What makes a book easier or harder to read? I am interested in books by academics that examine the following. How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading is the only relevant one that I found.

Suppose a reader to be deciding which books to read about a topic. Why do some readers:

judge some books easier to read than others?
comprehend some books faster and retain more than others?
What do authors (not) do that affect 1 and 2 above?

This question is open to some amount of opinion as there can be differences due to education level of the person reading the material etc.  However, there was a study by the American military in order to make their technical manuals as easy to read as possible.  The study was started by Rudolf Flesch with his Reading Ease evaluation, known as the Flesch reading-ease score (FRES) test, and Flesch later worked with J. Peter Kincaid to develop the Grade Level evaluation for the United States Navy, known as the "The Flesch–Kincaid" (F–K) reading grade level or Flesch–Kincaid readability test (Kincaid, et al. 1975)

Using the total number of words, syllables and sentences in the text, the formula for the Flesch reading-ease score (FRES) test is

$Score = 206.835 - 1.015 \left(\frac{total\;words}{total\;sentences}\right)-84.6\left(\frac{total\;syllables}{total\;words}\right)$

The readability tests used by schools is the F–K reading grade test.  The "Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level Formula" instead presents a score as a U.S. grade level, making it easier for teachers, parents, librarians, and others to judge the readability level of various books and texts.

Using the total number of words, syllables and sentences in the text, the Flesch–Kincaid (F-K) Grade Level Formula is

$Grade = 0.39\left(\frac{total\;words}{total\;sentences}\right)+11.8\left(\frac{total\;syllables}{total\;words}\right)-15.59$

Scores can be interpreted as shown in the following

References

Kincaid, J. P. Derivation of New Readability Formulas (Automated Readability Index, Fog Count, and Flesch Reading Ease Formula) Memphis:Naval Air Station Memphis [US Navy Unclassified PDF]
Available at: http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a006655.pdf


Are there any free databases of audio-visual emotional stimuli (English)? I am particularly interested in naturalistic and induced emotional content. I have found the SAVEE, the HUMAINE and the SEMAINE databases. I have read through the Terms for LDC (UPenn) and it seems somewhat complicated, especially as I am interested in their databases from 1993 and 2002. I have also found the EULA/ELDA resources, but these do not have much to offer. I have seen a passing reference to Glenn I. Roisman's database of Adult Attachment Interview recordings which seems to be perfect but I cannot get through to anyone from that team to inquire about availability.

Do you know any other databases of naturalistic/induced emotional stimuli which would be audio-visual and in English?

We have been using audio databases from THE CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF EMOTION AND ATTENTION.
Video databases we received from Anna Esposito & Maria Teresa Riviello:
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1694104
http://dl.acm.org/author_page.cfm?id=81100065756&CFID=220607811&CFTOKEN=47568792


Does self-directed speech help or hurt a blind subject's auditory recognition? Recently, it was found that self-directed speech was helpful to sighted subjects engaging in a visual search task:

  Participants searched for common objects, while being sometimes [sic] asked to speak the target’s name aloud. Speaking facilitated search, particularly when there was a strong association between the name and the visual target. As the discrepancy between the name and the target increased, speaking began to impair performance. Together, these results speak to the power of words to modulate ongoing visual processing.

So, if the subject were to be looking for a chair in a picture, saying the word "chair" aloud would lead to a more effective search.  Since the two modalities (vision and hearing) are separate, one set of information can compliment the other set and "constructively interferes," if you will, in the scenario above.

In trying to establish whether a similar "constructive interference" would occur in the auditory domain, so I'm wondering whether an experiment wherein a subject who is blind (since birth) repeating a word to themselves would show an difference in that subject's ability to discriminate muffled or otherwise disguised words that they were asked to listen to and identify as part of a task.

Would the degree to which repeating a word was helpful or harmful still depend on the similarity between the word spoken out loud and the word to be discriminated?  Or would there be a "destructive interference" effect under any circumstances, due to the same modality of hearing being used for the both discrimination of the information and the perception of the self-directed speech?

  Lupyan, G., Swingley, D. (2011).  Self-directed speech affects visual search performance.  The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, iFirst, 1-18.  DOI

It seems apparent that generating and hearing self-directed speech during discriminatory listening would inhibit said discrimination. This is because auditory processing of self-directed speech and audio processing in discriminatory listening would have to compete for resources in decoding auditory information, leading to poorer decoding of the already low-quality muffled audio.

If on the other hand the self-directed speech is performed only in-between the trials of discriminatory listening, then this competition for auditory-decoding resources no longer occurs.  In this case, I expect that the self-directed speech would effectively prime cognitive resources that are involved in discriminating the source of the muffled speech. This, then, would result in improved discriminatory performance. At least that would be my initial hypothesis.


Humans don't understand the accumulation of small numbers - what is this phenomena called? I find that if you tell someone to give you 20$ vs. giving you 1$ everyday for 20 days - people react differently.

Similarly humans have a hard time comprehending the fact that small changes in their behaviour everyday may eventually lead to big consequences.

Humans have loads of cognitive biases.

The one you have in mind could either be so called 'denomination effect', the tendency to care about large currency denominations and be less careful with smaller currency denominations. For example, not to care about the .99 part in a US 9.99 price tag.

It could also be the less-is-better effect. Small amounts of something are preferred than one big lump-sum. For example, buying something in 10 installments of US 110 is chosen instead of one scary US 1000 price tag.


What is the scientific support for Einstein's claim about the negative effects of reading too much? Einstein once said:

  Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its
  creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain
  too little falls into lazy habits of thinking, just as the man who spends too much time in   the theater is tempted to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life.

What is the scientific claim implicit in this quote?
Is it true that reading too much makes the mind lazy, and is reading too much harmful to the mind?

*Quote from an interview with G.S. Viereck, "What Life Means to Einstein," Saturday Evening Post, October 26, 1929; re-printed in Viereck, Glimpses of the Great, 437.

This answer is a bit more anecdotal, but perhaps it's useful.

From the perspective of an academic researcher (which perhaps is similar to Einstein's perspective), there is a balance between reading the literature and conducting your own research. There is a balance between learning new skills and applying those skills to your own projects. Even within the context of learning, there is a balance between reading how something is done and practicing actually doing it.

The very process of conducting your own research reveals challenges and gaps in understanding. Reading allows you to take on new information, however, doing good research also requires time to re-arrange ideas, refine your own theories. Furthermore, reading can vary in the degree to which it is a passive or active process. As an active process, choosing what to read, critically evaluating reading, is all part of building knowledge and ideas.

These ideas manifest in many places in curriculum design. A PhD thesis in particular is a good example of a project that requires a balance between understanding the existing literature and independent thought.

I presume that the quote is just a useful linguistic device to get people to think about this balancing process.


Is the concept of the 'inner child' considered to be pseudoscience? I have seen some text that said some pains in body caused by inner child like this,so i like to know does inner Child is a pseudoscience, so i have seen the Wikipedia, and seen some information :

Further developments Within the framework of psychosynthesis, the
inner child is often characterized as a subpersonality3 or may also
be seen as a central element surrounded by subpersonalities.[4]
Internal Family Systems therapy (IFS therapy) expanded the concept
considerably by positing that there is not just one inner child
sub-personality, but many. IFS therapy calls wounded inner child
sub-personalities "exiles" because they tend to be excluded from
waking thought in order to avoid/defend against the pain carried in
those memories. IFS therapy has a method that aims to gain safe access
to a person's exiles, witnessing the stories of their origins in
childhood, and healing them.

So i googled the and seems  is classified as Science, so my result is that inner child is classified as science, so i tied to understand the science meaning and psychology and found this text:

What is the difference between psychology and pseudoscience?
Psychology is a science because it is based on rigorous research and
empirical evidence. It can be distinguished from pseudoscience and
folk wisdom because it's theories can be followed through with
evidence while the other two are mere intelligent

based of this, Their must detected some pains in academic papers that be related to inner child and found some common human situation which inner child react in some specific pasterns, so i googled the  inner child pasterns pain and found :

and some others paper ...
So based of this information i think finding some pattern in humans mental behaviors and some software method for cutting the release and happy feeling could be classified as Science, but if you don't mind, i would like to know, your views point about this classification.
Thanks.

I Google(-scholared) the term too and indeed I would classify it as pseudoscience.
The hits are mainly books, or dodgy journal papers. No hits that are pointing to the more established journals. While recognizing this doesn't prove that the concept of the inner child is bogus, or that it's not classified a science, it is a strong indicator that the concept has not (yet?) been embraced by scientists.
The term sounds to fit the idea of the 'pure, innocent, unblemished' beings children are supposed to be, not yet molded to fit society. I guess it's an interesting idea, but it sounds New Agie to me.
However, there are people way more proficient in Psychology hangin' around here, so a more authorative answer can likely be expected anytime soon.


Is the mathematician's activity psychologically healthy? I am a professional mathematician, and I regularly meet other mathematicians.
I have come to wonder if there is something like a slight neurosis, specific to this activity.

To be more precise, let me grossly describe the mathematician's activity:
The mathematician tries to solve a problem. This problem is usually sufficiently hard to not be solvable without an intense concentration. There are two types of concentration here:

A local type: the intensity in the moment (i.e., all the thoughts are focused on this single problem).
A global type: the commitment in time (i.e., work on this problem for months, even years).

Usually, the local concentration can be sufficiently intense so that the mathematician loses the feeling of hunger, thirst or sleep. In this state, there is usually no room for a healthy relationship with others.
It is almost as if the mathematician has a state near that of autism (see Asperger syndrome).

The global concentration permits one to develop in the time a more and more intense concentration on the problem. The mathematician is committed "body and soul" into solving the problem and could neglect all other aspects of his life like social relationships, married life, children...
It is almost as if the mathematician has become more and more autistic.

