# Question
Title: How does a person who wears prism glasses through which the world is perceived upside-down experience the transition back to normal?
If someone wears prism glasses that turn the visual field upside down (see this video), this person will eventually adapt and see the world in its normal orientation again. Now my question is, how does the person wearing these glasses perceive the transition from upside-down back to normal after the prism glasses are taken off?

# Answer
**Short answer**
Based on the papers I've found I conclude that visual perceptions are not grossly altered after wearing prism glasses for extended periods. Instead, adaptation to prism glasses is mainly brought about by the adjustment of motor behavior to compensate for the shifted visual input.

**Background**
In a review on the topic of adaptation effects in response to wearing prism glasses, Harris concludes that it is the 'position sense' that adapts, and not the visual system (Harris, 1965). In the more recent literature the adaptation to the shifts, or reversals in vision brought about by prism glasses is indeed ascribed to the adaptation of the proprioceptive system, i.e., subjects adapt their motor behavior to compensate for the visual field shift (e.g., Richter *et al*. (2002), Hatada & Rosetti (2006)), or through shifts in their egocentric reference frame although subtle, short-lasting after-effects do seem to occur in the visual domain too (Hatada *et al*., 2006). Note that the experiments described above, human subjects were used and due to practical and ethical reasons, subjects did not wear the prism glasses longer than a few hours up to 1 week at max.

In animal studies, much longer prism-wearing times have been applied. In a study where monkeys wore left-right shifting prism goggles for 90 days, the ipsilateral visual cortex was found to be activated (Sugita *et al*., 1996). Normally, only the contralateral cortex is activated by ipsilateral stimuli. Hence, here in these experiments a definite neurophysiological correlate of visual adaptation was found. In four human subjects that wore similar goggles for about 36 days it was subsequently shown that also their ipsilateral cortices were activated, but only after 1 to 2 weeks (Miyauchi *et al*., 2004). However, the authors of this study don't report the after-effects, but they do conclude that:

> \[The\] changes observed \[in\] adaptation to left–right reversing may be associated with the process of \[...\] strategic **perceptual-motor control**. One of the most crucial actions for a subject with left–right reversed vision is controlling the hands \[...\]. For example, when the subjects wearing left–right reversing goggles pick up an object located in the left visual field, they have to use their right hand which is normally located in the right visual field and whose visual information is normally projected to left V1 (ipsilateral to the visual field in which the object appears). To perform such actions, the subjects \[...\] must change their **strategic (top-down) perceptual-motor control**. It is well-known that top-down visual imagery alone can activate primary visual cortex with a topographical representation \[...\]. In addition, there are several pieces of evidence which suggest that tactile and proprioceptive perception involve visual imagery and activate visual cortices \[...\]

Hence, even when neural adaptation occurs in the visual cortex, it is mainly motor, tactile and proprioceptive adaptations playing a role in adjusting to visual shifts and not so much gross changes in the visual field of view.

<sub>**References**
**-** Harris, *Psychological Review* (1965); **72**(6): 419-44
**-** Hatada *et al*., *Exp Brain Res* (2006); **173**(3): 415–24
**-** Hatada *et al*., *Exp Brain Res* (2006); **174**(1): 189–98
**-** Hatada & Rosetti, *Exp Brain Res* (2006); **169**(3): 417–26
**-** Miyauchi *et al*., *J Physiol - Paris* (2004); **98**: 207–19
**-** Richter *et al*., *Exp Brain Res* (2002); **144**(4): 445–57
**-** Sugita *et al*., *Nature* (1996); **380**: 523–6</sub>
> 5 votes

---
Tags: perception, vision, adaptation
---


# Question
Title: Are stress, frustration and existentialism considered cognitive distortions?
I was given a list of cognitive distortions and ways to 'untwist' them. However I noticed the 3 big things that I encounter often were not listed. Are these considered cognitive distortions?

# Answer
> 0 votes
When you say cognitive distortions, I assume you are talking about cognitive biases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_cognitive\_biases

Stress and frustration could be thought of as experiences. For example, some forms of stress are associated with the experience of negative emotions, fatigue, and so on. They could also influence cognitive biases. For example, fatigue can lead to a narrowing of focus. Anyway, the point is they are not cognitive biases per se.

Existentialism is a philosophy. Perhaps you are talking about experiencing existential dread or something like that. But that also is not a cognitive bias, in that it does not inherently provide a biased cognition about something.

---
Tags: cognitive-psychology, depression
---


# Question
Title: Can a person be brilliant even though slow at resolving problems?
Can a person be very intelligent, able to solve difficult problems if given enough time, yet really a slow thinker? Especially if nervous. Could such a slow thinking brilliant person get all the questions on an IQ test correct even though they were 20 minutes beyond the required end of the test?

Another way of putting this question is regarding the validity of time limits on IQ tests. How have these been arrived at? Have other (extended) time limits been tested? Have such time limits yielded different (higher) scores?

# Answer
An otherwise 'brilliant' person can be slow at solving certain problems, yes. And no, cognitive performance is not the same thing as running a marathon. A marathon measures your ability to reach a certain point in a certain amount of time. An intelligence test (or any academic test, for that matter) assesses to make sure that you have learned the material well enough that you can correctly answer a subset of questions pertaining to the material within a certain time constraint. The motivations here are completely different.

That being said, I would argue that the ability to answer questions rapidly has less to do with intelligence and more to do with executive functioning. For the sake of argument, I am going to use the word 'genius' to describe what you may otherwise be describing as a 'brilliant' person:

> A genius is a person who displays exceptionally superior intellectual ability, creativity, or originality, typically to a degree that is associated with the achievement of new advances in a domain of knowledge...There is no scientifically precise definition of genius, and the question of whether the notion itself has any real meaning has long been a subject of debate, although psychologists are converging on a definition that emphasizes creativity and eminent achievement.

Notice how this definition capitalizes on creativity, originality, and an understanding of a domain of knowledge to the point where he or she can advance the field forward. Notice how there is no mention of cognitive speed or processing speed outlined here. However, take a look at the definition of executive functioning:

> Executive functions (also known as cognitive control and supervisory attentional system) is an umbrella term for the management (regulation, control) of cognitive processes, including working memory, reasoning, task flexibility, and problem solving as well as planning and execution.

Sounds like executive functioning plays a large role in one's ability to rapidly solve problems. And this makes sense.

Consider "wonder drugs" (amphetamines, Modafinil, even caffeine) that typically boost cognitive performance and processing speed. One can take a drug to become more focused, and to increase their executive functioning. Amphetamines in particular (such as Vyvanse, Adderall, Ritalin) are drugs that are commonly administered to children and adults who struggle with ADHD -- a disorder caused by "significant problems with executive functions."  These drugs work by increasing norepinephrine and dopamine in the brain, thus temporarily boosting cognitive performance. Would you call a medicated adult with (ordinarily) poor executive functioning 'brilliant', as opposed to the unmedicated adult? To do so wouldn't make sense, unless we are to assume that one's intelligence is malleable based on the drugs that they take -- in which case, perhaps IQ tests (and achievement tests in general) are worthless.

I would reject the definition for 'intelligence' given earlier

> The ... capacity of the individual ... to deal effectively with his environment

because it can be used to refer to a multitude of things. The 'capacity of the individual to deal effectively with his environment' would more easily fit the stereotype of the salesman than that of the absentminded college professor. Take this description of Albert Einstein:

> \[Einstein\] was forgetful, could never find his keys and often seemed oblivious to his surroundings.

And take this description of Isaac Newton, taken from the Oxford Press:

> Quarrelsome and quirky, a disheveled recluse who ate little, slept less, and yet had an iron constitution, Isaac Newton rose from a virtually illiterate family to become one of the towering intellects of science.

None of these descriptions leave me with the impression that these otherwise-intelligent men had a knack for 'deal\[ing\] effectively with his environment'. Is the environment not external -- the antithesis of mental?
> 5 votes

# Answer
There are many definitions of intelligence. I find the one given by David Wechsler (1944) useful in the context of this question:

> The ... capacity of the individual ... to deal effectively with his environment

Finding a solution quickly is sometimes necessary if you want to deal with your environment effectively. Not all problems will wait for you to solve them slowly. Which is why the concept of intelligence usually includes a time component and a person solving the same problem slower is considered less intelligent.

"Brilliance" is not a psychological concept.

---

Source:

* Wechsler, D (1944). *The measurement of adult intelligence*. Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins.
> 9 votes

# Answer
Even though this is an old post, I'll post what I found online. I found the accepted answer to be missing something. For me, the definition of intelligence includes (even) more than either processing speed, or

> "creativity, originality, and an understanding of a domain of knowledge",

the points Sydney names. There's also the ability to understand difficult concepts with ease, for example.

So, I understood the question as "Are there people who understand difficult concepts very easily, but take longer than others to solve simpler problems / understand simpler concepts?" (While these others might not manage to understand the difficult concepts at all, or at least take much longer until they do).

