All Questions
6
votes
2answers
127 views
What does daytime actigraphy reveal about an active and awake brain?
I have interest in the study of human motion (
Actigraphy), and have built a couple of smartphone apps using its principles. The apps look at gross motor activity of an individual. Up until now, most ...
19
votes
2answers
426 views
Can critical thinking be taught?
Critical thinking is central to the scientific method and believed to be essential to a successful democracy. Recently, the 2012 Texas Republican platform voiced the party's opposition to the teaching ...
2
votes
0answers
77 views
classic category learning tasks with data
I need a list of classic categorization tasks (with available human/animal data) to use as a benchmark for a model.
I am interested in tasks that can be used to validate/invalidate a model of ...
10
votes
1answer
109 views
Are some methods of teaching reading “bad”?
I have a young daughter who I am teaching to read, and I was given a "Your Baby Can Read" DVD set by a friend. When discussing it with friends, several of my teacher friends frowned upon the use of ...
5
votes
1answer
111 views
How can prolonged stress lead to a sustained reduction in cognitive functioning?
Background: Ten years ago or so I went through a traumatic period which resulted in a lot of stress and anxiety. I initially assumed there was some depression but cognition and short term memory was ...
7
votes
1answer
122 views
Can psychosomatic reactions be completely unconcious?
I had always considered that psychosomatic reactions, such as Psychogenic pain, while "real" to the person experiencing them, would be a concious reaction at some level. That is to say, if the person ...
10
votes
1answer
153 views
What is a reliable physiological measure (e.g., serotonin levels) of positive affect?
Is there a reliable physiological measure or correlate to positive affect?
What does research say on this?
I thought that serotonin levels are correlated with self-reported happiness levels, but, ...
8
votes
1answer
94 views
How to measure well-being without using an extensive questionnaire?
I'm trying to create an iPhone app for music therapy (or other kinds of experimental therapy). Such app would help a music therapist keep track of sessions and evaluate progress. One of the issues ...
24
votes
1answer
907 views
By learning to read and write upside down, what did I do to myself?
If you've ever read Encyclopedia Brown books, you'll be familiar with the backwards writing in the back of the book that explains the solution to the case.
When I was in my mid-late teens (I don't ...
1
vote
4answers
818 views
Are there known cases where people can write upside down? [closed]
From the time I was able to write I have been writing upside down, as in literally turning the page 180 degrees and writing. The funny thing is, I can't write the right way up! I am left handed which ...
3
votes
1answer
43 views
What is the name of a test presenting words in different colors?
What's the name of this psychological test where you.
Read and pronounce words in three colors (red, blue, green). - Words and colors match. - Say word and color (which are the same).
As above - ...
11
votes
2answers
374 views
Do men and women differ in their desire to have children?
I was reading the comments of the following article on paternal health and birth defects. Someone made the following comment.
The other thing is that mens interest in being a father is nowhere
...
-1
votes
1answer
76 views
How to change the brain in order to change how one habitually thinks and feels? [closed]
In this snippet from "You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life" by Jeffrey Schwartz
Schwartz states that ...
6
votes
0answers
61 views
Problems with using personal feedback to motivate participation in an online psychological experiment?
I am planning on running an online psychological experiment where participants must learn about various simulated environments and then make inferences about them. Because completing the experiment ...
15
votes
1answer
244 views
Medium-term effects of polyphasic sleep on performance
Typical sleep patterns of one big block of 6 to 9 hours with no naps is usually referred to as monophasic sleep. A second natural sleep pattern is biphasic sleep which breaks up your sleep into two ...
6
votes
0answers
40 views
How to efficiently get a sense of the meaning of a score on a non-aptitude test that you encounter in a journal article?
Context: When reading research articles in psychology, you often encounter new non-aptitude self-report psychological tests (e.g., measures of personality, well-being, psychopathology, learning style, ...
13
votes
0answers
321 views
What neural structures motivate humans to decide to “throw it all away”?