So ok, autism is a severe neurosis and it's usually irreversible. It's the reason why I speak about a slight neurosis specific to mathematicians, because it's usually reversible...

In light of what I wrote:

  Is the mathematician's activity psychologically healthy ?

Well that looks like the behavior of any person with a strong passion and focus for his work. There are plenty of these around!

I guess it would be more common in any field of work were people already have dedicated a significant part of their life to it, and where it is almost a prerequisite. Being a mathematician selects and cultivates people able to display consistently that kind of behavior. Otherwise you just don't succesfully study high level maths, or fail at it. That is why you may observe many occurences of this phenomenon in your environment, when you work with other mathematicians.

Nothing to worry much about i think, there are plenty of people like you around, and this is not directly related to mathematics.


Are closed eye movements related to the content of dreams or the imagination? During rem sleep there are observed eye movements, which seem like they would correlate with the person visualizing their dreams.

Do their eye movements actually try to follow what they're dreaming about?  If so, do the eyes ever actually focus on something?

When a person closes their eyes and are thinking, are the eyes actually being used. By this I mean are the muscles moving in accordance with focusing. How is the focal point determined?

In regards to actively trying to control your eyes while they are closed, like attempting to do visualization like NLP, I believe that you choose what to focus on and where to focus at, exactly the same as my "pitch black" analogy whereby if you look into, say, a pitch black room, then although you know it's only 15 feet towards the wall, your vision does not.

Therefore, if you believe that it extends for millions of miles, then you can choose quite easily to focus into the darkness that way.

In regards to if you close your eyes and just kind of forget about them without going to sleep...like "resting your eyes", then I believe Chuck in another answer answered this best in his bottom two paragraphs.  Quick link: https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/a/4467/3433

Now in regards to during REM sleep, this gets tricky.

I did not think I'd find a study that answers your exact question about "how is focal point determined during REM sleep?".  I'll just start with that study first, then throw in a few others that are related to something called the "scanning hypothesis" which will help to unravel some of your other questions more specifically if they're about REM sleep specifically.

Let's start off with a definition of the "scanning hypothesis":

According to psychologydictionary.com,

  The scanning hypothesis is a concept hypothesizing that rapid eye
  movements identified in the course of the REM stage of sleep correlate
  to subjective gaze adjustments of the dreamer casting their gaze about
  in the dream with fixations in particular places.

At first I was worried that all the studies would just focus on this "scanning hypothesis," then I came across this gem:

  Exp Brain Res. 1997 Oct;117(1):153-60. Binocular eye movements not
  coordinated during REM sleep. Zhou W, King WM.

  Department of Neurology, University of Mississippi Medical Center,
  Jackson 39216, USA. wuz@vor.umsmed.edu

  Abstract

  Rapid eye movements (REMs) are a defining characteristic of REM sleep
  during which vivid dreams occur. It has been suggested that REMs may
  be binocularly coordinated and related to "watching" dream images. For
  the first time, binocular eye movements were recorded during natural
  REM sleep in monkeys to test the conjugate nature of the oculomotor
  system and the "scanning hypothesis" of REMs during sleep. During REM
  sleep, the lines of sight of the two eyes are frequently misaligned up
  to 30 degrees horizontally and/or vertically. Since the lines of sight
  usually don't intersect, there is no fixation point. Instead, each eye
  is aimed at a different part of the visual field during REM sleep.
  Furthermore, REMs are not usually conjugate, but are disjunctive or
  even monocular in horizontal or vertical directions. These data argue
  against the idea that REMs actually "track" dream images, unless each
  eye is watching its own dream! Binocular misalignment and disjunctive
  (even monocular) REMs during sleep suggest that separate left eye and
  right eye pathways generate saccades in each eye and control the
  position of each eye. Binocular coordination cannot be the passive
  result of anatomical connectivity as has been argued previously, but
  instead must result from a high-level process associated with the
  awake state that coordinates activity in left-eye and right-eye
  pathways. Hering's law of equal innervation is not consistent with
  these data. PMID: 9386014 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

Apparently also, part of the "scanning hypothesis" is that your eyes are trying to track down something...in other words fixate upon it...which would cause them to focus.  This results from this study say no to that.

So, as far as...

  "By this I mean are the muscles moving in accordance with focusing.
  How is the focal point determined?"

...during REM sleep, this study says that there is no fixation upon one thing and thus there is no focal point.  So, no, according to this study the muscles are not moving in accordance with focusing.

As a precursor to this study, a definition of "rapid eye movement disorder" is good to know.  So here is wikipedia's definition:

  Rapid eye movement disorder is a sleep disorder (more specifically a parasomnia) that
  involves abnormal behaviour during the sleep phase with rapid eye movement
  (REM) sleep. It was first described in 1986. The major and arguably
  only abnormal feature of RBD is loss of muscle atonia (paralysis)
  during otherwise intact REM sleep. This is the stage of sleep in which
  most vivid dreaming occurs. The loss of motor inhibition leads to a
  wide spectrum of behavioural release during sleep. This extends from
  simple limb twitches to more complex integrated movement, in which
  sufferers appear to be unconsciously acting out their dreams. These
  behaviours can be violent in nature and in some cases will result in
  injury to either the patient or their bed partner.

It's important to note the difference between the first study which was done in 1997 and this one done in 2010.  Perhaps the overall definition of the "scanning hypothesis" changed, or there is slight subjectivity to it.

For instance, in the first study the author says,

  "It has been suggested that REMs may
  be binocularly coordinated and related to "watching" dream images. For
  the first time, binocular eye movements were recorded during natural
  REM sleep in monkeys to test the conjugate nature of the oculomotor
  system and the "scanning hypothesis" of REMs during sleep."

So he's trying to test the "scanning hypothesis" by looking to see if the monkeys actually do focus on something by looking to see if the eyes are working together (ie. trying to triangulate distance and thus focus) are actually working together.

Now these French people (they always seem to have creative ideas actually) admit that the "scanning hypothesis" has been testing in this way...as in...by monitoring the muscles in the eyes.  So they're taking a different approach and (cleverly might I add) exploiting people who essentially have a disorder that is very similar to sleepwalking...but they lay in bed...THEN they are mixing in control patients who are normal so that they can compare the two and use that mixture to extrapolate it to the normal population as well & noone can criticize them for only using patients with that 1st specific disorder.

They're looking to see how their eyes align/what direction they move to when they are acting out certain motions.

  Brain. 2010 Jun;133(Pt 6):1737-46. doi: 10.1093/brain/awq110. Epub
  2010 May 16.
  Do the eyes scan dream images during rapid eye movement sleep? Evidence from the rapid eye movement sleep behaviour disorder model.
  Leclair-Visonneau L, Oudiette D, Gaymard B, Leu-Semenescu S, Arnulf I.
  Source Sleep Disorder Unit, Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, Assistance
  Publique - Hôpitaux de Paris, 75013 Paris, France.

  Erratum in Brain. 2011 Jul;134(Pt 7):1286.

  Abstract

  Rapid eye movements and complex visual dreams are salient
  features of human rapid eye movement sleep. However, it remains to be
  elucidated whether the eyes scan dream images, despite studies that
  have retrospectively compared the direction of rapid eye movements to
  the dream recall recorded after having awakened the sleeper. We used
  the model of rapid eye movement sleep behaviour disorder (when
  patients enact their dreams by persistence of muscle tone) to
  determine directly whether the eyes move in the same directions as the
  head and limbs. In 56 patients with rapid eye movement sleep behaviour
  disorder and 17 healthy matched controls, the eye movements were
  monitored by electrooculography in four (right, left, up and down)
  directions, calibrated with a target and synchronized with video and
  sleep monitoring. The rapid eye movement sleep behaviour
  disorder-associated behaviours occurred 2.1 times more frequently
  during rapid eye movement sleep with than without rapid eye movements,
  and more often during or after rapid eye movements than before. Rapid
  eye movement density, index and complexity were similar in patients
  with rapid eye movement sleep behaviour disorder and controls. When
  rapid eye movements accompanied goal-oriented motor behaviour during
  rapid eye movement sleep behaviour disorder (e.g. grabbing a fictive
  object, hand greetings, climbing a ladder), which happened in 19
  sequences, 82% were directed towards the action of the patient (same
  plane and direction) (Taal Note: Note what they just said in parenthesis). When restricted to the determinant rapid eye
  movements, the concordance increased to 90%. Rapid eye movements were
  absent in 38-42% of behaviours. This directional coherence between
  limbs, head and eye movements during rapid eye movement sleep
  behaviour disorder suggests that, when present, rapid eye movements
  imitate the scanning of the dream scene. Since the rapid eye movements
  are similar in subjects with and without rapid eye movement sleep
  behaviour disorder, this concordance can be extended to normal rapid
  eye movement sleep.

So,
1) Although behavioral movements and what the eyes are doing do not always seem to correlate:

  "Rapid eye movements were absent in 38-42% of behaviours."

When they do correlate at least during goal-oriented motor behavior, they do "imitate the 'scanning' of the dream scene." And that seems to happen about 82-90% of the time when they do this sort of behavior.

The math confuses me there as well though in contrast to how 38-42% of movements were absent of eye moments as well, but I believe the discretion is due to using the control vs. disordered group and lumping different group(s) into different calculated percentages.

Now also note above that when the goal-oriented behavior occurred and the eyes reflected this, they did so in the "same plane and direction."  This was peculiar as the word "plane" could mean horizontal or vertical plane I believe...it could also mean focal plane.  I wish they distinguished that better - I'm going to hypothesize it was just either the vertical or horizontal plane so that

In essence, a large part of the time people are acting out their behaviors when asleep the eyes correspond highly to the direction, but only to one plane, which means there wasn't really focal point - as you'd need to correspond to both the horizontal and vertical planes then.


