# All Questions

282 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 ...
129 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 ...
265 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 ...
221 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 ...
121 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 ...
144 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 ...
72 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., ...
818 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 ...
52 views

### Have there been any studies into language development in the blind?

The title pretty much says it all. I'm looking for any studies or experiments into language development in those born blind. I'm interested as part of my investigations into AI on how language is ...
67 views

### Open magnetic resonance imaging datasets on psychosis?

Are there any open magnetic resonance imaging datasets of normal and healthy adults (as controls) and psychotic subjects? Such as ADNI for Alzheimer's or OASIS for aging.
66 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 ...
79 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 ...
294 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 ...
41 views

### What exactly is an astroglial calcium wave?

There are quite a few conflicting reports as to what stimulates them, how they propagate, whether they communicate intercellularly, and what they look like. The only consistent information I can ...
93 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 ...
71 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 ...
269 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 ...
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 ...
106 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 ...
555 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 ...
237 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 ...
56 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 ...
127 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 ...
83 views

### Does Wim Hof really consciously control his autonomic nervous system?

While there is no question about the validity of Wim Hof's abilities, I question some of the claims made about his ability. He is claimed to be able to consciously control certain aspects of his ...
495 views

### When a group of people laugh, people will instinctively look at the person they feel closest to in that group

Many people online seem to claim that: When a group of people laugh, people will instinctively look at the person they feel closest to in that group. You can find the claim in 31 Psychological ...
75 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 ...
117 views

### Has there been a neuroscientific explanation of the color phi phenomenon?

The color phi phenomenon is a perceptual illusion in the visual domain which was demonstrated in an experiment by Kolers and von Grunau (1976). The experiment is as follows. A sequence of coloured ...
112 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. ...
80 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 ...
128 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 ...
79 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 ...
47 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 ...
124 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 ...
105 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, ...
150 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 ...
184 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 ...
58 views

### Is intelligence (or mental ability) genetically transferred (inherited characteristic) from the parent to the offspring or is it an acquired trait?

The question is simple- whether our mental ability i.e. ability to acquire and store knowledge and comprehend and analyse the stored bits, an inherited trait (i.e. genetically transmitted from the ...
47 views

### Are there emotions that motivate pattern completion?

I have been studying musical "tension." Musical tension essentially refers to the "expectations" one builds up in a melody that are then "released" when a stimulus matching the expectation occurs. For ...
60 views

### Do children really show brand preference at age 2?

As I was reading a marketing textbook, I came across a paragraph that stated research has shown children as young as two can show brand preference (although I haven't yet searched for the source in ...
36 views

### Is it easier/faster to recognise digits or written words?

Is there any peer-reviewed evidence which suggests whether it is faster and/or easier for a native English speaker to recognise digits (1, 2, 3, 4) vs. full written English word equivalents (one, two, ...
41 views

### How long does it take to learn to cane travel?

How long does it take the average person (either sighted or blind) to learn to use the guide cane successfully for mobility purposes? Source: Lions. Because required training times will depend on ...
56 views

### Would courts sentence differently if we used a different numeral system?

I hear a lot in the media about people sentenced to go to jail for a number of years divisible by 10. Does our numeral system affect it? Would courts sentence the same if we counted - for example - ...
44 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 ...
73 views

### Do readers consider the passive voice as more authoritative?

In the middle of the last century (roughly from the 20s-70s) the passive voice dominated scientific writing; or should it be said that scientific writing was dominated by the passive voice? ...
53 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 ...
20 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 ...
40 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 ...
30 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. ...
90 views

### Why do men have greater variance than women in mental test scores?

Hedges and Nowell (1995) write that Sex differences in central tendency, variability, and numbers of high scores on mental tests have been extensively studied. Research has not always seemed ...

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