I found only annectotal evidence that "brilliance" while being slow could be possible: \- In his post, Jonah Sinick writes that *"They referred me to a school psychologist, who found that I had exceptionally high reasoning abilities, but only average short term memory and processing speed:\[...\]"*

At least it seems that processing speed can be separated from other factors of intelligence:

* In their book "Information Processing Speed in Clinical Populations", J. DeLuca and J. Kalmar describe (in chapter 1, paragraph "Processing speed in the assessment of intelligence", ~p.12-14 - I could read it on google books), how they added another factor "processing speed" to the "Wechsler adult intelligence scale - III" because they found it to be an indepentent factor. (Other "indices" are verbal comprehension, perceptual organization, working memory. Don't know whether there are more.)
* In an article on childhood math skill development: *" Findings suggest that EC \[they mean 'executive capability'\] and processing speed are tightly intertwined in early childhood. As EC becomes progressively decoupled from processing speed with age, it begins to take on unique, discriminative importance for children's mathematics achievement."*

I'd say

1. Processing speed definitely is a part of intelligence (as other posts say).
2. It's not the only factor, and an IQ test should make it possible to measure other factors separately.

There's different IQ tests out there, I don't know how much they separate this factor from others.

---

**Edit:** Regarding the 'Wechsler adult intelligence scale' IQ test:

According to Wikipedia, in WAIS-III and WAIS-IV, there are only the mentioned four secondary indices. And WAIS-IV seems to separate a category not depending on neither working memory, nor processing speed; it's called "General Ability Index".
> 4 votes

---
Tags: intelligence, test
---


# Question
Title: Do the results of psychological studies change our behaviour?
This is a question that has been bugging me for a very long time.

Let me illustrate with a silly example.
Suppose that a study finds out that the majority of the population associate the number 1 with the colour blue (again, this is is a *very* silly example). Suppose this study becomes very popular and the result comes to be known to most people.
**How will this knowledge of the experiment change behaviour?**
Will the result still be the same after the study is known to the entire population?

**EDIT :**
I am not talking about the kind of results where we do not have influence on our behaviours, like our heart rate during a tense situation or how we react when our life is threatened. I am talking about experiments where we can make a conscious choice and is apparently "inconsequential" (so, nothing that poses harm to us).

**EDIT 2:**
//*New Example*//
The use of canned laughter in sitcoms -- Many of us by now have realised that laugh tracks are used in sitcoms to direct how the audience should react and make them think that what they are watching is funnier than it actually is (Example of Social Proof, which is nicely explained by Robert Cialdini). After I knew this, I actually found TV shows employing the technique to be less funny and in some cases, even annoying. (I assume that many people reacted the same way after finding out about it).
***So the study of this particular behaviour actually made me react in the opposite way that the TV show producers intended and how the study says I should be behaving. Thus, changing the results of the study.***

Are there other studies like this? How do we design experiments that are tolerant to this?

# Answer
> 5 votes
I do have to note this question is broad and opinion based, according to the stack conventions. Nonetheless, I think it's an important question, given that scientific publications may alter the behavior of people en mass and even generate entire movements that, *e.g.*, argue and campaign against vital medical interventions.

A notorious example being the **retracted** Lancet publication of the adverse effects of vaccination causing autism, based on **fraudulent** data (Rao & Andrade, 2011) by Wakefield (1998). This **unfortunate** paper has resulted in global anti-vaccine movements based on the **fictional assumption** that vaccination can cause autism.

<sub>**References**
**-** Rao & Andrade, *Indian J Psychiatry* (2011); **53**(2): 95–6
**-** Wakefield *et al*., *The Lancet* (**Retracted**)</sub>

---
Tags: cognitive-psychology, psychology, experiment-design, persuasion
---


# Question
Title: Paper showing that completing most psychological studies is less distressing than daily life
I once read a study that compared the level of distress of completing a psychological study to other activities in daily life (e.g., commuting to work; interacting with colleagues; watching tv; or something like that).

The paper is a good reference when you are applying for ethics approval.

Does anyone know the reference? Or perhaps there are a few such articles?

# Answer
> 2 votes
The article could be

How distressing is it to participate in medical research? A calibration study using an everyday events questionnaire.

Petrie, K. J., Faasse, K., Notman, T. A., & O'Carroll, R. (2013). *JRSM short reports*, 4, 1-7.

PDF available

---
Tags: reference-request, ethics
---


# Question
Title: Anorexia nervosa as an anxiety management tool
Talking to people with anorexia nervosa, I noticed that some of them have actually much bigger problems than their aforementioned condition.

In some cases it looked as if the person was spending daily an insane amount of time on food, having no time left to deal with other more serious issues in his life. Removing his anorexia, would leave him "helpless" against his real fear, so why would he want that? He would rather keep postponing facing his fear... indefinitely.

---

**Question:**

Are there any studies related to the above conditions being used by a person, as a way to divert his attention away from other events that are actually even more stressful?

---

**Note:**
I'm **not** implying that distraction is always the *only* (or even the main) reason these conditions appear; I'm simply wondering if they are *sometimes* used subconsciously as another anxiety management tool.

# Answer
If I'm understanding your question, you're wondering if anorexia nervosa is a symptom of other underlying problems in a person's life.

This is a current theory being supported by "Mental disorders as complex networks: An introduction and overview of a network approach to psychopathology" written by Nuijten et. al. The paper describes how instead of seeing a disorder as a single "latent variable" connecting all the symptoms, all the symptoms should just be considered as a network reinforcing themselves. This is demonstrated in the figure below taken from the paper:

For a discussion of the paper, see "Mental Disorders As Networks" by SlateStarCodex.
> 2 votes

---
Tags: cognitive-psychology, reference-request, anxiety
---


# Question
Title: What is the difference between facets and factors?
I am wondering whether there is a difference between factors and facets.

Concretely, I am doing a research about transformational leadership. My questionnaire has 8 factors which is based on a theory of transformational leadership consisting of 8 components (facets?). The questionnaire just copies the theory.

# Answer
> 2 votes
### Factors and facets

In personality trait research, traits are often conceptualised hierarchically. There is also a broad consensus that a small number of broad traits (typically the Big 5, but others argue for different numbers such as the HEXACO 6) explain personality quite well. The big 5 also goes by the name Five Factor Model. The terminology of "factor" is quite likely linked to the method of factor analysis often used for scale construction in this area.

Several popular personality tests measure traits at two-levels (e.g., NEO-PI-R, HEXACO-PI-R, IPIP, etc.). So for example, the NEO-PI-R is composed of five broad factors, each of which is composed of 6 narrower facets.

So in summary, there is a range of terminology that have similar meaning:

* broad traits, domains, factors
* narrow traits, facets

Another common terminology is that of scales and subscales.

On basic level, this is just convenient terminology for describing two levels of a hierarchy of measurement, particularly where the broader level is defined by the lower level.

For further discussion see:

Anglim, J., & Grant, S. L. (2014). Incremental criterion prediction of personality facets over factors: Obtaining unbiased estimates and confidence intervals. Journal of Research in Personality, 53, 148-157. https://osf.io/g8kbj/

### Your case of mapping a test onto a theory

In your case, you are mapping eight scales onto a theory that includes eight components. This doesn't have too much to do with the factor-facet distinction.

Perhaps the main issue is whether there is an overall scale (e.g., an overall leadership effectiveness scale, of which there are eight subscales). You could potentially call this the leadership effectiveness factor and call the eight elements "facets". But it might be more common to merely call the eight components "scales" or "subscales".

---
Tags: measurement, terminology, methodology, statistics, test
---


# Question
Title: What is the meaning of the peak polarity in EEG data?
I wish to define neuronal activities by analyzing the peaks of each channel in EEG signals. Some papers use the negative peaks as a measure of neuronal activity and others deploy the positive peaks. Which peak polarity should I use?

# Answer
**Short answer**
The peak polarity of an EEG is arbitrary.

**Background**
Positive and negative in an EEG measure is arbitrary. If you measure the EEG between two electrodes and you flip the wires, the polarity of the signal will reverse too.

Only when standard EEG montages are used, in which the active and reference electrodes are strictly defined, then signal polarity makes sense, but only because a certain convention is followed.

If you are interested in peak amplitudes - they are independent of polarity, as long as the peak latencies are defined and absolute values are reported.

If you are interested in peak latencies and wish to compare those with others, then you do need to be aware what polarity your signal has. If you find out the polarity is reversed due to whatever reason - multiply every sample simply with -1. Problem solved.
> 4 votes

---
Tags: neuroscience, eeg, electrophysiology, signal-processing
---


# Question
Title: Direction of electrical information flow in the brain (and output locations)
I am interested in the general electrical flow through the brain and found this very useful answer highlighting a good amount of it, but what I can't seem get any detailed visuals for on Google anywhere is where the outputs of the brain come from. (The one in the link is super simplified)

For example, where and how do the muscle outputs for eye come from after passing through the complex visual cortex(es). There are tons of visuals displaying the crossing inputs, but nothing for the outputs. Ideally, I would like to have clear visuals for all the output pathways.

Does the information processing happen slowly outwards toward the grey matter and at the point of the grey matter these outputs get combined into nerve pathways down the side of the brain or does the brains output appear to be travelling back parallel down along the inputs?

# Answer
As @AliceD pointed out in her comment, the concept of output of the brain is too broad. If you are interested in how eye movements are generated, I suggest you read about the frontal eye fields(FEF). This area of the prefrontal cortex is very closely related with the generation of eye movements, or saccades. However, its function is still not entirely clear. It participates in the generation of saccades, but also in the sensory processing and decision making.

Anatomically, the connections of the FEF are shown in the scholarpedia article I linked above, but I'll also copy it here.