What is the effect of merely expecting an interruption on performance? There's a lot of research about how interruptions affect cognitive performance.

Are there any studies that have looked at the effect of merely expecting to be interrupted (withou being actually interrupted) on performance?
What does these studies conclude about the effect of merely expecting an interruption on performance?

Fortin and Masse (2000) explored the effect of expecting an interruption on the ability to accurately produce a timing interval (e.g., producing a 2000 millisecond timing interval):

From the abstract:

  The interference from nontemporal processing on concurrent time
  estimation is usually attributed to disruption in timing caused by
  artentional requirements of nontemporal processing. Here, we examined
  interruption in timing without concurrent nontemporal processing.
  Empty breaks of various durations, during time-interval production,
  lengthened produced intervals. Moreover, an effect of break location
  was observed: Intervals lengthened proportionally to prebreak
  duration. When cued and uncued uninterrupted trials were introduced,
  the lengthening was proportional to the duration for which a break was
  expected. It was concluded that attentional time-sharing between time
  estimation and expectation of its interruption contributed to the
  interference effect in time-estimation research, independently of any
  concurrent processing requirements during time estimation.

So, I suppose you could use this as evidence to support the idea that if an individual is anticipating an interruption, this might consume some attentional  resources, especially if he or she is tuned into a signal that might communicate the commencement of the interruption.

References

Fortin, C. and Masse, N. (2000). Expecting a break in time estimation: Attentional time-sharing without concurrent processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 26, 1788. PUBLISHER PAGE


Do we repress aggression the same way we repress sexual urges? Do we repress aggression the same way we repress sexual urges?

"There is enough treachery, hatred, violence, absurdity in the average
human being to supply any given army on any given day"
--Bukowski

There is at least one somewhat influential theory according to which inhibition of sexual urges, aggressive urges, and many others (such as inhibition of racist behaviour for prosocial reasons) depend on a common pool of resources: the so-called ego depletion theory. Ego depletion means that inhibiting urges draws from a finite resource, and once it is spend, inhibition becomes harder and harder. Some experiments seem to show that inhibition in one domain (having to do a hard math test) makes it harder to consecutively inhibit in another domain (inhibit racist thoughts).

Even more general, according to general arousal theory, there is much overlap between sexual arousal and many possible reasons for aggression, such as fear; entailing that a general competence of arousal management supports both violence control and sexual control.

However, as is, the question is too broad to answer. Aggression is not repressed in only one way, and neither are sexual urges.

References

Baumeister, R. F. and Vohs, K. D. (2007), Self-Regulation, Ego Depletion, and Motivation. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 1: 115–128. doi: 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2007.00001.x


The feeling a person gets when they finish a series Take for example, a person reading a good book series that they enjoy. While they are reading it, they typically look forward to finishing each volume, as well as the whole series. However, when they actually finish the series, they may feel disappointed that there are no more books in the series that they can read. I have observed the same pattern with movie and game series as well.

Is there a name for this feeling of disappointment that comes at the completion of
a long task? What might a psychologist tell a patient to do if suffering from such symtoms? Can they look at the situation from a different perspective, for example, that would allow them to feel differently about their completion?

I am not sure if there is a specific name for sadness or feelings of emptiness following the completion of a long task, such as finishing the last book in a series. I will need to research this further to see if I can find any studies related to it. I can speak from personal experience and state that I too have felt this, so I believe it is a natural phenomenon. I would be interested to see what others say about it.

Regarding how Psychology would treat an individual complaining of such thoughts, one of the things covered in the Landmark Forum is how to change your conscious, logical thinking as a means of affecting your emotions. As an example, if one felt sadness or loss at the completion of a task, a therapist might encourage the individual to think about the positive: what they accomplished, what they enjoyed during their experience, what they learned or how they grew. By consciously thinking about specific things one can draw emotions connected with those thoughts.

The Wikipedia article on the Landmark Forum describes this as:

  There is a big difference between what actually happened in a person’s life and the meaning or interpretation they made up about it
  People create their own meaning to life – none is inherent in the world
  People can “transform” by simply declaring a new way of being instead of trying to change themselves in comparison to the past

At it's root, this school of thought comes from the Socratic method, a form of inquiry based around allowing logic to overrule emotion. To address the sadness one feels, one might ask themself a series of questions:

Why am I feeling sad?
What reasons do I have to feel sad?
Haven't I accomplished something good?
Am I not proud of myself for finishing the task?
Did I enjoy doing the task?
Is feeling sad helping me?
Do I want to feel sad?

By using logic in such a fashion, the idea is that one can change their feeling by reinforcing the positive emotions.

Edit: Note that upon further research, I have found that representatives of the Landmark Forum themselves state:

  What we do is personal and professional growth training and development. It's not therapy, it's not psychology, it's not psychological in nature

That's a quote from Deborah Beroset Miller, Director of PR for Landmark Education. Therefore my answer is anecdotal and not actually based on any specific Psychology research that I can find at this point. I will continue to search for actual research to back up my claims...


Does a recent general review of recurrent neural networks exist? Does anyone know of a comparatively recent paper reviewing the literature on psychological applications of recurrent neural networks?
I'm looking for a paper which provides a general overview of the use of this class of models (Elman networks, Hopfield networks, Boltzmann machines, localist attractor networks, etc.) in modelling psychological processes.

More practically, I have a line in a draft paper which currently says "A full discussion of this class of models is beyond the scope of the current review (see XXXX), but [...]" and I want to fill in the Xs.

I have Rogers and McClelland's (2004) Semantic Cognition, which is a nice review, but focuses on feed-forward models. Suggestions?

There may not be a single paper that reviews all models, but I have listed some articles and books below that may meet your needs.

Asakawa, Shinichi. (2003). Psychological applicability of simple recurrent neural networks. Japanese Psychological Review, 46(2), 274-287.

De Mulder, W., Bethard, S., & Moens, M. F. (2015). A survey on the application of recurrent neural networks to statistical language modeling. Computer Speech & Language, 30(1), 61-98.

Jacobsson, H. (2005). Rule extraction from recurrent neural networks: A taxonomy and review. Neural Computation, 17(6), 1223-1263.

Rojas, R. (2013). Neural networks: a systematic introduction. Springer Science & Business Media.

Subathra, B., & Radhakrishnan, T. K. (2012). Recurrent neuro fuzzy and fuzzy neural hybrid networks: a review. Instrumentation Science & Technology, 40(1), 29-50.

Suykens, J. A., Vandewalle, J. P., & de Moor, B. L. (2012). Artificial neural networks for modelling and control of non-linear systems. Springer Science & Business Media.

Zhang, H., Wang, Z., & Liu, D. (2014). A comprehensive review of stability analysis of continuous-time recurrent neural networks. Neural Networks and Learning Systems, IEEE Transactions on, 25(7), 1229-1262.


Why do scientists say brains are faster than computers? Supposing that neurons function similarly to transistors: A neuron able to fire $200$ times per second and transistors can be switched on and off more than $100,000,000,000$ ($10^{11}$) times per second. Let's say it fires 1 out of 2 times in average.
We have $86,000,000,000$ ($8.6 \cdot 10^{10}$) neurons in a brain, and $4,000,000,000$ ($4 \cdot 10^9$) transistors in medium CPU.

$\text{Units count} \cdot \text{firing probability} \cdot \text{firing rate} = \text{total fires per second}$

A brain's total fires per second: $(8.6 \cdot 10^{10}) \cdot 1 \cdot 200 = 1.72 \cdot 10^{13}$.

A CPU's total fires per second: $(4 \cdot 10^9) \cdot \frac{1}{2} \cdot 10^{11} = 2 \cdot 10^{20}$.

A CPU is faster than a brain by $\frac{2 \cdot 10^{20}}{1.72 \cdot 10^{13}} = 1.16 \cdot 10^7$, or about 12 million times faster. I gave the brain an advantage that every neuron is firing non-stop instead of just 1%, and that they fire at the rate of the fastest neurons.

Why isn't this argument valid?

Have you ever seen IBM's Watson? Watson is composed of a cluster of ninety IBM Power 750 servers, each of which uses a 3.5 GHz POWER7 eight core processor, with four threads per core. In total, the system has 2,880 POWER7 processor cores and has 16 terabytes of RAM. It must be kept in a (very) large refrigerated room.

  Watson is a question answering (QA) computing system that IBM built to apply advanced natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation, automated reasoning, and machine learning technologies to the field of open domain question answering. According to John Rennie, Watson can process 500 gigabytes, the equivalent of a million books, per second.

Watson's official debut was on the game show Jeopardy, where it was pitted against two of Jeopardy's best players. It won, but the humans gave it a run for its money. Most believe the win was more due to Watson's faster response time (it was electronically keyed into the buzzer; Watson could activate the buzzer within about eight milliseconds, whereas the human response time to the go ahead light signal is several tenths of a second. In addition, to access memory more quickly, content was stored in Watson's RAM for the game because data stored on hard drives are too slow to access.

Watson was devised as a medical diagnostician (as well as other applications). With many years, scores of technicians, who knows how many billions of dollars, and access to medical encyclopedias, books, medical journals and the internet, it can outperform third year medical students in only one area: oncology (and even then, only lung, prostate and breast CA).

So, one average medical resident (4 years of medical school, and, say, second year of residency) can outperform a very, very fast medical supercomputer 99% of the time. I specialize in Primary Care medicine: Family and Emergency Medicine. With a few exceptions per year, within minutes of initiating a conversation with a patient, by watching the patient, reading his vital signs, and hearing answers to perhaps a dozen questions, I already have narrowed down my diagnoses to 2 or 3 top candidates and several other lesser considerations. I am one individual with one brain which accesses only to the information to which I've been exposed, yet I will outperform a medical supercomputer >99% of the time. In under 10 minutes. (This does not mean that I only spend 10 minutes with a patient. Medicine is about more than the correct diagnosis.)

