say that it's more difficult to fall asleep in the light because the circadian rhythm is directly regulated by ambient light. Our retinas contain a small amount of cells specialized for detecting ambient light levels, and these are directly connected to the brain center which controls the circadian rhythm. As our eyelids don't completely block out ambient light, and the light which passes through and hits these specialized cells begins tampering with our circadian rhythm, it becomes more difficult to fall asleep.

Background
The Suprachiasmatic Nucleus
The reason is a small nucleus above the optic chiasm in the hypothalamus called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), found across many different species. Comprising only approximately 20,000 neurons, the human SCN is nonetheless responsible for regulating a vast number of circadian functions over the entire body. The SCN is, for all intents and purposes, the pacemaker of the brain, and it runs on light: if ambient light is detected, then it must be because it is time to be awake, and the circadian rhythm is slowly adjusted accordingly.

(Suprachiasmatic nucleus. Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The Retinohypothalamic Tract
In mammals, the SCN receives input through the retinohypothalamic tract, which originates at a set of special photosensitive ganglion cells on the retina. They contribute to regulating the circadian rhythm by expressing melanopsin (Berson, Dunn and Takao, 2002). These highly specialized, sensitive and non-image-forming retinal neurons evolved to detect an environment's ambient light levels. They are most sensitive to blue light wavelengths of 488 nanometers (al Enazi et al., 2011), which may in part explain why users of electronic monitors sometimes report difficulties falling asleep.

(Effects of light exposure on the mammalian retinohypothalamic tract. Source: Wikimedia Commons)

A critical note
These fairly recent discoveries, while published in top-tier journals and widely hailed, have generated some controversy. Due to the ethical difficulties in deploying a methodology consisting mostly of disabling cones and rods in human samples, most of the evidence has come from animal models. At least one study, however, managed to discover patients naturally lacking cones and rods due to a rare illness, and they did report support for the SCN account in humans (Zaidi et al., 2007):

We examined the spectral sensitivity of non-image-forming responses in two profoundly blind subjects lacking functional rods and cones (one male, 56 yr old; one female, 87 yr old). In the male subject, we found that short-wavelength light preferentially suppressed melatonin, reset the circadian pacemaker, and directly enhanced alertness compared to 555 nm exposure, which is the peak sensitivity of the photopic visual system. In an action spectrum for pupillary constriction, the female subject exhibited a peak spectral sensitivity (λmax) of 480 nm, matching that of the pRGCs but not that of the rods and cones. This subject was also able to correctly report a threshold short-wavelength stimulus (∼480 nm) but not other wavelengths. Collectively these data show that pRGCs contribute to both circadian physiology and rudimentary visual awareness in humans and challenge the assumption that rod- and cone-based photoreception mediate all “visual” responses to light.

References

al Enezi, J., Revell, V., Brown, T., Wynne, J., Schlangen, L., & Lucas, R. (2011). A “melanopic” spectral efficiency function predicts the sensitivity of melanopsin photoreceptors to polychromatic lights. Journal of biological rhythms, 26(4), 314-323.
Berson, D. M., Dunn, F. A., & Takao, M. (2002). Phototransduction by retinal ganglion cells that set the circadian clock. Science, 295(5557), 1070-1073.
Zaidi, F. H., Hull, J. T., Peirson, S. N., Wulff, K., Aeschbach, D., Gooley, J. J., ... & Lockley, S. W. (2007). Short-wavelength light sensitivity of circadian, pupillary, and visual awareness in humans lacking an outer retina. Current Biology, 17(24), 2122-2128.


Brain Right hemisphere is random and left hemisphere is linear? really? For long I've seen uncountable number of blogs, websites, tutorials, booklets about career-guide, self-improvement, meditation, parenting etc. claiming;

"Right hemisphere loves to work random, creative way; in contrast left-hemisphere loves to follow instructions and discipline."
"Right hemisphere takes part in lateral-thinking; in contrast left-hemisphere takes part in vertical thinking."
"Right hemisphere deals with pictures, visions, senses, feelings etc; in contrast, Left hemisphere deals with formula, equation, numbers, names, letters, calculations etc."
"Right hemisphere works in nonlinear, meshy manner; in contrast, Left hemisphere works in linear, rigid, sequential way.
"Right hemisphere see the whole, big-picture. Left hemisphere see one part only".

etc.