In the original formulation of this question, I was trying to understand what motivates "cut and run" behavior in humans. I was defining this anecdotally to include people that have severed ties with ...
6
votes
0answers
83 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 ...
11
votes
3answers
228 views
Is it possible for certain people to perceive colors differently?
What if someone perceives a color as 'red' when it is actually 'green'?
Since different people have preferences for different colors, and colors are perhaps constructed in the mind, is it possible ...
7
votes
1answer
170 views
Is there a practical limit to the amount of knowledge a human can learn?
There's definitely progressive interference and retroactive interference, which are basically two ways that old memories and new memories can interfere with each other.
But on the other hand, do ...
7
votes
1answer
83 views
Are there shapes defined by 3 (or more) generative parameters whose mapping to psychological similarity space is known?
I am trying to generate 4 shapes that are equidistant in psychological similarity space - meaning that they are all equally discriminable from one another - which differ in 3 parameters, such that ...
5
votes
1answer
74 views
How to test effectiveness of a children's museum in improving cognitive function?
For those who have never heard of a Children's Museum before, there is a national association in the US with some information. The basic idea stems from Vygotsky-like paradigms of learning through ...
7
votes
1answer
1k views
Is Apple's iPhone Retina Display really accurate to human eye resolution?
Apple based their Retina Display on the following claim, as cited by Wikipedia:
The display has a contrast ratio of 800:1. The screen is marketed by Apple as the "Retina Display", based on the ...
5
votes
1answer
117 views
Can the Go/No-Go Association Task be faked?
Go/No-Go Association task:
The GNAT (pronounced like the bug) is a flexible technique designed to
measure implicit social cognition. Conceptually similar to other
implicit measures like the ...
6
votes
2answers
99 views
How to computationally model the Wisconsin Card Sorting task? [closed]
The Wisconsin Card Sorting task is rather famous but appears to be quite difficult to model computationally.
To respond to @Artem's question, I work in RL and I am interested in how people learn the ...
7
votes
2answers
221 views
Is an autistic person's brain different from a non-autistic one?
Are there any differences between the autistic person's brain and the non-autistic one?
To be more specific, are there any differences in brain structure or brain activity, that can be used to ...
15
votes
1answer
425 views
Do people wake up faster with inconsistent alarm sounds?
Many people have one alarm clock sound that wakes them up every morning.
Is having this consistent sound the optimal way to wake someone up?
Or can you startle someone faster by changing to a ...
8
votes
1answer
188 views
What is the test-retest improvement in Block Design test?
Background:
My lab is conducting a research on perceptual training. We train participants on different tasks, and assess them pre- and post- training on a large battery of tests. Obviously, people ...
6
votes
1answer
220 views
Is addiction to sleep deprivation possible?
Background: I have Asperger's Syndrome. After staying awake for an entire night without sleeping medication, some individuals report feeling tired while others report feeling euphoric and at some ...
7
votes
1answer
125 views
What research has modelled the difficulty of mental mathematical calculation?
I posted this also on mathoverflow.
What research has modelled the difficulty of evaluating a formula mentally (for your average, numerate, person, not a trained mental calculator)?
For instance, ...
14
votes
2answers
459 views
Is there a term for individuals who can “visualize” numbers and advanced mathematics?
I recently saw an episode of 60 Minutes about Jacob Barnett, a 13 year old boy who is currently attending advanced physics classes at a local university and was portrayed by the show as being a child ...
10
votes
1answer
128 views
What structures in the brain are called upon to strengthen coupling between bilateral movements?
It is very difficult for the normally-coordinated person to be able to pat his/her head and rub his/her stomach at the same time (or pick a similar activity). It seems to be possible to maintain the ...
8
votes
1answer
209 views
Spurious attractors in Hopfield networks
A classic "Hopfield network" is a type of artificial neural network in which the units are bi-stable and fully interconnected by symmetrically weighted connections. In 1982, Hopfield showed that such ...