This is Watson:

My brain is about the size of the "W" etched on the room's window.

You tell me: Which is "faster", a supercomputer or a human brain? It really does depend on your definition of "faster", doesn't it?

References:
Wikipedia
Putting Watson to Work: Watson in Healthcare. IBM.
IBM's Watson is better at diagnosing cancer than human doctors
IBM Watson's impressive healthcare analytics capabilities continue to evolve


Is there any disease that prevents a person from being angry? Is there any disease that prevents a person from being angry? As a reference, the resection of the amygdala reduces feelings of fear.

web links

ABC news on damage to the amygdala reducing fear
Anecdotal report on inability to feel anger
Lack of expression of anger

Short answer
Brain damage is typically associated with increased expression of anger and aggressive behavior. I wasn't able to find any paper reporting lack of anger expression after brain damage. Great question!

Background
Assuming you are after symptoms associated with brain damage, I have put my efforts into writing up an answer on brain trauma and anger. To strat with your example of the amygdala - indeed, removal of the amygdala (amygdalectomy) has been used to treat extreme feelings fear. Damage to the amygdala reults in deficits in facial emotion recognition. Specifically they have impaired recognition of expressions of fear and guilt and trustworthiness. These findings suggest that the amygdala has a critical role in face emotion processing (Elliott et al., 2011).

Anger is thought to be mediated by the medial amygdaloidal areas that connect to the medial hypothalamus via the stria terminalis, and from there to the dorsal half of the periaqueductal gray. Aggression (the expression of anger) evoked by stimulation of the amygdala is dependent on the functional integrity of the medial hypothalamus and the periaqueductal gray. However, aggression evoked by stimulation of the periaqueductal gray is not dependent on the functional integrity of the amygdala. The amygdala-hypothalamus-periaqueductal gray is thought to mediate reactive aggression (Blair, 2013).

Hence, it seems that a likely candidate for the obliteration of feelings of anger is the periaqueductal gray. Does damage or removal of this structure reduces feelings of anger? Lesions in this area of the brain have been associated with loss of speech in humans (Esposito et al, 1999), reduced fear in rats (Lonstein & Stern, 1997), and upon complete destruction it resulted in a limp inertness in cats (Bailey & Davis, 1943). The Lonstein & Stern (1997) paper reports that

  [Periaqueductal gray] lesioned rats attacked a strange male twice as often as controls did, which is suggestive of reduced fearfulness. These results extend the known roles of the PAG [periaqueductal gray] in [] defensive behaviors.

Hence, removal of PAG actually increases aggressive behavior (reduces fear), rather than decreasing aggressive behavior!

In all, I wasn't able to find any study that reports on brain damage that results in a reduction of anger expression. Indeed, brain damage is often related to increased feelings of anger and there the track record is extensive

References
- Bailey & Davis, *Proc Soc Exp Biol Med (1942); 51: 305-6
- Blair, Wiley Interdiscip Rev Cogn Sci (2012); 3(1): 65–74
- Elliott et al., Neuropsychopharmacology (2011); 36(1): 153–82
- Esposito et all., NeuroReport (1999); 10(4): 681–5
- Lonstein & Stern, J Neurosci (1997); 17(9): 3364-78


Why do battered persons love their partners? Many persons who have been beaten by their partner, no matter how violently, claims that they do not want to leave their abusive partner because they still love them. A common phrase is: "I love him/her more than anything."

Is there research into why these abused partners do not "fall out of love"?

I am specifically interested in the feeling of love, not in other reasons to stay with an abusive partner, such as the fear of further escalation of violence, common children, or material dependence.

I long pondered the answer to this question myself.  The short answer is: Cognitive Dissonance*

("Cognitive Dissonance" is a hypothesized mental process in which two conflicting ideas are resolved through rationalization / attitude change, instead of addressing the underlying source of the conflict that the person may not be consciously aware of.  So here, we see two conflicting ideas - "I am being abused" and "I am not leaving" - resolved through a rationalization - "I love him", instead of addressing the underlying source of the conflict that the woman is not aware of - eg, "an addiction to the good times in the relationship."  More detail and references below.)

Long answer:

Research approaches to answering such a question are limited by ethical concerns, so most data on abusive relationships comes from self-reports, and most studies are conducted after the fact, though a few studies do examine self-reports during such relationships.

Reports of "love", "romantic narrative", or "emotional attachment" are common in such interviews, and often cited as the primary reason for staying.  However, like many other reasons for staying, victims often change their mind ("what was I thinking?") after break-up and recovery.  This suggests the possibility that emotional attachment may be a rationalization.

Real reasons for staying:

The likelihood of remaining in or returning to an abusive relationship is well predicted by other factors, such as economic dependency, social support, cultural factors, and characteristics of the abuse and the abuser.  This further supports the possibility that emotional attachment is a rationalization of an underlying reason that the victim is either unaware of or suppresses.

Consider another factor: In behavioural experiments, an intermittent reinforcement schedule is considered the most powerful schedule for addiction.  Abusive relationships typically involve a "cycle of abuse" (ie, intermittent) pattern.  Thus, "addiction" to the "good" periods of an abusive relationship may constitute the real reason for staying in some cases.

Rationalized reason for staying:

Dutton and Painter (1993) report that in their sample base, emotional attachment was highly correlated with intermittent abuse.  As is typical of addiction however, victims do not usually recognize the real reason behind it (eg, an intermittent schedule of abuse), and rationalize other reasons instead (eg, emotional attachment).

Dare, Guadagno, and Muscanell (2013) review the role of Cognitive Dissonance in abusive relationships:

  Women in abusive relationships may experience high levels of
  dissonance resulting from their negative attitude towards the abuse in
  the relationship and their inability to leave the relationship. If
  they feel "trapped" in the relationship, they may be inclined to
  change their negative attitude pertaining to the relationship or the
  abuse, whether they know it or not. ... Once the woman commits to an
  attitude change that results in her adopting positive feelings towards
  the abusive relationship, she will continue to have those positive
  emotions due to the human nature of wanting to remain consistent with
  our thoughts and actions; therefore, reducing dissonance. ...
  Eventually, her experienced dissonance will be at a minimum because
  her actions and attitudes have become consistent – she remains in the
  abusive relationship while developing a progressively more positive
  outlook on the relationship. This does not mean she thinks abuse is
  acceptable and wishes to be in a violent relationship, rather she
  feels most comfortable within the relationship whenever her cognitive
  dissonance is at a minimum.

Victims effectively convince themselves that they "love" their partner as a rationalization of their real reasons for staying in order to reduce their Cognitive Dissonance.

*-Note that Self-Perception Theory is an alternative to Cognitive Dissonance Theory that makes essentially the same prediction in this context, so there is no particular reason to prefer one interpretation over the other.


The effect of learning/expertise on cognitive control Rasmussen (1983) argued that with expertise, task are performed in different ways. He made a distinction between Rule- (least experience), Knowledge- and Skill-based behavior (most experience). The idea is that with training, less deliberate thought is necessary to perform a particular type of task.

Another factor that may play a role in task-performance is executive functioning, such as planning and cognitive control, i.e. the ability to focus on a task or switch tasks, either pro-actively or re-actively (Braver, 2012). I've heard that with expertise, executive functions improve. However, I cannot find a reference to support this. Is there any literature that may support this statement?

References

Braver, T. S. (2012). The variable nature of cognitive control: a dual mechanisms framework. Trends in cognitive sciences, 16(2), 106-113.

Rasmussen, J. (1983). Skills, rules, and knowledge; signals, signs, and symbols, and other distinctions in human performance models. IEEE transactions on systems, man, and cybernetics, (3), 257-266.

Sure.

I'll update this answer as I come across more papers, but here:

Alves, H., Voss, M. W., Boot, W. R., Deslandes, A., Cossich, V., Salles, J. I., & Kramer, A. F. (2013). Perceptual-Cognitive Expertise in Elite Volleyball Players. Frontiers in Psychology Front. Psychol., 4. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00036

  The goal of the current study was to investigate the relationship
  between sport expertise and perceptual and cognitive skills, as
  measured by the component skills approach. We hypothesized that
  athletes would outperform non-athlete controls in a number of
  perceptual and cognitive domains and that sport expertise would
  minimize gender differences. A total of 154 individuals (87
  professional volleyball players and 67 non-athlete controls)
  participated in the study. Participants performed a cognitive battery,
  which included tests of executive control, memory, and visuo-spatial
  attention. Athletes showed superior performance speed on three tasks
  (two executive control tasks and one visuo-spatial attentional
  processing task). In a subset of tasks, gender effects were observed
  mainly in the control group, supporting the notion that athletic
  experience can reduce traditional gender effects. The expertise
  effects obtained substantiate the view that laboratory tests of
  cognition may indeed enlighten the sport-cognition relationship.

It isn't a precise confirmation of the statement; after all, it only finds a relationship between cognitive control and expertise in a particular domain. But it definitely supports the statement.

This article here:

Voss, M. W., Kramer, A. F., Basak, C., Prakash, R. S., & Roberts, B. (2009). Are expert athletes ‘expert’ in the cognitive laboratory? A meta-analytic review of cognition and sport expertise. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 24(6), 812-826. doi:10.1002/acp.1588

performs a whole meta-analysis on athlete expertise and cognitive performance and offers a lot of results confirming increased attentional performance, but specifically states (in the year 2009!):

  we found no studies that have examined classic executive function
  measures such as task-switching, dual task performance, or inhibition

The article found here found that:

  Fencing experience and physical fitness facilitate a person's ability
  to withhold action when necessary. The interactive nature of aerobic
  fitness and sport expertise on action inhibition suggests that
  cognitive control benefits most from the combination of physical and
  mental training compared to when each is administered singly.

and I think I'm bored now! Hope this helps.