Some example here , here, here , here, here, here et cetera.

Thus I developed a concept about behavior of 2 hemisphere.

Now While I was going through following research article (of 2000):

Cerebral specialization and interhemispheric communication by M. Gazzaniga  (pdf) ,

I stuck on a diagram telling the exact opposite.

(URL: https://d1gqps90bl2jsp.cloudfront.net/content/brain/123/7/1293/F16.medium.gif)

(I've slightly edited the screenshot to enlarge the text and utilize the whitespace).

The only thing of the paper maches with popular view, is; the right hemisphere is taking important part in understanding pictures, geometric shapes, extrapolating to fill a gap in an image, etc.

But according to this diagram; actually Left hemisphere is site for viewing the 'big-picture' of a subject ('living things'), finding 'similarity' (sings, eats, has a etc). Also From personal experience, the way of thinking shown as relational-map at left hemisphere, is the cause of 'randomness' in me, so that I keep many books and files scattered while working; or was broken line (que) in school to collect a grass or stone. The thing shown at left side forces me to collect various objects and arrange them... not the rightward one. Also I zone-out too-much and day-dream because of the left-one... not the right-one.

In contrast, clearly the right-hemisphere in this diagram, is processing information in much rigid, linear or sequential, disciplined way; and looking a small-part... not the big-picture.

So, please could anyone explain me, why should I still have to consider left hemisphere as a rigid linear servant and right-hemisphere as rulebreaker daydreaming artist?

(P.S. most of these popular-series's tell that Right hemisphere is intuitive and Left hemisphere is logical. But I can't believe this because I can't separate logic and intuition. Logic is the bridge between intuition and reality.)

You shouldn't.  It is one of those stubbornly persistent myths.  It is almost entirely false.  It is true that in some tasks one half of the brain is more prominent (although even in supposed classic cases like speech both halves are actually involved, just one half more than the other).
But the idea that one half of the brain is logical and the other intuitive or emotional is simply false.  At most, one half the brain is slightly more prominent in processing some tasks that may be perceived by us as more logical or more intuitive, but that is really as far as it goes.


Calculating Significantly Above Chance for 3-AFC Test I am trying to figure out which participants who took a 18-item multiple choice test scored significantly above chance. Each item has 3 choices, so the probability of getting each question correct is 0.33. To know how many items correct a person would have to get in order to be significantly above chance, does it make sense to use a binomial probability calculator like this: https://stattrek.com/online-calculator/binomial.aspx and try different numbers of successes until the probability is < p=0.05 (assuming this is my significance criteria)?

For 18 items where the probability correct is 0.33, the probability of getting 9 correct is 0.061 and the probability of getting 10 correct is p=0.027, so does it make sense to use "10 items correct" as my criteria for "performed significantly above chance?"

The hypothesis would normally be expressed as a one-sided test as p(X≥10). The online calculator you have selected is fine and the significant result could be expressed in an article as follows: (p=0.33, q=0.66, K=10, n=18, p-value = 0.043).

Another way to think of this is that 9 or fewer correct answers is more likely to be random chance.

At the threshold of 10, it is unlikely that the result could be explained by random chance.


Structural neuroimaging processing with FreeSurfer or SPM? I have a limited amount of time to analyse strucutural neuroimaging from a sample of patients. My objective is to simply extract volumes from selected fronto-parietal areas.

I have no previous knowledge on using SPM nor FreeSurfer. Which should I learn? Which has the fastest learning curve?

I usually prefer working with free and open source software in research, so if any of these two is able to plug into R, for example, it would be a plus.

SPM and FreeSurfer are similar in the sense that both are morphometry tools.
However, they belong to different kinds.

SPM implements voxel-based morphometry while FreeSurfer represents surface-based morphometry. It is really difficult to do an objective choice here. I don't know a truly impartial comparison of both methods. As a disclaimer, I should say that I prefer surface-based morphometry, and I would suggest as a comparison for you the PDF An Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Surface- and Voxel-based Morphometric Analysis and, as it is written by researchers at the home of FreeSurfer, it is somewhat inclined to FreeSurfer's approach. But its references are good for both SPM and FreeSurfer if you want to know them better.