Your question, however, seems to assume that the information in the brain has a definite bottom-up direction, which somewhat neglecks the fact that brain regions have abundant recurrent and top-down connections. This is part of the reason FEF is involved both in motor, perceptual and higher cognitive processing. Nevertheless, you should take a look at the motor cortex, that will give you some insight to which brain regions are associated to motor commands, i.e. outputs.
> 2 votes

---
Tags: neuroanatomy
---


# Question
Title: Are social phobia cases on rise, being the Internet and mobile phones with cameras the main cause for their rise?
That's an hypothesis I have, that I believe makes plenty of sense, anyway I haven't found any article about that, although it's not like my search has been exhaustive.

I mean, years ago, on the case you were caught doing something that society finds unusual, the worst thing that was likely going to happen to you were that some people around you, maybe a whole village if you lived in one a bit little, heard rumors about what you did and you had problems with that people around you. On some rare ocassions what you had done would get to the news and you will be highly exposed on the whole country, but it would be extremely strange than more than that would happen.

But now if you make something unusual, there are plenty of people that could record what you are doing and you cannot possibly be aware of everyone, and if you are caught and the video of you is uploaded, for example, to a good bunch of social networks, you are in danger of hundreds of millions of people watching what you have done.

So this looks as a good reason for an increase of social phobia cases.

Are there some studies that confirm my hypothesis?

Thanks.

# Answer
Studies have been done to see how technology can alleviate social phobia, by communication through the net. (Yen et al 2012)

Heavy use increases (general) anxiety: (Anxiety was measured using the Beck Anxiety Inventory.) "Logistic regression analyses indicated that heavy Internet use is associated with high anxiety; high cell-phone use is associated to being female, and having high anxiety and insomnia." (Jenaro et al, 2006) \*2 A replication of this study with a comparable population might answer your question.

Other studies have shown that "social phobia was associated with the risk for smartphone addiction in young people." (Darcin et al, 2016)

A study published 2009 sets the prevalence rates of social phobia at "in community samples of children and adolescents also vary considerably, ranging from 0.9 to 13.1% \[26\]. The highest rates have been noted in studies of older adolescents and young adults ", and sets the numbers for the whole population, quoting other articles, "3.9–13.7% in Western societies" (Gren-Landell et al).

The prevalence numbers seem to vary wildly depending on how the research has been done, as Furmark (2002) points out in his review of epidemiological studies from the 1980s onwards. - Doing this with current research would give more of an insight into your question.

So I'm sorry to say I couldn't, so far, find a study that specifically addresses your issue. :-(
> 3 votes

---
Tags: social-psychology, phobia
---


# Question
Title: Evidence for gender-based math ability differences?
What evidence and counter-evidence is there for mathematical ability for being correlated with gender? If there is a difference, how significant is it (mean vs. variance) and when does it start to become visible? Actual causes for this difference are secondary and outside the scope of this question (although still very valid paths of research and investigation). Also, to further narrow the scope of the question, let's focus on evidence based on Western cultures (Europe, USA, Canada).

The evidence I have so far is this blog post, which finds a correlation between gender and math scores on the GRE and SATs. I also seem to recall finding somewhere evidence that gender-based math differences start as early as first grade, but I can't find the link at this point.

I'm not expecting a conclusive answer, more of a quick summary of the state of the field.

# Answer
It is generally understood that girls develop a small to moderate deficit in math abilities, compared to boys, over the course of schooling, as measured by mean school grades or test scores (Hyde & Linn, 2006 give a number of .08 standard deviations in favor of men for mathematical problem solving on average, a larger effect favoring elementary school girls, and no difference for high school math; on the maths section of the SAT, girls score ~.3 SD below boys). Similarly, particularly math-heavy academic disciplines (such as physics, maths, computer science) feature a smaller proportion of women than other disciplines, although this effect is attenuated for some surprising cases, such as statistics, and present for some math-light degrees, such as philosophy. This effect is the stronger, the further advanced the position is (e.g., the ratio of female maths BAs is much higher than the ratio of female math PhDs).
All in all, across these various measures, women tend to score slightly worse than men, although not across the board, and extreme differences are only observable in comparatively rare and extreme contexts (e.g., math PhDs).

The variance ratio (that is, how much more men vary compared to women) is somewhere around 1.1 as given by Hyde, indicating that men show a bit, but not much more variance.

These findings concern data from the United States. Janet Hyde has published multiple *cross-national* meta-analyses on this topic, including:

Cross-National Patterns of Gender Differences in Mathematics: A Meta-Analysis

Gender, culture, and mathematics performance

Gender Similarities in Mathematics and Science

Her primary finding is the *culture dependence* of this gender gap. For example, she observes the gap not only varies with countries, but also interacts with, for example, gender equality (although see Fryer & Levitt, 2009). It is different for various ethnic groups within countries (e.g., amongst US Asians, women are somewhat more frequently top scorers). Furthermore, the effects are highly variable in time; for example, the ratio of female math PhDs hit an all-time low of 5% in the 1950s, was higher in the pre-war time, and has been on a steady upwards trend ever since.

Combining all of this evidence, it seems to me fair to say that there is currently, in Western countries in this time, somewhat stronger math performance by boys, but that there is no convincing evidence that this pattern is necessarily generalizable.
> 3 votes

# Answer
There is evidence much deeper than simply looking at grades. It should come as no surprise that male and female brains are different (for one, the female brain weighs 100 grams less, or so). Some key differences are that, in general:

1. Women learn to speak language earlier than boys, speak more than boys in general, have fewer speech problems and use both sides of the brain for language
2. Men exceed in visual spatial task, 3-dimensional cube folding, labyrinth path finding. Solving Rubik's cube blindfolded or playing chess blindfold, for example, should come very difficult for women.

None of these makes great difference in mathematics and in mathematics-based sciences.

It's a behavioral difference due to testosterone. The old experiment goes (at 6 weeks of age): give a baby a screen and some kind of rope. When the rope is pulled by the baby colorful images on the screen are changed(stimulus). On random the rope is made to stop working.

1. Typical boy behavior — gets angry, starts pulling with both hands, helping with the foot sometimes and eventually gives up and cry .
2. Typical girl behavior — immediately gives up and starts crying.

On average, girls don't like clinging onto a problem for too much time. They just give up. Furthermore, the median should be looked for it is known that boys have greater variability in almost every physical and behavioral characteristic, i.e., girls' scores are more clustered and boys; are more dispersed. So, I would expect that even in areas where women should have a natural advantage, the top of the field should be men.
> 0 votes

---
Tags: reference-request, mathematical-ability, gender
---


# Question
Title: Why I value celebrities opinion more than a person I have actually met?
I have been working on project with a person who is climate change activist, and after all those months I had a feeling he is on to something, but I was not convinced.

Now comes Leonardo DiCaprio with his National Geographic documentary and I am completely sold and have started to slowly participate in the climate change movement.

Why do I value celebrities opinion, a person I have never met, more than a person I have spent months together in meetings, pubs and even birthdays?

# Answer
> 1 votes
*My take* on this is because there are no other options. We have no previous emotional involvement, attachment or knowledge of them on a personal level.

We trust strangers on a daily basis. We get on a bus, which is driven by a stranger. We go out to eat food and that food is cooked by strangers. We also work for strangers (until we get to know them, better). Celebrities are paid, celebrities are smart. They build up reputation and we trust statistics more than just one example from our personal lives. Thousands of people know Leo. Millions. There are probably no public statistics on our friends or co-workers, people we work with or spend time with. We just go by *our* opinion.

---

When you meet someone and work with them, what does that relationship entail? ***Emotional involvement.*** You get to know them and form opinions. Things you *like* about them and things you don't *like*. You're listening to more than just a few conversations about a given topic.

If you're listening to a speech from a celebrity you know of and their opinion is to your liking, that's all you're hearing. You don't really know anything else about them to have any other options but to trust them.

> This is also very similar to why some people trust their therapist over their friend, even if what both of them say are similar. Sometimes, they aren't similar. We tend to trust what we're more objective towards. Who you're surrounded by makes a huge difference. They can be abusive, vulgar, rude. You're seeing more than just one side to them. You're only seeing one side of your therapist. The helpful, knowledgeable side.

If we spend enough time to form an emotional bond with a therapist or let's say someone we've never met, we could very well go back to square one. Not trusting them as much as another celebrity you're objective towards.

When we're listening to the opinion of someone we know, other emotional factors are involved. Our dislikes (and other opinions of them) influence our trust in them and their opinions or knowledge of a given topic.

It's about things being objective. What we don't know can't hurt us. In your case, you don't know much about Leo's personal life. You only know the opinions he shares. There's nothing else to go by and usually documentaries give you the best parts specified information. Nothing that sounds inaccurate, immoral, wrong or questionable.

---

**Helpful Sources**

---
Tags: social-psychology, decision-making
---


title: Sleep is God, Go Worship! How?

text:
# Question
Title: Sleep is God, Go Worship! How?
Jim Butcher once said that

> Sleep is God, Go Worship

However, Benjamin Franklin once said that

> there is plenty of time to sleep when you are dead

Thomas Edison echoed this when he stated

> sleeping was a "criminal waste of time"

All these peoples were legends. They must have said these statement in some context. It is scientifically proved that we must take at least 6 to 8 hours of sleep each night. I would like to ask stack exchange community, how would you interpret "sleep"? Do you really mean it?

# Answer
## Recommended amounts of sleep

Before I answer your main question, I would like to point out that your asseration that we need 6-8 hours of sleep each night is not quite accurate from what I have read.

The National Sleep Foundation in the US, released the results of a world-class study that took more than two years of research to complete – an update to our most-cited guidelines on how much sleep you really need at each age. You can read the research paper published in *Sleep Health*.