Why do we see unknown people and places in dreams? People often see unknown things, places, and people in their dreams.

How is it possible to have such perceptions in our dreams that go beyond our actual experiences and memories?

The mind/brain imagines things in a very uncontrolled way when we're asleep, and it basically does this by using various stimuli (sights/sounds/etc.) we've experienced before and combining them in expected or unexpected ways. By "expected" I mean that we may recall a known/real person in our dreams from memory, and by "unexpected" I mean that we may randomly piece together an imaginary person from various memories. As far as I know, there is very little conclusive research about why we dream what we dream (which is often unrealistic) - however, there are a few theories. The most popular (experimentally tested!) one is that we dream to consolidate memories. Accordingly, our dreams are often about the day's events - but reimagined by the brain in often very weird ways. So, for example, if one plays Tetris for a few hours before sleeping, one might have dreams with block-like shapes and falling-like movement. In general, it is very hard to predict what a person will dream, and it seems to be a relatively random reactivation of various connections between stimuli we've experienced previously. Some research suggests that we recombine 'pieces' of memories in creative ways during sleep because it might help inductive thinking/insight. A tentative suggestion is that dreams somehow help the brain predict things it hasn't experienced yet.


What is the evolutionary advantage of being embarrassed? What I am trying to understand is why do I feel embarrassed in certain situation.

E.g. when I'm talking to people, why do I think about being judged or sounding stupid that would result me in embarrassment. I have been considered as "intelligent" since I was a kid and may be making or looking stupid goes against my own belief of me being 'intelligent'?

Also, when I'm playing a game or playing music, I think about embarrassing myself, making mistakes and think what may the audience/team mates thinking about me? So I avoid it and when I actually get a chance of play, I make mistake and regret/punish myself mentally for making a mistake or regret quite a bit. So, basically, this results me in being low confident.

I'm thinking about "impressing people" and me resulting in an embarrassing situation, acting stupid, sounding stupid would spoil my "impression".
However, I want to act stupid or sound stupid sometime and be ok with it.
Somehow my biology/mind prevents me every time and I feel the resistance.

So, in search of understanding the reason, I wanted to ask if this has any evolutionary benefit or is it part of natural selection? E.g. having a better chances of survival, when you express less/ be quiet or shy, so that others are not threatened by you?

Can anybody with more knowledge shed some light or possibly guide me to help my situation?

Thanks for reading a long post!

Marks and Nesse investigated evolutionary causes of anxiety disorders and reported about embarrassment in particular:

  Social threats evoke responses that promote group acceptance, for
  example, submission to dominants and to norms of dress, mien, odor,
  speech, customs, beliefs. This prevents dangerous extrusion from the
  group. Mild shyness and embarrassment can promote acceptance. If
  shyness and embarrassment are excessive, however, then fitness
  suffers, as in several anxiety disorders: pervasive shyness in
  avoidant personality disorder; gaze aversion and fear of scrutiny, of
  shaking, and of blushing in social  252 I. M. Marks and R. M. Nesse
  phobia; fear of excreting near others in sphincteric phobias (Marks
  1987, pp. 362-371); terror of looking or smelling abnormal in
  dysmorphopho- bia; fear of behaving antisocially in
  obsessive-compulsive disorder. Impulses to behave in ways that would
  cause social rejection may arouse general anxiety without the subject
  being aware of those punishable impulses, thus helping to conceal them
  from others (Nesse 1990). We do not emphasize a distinction between
  fear of specific dangers and anxiety aroused by nonspecific dangers or
  unconscious impulses, because in all cases the state, whether anxiety
  or fear, is aroused by a cue that indicates a threat to reproductive
  resources.

Nesse, Randolph M. "Fear and fitness: An evolutionary analysis of anxiety disorders." Ethology and sociobiology 15.5-6 (1994): 247-261. https://doi.org/10.1016/0162-3095(94)90002-7


Working on one problem opposed to working on mutliple problems when programming I'm learning programming and I'm now at an advanced stage meaning that I need to solve problems from fields such as dynamic programming, path finding or recursion problems. Depending on the problem I need anywhere from multiple hours to weeks to solve a problem. I often get stuck which seems to be normal from what I have read so far. However sometimes I got stuck and did not code for weeks and then finally was able to solve the problem, even when not thinking about it. I just looked at it from a different angle and was able to solve it. The question is: If I am really stuck, so that I do not code for days to weeks, should I start another problem or should I insist on finding the solution to the problem I'm stuck with. Is there any research pertaining this phenomena?

Interesting queston I am a psychology student who is learning how to code as well. I am often thinking about what are the best strategies to learn. Below I am referencing a research paper that showed that a too rigid mindset impairs performance in general problem solving abilities.

ErEl, H., & Meiran, N. (2017). A drop in performance on a fluid intelligence test due to instructed-rule mindset. Psychological Research, 81(5), 901–909. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-016-0796-8

I am found something similar in my attempts to learn. Sometimes it is useful to take a break to relax your mindset, as it seems that the mind inhibits other solutions, when you are focused on something to exclusively.


What does science say about feeling appreciated/loved/valued? I believe firmly that people who feel appreciated/loved/valued will (generally) experience all kinds of benefits for themselves and the people around them.

Think about:

Being more healthy
Experience more happiness
Perform better at work
Being more kind to others
etc.

I would like to know what science says about the effects of people feeling appreciated, loved, valued, or things of that nature.

Can anybody recommend some sources? I would be interested in anything that is related, but mostly things that are backed up by science.

A broad question with an even broader scientific literature speaking to it; I'll highlight a few of the major "camps" with key references that you can follow up with if you find them interesting:

Without any particular theoretical allegiance, Baumeister & Leary (1995) argue that the need to belong is a fundamental human motivation. You can read a bit more about what they argue this classification implies in my answer to another question here. Baumeister (1991) also describes belong alongside other core "meanings" of life in his book (which I found an interesting read).
Supporters of an attachment theory perspective (e.g., Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007a) argue that establishing a sense of relational security--the feeling that others can and will be there for you in times of need, and are generally well-intentioned--corresponds to better emotion regulation, social relationships, and more pro-social behavior (see Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007b, for a review).
From an existential psychology perspective (see Solomon et al., 1999), humans have a unique awareness of their inevitable mortality, which they respond to in a number of ways in an attempt to preserve their symbolic selves (Burke et al., 2010). Close relationships are theorized to serve as one of these sources of existential security (see Hart et al., 2005), and existential security in turn has been linked to health (Goldenberg & Arndt, 2008) and interpersonal relationships (Greenberg et al., 1990).
According to self-determination theory (see Ryan & Deci, 2000), relatedness is one of three core human needs. When these basic needs (the others include competence and autonomy) are met, people are more intrinsically motivated, and experience benefits to their mental health, and well-being, as well as in many applied areas (e.g., work, education, etc.,).
Finally, according to some clinical perspectives (e.g., Rogers, 1992), clients need to feel unconditional positive regard from their therapists in order for therapy to be successful.

References

Baumeister, R. F. (1991). Meanings of life. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497-527.

Burke, B. L., Martens, A., & Faucher, E. H. (2010). Two decades of terror management theory: A meta-analysis of mortality salience research. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14(2), 155-195.

Goldenberg, J. L., & Arndt, J. (2008). The implications of death for health: A terror management health model for behavioral health promotion. Psychological Review, 115(4), 1032-1053.

Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., Solomon, S., Rosenblatt, A., Veeder, M., Kirkland, S., & Lyon, D. (1990). Evidence for terror management theory II: The effects of mortality salience on reactions to those who threaten or bolster the cultural worldview. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58(2), 308-318.

Hart, J., Shaver, P. R., & Goldenberg, J. L. (2005). Attachment, self-esteem, worldviews, and terror management: evidence for a tripartite security system. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88(6), 999-1013.

Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2007a). Attachment in adulthood: Structure, dynamics, and change. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2007). Boosting attachment security to promote mental health, prosocial values, and inter-group tolerance. Psychological Inquiry, 18(3), 139-156.

Rogers, C. R. (1992). The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 60(6), 827-832.

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68-78.

Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (1991). A terror management theory of social behavior: The psychological functions of self-esteem and cultural worldviews. In Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 24, pp. 93-159). Academic Press.


EEG Equipment For High Schoolers? I am doing a research project for school, and I'm trying to investigate the effectiveness of inhaling lavender oil in reducing anxiety.

I plan to measure the strength of alpha wave activities, as it seems to be commonly accepted as an index for the level of relaxation/anxiety.  I may also measure the strength of gamma activity at the T3 location, for Oathes et al. have suggested that the increase in gamma power in that location is associated with worrying (https://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.biopsycho.2008.04.005).

(That being said, I know very little about EEG research and will ask about the details of conducting one in another post because this post is about the equipment)

We are in a high school, though a fairly well-resourced one, so our budget isn't too big.  Ideally, I would like to obtain a research-grade EEG headset plus the related equipment (e.g. A/D converter) under 1000 dollars, at most 2000 dollars.

So, what are some brands and models that might be suitable for my situation?

Thanks

Edit:

I think I might as well ask about the process of analyzing the raw signals here.  I've done some searching online, and many people recommended using EEGLAB, a toolbox for MATLAB.  So I plan to purchase a MATLAB student license and install the free toolbox.  Is that a good idea?  If so, do you have any recommendations for resources that I can use to learn about using this tool for data analysis?