Putting morphometric technicalities aside, other aspect setting them apart is that SPM is a MATLAB toolbox, so despite being free, it relies on a non-free software.  SPM project, under request, are able to provide a standalone version, but this precludes contributed SPM toolboxes. This can be an option when core SPM is enough for your needs. Regarding FreeSurfer, it can be used on a mostly free platform (not free as in Free Software Foundation's sense but more like what you would find in Ubuntu's based software). FreeSurfer runs natively on POSIX-like operating systems (Linux and MacOS) and the project has virtual machine images for VirtualBox, so Windows users can run a virtualized XUbuntu with FreeSurfer installed.

Finally, in terms of integration with R, FreeSurfer project lacks an official integration as it tries to be self contained and includes some statistical analysis capabilities on its own. I have used R to analyze data from FreeSurfer and it wasn't particularly difficult as it is stored in textual form. I heard about an R package, freesurfR — I don't know if it is still maintained — that could do some things in a two-way fashion.

SPM, being aimed at MATLAB, makes an integration with R a somewhat challenging manual task. I heard about an attempt to implement it in R, by means of a package called spmR. When I have used SPM, I had access to a licensed MATLAB and R integration was not that important so I have not insisted. Perhaps it can be done on a more natural way.

In the context of my Master's, FreeSurfer was our choice.


To what extent are correlations of father's age with birth defects and autism causal? I read the following in the paper today:

  Dr Karin Hammarberg ... said that while most
  children are born healthy, large studies of parental age were starting
  to show higher rates of birth defects and autism in children born to
  men over 40.

  A recent review of paternal age published in the Asian Journal of
  Andrology said an American study of 132,000 men found children of
  those over 45 were nearly six times more likely to have an autism
  spectrum disorder compared to children born to men under 30.

  The review also pointed to a Dutch study of 60,000 births which found
  children born to men over 40 were three times more likely to have
  autism and a US study of 5 million births which showed men over 50 had
  a 15 per cent higher chance of having a baby with birth defects
  including congenital heart disease and cleft palates.

However, my first thought was that the age of the father must be highly correlated with the age of the mother. Thus, an alternative explanation is that the higher prevalence of birth defects for older fathers is due to the fact that older fathers typically have babies with older mothers. Of course, the same argument could be made for the reported higher prevalence of birth defects in older mothers (i.e., they're having babies with older fathers).

Questions:

To what extent is paternal age associated with prevalence of birth defects after controlling for maternal age?
To what extent is any association between paternal age and prevalence of birth defects causal? (maternal age is the main covariate that I could think of, but there might be other important confounding variables)

This is a partial answer suggesting a possible causal mechanism.
One of the factors leading to birth defects and autism is mutations in the parent's genetic material. In a recently published article, Sun et al. (2012) observed that:

The paternal-to-maternal mutation rate ratio is 3.3, and the rate in fathers doubles from age 20 to 58, whereas there is no association with age in mothers.

In other words, while the mother's age will not have an effect on the number of mutations passed to the offspring, the older the father the more mutations. That means a possible causal mechanism for correlations of father's old age is an increase in the number of mutations (most of which are neutral or detrimental) passed to the offspring.
Kong et al. (2012) explain the connection of de novo mutations (of the sort observed by Sun et al. (2012)) to autism and other disorders more clearly. This blog post suggests why fathers might produce more mutations:

The difference probably comes from the distinct biology of male and female reproduction. Cells that give rise to sperm cells continuously divide throughout a man’s life while cells that develop into ovules stop replicating when the woman is still a fetus. Consequently, an ovule at any time of a woman’s life will have gone through 24 cell divisions while sperm will be at about 200 divisions in a 20 year old man and up to 600 in a man of 40 years. When cells divide, they replicate their DNA to transmit a copy of the genome to each daughter cell but this replication is not 100% accurate. With each division mutations creep in the DNA so the more divisions a cell goes through, the more mutations it accumulates.

References
Kong, A., Frigge, M.L., Masson, G., Besenbacher, S., Sulem, P., Magnusson, G., Gudjonsson, S.A., Sigurdsson, A., Jonasdottir, As.,   Jonasdottir, Ad., Wong, W.S.W., Sigurdsson, G., Walters, G.B., Steinberg, S., Helgason, H., Thorleifsson, G., Gudbjartsson, D.F., Helgason, A., Magnusson, O.Th., Thorsteinsdottir. U., & Stefansson, K., (2012) Rate of de novo mutations and the importance of father’s age to disease risk. Nature 488: 471-475.
Sun, J.X., Helgason, A., Masson, S., Ebenesersdóttir, S.S., Li, H., Mallick, S., Gnerre, S., Patterson, N., Kong, A., Reich, R., & Stefansson, K. (2012) A direct characterization of human mutation based on microsatellites. Nature Genetics [press]


Why does weather often affect mood? There are plenty of people who feel sad, sometimes even depressed when it rains or storms. This effect is often featured in writing and song, where the weather is often a sign of something sinister ("It was a dark and stormy night" is a very cliche beginning for darker stories). I'm curious as to why that is.

