# All Questions

253 views

### Development of social cognition as an alternative to the obstetrical dilemma

Human infants are strange in that they are born more helpless than the infants of other great apes. They are born with about 25-30% of their brain developed, compared to the 40-50% of other great ...
119 views

### 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 ...
201 views

### Human behaviour in one-shot perfect information games

Background A one-shot game is one where two participants have some set of actions $\{1, ... , n\}$, they make their decision on which option to take (without knowing the decision of their partner, or ...
116 views

### What do anatomical substrates of conditioned taste aversion tell us about treatment?

Conditioned taste aversions (CTAs) or Garcia effect are a byproduct of feeling ill after we've consumed a certain food. These aversions is present even if the illness is not related to ingestion and ...
230 views

### Does dream recall interfere with “reverse learning”? (Crick and Mitchison's theory of REM sleep)

I've recently became aware of the idea of "reverse learning" that might happen during REM sleep - the brain's attempt to eliminate pathological attractors that might appear in neural networks. The ...
65 views

### What are some known roles or correlations of glucocorticoid receptor function to behaviour?

The NR3C1 gene encodes for a neuron-specific glucocorticoid receptor (GR), of which methylation levels have been shown to relate to altered maternal care and stress response in rodents (Weaver et al., ...
670 views

### How does goal-tracking and sign-tracking behaviour vary across species?

In Pavlonian (classical) conditioning, conditioned responses of an animal may vary. Some animals focus on the unconditioned stimulus (ie., food / location of food) while others may focus on the ...
131 views

### Do animals that sleep during the day have a different sleep architecture than those who sleep at night?

A typical hypnogram, delineating the sleep architecture for a (human) mammal looks like A distinct distribution of non-REM and REM sleep can be observed. Is this pattern of sleep cycles ...
50 views

### Publicly available social networks in apes and hunter-gatherer societies

Social network analysis is an indiscpensable tool for sociology, and is becoming increasing popular in anthropology, social-psychology and other fields. There are many papers that examine the ...
137 views

I am looking for a specific type of experimental test of active learning. Given some artificial or natural learning task that consists of classifying inputs $x$ from a large input space $X$. There is ...
284 views

### Refinements of Rescorla-Wagner model of classical conditioning

The Rescorla-Wagner model is one of the most commonly discussed mathematical models of classical conditioning. It was wildly popular when it came out in 1972, and very successful. The same math, is ...
76 views

### What are the psychological differences in camelCase and underscore_case programming conventions?

In computer programming, spaces are often forbidden in the declaration of variable names, so programmers have created alternate methods of identifying word boundaries in variable names: camel case and ...
39 views

### 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 ...
108 views

### Are introverts more talkative in written form than extroverts?

We all know that extroverts are in general more talkative than introverts in oral form. But how about written communication? After having talked with lots of people on the internet and met several of ...
177 views

### Does data support Domhoff's neurocognitive theory of dreams?

Background: A friend described consistent feelings and themes during a dream. It is my understanding that the contents of our dreams are our subconscious/unconscious/preconscious processing stimuli ...
110 views

### What is the optimal exercise regime for improving cognitive functioning?

It seems that researchers agree that exercise increases cognitive abilities. This seems to work universally for all ages: children, adults and old people. It is suggested that everyone should ...
117 views

### Does correcting responses after feedback lead to better learning?

In a typical supervised learning experiment, one might present visual stimuli, e.g. faces, one after another and ask participants to classify each one into one of two categories, e.g. A and B. Usually ...
32 views

### Does distraction cause us to skip to the next step in a motor plan?

Often, if one is concentrating too hard on a particular task, it seems as though it's quite easy to skip to the next step of a plan of action. For example, a baseball infielder may attempt a throw to ...
65 views

### How do our emotions toward a subject affect our brain activity within similar activities?

I'll bring an example: there are people who love to dance and could do it for hours. Yet, if you'd make them run a long distance they would get tired really soon just because they don't like running ...
84 views

### Are there any models of the human visual field of view taking into account head, neck and eye movements and calculating likelihood of fixation?

I would like to know if there are studies that (1) model the field of view taking into account all degrees of freedom of the head, neck and eyes and (2) if there is any probabilistic model assigned to ...
98 views

### How to teach parents to apply early childhood interventions to improve cognitive outcomes in children?

I've watched the "My Brilliant Brain: Born Genius" documentary where they refer to the Abecedarian Project, in that investigation, a group of children that were exposed to early childhood education ...
520 views

### Cultural brain hypothesis and gene-culture co-evolution

Recently, Joseph Henrich of UBC has been promoting his cultural brain hypothesis. The goal is to explain a selection pressure behind the development of the human brain and general intelligence. The ...
208 views

### How do cooperative vs. competitive activities impact the learning patterns of an individual?

To what extent does cooperative versus competitive learning influence personality development or even pathological behaviors? If these activities need to be narrowed down to a specific category, I'm ...
54 views

### What is the correlation between self and other ratings of goal orientation?

In educational psychology goal orientation is a popular construct. In particular popular dimensions of goal orientation include performance-approach, performance-avoidance, and mastery. The studies ...
117 views

### What processes underly confidence ratings in cognitive decision-making?

Many experiments in cognitive psychology and other domains ask for confidence ratings (e.g., on a 0-100 scale, 100 meaning "I'm sure I experienced this stimulus"). What accounts describe how these ...
55 views