EEG systems are quite expensive and are far out of the budget you have outlined. There are four points to be made on this matter:

The most basic "set" I could find produced by Biosemi costs $11,000 and this set doesn't include the caps and bands (electrodes) required for collecting data.
It is also important that the location of this system be in a soundproof and electromagnetic safe room to ensure there is little interference in data collection.
There is quite a lot of training required to properly conduct an EEG study and to test participants in a safe and ethical manner.
Analyzing raw EEG data is also not a simple feat. The level of statistics understanding and software knowledge required for this type of analysis is not usually obtained until graduate-level studies.

As an aside, I am not sure that the question you have is worth the resources needed to test via EEG. For high school level research it would be best to conduct a behavioural study to measure the effects of lavender oil inhalation on anxiety symptoms. There are many available behavioural measures of anxiety that have been tried and tested in the scientific community. It is standard practice to begin with behavioural measures before moving to physiological measures.

Please note, there is great value in replicating studies. The scientific community often feels pressured to produce novel findings, as new and exciting results may lead to fame and a bigger pay cheque. It is paramount to scientific progress to replicate previous findings as often times novel findings are never replicated and therefore never subjected to "fact checking" (and could therefore not be replicable in the first place,  fluke findings do occur). Progress can only be made if we are constantly questioning what we think is right. It would be advisable for a high school level researcher to find a study related to the topic you are interested in and to replicate the methods used in that study in an attempt to find the same results as the original authors. Not only would this be more accessible to you at this level of education, but it will teach you valuable research skills and help improve your understanding of the questions you have.


Are sensations of turbulence after flights proprioceptive hallucinations? I noticed on several occasions after long-haul flights (greater than eight hours) that I would still feel a sensation of turbulence or movement as if I were still in the aircraft. These would be persistent for approximately a day and occur periodically every minute or so.

As there is no sensory input from reality which could cause these sensations, are they technically proprioceptive hallucinations? If so, why do they occur? (I am assuming the abnormality or cause lies in the brain and central nervous system as my inner ear is not infected or altered.)

As there is no sensory input from reality which could cause these sensations, are they technically proprioceptive hallucinations?

Not really, although I think it wouldn't be completely inaccurate to think of them that way. A hallucination has no basis in reality (e.g. auditory hallucinations); what you're describing has a physical basis in reality. It is based on a physical disconnect between your previous reality (a mildly turbulent flight of significant hours duration) and the removal of such stimuli (your disembarkation) while your sensitized vestibulo-occular mechanism continues to function as if you were on board.  First noticed on ships, but expanded to flights and other stimuli, it's been called landsickness [1] when of short duration, and Mal de Debarquement if it lasts longer much longer than 1-2 days.[2]

To understand this, a bit of basic physiology is in order. First, there are three semicircular canals located in little pockets of bone called the inner ear, one on each side. The three canals are oriented at (basically) 90° angles to each other so that we can maintain our balance no matter which position our head is in. These are also connected to one's ocular reflexes. Together they're called the vestibolo-occular system, which functions as a reflex (VOR).[3]  Because the connections are excitatory, increased firing from a canal afferent leads to contralateral movement of the eyes (which is how spinning ice skaters can keep track of / focus on where they are visually). Normally all this occurs without our notice.

The latency of action of the rotational vestibulo-ocular reflex (r-VOR) is 7-15 milliseconds, which is the time required for the eyes to respond in an equal, but opposite, manner to the motion of the head. This time is remarkably fast compared with the latency for visually mediated eye movements, which is longer than 75 milliseconds.[4]

What happens is that with excitation (say, spinning in one plane), the cilia of the hair cells (see @Chuck Sherrington's diagram here) are displaced, and remain displaced as long as one is spinning with the same velocity and direction. Once the spinning suddenly stops, the cilia proceed to move to their default position, tricking the VOR into moving the eyes in the opposite direction repeatedly until the cilia come to a complete stop.[3] You can observe this phenomenon by looking into the person's eyes immediately after they stop spinning (make sure they are safe from falling.) Once things settle down in the inner ear, the vertigo (perception of spinning) stops shortly thereafter as well.

Flying or being on a ship causes multiple VOR inputs and adjustments (by our brains) to this movement. As the flight continues and you experience choppy motions, your VOR "adjusts" to these frequent shifts and you don't feel them as much. When you disembark, however, there is an adjustment period to go through; we are still receiving mixed signals until we are completely sensitized to the new "normal". It is of varying intensity and duration, and can appear suddenly (maybe on head movement or rapid eye movement) and be persistent or transient.

If you can relax, you can enjoy these tricks the brain is playing on your mind, and marvel at how well we are adaptable. I had my first truly noticeable episodes of this phenomenon while traveling on the vaporetti in Venice for a few days. If you feel it's worse that what I describe, I would start my search with sea legs, landsickness, and MDDS (though the latter is highly unlikely).

[1] landsickness
[2] Mal de Debarquement Syndrome
[3] Anatomy and Physiology of the Vestibular System Gizzi, et. al.
[4] Vestibuloocular Reflex Testing - Amin, et. al.
[5] Baloh and Honrubia's Clinical Neurophysiology of the Vestibular System
 By Robert William Baloh, Kevin Kerber, MD


Effects of Game-based Learning on Motivation for Learning I have already asked this question here, but I did not receive my answer. I found this site a more appropriate place to ask it.

I found many studies discovering the impacts of game-based learning on motivation for learning.

For example, these papers

You can also find a summary of them in this book chapter.

However, it is still unclear to me if this motivation is for entertainment or for learning. I was wondering if there is any study showing that students who are adapted to this method of learning have a higher motivation to pursue learning in other forms. My concern is about long-term effects of this method of learning. What is the intrinsic reaction of K-12 students who have adapted to game-based learning when they start higher education in which game-based learning is not provided? Will they have a higher incentive to study? or a lower incentive, because they prefer to play games rather than studying?

I think it depends.

If the game is good, the player will be motivated to learn what they need to succeed in the game. The long term effects may vary depending on different attributes, which I divided into two groups.

This is of course not an exhaustive list.

Providing learning tools

Did the game generalize enough, so that the player feels like the more they learn the better they will be in the game? as opposed to being predictable enough so that the user can learn exactly what they need and only that.
Did the user learn how to learn independently or did they rely on specific instructions in the game?

providing learning motivation

Why did the user not want to learn in the first place? If it's because of a sense of incapability, games are great. If it's lack of interest, the long term effect could be negligible.
Did what the player learn in the game turn out useful for the player in real life? Did the player see it as a positive outcome of learning, or as an outcome of the game?
Did a motivation swap occur? sometimes the user may be one that learns for fun, and after playing the game they will only learn for points etc.

Since the concepts 'game' and 'learn' are so wide and subjective, I'm doubtful you can get a clear cut answer on this question.


Curved/angled geometrical forms and association with femininity/ masculinity Is there any research or theoretical reasoning on a strong inclination of human mind to associate curved forms with femininity and angled ones with masculinity?
A similar concept of association is the Maluma/ takete or Bouba/kiki effect.
Another example is font perception. Articles:

15 Fonts Designers Hate And Why | Ambilogo,
Emotional and persuasive perception of fonts by Samuel Juni, Julie S Gross, Perceptual Motor Skills, February 2008,
http://typophile.com/node/58433 (dead link, verified on 26.12.2020),
http://ojad.emu.edu.tr/articles/13/134.pdf (dead link, verified on 26.12.2020).

Yes. Lieven et al. (2015) attributed angular logos to masculinity (and curved logos to femininity). They grounded their hypothesis in the shared perceptual traits:

  "Whereas the prototypical masculine body shape involves an angular
  V-shape induced by a low WCR (Horvath, 1981) and moderate heaviness
  (Furnham and Radley, 1989), a curved (“hourglass”) body shape
  characterized by a WHR of about 0.7 and a slender build is associated
  with femininity and female attractiveness (Singh and Young, 1995)."

They also cite the book Marketing Aesthetics when referring to the general concept. I'm not sure if it contains an empirical study, but it might have more evidence.

I found that previous study when I was researching the literature for my article on font psychology. You might find value in my article as well. I explain more details on the curved vs. angular relationship.

Sources:

Lieven, T., Grohmann, B., Herrmann, A., Landwehr, J. R., & van    Tilburg, M. (2015). The effect of brand design on brand gender    perceptions and brand preference. European Journal of Marketing,    49(1/2), 146-169.

Schmitt, B., & Simonson, A. (1997). Marketing aesthetics: The    strategic management of brands, identity, and image. Free Press.


How many answer choices is too many answer choices? When building a survey, what is the maximum number of response choices in a question? In the interest of reducing cognitive load and/or avoid choice paralysis.
I couldn't find any research on this specifically.

Take a look at researches on human Working Memory Capacity (WMC) and it applications in different problems, for instance, here is Elsevier ScienceDirect chapter/paper set related to WMC. Most of the researches depicts that WMC of an adult human is limited to 3-5-7 items, depending of how large and complex these items are.
Therefore, if your survey question is about something minimalistic, like preferable color or time slots, which are quite simple objects to comprehend, you may confidently provide up to 7 answer options. But if your question is asking about behaviour in some imagined environment, and answer options present different complex scenarios in a response to this environment, it's better to limit them to 3-4 options so that respondents would be able to comprehend each option separately and consciously compare it with other ones.


Importance of colors in learning process? I am starting a graduating project that is an interactive software for learning programming with an animated interface.

To be more specific, it's a software that should help students learning how to write simple programs in a programming language called C. Learning C at the beginning has its own benefits, so it's featured at many programming disciplines at universities, at least where I live. But there are some details in its syntax that may be obscure for beginners and lead to many errors and, therefore, it's an obstacle to focus on the 'big picture' of a problem, on the essence of a given solution.

Roughly anyone who is learning programming needs to deal with frustration, but I think that the issues I mentioned make things worse. Additionally, the software that is traditionally used for writing and running code is aesthetically poor (I remember how difficult it was to look to that screen for so long when I was a beginner). The result is that many students have a very negative feeling about programming.