I do understand that there are certain activities that can't be done when it rains, but there are "rainy day activities" that take their place. What is it about the weather that makes people feel "down"?

The answer is that we don't really know (for non-clinical populations). The relationship between weather and mood isn't straightforward, and the impact of weather on mood may be very small (on average).

There have been some great experience-sampling studies that have looked at this. For example, in a sample of 1233, Denissen, Butalid, Penke, and van Aken (2008) found that:

Daily weather had no significant effects on positive affect
Higher temperature was associated with higher negative affect
Lower wind power and lower sunlight were associated with higher negative affect
Lower sunlight was associated with greater tiredness
Being outdoors moderated the impact of some weather variables on affect
The impact of weather on mood varied significantly across individuals
The overall effect of weather on mood was very small

Kööts, Realo, and Allik (2011) found that:

Higher temperature was associated with increased positive and negative affect
More sunlight was associated with increased positive affect (but not with negative affect)
Temperature and luminance were inversely related to feelings of fatigue
Being outdoors interacted with weather variables to predict negative and positive affect
Neuroticism may account for some individuals' greater reactivity to weather

Keller et al. (2005) found that:

The interaction between more time spent outdoors and higher temperature and barometric pressure predicted greater positive affect.
Interestingly:

  Among participants who spent more than 30 min outside, higher temperature and pressure were associated with higher moods, but among those who spent 30 min or less outside, this relationship was reversed.

  Conclusion: As stated, the effects of weather on mood aren't linear. Sunlight can boost serotonin levels, which may explain why spending time outdoors improves mood (even when controlling for physical activity). This is corroborated by studies using light therapy for SAD or other forms of depression. And more obviously, we feel fatigued/tired as sunlight lessens. But overall, these effects aren't very big, and they vary quite a bit across individuals (indicating the effects of moderating variables like neuroticism).


Postgraduate level books on personality psychology I have an undergraduate degree in psychology and I'm currently pursuing a master's degree in a different field. However, I am still interested in many aspects of psychology, including personality psychology. During my undergrad, I took two courses on personality, one dealing with personality at large, and one dealing with psychopathology. I'm looking for a more advanced book on personality psychology to read over the summer, perhaps a textbook that is read as part of a postgraduate degree in personality psychology. I'm not interested in psychopathology. Any recommendations?

The best place to start is probably THE personality psychologist, Gordon Allport. He wrote several texts that give a good overview of the issues facing the investigation of personality. He gives a fairly critical look at defining and measuring personality. Highly recommended reading if you plan on delving into personality theory.

His books on the topic:

Personality: A psychological interpretation. (1937) New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.

Becoming: Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality. (1955). New Haven : Yale University Press.

The Nature of Personality: Selected Papers. (1950; 1975). Westport, CN : Greenwood Press.

The Person in Psychology (1968). Boston: Beacon Press

The Psychologist's Frame of Reference (1940).

Pattern and Growth in Personality. (1961). Harcourt College Pub.

Personality & social encounter. (1960). Boston: Beacon Press.


Effect of compactness of notation on cognition? I vaguely remember reading somewhere that one of the reasons that the Romans failed to make any mathematical achievements is that their number system is illogical and does not lend itself to trivial observations that the Arabic (or Indian) numeral system allows.

Similarly, the increasing compactness of modern mathematical notation allows increasingly complex thoughts to be written down and processed with much greater ease (the only downside being the increased required background knowledge to understand the notation).

I also remember reading somewhere that the reduction of Maxwell's 20 differential equations to 4 has greatly improved physicists ability to think, so much so that even a physics grad student today is able to have complex thoughts that even Newton was not capable of having, purely due to compactness of notation.

Actually, I think the source said that the reduced set of equations emphasized the parameters that physicists normally cared about - I forgot exactly what it said.