Basically, the required amount of sleep varies from person to person and the recommended amounts are different depending on the age of the person.

## Your main question: How can sleep be interpreted by other "legends"?

My opinion, and 3 others looking at the flags raised on this question as I edit, is that this question is off-topic for this site as it would lead to answers which would primarily be opinion based, such as the quotes which you provided.

* Jim Butcher's quote was from a work of fiction (Death Mask - #5 in a series called The Dresden Files).
* Benjamin Franklin's quote is his opinion on sleep
* Thomas Edison's quote is another opinion on sleep. ("Why sleep when you could use that time to be productive" is a possible interpretation on what he was trying to convey but that is only opinion. I don't know where this quote came from and I cannot answer for him.)

## Now for a more on-topic area on sleep - What is sleep?

Again, the National Sleep Foundation covers this.

> Sleep architecture follows a pattern of alternating REM (rapid eye movement) and NREM (non-rapid eye movement) sleep throughout a typical night in a cycle that repeats itself about every 90 minutes. What role does each state and stage of sleep play?
>
> ### NREM (75% of night):
>
> As we begin to fall asleep, we enter NREM sleep, which is composed of stages 1-4
>
> ### Stage 1
>
> * Between being awake and falling asleep
> * Light sleep
>
> ### Stage 2
>
> * Onset of sleep
> * Becoming disengaged from surroundings
> * Breathing and heart rate are regular
> * Body temperature drops (so sleeping in a cool room is helpful)
>
> ### Stages 3 and 4
>
> * Deepest and most restorative sleep
> * Blood pressure drops
> * Breathing becomes slower
> * Muscles are relaxed
> * Blood supply to muscles increases
> * Tissue growth and repair occurs
> * Energy is restored
> * Hormones are released, such as: Growth hormone, essential for growth and development, including muscle development
>
> ### REM (25% of night):
>
> First occurs about 90 minutes after falling asleep and recurs about every 90 minutes, getting longer later in the night * Provides energy to brain and body
> * Supports daytime performance
> * Brain is active and dreams occur
> * Eyes dart back and forth
> * Body becomes immobile and relaxed, as muscles are turned off
> 1 votes

---
Tags: cognitive-psychology, sleep, dreams
---


# Question
Title: Effect of time on emotion self-perception
When I participated in the study that led to "A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind" I answered questions on my phone that insisted that I answer as soon as I got the notification. This made me assume that there is a significant change in emotional perception as time passes, however I can't find any evidence of this. In other words, how is the experience of an emotion affected by the amount of time between it's experience and it's recollection? If this question is too broad, it can be narrowed down to pain and pleasure.

# Answer
As shown in the Wikipedia section "Memory of felt emotion" there are *many* ways that recollected emotion is significantly different than experienced emotion. From the section:

> Another study found that people's memories for how distressed they felt when they learned of the 9/11 terrorist attacks changed over time and moreover, were predicted by their current appraisals of the impact of the attacks (Levine et al., 2004). It appears that memories of past emotional responses are not always accurate, and can even be partially reconstructed based on their current appraisal of events. \[45\]
>
> Studies have shown that as episodic memory becomes less accessible over time, the reliance on semantic memory to remember past emotions increases. In one study Levine (2009)\[47\] primes of the cultural belief of women being more emotional than men had a greater effect on responses for older memories compared to new memories. The long term recall of emotions was more in line with the primed opinions, showing that long term recall of emotions was heavily influenced by current opinions.
>
> \[45\] Levine L.J. and Pizarro D.A. (2004) "Emotion and memory research: A grumpy overview" Social Cognition, Vol. 22, No. 5, 2004, pp.530-554
>
> \[47\] Levine; Lench, Heather; Safer, Martin (2009). "Functions of Remembering and Misremembering Emotion". Applied Cognitive Psychology. 23: 1059–1075.
> 1 votes

---
Tags: cognitive-psychology, emotion
---


# Question
Title: Negative emotions in individuals spreading to others
I am aware of the effect of positive emotions on others, but I am wondering about negative emotions. I am not talking about insults leading to negative emotions. I am talking about emotions like anger, frustration etc. in some leading to anger, frustration etc. in others.

Are there any studies which suggest that there is the ability for emotions such as anger and frustration to transfer and spread amongst others or lead to **other** emotions in others?

For example, can a group of people seeing one or more people getting frustrated about something lead to some or all in the observing group suffer from frustration or annoyance or other negative emotions?

## \**Update\**

I have found the answer to this question which was interesting, talking about **negative priors** (Beck, 1979; Huys, Daw, & Dayan, 2015) shaping your predictions about the world leading to more negative emotions.

What I am interested in is the possibility of negative emotions spreading amongst otherwise psychologically healthy people, just as positive emotions do. Although there is an interesting quote...

“Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.” ― Stanley Gordon West, Growing an Inch

# Answer
> 3 votes
I have found that there is a term which encompasses the phenomenon of both positive and negative emotions spreading from person to person and that is **Emotional Contagion**.

Hatfield et al. (1993) points out that emotions can be "caught" in several different ways and outlines 3 propositions.

1. **Mimicry**

> In conversation, people automatically and continually mimic and synchronise their movements with the facial expressions, voices, postures, movements and instrumental behaviours of other people.

2. **Feedback**

> Subjective emotional experience is affected, moment to moment, by the activation of and feedback from facial, vocal, postrural and movement mimicry.

3. **Contagion**

> Consequently, people tend, from moment, to "catch" other people's emotions.

Apparently, Gerald Schoenewolf said in Emotional contagion: Behavioral induction in individuals and groups. *Modern Psychoanalysis*; 15, 49-61, that Emotional Contagion is

> a process in which a person or group influences the emotions or behaviour of another person or group through the conscious or unconscious induction of emotion states and behavioral attitudes.

I don't have access to this article so I cannot confirm this.

Emotional contagion and empathy have an interesting relationship, in that they share similar characteristics, with the exception of the ability to differentiate between personal and pre-personal experiences, a process known as individuation. In *The Art of Loving*, social psychologist Erich Fromm explores these differences, suggesting that autonomy (self-regulation) is necessary for empathy, which is not found in emotional contagion.

> “The faculty to think objectively is *reason*; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of *humility*. To be objective, to use one's reason, is possible only if one has achieved an attitude of humility, if one has emerged from the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence which one has as a child. Love, being dependent on the relative absence of narcissism, requires the developement of humility, objectivity and reason.
>
> I must try to see the difference between *my* picture of a person and his behavior, as it is narcissistically distorted, and the person's reality as it exists regardless of my interests, needs and fears.” ― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

---
Tags: emotion, empathy
---


# Question
Title: How to generate networks for dynamic emotion modelling
In Figure 1 (shown below) of "Micro-Level Affect Dynamics in Psychopathology Viewed From Complex Dynamical System Theory" by Wichers et al, they claim that the emotional/affective dynamics of networks of mentally ill individuals are more highly connected than healthy controls. These highly connected networks are more sensitive to perturbations.

How are these networks generated? What are the meaning behind the `N` variables?

# Answer
> 1 votes
The networks are a stand-in for a variety of networks coming from various publications with roughly the same shape. For example, these networks from "Emotion-Network Density in Major Depressive Disorder" comparing the causal interaction between different states for those with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and Healthy Controls (CTL) in various affective situations:

As well as these networks from "Exploring the underlying structure of mental disorders: cross-diagnostic differences and similarities from a network perspective using both a top-down and a bottom-up approach" doing the same comparison:

The method for creating these networks is covered in detail in "A Network Approach to Psychopathology: New Insights into Clinical Longitudinal Data".

---
Tags: cognitive-psychology, emotion, clinical-psychology, dynamic-systems
---


# Question
Title: Relation between disposition personality in emotional response
In "Determinants of Emotion Duration and Underlying Psychological and Neural Mechanisms" by Verduyn et al, the authors discuss various dispositions that account for how long an emotional effect lasts:

* Resilience
* Depression level
* Extraversion and neuroticism

Extraversion and neuroticism are two components of the OCEAN model of personality. How were these two attributes determined to be most important when it comes to dealing with emotions? What is the relation between personality and disposition?

# Answer
Those two personality factors can be considered as a component of disposition. Two publications established that extraversion and neuroticism as being the most correlated with emotional processing.

In "Adding Liebe und Arbeit: The Full Five-Factor Model and Well-Being" from McCrae et al (1991), the authors correlated three measure of weel-being with 429 adult men and women.

> Consistent with previous rescarch, neuroticism was negatively, and extraversion was positively, related to well-being. Both agreeableness and conscientiousness were also significant independent predictors

In "The happy personality: a meta-analysis of 137 personality traits and subjective well-being" by DeNeve et al (1998) examine 137 personality constructs across 9 literature search strategies to find determine the effect on positive and negative affect.

> The traits most closely associated with SWB were repressive-defensiveness, trust, emotional stability, locus of control-chance, desire for control, hardiness, positive affectivity, private collective self-esteem, and tension. When personality traits were grouped according to the Big Five factors, Neuroticism was the strongest predictor of life satisfaction, happiness, and negative affect. Positive affect was predicted equally well by Extraversion and Agreeableness.
> 0 votes

---
Tags: cognitive-psychology, emotion, personality
---


# Question
Title: 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 of the human brain without resort to invasive methods of data collection. By analyzing very large volumes of data, from different –omics levels, we can identify principles of design that cannot emerge from smaller studies and that make it possible to extrapolate data collected in one species to others, including humans. This **Predictive Reverse Engineering** will allow us to predict how different patterns of gene expression produce neurons with different morphologies expressing different molecules, and different synaptic connection

(The Human Brain Project is a research project, established recently, which costs around €1 billion and is mostly funded by the European Union. The project's aim is to create a detailed computer simulation of the human brain for medical and neuroscientific research)

But there is no reference as to what this "Predictive Reverse Engineering" method actually is. I couldn't find any reference to it myself either. Can you please tell me about this or attach relevant links?