So I decided to create a software that, along with some other features, is friendly on its visual aspect. One of the main features is that it allows to hide obscure elements, making an instruction simpler. Anytime, it's possible to expand that instruction and the obscure elements would change it's color, one by one, while some other elements would be colored and animated to indicate that there's a relationship envolved. That's the basic idea.

Many years ago, in 2005, my Calculus teacher, that used to like to speak about the way we learn things, mentioned a discovery about the importance of color and movement in the learning process. I heard a similar thing on the famous TED Talk from Ken Robinson, "Do schools kill creativity?". I never searched about it before, but the impression I have is that all these scientific conclusions broke with some formal and strict way of education.

I need a good article about this importance of visualization, colors and movement for two reasons. First, I think my teacher, that supervises my project, doesn't think all the 'fancy stuff' I proposed really have utility. Maybe, because, for my surprise, he wasn't aware about the discoveries I mentioned. Second, there's a formal procedure to submit the project and I need some reference to endorce it.

I found only books about this subject. Off course, it would be nice to read some of it, but for now I really need an article to start the project.

You asked for

  an article that discusses the latest discoveries about how visualization, specially colors and moving images are important in the process of learning....It would be nice to know about a good book about it, but for now I need to start the project and I need an article in first place.

There is one free open access article by Lindelani Mnguni (2014) which funnily enough has a book reference in the quote I am putting below.

"Chunking" is the name given to a technique used to remember things learnt, and Mnguni's article discusses how visualisation helps with chunking, along with the idea that:

  there are at least four main factors that determine how humans “chunk” information, namely, closure, proximity, similarity and simplicity. The closure principle suggests that the mind tends to complete figures even in cases where information is missing. The principle of proximity (also referred to as the principle of contiguity) suggests that when visual features are placed closer to each other, they are perceived as a unit (Mullet and Sano 1995). According to the similarity principle, items that have commonalities such as shape, size, colour, texture and orientation are often grouped as belonging together (Mullet and Sano 1995). Finally, according to the simplicity principle, items are grouped together according to symmetry, regularity and smoothness. All these principles reflect the behaviour of the cognitive system towards new visual information that has been perceived. (Mnguni, 2014).

With regard to moving images, Mnguni also points out that:

  McClean et al. (2005) present evidence showing that student retention of content material in biology education is improved when such content is presented via a lecture coupled with the animations and when an animation is used as an individual study activity.

McClean et al. (2005) is also available free.

References

McClean, P., Johnson, C., Rogers, R., Daniels, L., Reber, J., Slator, B. M., ... & White, A. (2005). Molecular and cellular biology animations: development and impact on student learning. Cell Biology Education, 4(2), 169-179.DOI: 10.1187/cbe.04-07-0047 PMCID: PMC1103718 PMID: 15917875

Mnguni, L. E. (2014). The theoretical cognitive process of visualization for science education. SpringerPlus, 3(1), 184DOI: 10.1186/2193-1801-3-184 PMCID: PMC4000355 PMID: 24790828

Mullet, K., & Sano, D. (1994). Designing visual interfaces: Communication oriented techniques. New Jersey: Prentice Hall


Is decision making/theory/analysis applicable to game design? I've done research over the last year in game design by reading some of the most well-known books in the field. Making interesting decisions is one of the fundamental elements of fun in games. I'm also learning( still a novice ) about cognition through two classes I'm taking the semester, Psychology of HCI and Human Factors Engineering.

It seems that what is said about decision making in cognitive psychology could also apply to the decisions we make in games. There's definitely choice and uncertainty while making these choices in games.

It seems one of the hardest parts of game design is coming up with game mechanics that cause the player to make interesting decisions based on these game mechanics.

Could studying decision making/theory/analysis possibly help with this process of creating good game mechanics where interesting decisions emerge from the player analyzing and making decisions based on these mechanics?

It seems obvious that this would be the case, but here recently I talked to someone in the psychology department who has a lot of experience in the subject of decision making who told me that it's not the same thing. They said decision making in the cognitive psychology realm isn't the same as decision making in games. They said you make weighted choices based on your options while playing games, which seems the same to me. But I'm still a novice in cognitive psychology so I feel I must trust the expert.

This is my attempt to get a second opinion.

This question seems to arise out of a slight terminological confusion. Empirical studies of human decision-making in particular are not covered by decision theory. Decision theory is the mathematical study of strategies for optimal decision-making between options involving different risks or expectations of gain or loss depending on the outcome. These sometimes overlap, such as in economics, but one need not use decision theory to study decision making.

Decision theory could conceivably have some uses in game design, such as identifying dominant strategies (strategies that are always optimal, regardless of what any other player does), but decision theory takes the game rules as a given. Hence, while it can help formalize the mechanics of a set of rules once they are designed, it doesn't have a way to actually generate rules. Decision theory is not so much helpful in designing game rules as in evaluating them.

You may be interested in what's called mechanism design theory, or reverse game theory. In contrast to decision theory, mechanism design theory is designed to work 'forwards' rather than 'backwards.' Instead of taking the rules of the game (or mechanism) as a given, mechanism design theory takes the goal as a given and finds a suitable mechanism. This seems to more closely fit what the question is looking for.


In SDT, are there other measures of detection sensitivity besides d'? The reason I ask is that I often hear of alternate measures of response bias besides β, but have never heard of an alternate measure of detection sensitivity to d'.

If there is no other measure of detection sensitivity, is that a matter of mathematical necessity?

Yes, there are several alternatives to d'.

First of all, why do we need alternatives to d'?

d' assumes the distribution of internal representation of signal and noise are Gaussian. This assumption is common, but may not be true, and a measure that does not make this assumption is more robust.
There are technical problems computing d' when the Hit Rate or the False Alarm Rate are 0 or 1 (d' becomes inf or -inf).

Proposed alternatives to d' include:

Area under the ROC (Green & Swets, 1966)
A' (Pollak & Norman, 1964), A'' (Smith, 1995) which is a correction of A', and A (Zhang & Mueller, 2005) which is a correction of A''.
S' (Balakrishnan, 1998)

Balakrishnan, J. D. (1998). Some more sensitive measures of sensitivity and response bias. Psychological Methods, 3(1), 68.

Zhang, J., & Mueller, S. T. (2005). A note on ROC analysis and non-parametric estimate of sensitivity. Psychometrika, 70(1), 203-212.

Smith, W. D. (1995). Clarification of sensitivity measure A'. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 39(1), 82-89.

Pollack, I., & Norman, D. A. (1964). A non-parametric analysis of recognition experiments. Psychonomic Science.

Green, D. M., & Swets, J. A. (1966). Signal detection theory and psychophysics (Vol. 1). New York: Wiley.


How are research participants normally divided into equal groups to allow scientific comparison? I'm neither a academic nor familiar with the proper English choice of words regarding research. However, I would really like to know a few things about the process of doing a research with people itself as a subject, so that I can apply it to my work.

I would like to know how normally the participants are divided into multiple groups, so that the results can be scientifically compared to each other.

I understand this can have detailed answers, I am really looking for a abstract method to achieve this such that I have meaningful results.

Adding to Jeromy's answer, the answer to your question would depend on what you want to study.

If you study normal behavior, common to all people, you assign your participants randomly to the experimental and control group. The experimental group receives the factor you want to study (e.g. watches some advertising), while the control group does not, and then you calculate the avarage difference in their behavior (do those that watched the advertising buy more of that product?).

If you study abnormal behavior, found only in certain people, these certain people (e.g. people suffering from some mental disorder) go into one group, people without this abnormality (e.g. people without that mental disorder) go into another group. Both receive the factor your want to study or are given the same task, and then you calculate the average difference in their behavior.

This, obviously, is not a random assignment. There are different techniques to counter biases (such as more old people with dementia in one group, because dementia usually happens in old age, so that performance differences might be attributable to age, not dementia). For example, you may "match" participants in relevant aspects, so that when you find a participant with, say, dementia, you search for a participant without dementia who has the same age, same sex, same educational background etc., so that their differences are unlikely to result from these secondary factors.

There are also experiments without control groups, or any kind of group assignments. For example, if you study something in which all (healthy) people are the same, you do not need a control group. For example, if you want to research human three dimensional vision, you could work with only one participant, because you could rightfully assume that all human beings have two eyes in approximately the same position, so that individual differences would not influence understanding the basic process. Many classic experiments in fundational fields of psycholoy such as perception were done with only one or a mere handful of participants.


What do you call the inability to see alternative solutions to a problem? Once I "learned" for a condition in which you have a specific solution of a problem, but you are only thinking of it and do not realize there are other / probably more appropriate / solutions. Something like.. being stuck to an attempt of a solution.

So there was a name for it. But google results for tokens such as "Problem Solving Disease" lead me to nothing related.

This is called the Einstellung effect:

  ...Einstellung refers to a person's predisposition to solve a given problem in a specific manner even though "better" or more appropriate methods of solving the problem exist

It is related to the idea of functional fixedness:

  Functional fixedness is a cognitive bias that limits a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used. `


How do we hear our inner voice? How do we perceive inner speech? Does it follow the same neural pathways as normal acoustic speech? If yes, what is the extent of overlap between the two neural pathways?

No, inner speech does not follow the same neural pathway as speech coming in from outside.

Rather, inner speech uses the same neural mechanism as outer speech - that is, speech going out.  The neural mechanisms of inner speech can be studied using recently developed technologies such as fMRI imaging of subjects instructed to or prevented from engaging in self-reflection and internal monologue.  Such studies suggest that inner speech is primarily localized to Broca's area (LIFG, on the left side of the brain), just as is outer speech (McGuire, 1996; Morin & Hamper, 2012). These findings are consistent with other evidence that inner speech is a form of silent (simulated) outer speech, and thus uses the same physical mechanism.  This is based on private speech theories originating in the 1920s and 30s by Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, that inner speech is actually outer speech that children learn to internalize.