8
votes
1answer
101 views
Hearing first but understanding later?
I have experienced this phenomenon several times and checked with other people as well.
It goes like this: you hear something, but it's just a sound with no meaning. Some seconds later, you ...
12
votes
2answers
216 views
How are autistic savants able to perform certain mathematical computations so quickly?
How do autistic savants (or other people with these abilities) compute equations like $81^{100}$ in 2.5 minutes?
Which algorithms do they use? Is it an efficient one, or do they just have a lot of ...
6
votes
2answers
132 views
Are different types of long term memories stored in different parts of the brain?
I recently had some questions concerning the capacity of the brain's memory:
Are different types of long term-memories like know-how, your-life, etc. remembered in different parts of the brain?
If ...
6
votes
0answers
91 views
Is multiple personality disorder a medical condition or artifact of psychotherapy?
The popular media has offered such examples as "Eve" (based on Chris Costner-Sizemore) and "Sybil" (based on Shirley Ardell Mason) as sufferers of dissociative identity disorder (at one point known as ...
8
votes
0answers
65 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 ...
8
votes
1answer
181 views
Does dream recall disturb the processes of memory consolidation?
Psychology in the time of Freud was occupied with dreams. Relaying these to one's analyst was an important part of treatment.
Fast-forward to less than 100 years later, and we know so much about the ...
15
votes
1answer
631 views
Is there a reduction of “Brain Fog” with fewer hours of sleep?
I've heard patients who complain of "brain fog" (and fatigue) claim a reduction in "brain fog" (and more mental clarity) when they get fewer hours of sleep (usually less than 5.5 hours).
Here I'd ...
10
votes
1answer
108 views
What constructs help explain limited cognitive processing and the cognitive effects of rules that limit decision making choices?
Supposed that I'm a married man, and my wife asks me to pick out a paint color for our new house. It's not terribly mentally taxing. However, my wife starts to add rules. The color can't be too ...
10
votes
1answer
222 views
Does intelligence cause greater alcohol consumption?
I just stumbled on a blog post that asserts that more intelligent people drink more than less intelligent people.
The author writes:
Controlling for a large number of demographic variables, such ...
3
votes
1answer
291 views
What is the correlation between Grade Point Average (GPA) and intelligence?
What is an authoritative empirical estimate of the correlation between pscyhometric measures of intelligence and Grade Point Average (GPA)?
What are the main factors that influence the size of the ...
1
vote
1answer
97 views
How many bits of data would it take to represent an entire life as a film?
Imagine your life as a film. Add all the stuff you know.
Is it possible to express this amount of data in bits? (A rough order of magnitude would be ok.)
See also: Partitions and Savants:
4
votes
1answer
38 views
Is it reasonable to have a factor with only two levels in a carry-over design for an fMRI study?
I'm planning a carry-over design for an fMRI study.
To save time, since it seems that I'll need a huge number of trials for my purpose, I'm wondering if it's reasonable to have a matrix 2x3x3, ...
9
votes
0answers
56 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 ...
6
votes
1answer
169 views
For depression diagnoses, does one make a clear distinction between endogenous and exogenous causes of depression?
Roughly speaking, we might imagine that people have depression predominantly for one of two reasons:
Endogenously induced: The person has some inherent inballance between different ...
5
votes
0answers
69 views
How to measure student activity, participation, tendency to ask questions, etc?
We would like to compare students from different education systems on the following variables:
tendency to actively participate on lessons
tendency to ask questions
tendency and experience in ...
8
votes
0answers
168 views
Modern treatments of Alan Turing's B-type neural networks
In the cognitive sciences Alan Turing is best known for launching AI with his Computing machinery and intelligence (1950). However, this was not his first contribution to the cognitive sciences, in ...
-3
votes
1answer
186 views
What test can be used to measure memory? [closed]
We want to have a test to determine the status of a person's memory.
For example, a good test might consist of multtiple choice questions and take 5 - 10 minutes. The end result would be a summary ...
