# All Questions

180 views

### What defines the easiest time to get out of bed in the morning for humans?

I'm interested in sleep research, and sometimes in conversations with people the following idea gets discussed: "A person becomes aware at a certain time in the morning and feel great(while still in ...
522 views

### Math or Physics: Which is the more relevant background to enter Cognitive Sciences and Psychology? [closed]

What would be a more suitable background to enter cognitive sciences, mathematical psychology, and study of emotions? I have the option of taking a Integrated Masters Degree in Mathematical Sciences, ...
85 views

### Have there been any mechanisms proposed for normalization in probabilistic population codes?

I heard a talk yesterday by Dora Angelaki about multi-sensory integration. Part of the talk was about bayesian inference with multiple noisy sources of information. I know that there has been a lot ...
388 views

### What is the conceptual relationship between higher order thinking and inductive reasoning?

Higher order thinking seems like a larger construct than inductive reasoning but the constructs also seem related. What is the connection between inductive reasoning and higher order thinking? Is ...
193 views

### How much time is required to relearn a subject after x years?

I'm searching for research answering or giving any form of insight to this question: How long does it take a person to relearn something (any type of learning) when relearning happens x, x+1, ...
146 views

### Is metacognition an affective, cognitive, or behavioural variable?

Is metacognition an affect or cognitive or behaviour variable ? I want to study variation in metacognition and working memory ability level and its effect on inductive reasoning. Therefore i am ...
139 views

### Why do we use 3 channel R,G,B to represent color?

I read that there're some more colors which cannot be represented by R,G,B. What is the experiment that lead people to use 3 variables R,G,B? Can that experiment be replicated in other modals, such ...
200 views

### Time pressure and learning

What are the effects of time pressure (salient vs. non-salient) and learning? Salient time pressure is basically when you have a countdown timer in front of you. Non salient time pressure would be ...
185 views

### What is the difference between psychophysics and neurophysiology?

I'm an engineering student who is doing some subjective tests. What are the difference between psychophysics and neurophysiology? Is it correct that in the latter case, we have to implant to read ...
123 views

### Fusiform Face Area (FFA) for within class recognition?

Is there any evidence (papers, studies, etc) that the Fusiform Face Area is used for any other type of recognition besides facial recognition? I remember hearing or reading a long time ago that ...
39 views

### Does the subjective experience of artificial light brightness vary for people, if so, by how much?

I'm thinking about human perception and particularly the experience of how bright artificial light is. I'm talking about dusk, when the sun has set and only street lamps and light reflecting off ...
376 views

### Can hypomania be induced by just thinking quickly and variably?

Emily Pronin and Daniel Wegner have shown that fast and variable thinking induces positive affect. This is independent of thought content. Sheri Johnson has noted that the key things that might start ...
154 views

### Implementation Intentions and Mental Contrasting vs Meditation

Everyday I see so many studies on meditation. These include all types (mindfulness, TM, etc..). The studies only report positive results. Meditation has been purported to increase self-control and ...
83 views

### Short term time perception affect long term time perception?

It is known that attending to time (i.e. looking at duration) expands subjective time. So if I want to do something for 20 minutes and look at my watch, this would increase my subjective time ...
85 views

### Is actively trying to create insight inducing conditions effective in generating insights?

Kounios and Beeman (2009) show that many insight solutions come when one is in a relaxed state. Furthermore, positive mood helps with insight solutions. But practically speaking, is it wise to try ...
196 views

### What is the effect of Social Media consumption on self-esteem?

I have been seeing many conflicting studies saying that facebook usage increases or decreases self-esteem. What is the current consensus regarding the effect of facebook usage on self-esteem? Has ...
7k views

### Does masturbation in men negatively affect cognitive processes?

Gary Wilson has mentioned that porn and masturbation is an addiction that negatively affect mental performance. Moreover, there is some "pseudo-science" claiming that abstaining from masturbation ...
59 views

### When did neurotransmitters derived from monoamines first appear in evolutionary history?

When did neurotransmitters derived from monoamines first appear in evolutionary history? What are main the points in evolution for monoamines based on the neurotransmitter system ? Edition I'm ...
63 views

### Is there a variance in acceptance of conspiracy theories by occupation?

For some time I have been very interested in the intelligent design (ID)/creationism vs. evolution debate. My parents are both medical professionals and consider themselves creationists. I have many ...
94 views

I am currently programming an experiment where participants have to do a divided visual field task. In a paper about the correct methodology about these tasks, it is said that you should use a ...
481 views

### What is the difference between hypnosis and meditation?

It seems that many people say that hypnosis and meditation are very similar. But what are their key differences (both in a soft and hard way)?
400 views

### Computational Neuroscience software

What are the most common software tools you use in your day to day work in computational neuroscience? I am referring to neuroscience tools like GENESIS and NOT to generic tools like Excel.
238 views

### What causes an individual to not be able to hold all the details of a large project in memory?

Background: First of all, I'm not in any kind related to cognitive science, I'm a programmer. I'm not even sure that it's the right place for asking my question, but I'll try anyway. So, first of all, ...
375 views

### How to design research participant recruitment flyer to maximise participant response?

I often supervise student research projects. Often these projects involve recruiting participants by placing one page flyers in strategic locations. The most common scenario is that the flyer is ...
139 views