However, if inner speech uses the same mechanism as outer speech rather than the incoming auditory system, then how is it that we "hear" it?  One proposal is based on the attenuation mechanism involved in normal speech production.  This mechanism filters self-generated sounds from other sounds.  It is believed to work analogously to noise cancellation technologies - by predicting self-generated sound and modulating audio processing accordingly.  Experiments by Scott (2013) and Scott et al (2013) demonstrate that this attenuation is also active in inner speech, and suggests that perhaps what we "hear" is the prediction of our own voice by this system.

Another approach by Alderson-Day et al (2016) distinguishes between multiple kinds of inner speech - monologic inner speech of the type traditionally studied as above, and dialogic inner speech that adds a second voice (an interlocutor).  Brain scans of subjects engaging in dialogic inner speech show additional activity in areas associated with auditory hallucinations, and may therefore be "heard" in a similar way.  This is still a very active area of research, so stay tuned!


Is the Flynn effect related to the discovery of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome? Is it possible that the measured rise in average IQ in the last century is related to the discovery that drinking alcohol during pregnancy can result in birth defects, including issues with brain development?

Has any work been done on this question?

TL;DR

The story is not that clear cut. The hyposthesis is possible, however the incidence levels of Foetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) has risen over the years.  Speculation might say that the higher IQ averages would indicate that the average severity of FAS has decreased, but I cannot find any study to back that up.

Full answer

I would say that in order to answer this question you need to look at the framework of your question and the whole question centres on IQ (Intelligence Quotient) and Fetal Alcohol Syndome.  So let's break this up into the 2 components.

IQ (Intelligence Quotient)

The Intelligence Quotient is a total score derived from several standardised tests designed to assess human intelligence, and human intelligence involves the cognitive abilities to learn, form concepts, understand, apply logic, and reason, including the capacities to recognize patterns, comprehend ideas, plan, solve problems, make decisions, retain information, and use language to communicate. Intelligence enables humans to experience and think.

Foetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS)

A baby exposed to alcohol in the womb may have learning difficulties such as problems with thinking, speech, maths or memory (NHS, 2017) — all needed for high intelligence — and foetal alcohol syndrome is a type of foetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD), the name for all the various problems that can affect children if their mother drinks alcohol in pregnancy (CDC, 2018).

CDC (2018) also states that a person with an FASD might have:

Difficulty with attention
Poor memory
Difficulty in school (especially with math)
Learning disabilities
Speech and language delays
Poor reasoning and judgment skills, and
Intellectual disability or low IQ

With all this in mind, it is possible that with lower incidences of FAS due to lower numbers of drinking pregnant mothers, comes higher average IQ numbers.

The following studies looked at this hypothesis

FAS and corresponding IQ levels

  Riikonen, R., Salonen, I., Partanen, K., & Verho, S. (1999). Brain perfusion SPECT and MRI in foetal alcohol syndrome.

  Eleven  children  with  a  diagnosis  of  FAS  (six  boys  and  five
  girls), with a mean age of 8.6 (range 3 to 13) years, participated in the study. [...] Tests showed moderate learning disability in two children (IQ 40 and 46, respectively) (subjects 2 and 11) and mild learning disability (IQ 68 to 85) or normal intelligence (IQ >85) in the others.

  Streissguth, A. P., Herman, C. S., & Smith, D. W. (1978). Intelligence, behavior, and dysmorphogenesis in the fetal alcohol syndrome: A report on 20 patients.

  In a sample of 20 patients with the fetal alcohol syndrome, ages 9 months to 21 years, the average IQ was 65, with a range of 16 to 105; 60% of the patients had IQ's more than two standard deviations below the mean. The sample included patients who ranged in severity of dysmorphogenesis from mild to severe. The severity of the dysmorphic features was related to degree of mental deficiency; children with the most severe manifestations of FAS had an average IQ of 55, whereas children with lesser manifestations had an average IQ of 82. All children were growth deficient for height and/or head circumference, but in this study only height was significantly correlated with IQ.

Incidence levels of FAS

  Abel, E. L. (1995). An update on incidence of FAS: FAS is not an equal opportunity birth defect.

  In a previous survey (Abel & Sokol, 1991), the incidence of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) in the Western world was estimated at 0.33 cases per 1,000 live born, with a higher incidence among low SES/ African Americans than among middle-high SES/Caucasians. That eariier survey was based on 15 prospective studies of general obstetric populations appearing for prenatal care. Since that analysis, there has been almost a two-fold increase in such studies, allowing for a more up-to-date estimate of the incidence of this anomaly and a clearer perspective of at-risk populations.

  The incidence of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is now estimated at 0.97 cases per 1,000 live births in the general obstetric population and 4.3% among “heavy” drinkers. The general incidence is more than 20 times higher in the United States (1.95 per 1,000) compared to Europe and other countries (0.08 per 1,000). Within the United States, the incidence at sites characterized by low socioeconomic status, and African American or Native American background are about 10 times higher (2.29 cases per 1,000) compared to sites with a predominant middle/upper SES and Caucasian background (0.26 per 1,000). Based on racial background, the number of pregnant women in the U.S. giving birth to FAS children is 2,043 per year; if based on socioeconomic status, the number is slightly higher 2,366. Although race and SES are confounded in the U.S. studies, an examination of U.S. and European studies suggests that the major factor associated with FAS is low SES rather than racial background.

  Habbick, B. F., Nanson, J. L., Snyder, R. E., Casey, R. E., & Schulman, A. L. (1996). Foetal alcohol syndrome in Saskatchewan: unchanged incidence in a 20-year period.

  Despite major initiatives in public and professional education about foetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) in Saskatchewan in the last 20 years, its incidence rate has not fallen. The rate was 0.515 per 1,000 live births in 1973-1977 and 0.589 in 1988-1992.

Conclusion

The story is not that clear cut. The hyposthesis is possible, however the incidence levels of Foetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) has risen over the years. Speculation might say that the higher IQ averages would indicate that the average severity of FAS has decreased, but I cannot find any study to back that up.

References

Abel, E. L., & Sokol, R. J. (1991). A revised conservative estimate of the incidence of FAS and its economic impact. Alcoholism: Clinical and experimental research, 15(3), 514-524. doi: 10.1111/j.1530-0277.1991.tb00553.x

Abel, E. L. (1995). An update on incidence of FAS: FAS is not an equal opportunity birth defect. Neurotoxicology and teratology, 17(4), 437-443. doi: 10.1016/0892-0362(95)00005-C

CDC (2018). Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASDs) [Online]Retrieved from: https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/fasd/facts.html

Habbick, B., Nanson, J., Snyder, R., Casey, R., & Schulman, A. (1996). Foetal Alcohol Syndrome in Saskatchewan: Unchanged Incidence in a 20-year Period. Canadian Journal of Public Health / Revue Canadienne De Sante'e Publique, 87(3), 204-207. Retrieved from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41991432 PMID: 8771927

NHS (2017). Foetal alcohol syndrome [Online]
Retrieved from: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/foetal-alcohol-syndrome

Riikonen, R., Salonen, I., Partanen, K., & Verho, S. (1999). Brain perfusion SPECT and MRI in foetal alcohol syndrome. Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology, 41(10), 652-659. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-8749.1999.tb00518.x

Streissguth, A. P., Herman, C. S., & Smith, D. W. (1978). Intelligence, behavior, and dysmorphogenesis in the fetal alcohol syndrome: A report on 20 patients. The Journal of pediatrics, 92(3), 363-367. doi: 10.1016/S0022-3476(78)80420-X


Does any evidence show that Smartphone users have poorer memory? An ages old complaint is that new technology harms memory. Why remember something when you can look it up?

In a course on Human Memory I distinctly recall an interesting discussion on phones and memory, and an interesting point came up; even though smart phones mean we no longer remember phone numbers as often as we used to we have to remember passwords, userids and other trivial bits of information which keeps our encoding skills sharp. However I don't recall and studies to support this hypothesis.

Are there any recent studies to suggest whether users of portable digital tools like smartphones actually perform worse on any memory-related psychometrics?

And no I'm not talking about these extremely questionable Cellphones Harm Memory in Mice stories the media has picked up on. I'm not concerned with electromagnetic radiation's effects on the brain, but rather the effect of having easy access to external information.

One relevant study by Sparrow et al. (2011) that came out last year in Science was on the "Google effect": When subjects expected that they'd be able to have later access to information, their memory was poorer for it. We can extrapolate to smartphones -- if individuals know they have information at their fingertips, they don't need to worry so much about retaining that information.

Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, and Daniel M. Wegner (2011) Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips Science 1207745 Published online 14 July 2011 [DOI:10.1126/science.1207745] (Free PDF)


How actively does your brain physically prune connections? Is pruning defined as neural apoptosis or are connections (neural synapses) simply separated?

At what rate, if known, does this occur in individuals (ages 18+)?

Apoptosis is the programmed death of a cell. This is not required for pruning of connections.

During development, axons and dendrites of neurons undergo extensive lengthening, branching and also retraction. Simultaneous with this process, many many synapses are being constructed and deconstructed between axons and nearby dendrites. Also during adulthood, synapses are constructed, strengthened, weakened and deconstructed.

Hard numbers:
Between the ages of 20-90, a 10% reduction in number of neurons occurred. On average, neurons make around 7000 synapses per neuron. Under the assumption that the number of synapses per neuron doesn't change, there will be around a 10% reduction of synapses between ages 20-90. The paper referenced below states that estimates of numbers of synapses over different ages is in progress, but I couldn't find a follow-up publication.

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