# All Questions

2k views

### Are there any standard tests to measure psychopathy?

While looking into another question on how to measure the adoption of norms, I came to wonder whether there are any standard tests to measure psychopathy. What are the accepted standard tests to ...
305 views

### Does the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis apply to artificial (specifically programming) languages?

As a computer programmer, I have an intuition that the idea "language influences thought" is very relevant to programmers and programming languages. Is there any research that examines whether ...
93 views

### What type of behaviour is showing, but withholding, a reward?

A specific example of what I mean is: when you go shopping at a supermarket with a loyalty card system, and you do not participate, the receipt say something along the lines of If you had a ...
134 views

### Introductory resources on developmental psychology/neuroscience

I'd like to be able to answer questions such as: What neuro/psychological functions underly competences such as empathy (or others - see background below)? What neurotransmitters are of particular ...
108 views

### Is it possible to distinguish recall and calculation?

Say I ask subjects what $20 \cdot 20$ is. Is there any way, besides introspection, to evaluate whether subjects recalled the answer or calculated the answer? In general, I would expect that the ...
122 views

### Perceptual flicker when rotating my face

Informal Experiment: I look up at a wooden beam on the ceiling, or I look at the office door; both the door and the ceiling are about 2 meters from my face. I rotate my face 90 degrees left or right ...
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### How do you refer to something in APA-style that is not submitted to be published?

I'm writing a paper in APA-style. At the end of it, I have my references. There is this one paper (actually an internship report) that I refer to, but it hasn't been submitted for publication. How ...
259 views

### Does “The Brain Machine” work?

I came across this article on Make Magazine on "The Brain Machine" which will supposedly put one into a trancelike meditative state via a combination of sound and light pulses. Is there any ...
199 views

### How do people that can't perceive 3D view a stereoscopic 3D image or movie?

According to Mendiburu (2009), 3-15% of the people can't view a stereoscopic 3D image or movie, mostly due to poor binocular vision. Imagine one of those is in the movie theater, trying to watch a 3D ...
241 views

### Is there a field of research based around music and emotion in the brain?

I'm looking for research surrounding the scientific study of music and emotion and its effects on the brain. In particular, are there known parts of the brain which activate when playing or listening ...
802 views

### Do high heels increase female attractiveness in men only through indirect means?

It seems widely accepted that, overall, men tend to find women in high heels more attractive. (There will, of course, be many exceptions to this rule.) "High heels may well be the most potent ...
808 views

### Does language and/or culture affect an individual's cognitive capacity?

Some languages have multiple expressions to identify, address, comprehend, and interpret a single concept and/or experience. Are limits placed on understanding and describing aspects of cognition due ...
1k views

### What does “veridicality” mean in terms of psychology?

I'm reading the paper "Visual Space Perception and Visually Directed Action" by Loomis, Da Silva, Fujita and Fukusima (1992; pdf). In this paper, the word 'veridicality' is used in several sentences. ...
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### Is there any evidence to support a correlation between how much bodily energy you are using, and how quickly time appears to pass?

It seems to me that time passes more slowly when I am drinking coffee, but when I stop, or I am tired it seems that time passes a lot faster. Could this have something to do with the sampling rate at ...
178 views

### The current recommended text for statistics in behavioural sciences

I have an old book: Statistics for the Behavioural Sciences (4th ed.) by Gravetter & Wallnau. I want to transition my textbooks to eBook format, but this book doesn't come like that (as far as I ...
152 views

### 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 ...
130 views

### Phenomenon that causes music to sound like it's being played at a different tempo than remembered?

Something I've noticed now and then is that I'll be listening to a song off my music player and it sounds like it's being played in a tempo faster or slower than I remember the song being. Is this a ...
620 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 ...
484 views

### What are the appraisals tendencies for fear and anger?

I understand the actions tendencies for fear and anger. For example: We might verbally insult someone when we are angry. We might feel like running away when we are afraid. According to appraisal ...
783 views

### Do some Photosensitive epileptics desire seizures?

It seems absurd, but from the Wikipedia article on Photosensitive Epilepsy: Some PSE patients, especially children, may exhibit an uncontrollable fascination with television images that trigger ...
496 views

### Do students exhibit rational behavior in determining study time?

While I teach some economics classes, I must admit to near complete ignorance on the optimization processes students undertake when studying. We often say that the "best" students are those who earn ...
321 views

### Cognitive explanation of why beta blockers are effective for anxiety

Beta blockers essentially reduce physical effects of anxiety and panic disorder, but there is no proof that there is a direct effect on anxiety. Some scientists believe there is an indirect effect. ...
182 views

### Does self-rated performance predict objective performance over and above other-rated performance?

Context: I was at a talk today where data was presented where a group of sports people ranked their own performance and everyone else in the group. This enabled self-rated performance to be ...
197 views

### What is a good book for studying incentives?

I am looking for a book, which gives a broad overview of all the main theories regarding incentives. Using this book, I would like to further my understanding of things like: Why slot machines ...
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### How can you limit excessive risk-taking at the institutional level?