Thanks.

# Answer
I am unfamiliar with the term "Predictive Reverse Engineering" but your question seemed very interesting. Informally speaking, "Predictive Reverse Engineering" seems to denote trying to reverse engineer the brain's architecture in a way that is also able to predict brain function, which was not used in the process of constructing the brain's map. In other words, to try to construct a model of the brain from sparse data, which is able to predict the results of novel observations. Like I said, I'm no expert in the subject so I poked around a bit and here is what I found. I hope it helps.

The human brain project (HBP) has a list of key results and publications list. The most noteworthy of all seems to be Markram et al (2015), which is a huge paper that shows the results of a first draft reconstruction of the rat's somatosensory cortex. This paper has a very long suppplementary information section describing how they reconstructed neuronal morphologies from the experimental data.

The introduction of the above article cites many works that communicate how the anatomical and physiological properties of synaptic connections can be characterized (Cobb et al., 1997; Feldmeyer et al., 1999; Frick et al., 2008; Gupta et al., 2000; Mason et al., 1991; Reyes et al., 1998; Thomson et al., 1993). It also lists some methods used to map pre and postsynaptic neurons for individual neurons, such as: retrograde and anterograde tracers and trans-synaptic viral vectors, imaging with array tomography, and saturated reconstruction with electron microscopy. The references they cite for these methods are: Boyd and Matsubara, 1991; Callaway, 2008; Glenn et al., 1982; Kasthuri et al., 2015; Killackey et al., 1983; Micheva and Smith, 2007; Micheva et al., 2010; Wickersham et al., 2007.

The methods listed above by no way map the entire somatosensory cortex. They gather data from a sparse locations and Markram et al present a computational method to reconstruct the entire microcircuitry, i.e. reverse engineer the somatosensory cortex from sparse observations. They show that they are able to cross validate their algorithmic approach with the data and also account for new experimental observations.

Another paper that you could find interesting is Frackowiak and Markram (2015), "The future of human cerebral cartography: a novel approach", which is a perspectives article on how the brain can be cartographically mapped to understand function.
> 3 votes

---
Tags: computational-modeling
---


# Question
Title: Is there any explanation of how the human brain calculates arithmetical problems?
It is true that the brain greatly outperforms the calculator, but it is apparent that humans make mistakes even with simple math problems, and take longer to answer, whilst the calculator just runs a bunch of bits through logic gates and pops out a correct result almost instantaneously.

Considering the above statement, it seems apparent that the human mind takes a completely different approach to arithmetic problems than the calculator.

Has there been any research that at least provides a general idea of the brain's approach?

# Answer
> 1 votes
What I know is that there is evidence that the brain treats arithmetics very similarly as language. I also know that there is a cortical area more akin to encoding the sense of numerosity, which could be accessed while performing arithmetic calculations. However, I am no expert in the area and only know of some works done by some colleagues that I'll link here.

1. Eye gaze reveals a fast, parallel extraction of the syntax of arithmetic formulas
2. When order matters: Last-come first-served effect in sequential arithmetic operations
3. The cortical representation of simple mathematical expressions

If you are interested, you should look at Stanislas Dehaene's work. He has many papers on how the brain does math and how it also is able to naturally encode numbers.

---
Tags: cognitive-psychology
---


# Question
Title: Length of neuro-physiological signals of emotion compared to feeling time
In "Determinants of Emotion Duration and Underlying Psychological and Neural Mechanisms" by Verduyn et al. discuss how certain physiological signals are outlasted by actual feelings:

> In particular, whereas the duration of expressive (e.g., facial expression; \[1\]), and (neuro)physiological components (e.g., cardiovascular recovery; \[2\]) seems to rarely exceed a few minutes, feelings and associated cognitions may persist for hours or longer (e.g., \[3\], \[4\]).

Is this true for all external physiological signals including Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) and Electromyography (EMG)? I would find this surprising given that there is evidence of the central nervous system being related relating physical to social pain, as shown in "Acetaminophen Reduces Social Pain: Behavioral and Neural Evidence" Dewall et al., so I would expect some external evidence of this physical pain.

---

\[1\] Ekman, Paul, and Wallace V. Friesen. "Felt, false, and miserable smiles." Journal of nonverbal behavior 6.4 (1982): 238-252.

\[2\] L. Fredrickson, Barbara, and Robert W. Levenson. "Positive emotions speed recovery from the cardiovascular sequelae of negative emotions." Cognition & emotion 12.2 (1998): 191-220.

\[3\] Nolen-Hoeksema, Susan, and Jannay Morrow. "Effects of rumination and distraction on naturally occurring depressed mood." Cognition & Emotion 7.6 (1993): 561-570.

\[4\] Verduyn, Philippe, Iven Van Mechelen, and Francis Tuerlinckx. "The relation between event processing and the duration of emotional experience." Emotion 11.1 (2011): 20.

# Answer
In "Simultaneous acquisition of corrugator electromyography and functional magnetic resonance imaging: A new method for objectively measuring affect and neural activity concurrently" Aaron et al. use face EMG to measure emotional reaction to photos. As shown in the figure below, the response only lasts a few seconds:

Getting a GSR response is more complicated due to the noise in the reading. In "Time-series analysis for rapid event-related skin conductance responses" by Bach et al., the authors figure out a mathematical approach for figuring out the event-related response. Both via a smoothed fitted gamma distribution and PCA component analysis are used below:

Both response measures seem to return to reference levels after 30 minutes.
> 1 votes

---
Tags: cognitive-neuroscience, emotion, neurophysiology
---


title: Measuring emotion

text:
# Question
Title: Measuring emotion
I'm doing a quasi-experiment for an assignment, and the dependent variable is emotional response. FMRI is not a feasible option, so is there another good and reliable way to measure emotion without using FMRI? I'd appreciate your suggestions for other instruments.

# Answer
You can simply use a questionnaire based measurement scale. I recommend the PANAS scale by Watson, Clark, and Tellegen (1988), which has extensive support in literature. It is a twenty-item questionnaire, utilising 5-point likert scales, that consolidates into two scales: positive, and negative affect.

> In recent research, two broad, general factors--typically labeled Positive Affect (PA) and Negative Affect (NA)--have emerged reliably as the dominant dimensions of emotional experience. These factors have been identified in both intra- and interindividual analyses, and they emerge consistently across diverse descriptor sets, time frames, response formats, languages, and cultures (Clark, 2015).

The measure has cross-cultural support, unlike most measures of state based affect.

*Personal note.* I use this measure in most of my experiments as its quick and easy to understand for participants, and is easy to respond to. I also regularly find effects with it, even if its not what I was expecting. While it is reductionist in reducing affect into two scales, this actually makes it stronger at picking up change in affect generally.

**References**

Watson, D., Clark, L. A., & Tellegen, A. (1988). Development and Validation of Brief Measures of Positive and Negative Affect: The PANAS Scales. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(6), 1063–1070.

Crawford, J. R., & Henry, J. D. (2004). The Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS): Construct validity, measurement properties and normative data in a large non‐clinical sample. British Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Clark, D. W. A. L. A. (2015). The PANAS-X: Manual for the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule - Expanded Form, 1–28.

Thompson, E. R. (2007). Development and Validation of an Internationally Reliable Short-Form of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS). Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 38(2), 227–242. http://doi.org/10.1177/0022022106297301
> 1 votes

---
Tags: emotion, methodology, experimental-psychology, psychology, reproducible-research
---


# Question
Title: Why do those with viral infections feel better after wrongly taking antibiotics?
Though I'm unversed in science, I accept and understand that bacteria differ from viruses; so antibiotics don't help in viral infections. Regardless, because older family members still allege that antibiotics have mitigated their colds, can psychology explain their misbelief?

They claim that within a day of taking antibiotics, their ability to speak returns and their sore throats are soothed. I can attest to this improvement; they do feel better. I'm also unversed in psychology, but can some placebo effect (again, NOT the antibiotics themselves) truly contrive such genuine relief?

# Answer
> 7 votes
Placebo effect is not the only explanation, although it can be a large component.

To be clear: Neither of the explanations below are reasons to use antibiotics for infections not due to bacteria. They do illustrate anchoring. Just because we call a drug an antibiotic and first note its effects to be killing bacteria does not forbid that drug from having other effects.

**Antibiotics are anti-inflammatory**

Bacterial and viral infections both induce an innate immune response, which includes the release of pro-inflammatory cytokines. Antibiotics can provide symptomatic relief by inhibiting the release of those cytokines, decreasing inflammation.

**Bacterial super infections**

The risk of a bacterial infection jumps during and shorty after a viral infection. Children, for example, are more likely to get strep throat after the flu. If the patient is unaware of two infections, taking an antibiotic will appear to treat the viral infection. It is, in reality, treating the bacterial rider.