### How to interpret HLM analyses looking at work group and individual worker effects?

Liden et al (2004, PDF) is an example of a study examining employees in work groups in an organisation. Thus, measures are obtained of both individual workers and of the work groups that they belong ...
76 views

### How to compare linear and categorical models of perceptual comparisons?

Say I have a confusion matrix of perceptual similarity data for stimuli drawn from an underlying continuous spectrum. Participants also learned to categorise these stimuli such that the spectrum is ...
860 views

### Deception and nose touching - does it work for things that are about to be said in prepared speeches?

I'm not sure if nose touching is a scientifically-validated signature of deception or internal conflict. For the purposes of this question I would assume that it's fairly common knowledge in ...
342 views

### What psychological factors account for code readability?

Readability is often intuitively synthesized. If you see some piece of code, you just know whether it is readable or not. But what are actual psychological, scientific explanations for this? There ...
700 views

### How can psychometry measure the very high IQ's in adults?

From Wikipedia's page on Mental age, we learn that: Originally, the differences between mental age and chronological age were used to compute the intelligence quotient, or IQ. This was computed ...
221 views

### What is the status of evolutionary psychology in academia today?

Having an interest in human psychology (but no formal training) I decided to take Coursera's Introduction to Psychology as a Science. Here's a snippet from an introductory lecture (it requires ...
40 views

### How many thalamocortical relay cells synapse onto each spiny stellate cell in neocortex?

I am curious about how many different thalamocortical relay cells synapse onto each layer IV spiny stellate cell, on average? The answer is likely to be different per region and species, of course. I ...
68 views

### Predicting the Duration of Future Events

I am interested in the question of how people use/integrate previous experiences with instances of tasks or events to make predictions about the duration of future instances of tasks/events. To ...
224 views

### Facet versus scale prediction of Big 5 personality

NEO facets and scales: The NEO model of personality has 5 scales (i.e., extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, openness, and conscientiousness). For each scale there are 6 facets (e.g., neuroticism ...
85 views

### Psychometric information on IPIP representation of NEO facets

The IPIP (International Personality Item Pool) website provides a copy of the IPIP representation of the NEO 30 facet form. It also provides some information comparing IPIP NEO with official NEO. ...
405 views

### What is a good textbook for an undergrad Cognitive Neuroscience course?

I am slated to teach an undergrad Cognitive Neuroscience course next year and I am not sure which textbook to use. This would be an entry-level course (no pre-requisites) primarily intended for ...
252 views

### What brain skill does Nonogram (Picross) games develop?

I've been playing Nonogram Picross a lot lately. I really like it and you can always find a harder challenge but I would hate to waste my time for nothing. What brain skill does Nonogram (Picross) ...
358 views

### Is learning facts via audio while sleeping possible?

Is there a way to make onself remember facts from an audiobook (containing for instance a list of countries and their capitals) played out loud while sleeping?
324 views

### How to estimate an expected effect size for a planned psychology study?

When planning a psychological study, researchers are often asked to formulate an estimate of expected effect sizes for important hypotheses in the study. This might be the expected group mean ...
2k views

### Intelligence and marriage satisfaction

A recent letter by a Princeton alumni stated: Men regularly marry women who are younger, less intelligent, less educated. It’s amazing how forgiving men can be about a woman’s lack of ...
19 views

### Does higher Electronic use relate to lower memory [duplicate]

lots of us use electronics as memory devices--making notes, reminders, etc. Does more use of electronics relate to lower retention? In other words, does not using your memory make it worse?
111 views

### Inducing Auditory-to-Visual Synesthesia

I recently watched an interesting video that was discussing conveying color to the blind through language. It implied that there may be a way to insert the sensation of color into a person's mind via ...
47 views

### What happens in the brain when conscious awareness is changed during dreaming onset?

I've long been interested in dreaming and there's a peculiar phenomenon of the very start of the dreaming process. Different people experience it differently, but even for the same person there's ...
161 views

### Should questions in psychology always be objective questions? [closed]

Is it correct that a subjective question is not a psychological question? I.e. for a question to be psychological, must it be an objective question? E.g. a question about an objective probability ...
1k views

### Training for the corpus callosum?

Since reading is done in the left hemisphere of the brain, does reading text in the left visual field train the corpus callosum? For instance, I am interested in knowing whether training may lead to ...
23 views

### What is the relationship between practice and performance of telephone call centre workers?

I am interested in modelling the relationship between practice and performance both in laboratory tasks and field settings. I was interested in what existing research has examined how the performance ...
286 views

### Do children follow parents' phobias genetically or by learning?

Children's personalities come from two sources: Parents' genes and the environment. Is there any research showing adults acquiring phobias as a result of being exposed to parents with the same ...
69 views

### What is the study which shows that babies can teach young children empathy?

I saw a fascinating segment on the PBS NewsHour which said that studies have shown that young children (ages 5 - 8 years of age) can be taught empathy by having a class where they observe and learn to ...
347 views

### What is the effect of mindfulness practice on cognition?

The following article by ScienceDaily reported on a paper in Psychological Science (Mrazek et al., 2013), claiming that mindfulness training led to improved working memory and GRE scores. These ...
I have conducted several studies that get participants to complete the IPIP personality test while role play going for a job. A common finding is that the average correlation (i.e., $\bar{r}$ between ...