Some firms have a compensation structure that encourages risk-taking while insulating employees from the bad consequences of their decisions. This creates the potential for moral hazard. I started ...
1k views

### Game-theory strategies to overcome holdout problem?

The hold-out problem often occurs in debt-restructuring or in urban development. The hold-out problem is defined where an agent, for example a land developer, must negotiate with many lot owners and ...
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### What are the key algorithms for learning optimal behavior of economic agents?

I'm playing around with social learning of near-optimal behavioral rules on a set of agents. The idea is roughly that given an income process (or technology process, depending on the question) an ...
252 views

### Defining shyness towards strangers in confrontational situations

First of all, I would like to stress that I am not a cogsci person and I have almost no background in those areas of science. The question is whether there exists a definition of a phenomenon I ...
411 views

### Beyond a certain level, is reading comprehension affected more by psychological intuition than by verbal intelligence?

Certainly, you have reading comprehension passages on the SAT, GRE, and LSAT. But beyond that point, is it really possible to measure reading comprehension through multiple-choice tests? There are ...
1k views

### Why are people inclined to praise or fear the unknown?

Human beings are inclined to "praise" the unknown, and are often afraid of the unknown. This inclination has led to the creation of mythology and many gods. To this date we are still carrying this ...
398 views

### Difference between “Social Roles” and “Social Groups”

The two terms "Social Roles" and "Social Groups" sound similar and I don't know if these terms are often just used interchangeably. Is there a specific difference between "Social Roles" and "Social ...
465 views

### How is motivation influenced by chance of reward?

Sometimes, I work on a project where there is a chance that the whole project will become irrelevant before it is finished. I have noticed that even though I believe that the risk of this happening is ...
742 views

### Can response time be incorporated into signal detection theory?

In signal detection theory, one typically uses "signal" and "no signal" responses to analyze the data (that is, the analysis is based on a discrete choice for each trial, effectively generating the ...
526 views

### What is the “static” in human vision called?

Sort of like a cheap digital Camera, the human eye has certain feedback that's perceived but doesn't actually exist in the real world; a little layer of Static that's especially noticeable in pitch ...
148 views

### Which statistical test should I use when there are multiple latent predictors and multiple latent outcomes?

Which statistical method should I use when Predicting organization commitment (composed of 3 latent variables) using the five factors of personality? Its a cross-sectional design with survey data. ...
1k views

### How is a young child able to learn language so easily?

It's a well known fact that the earlier children are exposed to languages the better, as young children have a better ability to learn new languages than adults. Why is this? At what age does a ...
421 views

### What is the current status of tetrachromacy in humans?

Tetrachromacy is a condition of having four colour channels. There is a hypothesis that some women posses 4 different types of cone cells (each with different opsin responsible for different ...
737 views

### Is learning to do a task automatically an example of intuition?

I'm looking for some examples to understand what people call their intuition at work when making their decisions. For example: We learn to type and then after some time we begin to type by ...
446 views

### Introductory resources on bayesian modeling for cognitive sciences

On Cross Validated there is a great question about best introductory books for bayesian statistics. Also, Jeromy Anglim blogged recently about use of JAGS, rjags, and Bayesian Modelling, with some ...
3k views

### How is the Stanford Prison Experiment connected to Conformity?

I am still not very clear with what the Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Zimbardo was trying to conclude about from the experiment. From Wikipedia, it says the conclusion was to: ...
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### How to assess participant awareness of experimental deception without inducing awareness?

I am designing a memory experiment with a deceptive critical trial, wherein an item is swapped without the participant's knowledge. What is the best way to determine if the participant has noticed ...
517 views

### How does posture affect cerebral blood flow?

This is a follow-up question to an answer on Quora: In the upright posture, venous outﬂow is considerably less pulsatile (57%) and occurs predominantly through the vertebral plexus, while in ...
349 views

### Behaviorist interpretations of decision field theory

Decision field theory is usually presented as a dynamic cognitive model of decision making. However, in its basic form, the theory seems to only be concerned with behavior (decisions) and stimuli ...
579 views

### What is the most complex artificial neural network created to date?

A few years ago I wrote a research paper for college on neural networks. At the time IBM's Blue Brain was the clear winner. Some rumor went around that they were close to emulating a brain the ...
599 views

### Free software to run questionnaire based experiments

I am looking for free software to build experiments that do not heavily rely on accurate timing (where I use PsychoPy and heard a lot of good things about OpenSesame) but more on an easy way to ...
109 views

### Combinatorial woes

I am interested in the creation of chunks (aka configural nodes) from smaller chunks and input features (only interested in System 1 cognition). Unitization studies (e.g. Goldstone (pdf)), suggest ...
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### What is the term for “What has been seen cannot be unseen” in cognitive sciences?

During a discussion with my officemate I told him that I read somewhere that the gas pillar in Carina nebula looks like a cat punching the dog; ever since then, every time my wallpaper slideshow ...
302 views

### Is positive self-talk beneficial for those with low self-esteem?

According to the paper Positive Self-Statements: Power for Some, Peril for Others by Wood (2009) positive self-talk is beneficial when the person has a reasonable level of self-esteem in the ...