# Answer
> 4 votes
They might also just be getting better. The immune system could fight off the cold shortly after the antibiotics are taken, and they are misattributing the causality of getting better to the drugs instead of the immune system. People are prone to make errors in causal judgment of this kind.

# Answer
> -2 votes
Pretty much, for the same reason you're told to use rubbing alcohol to clean open cuts/sores. When you have a quite exposed inflamed area (e.g., lesions in sore throat), viruses are not the only things that can attack or lead to more inflammation. Antibiotics may not solve the "virus" problem, but they lighten the load as far as handling all of the innumerable other things that will gladly (opportunistically) attack the weakened tissue. It's not uncommon for people to get "secondary infections" after fighting off the primary or first one(s).

However, due to fears of evolving resistant strains of bacteria from antibiotic use, antibiotics are generally restricted to prescription-only in the united states. It's sort of a, "You'll suffer more, but for the greater good" philosophy.

---
Tags: perception
---


# Question
Title: How long does it take to decide for an multiple choice option with increasing number of choices?
I am trying to estimate the duration of an empirical experiment. In that experiment, the participant has to progress through as many trials as possible, and every trial is a simple multiple choice question like `Which color do you like more? Red, Blue or Green`. The experiment should last 30 minutes, and one goal is that the participant has given as much feedback as possible. Feedback is every choice that has been displayed, not only those choices the participant decided for in every particular trial.

Obviously, the participant should evaluate every choice available in a trial, and therefore time to answer should increase. However, I assume that this is not linearly correlated.

I.e. is there some heuristic available that enables me to extrapolate from `time needed to answer a question with two choices` to `time needed to answer a question with 20 choices`?

# Answer
A starting point is Hick's Law: As noted in the URL, the visual complexity of the choice space may be important independent of the informational complexity of the question options
> 2 votes

# Answer
The answer time as function of the number of choices will theoretically follow a marginal decreasing convex function. There is a constant time dependent on the complexity of the question, and then a variable time dependent on the number of multiple options. I believe that in order to derive the exact functional form of this function you must make some experiments and then adjust it to the specific response times you get from your sample
> 1 votes

---
Tags: measurement, decision-making
---


# Question
Title: How can I recognize if a person is good subject for hypnosis?
Which behavior/personality traits should I look for?

# Answer
Despite quite of lot of research looking for personality correlates of hypnotisability no very clear links have been found. There is evidence of weak associations between hypnotisability and *absorption* (the capacity to direct a great deal of attention to a narrow range of stimuli, such as getting caught up in film or book) and also of associations between hypnotisability and *fantasy-proneness* (the tendency to engage in imaginative activity) - but neither of these characteristics has much practical predictive value.

Instead, in scientific hypnosis, rather than using indirect personality measure to identify hypnotisable participants, researchers use measures specifically designed to measure hypnotisability. The most common measures are the Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotisability and the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale. Both of these are behavioural measures that consist of an induction followed series of simple hypnotic suggestions (e.g., your arm will heavy). Following the suggestions participants are scored as passing or failing each suggestion based on whether they meet a specific criteria (i.e., did they drop their arm more than 6 inches). The more items they pass, the higher their hypnotisability.

So in summary: personality cannot reliably predict hypnotisability. To tell if someone is susceptible, the best way is to see how they respond to hypnotic items.
> 5 votes

# Answer
Instead of looking for personality traits, we can conduct some explicit visualization tests:

* make two fists, bring hands together making thumbs and knuckles touching itselves, extend index fingers, pick any spot and focus attention on it, breathe and exhale slowly and deeply three times and close eyes, imagine that tips of fingers are magnetized and are being drawn closer and closer together and magnetic attraction is growing stronger and stronger until soon they actually touch
* extend both of the arms straight out that the palms of hands are facing each other and thumbs pointing to the ceiling, turn left hand palm to the ceiling, take spot at thumb on right hand, breathe and exhale slowly and deeply three times and close eyes, imagine that there is a thick, heavy book in the palm of left hand causing the hand to feel heavier and heavier, being pushed all the way down; imagine a string tied around right wrist, string connected to giant balloon filled with helium gas gently drawing arm higher and higher into the air so soon arm will be pointing straight up into the air

Hypnotists always look for vesiculated motion - not a smooth motion, but tugged and jerked one.

Anthony Galie - https://youtu.be/I2EhK9itRME?t=12m47s
David Lion - https://www.facebook.com/lionismtv/videos/1182427528493167/
> 0 votes

---
Tags: personality, behavior, hypnosis
---


# Question
Title: Alternatives to "Honest Signals" theory of non-semantic communication
# Intro

In "Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World" and the related publications "Understanding 'Honest Signals' in Business" and "Social Dynamics: Signals and Behavior", Alex Petland puts forth the idea that non-semantic communication (communication we do without explicitly representing thoughts using words/drawings, such as our gestures or aspects of our voice) falls into the following four types.

# Types of Non-Semantic Communication

## 1. Consistency/Variance/Stress/Emphasis

Jerky, uneven motions indicate many different thoughts indicating openness to influence. Consistent emphasis and timing indicates mental focus.

## 2. Mimicry/Mirroring/Imitation

How much the social patterns of each participant match. Correlates with trust. Verbally this is measured by sub-second utterances ("Uh-huh") and exchanges built on these utterances ("OK?", "OK!", "Done?", "Yup.").

## 3. Engagement/Influence

The amount one forces or cedes their social patterns to another. Could also be considered as who's driving the conversation.

## 4. Activity level

Describes how much energy in general is being expended in the interaction. Verbally, this can be considered by the ratio of silence to exclamations.

He then applies these four concepts to analyse various scenarios (speed dating, negotiation) and demonstrates their predictive power.

# Question

Do other theories or frameworks exist with an alternative interpretation of non-semantic communication while still having the same predictive power?

# Answer
A related theory of latent dimensions of emotional expression is Affect Control Theory (ACT), which can be broken into four separate dimensions in "The World of Emotions Is Not Two-Dimensional" by Fontaine et al. Three of these dimensions map easily onto Honest Signals. This is shown in the table below:

The mismatching dimensions of ACT and Honest Signals are Valence/Pleasantness and Mimicry. This makes sense since ACT is more focused on the expression and perception of emotions, whereas Honest Signals is more about the co-operation of two individuals. In other words, when two people are interacting, it's more important if one person is responding to that other person's emotions than what that emotion is. This is interestingly confirmed in Non-Violent Communication, which establishes that mirroring an emotion must be done before the root cause of that emotion can be addressed.
> 0 votes

---
Tags: social-psychology, reference-request
---


# Question
Title: Why do some memories stick out more than others?
I have noticed this in myself and in many autobiographies as well. Some memories tend to stick out really well even though there appears to be nothing special about them. For example, I vividly remember walking into my babysitter's house once when I was a child. There was nothing special about that day from any other and yet I can remember it much better than some more intense memories I've had of getting hurt or being really happy. In books as well, authors often recount plain memories that one wouldn't expect to stick out. Is there some other factor(than our emotional state at the time) that is involved in making some memories more memorable?

# Answer
First, whenever talking about memory, it helps to be specific. Memory is, somewhat controversially, categorized in a number of different ways.

I'll take the liberty of assuming that you are specifically referring to episodic memory. Given your examples, we might even call it autobiographical episodic memory.

Episodic memory is special in that it is a highly multimodal kind of memory. It's the kind of memory involved in "mental time travel", or the ability to retrieve a memory over many sensory domains and "relive" it.

As such, there's a lot we don't know about why some of these memories are encoded more strongly than others. This is especially the case for events that we don't remember paying particular attention to, like walking to your babysitter's house.

It could be, as you mentioned, that the emotional state associated with that event is strong. Or, it could be that there's some combination of sensory inputs (sight, smell, taste, etc) that affect our bottom-up attention and are involved with being able to remember the event (Cabeza, 2008). It could also be that particular dynamic brain states are simply more "friendly" to encoding these memories (Watrous 2014), and your brain may have been in such a state at the time.

It's a very open question. If interested in this kind of memory, I would recommend reading Elements of Episodic Memory (Tulving 1983).

References:

Cabeza, R. Role of posterior parietal regions in episodic memory retrieval: the dual attentional processes hypothesis. Neuropsychologia 46, 1813–1827 (2008).

Watrous, A.J., Ekstrom, A.D. The spectro-contextual encoding and retrieval theory of episodic memory. Front Hum Neurosci, 8 (2014)
> 7 votes

---
Tags: long-term-memory
---


# Question
Title: Pros and Cons of PsychoPy for designing psychological experiments?
What are the advantages of using PsychoPy for making an experiment (beyond the fact that it is free and open source)? I do not use psychophysics stimuli (no Gabor for instance); my stimuli are static images or text. Compared to E-Prime for example, how easy is it to set up a basic RT experiment?

# Answer
I highly recommend PsychoPy over E-prime. Why?

* Keeping track of who has the e-prime dongle is annoying.
* Students learn it more easily (see data below).
* E-prime uses visual basic (boo) and PsychoPy uses Python (yay!).
* PsychoPy easily integrates with R, matlab, and HTML.
* Everyone is doing it... (see data).

Some folks at UCSD did a survey in summer/fall 2014 asking researchers for their opinions. Here is a summary of the findings.
> 6 votes

---
Tags: decision-making, software
---


# Question
Title: People with dead nerves cell, can they feel pain/emotions?
Exactly what the title said, can they feel love/sad/hurt/disgust/fear/etc, emotions, after their neurons are dead? Also are there specific nerves for each emotion that transmits emotion? So let's say I lose some of my neurons not all, I will still feel all emotions right? I wont feel emotions until they're all gone, correct?