Are there any studies or books on this? I've been searching and trying to find the sources where I got these informations from but to no avail.

If I recall correctly, in his book "The number sense", Stanislas Dehaene says that one reason Chinese have better than average math skills is because all digits have only 1 syllable and the number of syllables increases linearly with the number of digits (vs. for example the horrible seventy-seven in English). If I still remember correctly, he cites some studies about that. It's not exactly what you asked but that's definitively a reference relevant to your question.

Dehaene, S. (2011). The number sense: How the mind creates mathematics. OUP USA.


Is forward associated with right and backwards with left? The following is an observation I made in an informal sample group of about 10 people. I am looking into understanding the behavior I observed. Here is the setting:

On a computer keyboard there are the 4 arrow directions: up/forward, down/backward, left and right. Only the up/forward and down/backward keys are functional. On the screen is a first-person view that can rotate left (counterclockwise) and right (clockwise). The up/forward and down/backward keys are to be bounded to those rotations, so that pressing one would rotate the view in the bound direction.

I've noticed that most people bind the up/forward key to the right rotation and the down/backward key to the left rotation. I thought that this has to do with handedness, but it seems not to be the case. The exact numbers don't matter because there is not enough here for statistical significance. It could be that there is an association of clockwise rotation with (time) moving forwards, and same for counterclockwise.

Is there any reasoning for this, or studies on this?

It may have to do with language.

The idea that language influences thought is called Linguistic Relativity:

  The more accepted weak version claims that linguistic categories and
  usage only influence thoughts and decisions.

Lera Boroditsky summarizes research on the influence language has on direction and time:

  English speakers tend to talk about time using horizontal spatial
  metaphors (e.g., "The best is ahead of us," "The worst is behind us"),
  whereas Mandarin speakers have a vertical metaphor for time (e.g., the
  next month is the "down month" and the last month is the "up month").
  ... Imagine this simple experiment. I stand next to you, point to a
  spot in space directly in front of you, and tell you, "This spot,
  here, is today. Where would you put yesterday? And where would you put
  tomorrow?" When English speakers are asked to do this, they nearly
  always point horizontally. But Mandarin speakers often point
  vertically, about seven or eight times more often than do English
  speakers.

And in more detail in a Scientific American article:

  ... my colleague Alice Gaby of the University of California, Berkeley,
  and I gave Kuuk Thaayorre speakers sets of pictures that showed
  temporal progressions—a man aging, a crocodile growing, a banana being
  eaten. We then asked them to arrange the shuffled photographs on the
  ground to indicate the correct temporal order. We tested each person
  twice, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. English
  speakers given this task will arrange the cards so that time proceeds
  from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the cards
  from right to left. This shows that writing direction in a language
  influences how we organize time. The Kuuk Thaayorre, however, did not
  routinely arrange the cards from left to right or right to left. They
  arranged them from east to west. ... in Aymara, a language spoken in
  the Andes, the past is said to be in front and the future behind. And
  the Aymara speakers’ body language matches their way of talking: in
  2006 Raphael Núñez of U.C.S.D. and Eve Sweetser of U.C. Berkeley found
  that Aymara gesture in front of them when talking about the past and
  behind them when discussing the future.

This suggests that if you reversed the exercise, binding the left/right keys to movement forward or back, then you might get different results from Hebrew speakers than English ones.  And if you presented this exercise to speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre, then the results might depend on which way the keyboard is oriented - ie, you would get different results depending on whether the keyboard faces East or West!


How to get started with the glba R-package? I am struggling with getting started using the glba package in R.

Often, the program will not fit the data at all. It immediately converges, but not really, and then instead of estimating it gives the starting values that I gave it, or it generates absurd values, such as negative non-decision times.

I tried to fit the data that is given as an example (bh08) and it worked great, however, with my own data that seemed superficially at least very similar (the RT distributions were in the same ballpark, and with a similar distribution shape) it did not work (converged immediately).  I started with the suggested starting values, but also changed them.

Any smart advice?

(I guess RT should be in seconds and accuracy is a 1:0 variable.  By the way, the program worked and did not stop when RT was in milliseconds, but the estimates were bizarre).

It appears as if the problem was caused by pre-processing using (the amazing) tidyverse package.  When I (a) wrote the dataframe as a .csv file and then uploaded it, the LBA worked (in most subjects) nicely, converged quickly, and yielded sensible estimates.

Thank you!