### How is brain processing different for situation-less emotional faces vs. situated emotional faces?

In traditional emotional face perception paradigms, participants are shown circle cut-outs of emotional faces. All context has been removed. Participants only see the face. However, it's well ...
53 views

### Difference between Logan's Instance theory and Exemplar-Based Random Walk (EBRW) theory

I'm trying to find a clear explanation of the difference between Logan's instance theory (Logan, 2002) and the Exemplar-Based Random Walk theory (Nosofsky & Palmari, 1997). Am I mistaken that they ...
50 views

### Psychology of brand names

Marketers use the fact that different letters are associated with different mental images and emotions when they create brand names. Studies show that letters and their combinations produce ...
59 views

### Trying to understand equations in Karl Friston article

I am trying to understand a neuroscience article by Karl Friston. In it he gives three equations that are, as I understand him, equivalent or inter-convertible and refer to both physical and Shannon ...
93 views

### Why do many people play Candy Crush without ever buying anything while some spend all their money on it?

I'm trying to understand how free-to-play games like Candy Crush Saga use existing knowledge of the human brain to keep people engaged and how they convince players to pay money for in-game goods. ...
217 views

### What is the neurological basis of maintaining self discipline?

Self Discipline, as defined in this meagre Wikipedia article as being as the ability to motivate oneself in spite of a negative emotion This is partly distinct from self control and willpower ...
76 views

### Which study design to use: nested case-control or case-cohort?

I am following a cohort of patients over time from which I am planning to sub-sample a sub-group of patients to pilot a new intervention. The plan is to compare the effectiveness of the new ...
117 views

### Is abstract knowledge incompatible with literal memorization?

Let me describe 2 interesting cases : Solomon Shereshevsky (Luria, 1968 - the Mind of a Mnemonist) had an almost perfect literal memory. He remembers strings of hundreds of digits for years after ...
69 views

### Resource on how to effectively develop within-subjects vignette based study

Background: Where I used to work fellow researchers used to have a task known as the CV task. The task required participants to answer a number of questions about a set of CVs (e.g., is this a good ...
46 views

### Source for turning cone cell opponent process diagram into equations

There is a diagram on wikipedia that is part of the article on the opponent process. I assume practical equations have been developed, at least reasonable approximations, but they appear to be missing ...
117 views

### How can I test whether Dorsal Raphe Nucleus(DRN) activity at night is related to variations in mood?

I'm reading this paper, which discusses Serotonin activity in the Dorsal Ralphe Nucleus(DRN), and even includes some mathematical models of how serotonin is released and reabsorbed. The paper states ...
102 views

### Is there any “predictive” component to positive/negative affect in Seasonal Affective Disorder and Bipolar Disorder?

I'm wondering if the human brain "predicts" how certain weeks of the year should feel? For example, a child who is going to school may have a more positive affect in anticipation of summer holidays, ...
130 views

### Chunking Patterns and Enjoyment of Applying Patterns

I've been reading a book "The Theory of Fun in Game Design" it talks about two concepts of psychology that I wanted to confirm are true. The writer the book isn't a psychologist. The two concepts ...
161 views

### Online datasets for the disjunction effect and violations of the sure-thing principle

The disjunction effect (or violation of the sure-thing principle) is as follows: A dis­junc­tion effect occurs when peo­ple pre­fer x over y when they know that event A obtains, and they also ...
29 views

### Are males more likely to view homosexuals as mentally ill than females?

It's generally accepted that males tend to have a more negative attitude toward homosexuality than females: Three studies conducted with students at six different universities revealed a ...
20 views

### Simultaneous DTI, structural MRI and 1H-MRS - Are there any examples of this?

I have been reading about recent articles relating to treatment resistant schizophrenia, and apparently there are a lack of studies using multimodal imaging. Initially I just thought that would be ...
35 views

### How successful are modern (2015) sentiment analysis algorithms for identifying emotion?

I see a number of questions about implementing text sentiment analysis algorithms on StackOverflow, and am interested - how effective are sentiment analysis algorithms at identifying the ...
15 views

### What is “Predictive Reverse Engineering” and how can it be used for understanding brain structure?

Here is a quotation from the paper Markram et al., Introducing the Human Brain Project : New informatics and modeling approaches are making it possible to reverse engineer the detailed structure ...
47 views

### Comparison between IO psychology, Arbeitspsychologie and Psychologie du travail et des organisations

Reading the Wikipedia pages on IO Psychology, Arbeitspsychologie and Psychologie du travail et des organisations you can see many differences on the topics and authors of the fields. At a first ...
31 views

### 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 ...
23 views

### Is there a hierarchy of gestalt visual stimuli processing?

Let's say that we have a set of shapes. They can be grouped according to the different Gestalt laws of grouping. However, different Gestalt principles will divide the set into different groups, e.g. ...
114 views

### Is there a relation between speed of executing a task and ones intelligence?

I recently came across a code refactoring problem. Considering the risk of getting into a risky bug later I switched to my usual mode of think and solve it, rather than go and make the changes fast. ...
60 views

### What cognitively interesting event-related potentials at FP1, FP2, TP9 or TP10 can be measured with consumer-grade EEG hardware?

I'm looking for cognitively interesting event-related potentials at places like FP1, FP2, TP9 or TP10 that can be measured with consumer-grade EEG hardware. Right now I have an Interaxon Muse EEG and ...