# Answer
In the limit, if all your cells are dead, well, you won't feel anything. For the rest, it is both a question of quantity and their relations in a network of cells. One individual cell, in a large array of neurons, has very little influence on the overall behavior of the network. So remove one, you won't notice anything. Remove an important proportion of the cells, and emotions (or anything that is being processed by these cells) will degrade. Some have proposed that degradation of "performance" is "graceful", although this is not a proven fact. Past a critical number of destruction, plausibly, the system will just make erratic behavior (or here, non-sense emotions, whatever it might look like).

Some have also argued that non-nervous cells play a role in some of our cognition. So just destroying neurons may not be the whole story.
> 1 votes

---
Tags: neuroscience, emotion
---


# Question
Title: What are the advantages of 2AFC in a psychophysical discrimination task?
As far as I understand. In the task of Two alternative forced choice (2AFC), given two possible stimuli, $S1$ or $S2$, the subject has to decide weather he\she (it) saw the sequence $(S1,S2)$ or the sequence $(S2,S1)$.

My question is, what are the advantages of this method over the simple one, in which the subject has to decide weather he saw the stimulus $S1$ or stimulus $S2$.

# Answer
> 6 votes
**What makes a task a two alternative forced choice task?**

I am beginning my answer with this question because there is a general misconception about what 2AFC really means. Many people believe that 2AFC refers to any task where subjects are asked to select one of two options (yes/no, old/new, bright/dim). *However* what defines it instead is that there are two stimuli presented on each trial.

Your definition can be thought of as an example of a interval-2AFC (AKA temporal-2AFC), but your example is not a typical 2AFC paradigm. It is true that both s1 and s2 are presented prior to the decision, however, typically (in my experience) subjects only respond about one of the stimuli (like my examples in the figure above). That said, the important distinction is that in a true 2AFC task, subjects are presented with two stimuli per trial. Whenever subjects are judging a single stimulus per trial it is considered a discrimination task or a detection task (e.g., judging the direction of motion in a random dot kinematogram).

**Pros and Cons of Detection and 2AFC Tasks**

The most cited reason for using the 2AFC procedure is that it is unbiased. For example, in my gender discrimination task (presented in the leftmost panel of the figure), a participant could be biased to respond male more so than female. But in the 2AFC version of the task, the participant is choosing a spatial location (left/right) or an interval (1st or 2nd), so any bias they have about gender is eliminated from the decision. If bias is reduced or eliminated it has the added benefit of rendering assumptions necessary for signal detection models obsolete (e.g., that underlying distributions are gaussian).

A second reason for using 2AFC is that there is a performance enhancement resulting from the fact that participants are provided with more information on each trial. That is, in one case you are presented with a single face and must decide which distribution it comes from, which is harder than being presented with one face from each distribution and having to judge which face belongs to the target distribution.

As for the cons, the aforementioned pros may not be true at all. For that discussion I point you to this 2008 paper by Yeshurun, Carrasco, & Maloney.

Ultimately the better procedure will depend on what your question is and what assumptions you are or are not willing to make.

---
Tags: cognitive-psychology, cognitive-neuroscience, experimental-psychology, theoretical-neuroscience, psychophysics
---


# Question
Title: Where to post online psychology studies for participant recruitment?
A common challenge when running psychological studies is getting enough participants. Of course, there are many general strategies for recruiting participants, but I was specifically interested in forums and web pages that are specifically designed for posting links about online psychological studies.

For a given forum, are there any rules about what can be posted? is there any indication of the likely response rate?

# Answer
### Sites:

* The **social psychology network** has a page for posting online social psychology studies. There are a range of requirements. In particular, it needs to be closely related to social or personality psychology.
* **SampleSize Subreddit** is a community dedicated to completing surveys. They like it when results will be provided at study completion. It has close to 10,000 subscribers at time of posting. I have also seen posts to other subreddits such as the psych subreddit. However, such forums do not always react positively to such postings. If there is particular alignment between the topic and the reddit forum, then there is more likely to be a positive response.
* **Psychology Research on the Net** is a site maintained by Dr John H. Krantz at Hanover College. It lists a lot of different studies.
* **Online Psychology Research UK** contains several hundred studies and is maintained by Dr Kathryn Gardner from University of Central Lancashire.
* **PsychStudies** is maintained by Andrew Thomas from Swansea University.
* Psych Forums has a section for posting studies to a section of their forum. However, they do require some form of payment for posting.

### General observations

* Most of these forums require that you have ethics clearance.

### Other strategies

* As @lmjohns3 mentions Mechanical Turk is a more general strategy
* http://beta.cognilab.com/ looks like it might try to make the process of using Mechanical Turk simpler
* Many general purpose forums on the internet have an "off-topic" section, which can be effective if the topic of the study is aligned with the topic of the forum. In particular, I have heard about people getting very large samples when posting research surveys to appropriately themed SubReddits.
> 15 votes

# Answer
In Germany, most students and many researchers conduct their online surveys using the portals soscisurvey.de and unipark.info. Soscisurvey.de includes a so-called "panel", a pool of currently more than 100.000 persons interested in partaking in surveys. To use the panel, you do not have to host your survey on soscisurvey.de, but you must apply a month in advance and comply with the conditions for use (the panel and its members are German). There is an English language conference poster describing the panel.

I know that this answer is restricted to Germany, but maybe something similar exists for other countries and it will give you an idea for your search.
> 9 votes

# Answer
After I had finished writing my master's thesis in 2015, I decided to (try to) tackle the problem of small sample sizes with a new approach. The goal was to develop a website that allows everyone to post their empirical study (online survey or experiment) and to find additional participants based on the principle of voluntary and fair mutual support.

The project has turned into a small start-up called SurveyCircle and the website www.surveycircle.com. The platform was recently launched in 9 English speaking countries. The usage is free and you can see all current studies without even signing up.
> 5 votes

# Answer
This depends heavily on what sort of study you are trying to do, but I know of a number of cognitive science and computational linguistics studies in the past several years that have used Amazon's Mechanical Turk to run subjects online.

As an example from behavioral economics, see Paolacci, Chandler, and Ipeirotis, "Running experiments on Mechanical Turk", Judgment and Decision Making, vol 5, no 5, 2010: http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/31983/jdm10630a%255B1%255D.pdf
> 3 votes

# Answer
> Psych Forums has a section for posting studies to a section of their forum. However, they do require some form of payment for posting.

In fact it's not exact. As explained here : http://www.psychforums.com/surveys-studies/topic44450.html if you are a "professor/researcher/student in a university/college/institute/faculty of psychology" it's entirely free and you get your links somehow included in specific forums so you have exact targeted audience for your studies.

Note that psych forums has more than 125'000 members, hundreds of forums and gets about 40'000 visitors a day so it's kind of ideal if you have any research to achieve.
> 3 votes

# Answer
In my opinion, Psychforums.com is by far the best place to post online studies, but your school/university needs to establish a partnership with them first. Best is to speak with your professor or someone responsible for your Psychology department in order to have that partnership in place, which is in fact really easy (see the post before). Once done, all the students/researchers/professors of your school will be able to post there, so it's not on a per-study basis. Also, your study can be exposed in 3 specific forums.

The problem with the other places is that it's focusing on online studies, so only people searching specifically for online studies will found them, and you also only get participants interested in cash reward, which I suspect change results, as it drags in people that might not be interested in your online study at all. On Psychforums you can have very specific targeted audience as well as a very general audience depending on which forum you ask to be exposed to, and those participants are not coming to Psychforums initially to participate in a study. Of course it depends on your study, but in my personal experience, I got more than 50 participants in a week, while all the other places I've posted brought me less than 5 participants.
> 3 votes

# Answer
A relatively new site for subject recruitment online is Prolific Academic. It is a Mechanical Turk competitor targeted at the academic market. It offers some features that mturk doesn't that may be useful for researchers, such as more in depth pre-screening and demographics information. A potential negative of the site is that they currently require a minimum payment rate of $7.50/hour, which is more expensive than the typical Turk rate.
> 3 votes

---
Tags: methodology, internet, sampling
---


# Question
Title: Is love from families a necessity for children to form normal relationship?
Some human skills need specific input during childhood to develop, such as language skills. Is the ability to love one of them? I.e., does the formulation of intimate relationship with partner (or any other relationship, like with kids or friends) require the input of love from family members during childhood?

Related research can be, like, can victims of domestic violence form normal and long-lasting relationships when they grow up? Or any dataset/survey/study on similar focus?

# Answer
> 0 votes
not being an expert in developmental psychology i cant give precise information but i have recently been listen several of "the great courses" on human development and personality.

i think the consensus of modern (and a large extent of more "vintage" research) would support the idea that we need affection and the security that having a relationship with caregiver provides. (bowlbys monkeys etc). any diusruption to this kind of input will have an affect on development. i did read an interesting study (i think it was an Italian university) on the development of psychopathic traits in abused children, so i think its probably safe to say that the trend certainly lies in the direction that says forming relationships needs some reciprocal affection.

i wouldnt go as far as to say that authoritarian parents = less love-capable offspring, people are to complex for such a basic interpretation. there is also the issue of CBT and other treatments in helping to develop these bonds. i think most parents would probably agree that they didnt really know as much about love as they thought until they had children to care for.

---
Tags: social-psychology, developmental-psychology
---


# Question
Title: Is there a lot of redundancy in written and spoken language?
I read years ago in a pop science book that written and spoken language can be shown to have a high level of redundancy. The speculation was that this served to allow error correction because language is encountered in noisy environments and understanding has a high survival value. The figure I remember is that if 35% of the information remains an attentive listener or reader can still make out the message. This has become a cherished notion in my world view as an indicator that language and human endeavor contains complexity we are not consciously aware of.

**I am looking for a knowledgeable confirmation of the idea that spoken or written language contains this redundancy.** An impolite smack down due to unexamined confirmation bias is always welcome as well.

# Answer
It seems that for written English, the figure is 50%.

From pages 27 to 28 of *The making of cognitive science: Essays in honor of George A. Miller* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)

> *Estimates of redundancy*. Shannon (1948, 1951) had himself estimated the redundancy of printed English to be about 50 percent. He had used a technique in which a subject was given a passage of text and then required to guess the next letter until the correct response (i.e., that corresponding to the original text) was given. Redundancy was calculated from the distribution of the numbers of guesses required. Garner and Carson (1960) \[...\] also estimated the redundancy of printed English to be about 50 percent. Newman and Gerstman (1952) \[...\] estimated redundancy to be 52 percent.
>
> *Uses of redundancy*. \[...\] Chapanis (1954) and Miller and Friedman (1957) both showed that when text was mutilated by deleting different percentages of letters, subjects were able to restore the missing letters with a high degree of accuracy. Such restoration is possible because of redundancy, so these experiments showed that redundancy was useful to humans.
>
> \[...\]
>
> In summary, printed English is redundant, and thus constrained, both in letter sequences within words and in sequences of words themselves. This redundancy is known to humans, who can use it to reconstruct mutilated text and to recognize and learn words and sequences of words that reflect varying degrees of this constraint. \[...\]

From page 1086 of *A new kind of science* by Stephen Wolfram (Wolfram Media, Inc., 2002):

> \[...\] English text typically remains intelligible until about half its characters have been deleted, indicating that it has a redundancy of around 0.5. Most other languages have slightly higher redundancies, making documents in those languages slightly longer than their counterparts in English.
> 9 votes

# Answer
The fact that you can tell when I use "it is" or "its" incorrectly is confirmation of redundancy. If there was no context telling you which it should be, you wouldn't know; and if there is context telling you what it should be, there is no need to write the apostrophe because you already know what the writer intended.

That much is fairly obvious. Further, data compression can give another insight into this. Standard text compression yields a much higher compression ratio than 50%. If I compress your question with "gzip" (a standard compression utility), it goes down from 770 bytes to 440 bytes (57% of the original). This is fairly bad, but this is with zero pre-existing knowledge -- something humans have *loads* of when processing text.

If I prepend what is currently on Wikipedia's front page (some text about "Suillus salmonicolor", some fungus), compressing your question takes an additional 378 bytes (49% of the original), probably because it can replace words like "and" with a very short code without having to pre-define it.

It doesn't end there either: trying to remove redundancy (e.g. writing words in conjugated form is almost always unnecessary; as are words like "she" in the phrase "Sarah went to the store when she needed something" ("Sarah went to the store when needed something" gets the message across; or at least "he" or "it" (both are a character shorter) would suffice).

I have often wondered how much redundancy is in languages: both in its basic form (sentences as an abstract concept) as well as in its representations (written characters or spoken sounds). I've come to terms with it because it must be for error correction. I probably wouldn't catch half of what my aunt is telling at the Christmas dinner table if not for that.

A related experiment that ran in 2013 looked at how much of a sentence you can hide before it becomes unreadable: https://lucb1e.com/rp/js/read.html For me, more than half can be hidden with no problems at all, meaning the character shapes that we use are \>50% redundant as well, at least when combined with the redundancy in words themselves (because an h of which the top is hidden look like an n, but the word probably only makes sense with one of the two).
> 0 votes

---
Tags: language, signal-detection
---


# Question
Title: What is the difference between apparent motion and apparent movement?
A definition for **apparent movement** is:

> The perception of movement produced by stimuli that are stationary but are presented first at one position and then, at an appropriate time interval, presented at a different position.

**Example:**

---

And **apparent motion** is defined as:

> Motion can be detected even if there is no real motion

**Example:**

Flip Books

---

Now to my actual **question**: I know that those two forms of perception are very close; so what is the actual difference between the two? Is there a pure definition of the difference? I feel that both apparent movement and apparent motion are according to Gleitman et al. (2010) pretty much the same, and could be applied to both sorts of examples. So if presented with a stimulus/illusion, how would one approach them to discern which is which?

# Answer
There is no difference between the two; illusionary movement and motion are interchangeable terms. For example, a definition of apparent **motion** is (Oxford Index):

> A sensation of **movement** in the absence of actual movement, \[for example\] visual illusions \[...\]

And a definition for apparent **movement** (Psychology Dictionary) is:

> \[A\]n illusion of **motion** or change of size that is cued by visual tricks.

In other words, apparent movement and apparent motion are the same thing. The two visual illusions you provide, though, *are* caused by two different neurophysiological phenomena altogether.

The flip book relies on persistent vision where multiple images are blurred into a coherent perception over time.

The rotating spokes illusion is thought to be caused by asymmetric luminance steps that trigger the motion detectors in the brain.
> 3 votes

---
Tags: neuroscience, perception, vision, neurophysiology, optical-illusion
---


# Question
Title: Timing accuracies for displaying frames and recording response times?
There are a few open-sources tools available to run psychology experiments. However, some are working in a browser. Do we know how precisely they can record response times? Also, can we present a visual frame for a precise amount of time? Considering refresh rates and wait\_top signals, this is not trivial. The few tools I have in mind are the following, but the answer may include other platforms as well:

* jsPsych (browser-based)
* PsychoPy
* OpenSesame
* PEBL

If good reviews of these software have been published, please share reference.

# Answer
**Short answer**
"Precision" and "accuracy" are relative parameters and the interpretation depends on your demands; their exact values depend on your hardware and software.

**Background**
RT measurements are finicky, even on a single pc simple basic USB polling latencies can add unacceptable latencies (8 ms or so) to RT estimates. Graphics latencies in visual tasks, or syncing issues in auditory-visual tasks can seriously mess up the stimulus timing. First-time calling of Matlab commands may add unacceptable latencies to the first trial. Etcetera etcetera. The Psychophysics Toolbox site has a wealth of information on these things.

Depending on why you wish to use a browser environment, but if you are attempting to do remote experiments over the internet, and assuming the software is stand-alone on the pc on the other end, you cannot control above-mentioned parameters at all. Further, if your pc is driving the experiment, things can get a lot worse, because a server or two will process the data in-between and there's the pc on the other end that you can't control.

But everything depends on the type of reaction time you are after. Are you interested in millisecond-range responses (standard react as-fast-as-you-can tasks), or do a few seconds more or less not matter (tasks where subjects get the time to make a cognitively evaluated choice)?

Also - if you are interested in latency differences (e.g. before and after drinking a few beers), then systematic latency deviations due to hardware issues do not matter anymore, as they are contained in both conditions and will be subtracted.

So it all depends on the experiment you are to use, the hardware that will be deployed and most of all, the type of response you are testing.
> 2 votes

---
Tags: software, reaction-time, psychophysics
---


title: Labeling and discrimination

text:
# Question
Title: Labeling and discrimination
I recently saw a video (unfortunately can't remember where), where someone claimed that the use of labels to identify social groups produced or increased prejudice. So the labels of nationality, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, etc. influence the perception of such groups by others, and result in segregation and discrimination rather than a desired effect of acceptance or unification.

I believe the context is described as "identity politics", where social groups label themselves, or are labeled, in an attempt to promote awareness of their social status / plight / cause, etc. My impression was that the labels promote an "us vs. them" mindset, potentially by reinforcing differences rather than shared traits. (Tribalism?)

Does this theory regarding the 'negative' consequences of the use of labels have a name?

Are there studies demonstrating such behavior?

I found the term "labels" used in the context of symbolic interactionism, but the articles I've found so far seem to describe that as the tendency of a person to act in a way that conforms to the label (e.g. a person labeled as "deviant" will adopt behavior to meet the definition of the term). I'm interested in how the self-adoption of a label by a group may produce a negative perception or separation / isolation of the group, such as producing discrimination that might not otherwise occur.

**UPDATE:** I saw this discussion of ingroup / outgroup behavior, which sounds relevant. Are labels one mechanism by which ingroup / outgroup associations developed? Is the discrimination a reliable / consistent result of identifying people as outgroup?

What is the primary mechanism behind nationalism, sports-team-ism, product-ism etc.?

# Answer
It seems like ingroup-outgroup stereotyping / bias / discrimination is the concept I'm looking for. This article seems to sum it up well.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201012/in-groups-out-groups-and-the-psychology-crowds
> 1 votes

---
Tags: cognitive-psychology, social-psychology
---


# Question
Title: What is the difference between attractor and recurrent network?
How are attractor and recurrent networks related? Is attractor network is private case of recurrent? Is there a mathematical formalism that defines both rigorously as graphs?

# Answer
> 4 votes
Many recurrent networks have attractors. For example, the BAM (bidirectional associative network) is a recurrent network: one input is presented and the network cycles until no more changes are seen in the connection weights. The BAM can be understood as developing attractor states: Seen in n-dimensions (in which n is the number of units in the model), the state can be seen as a position. Whenever the same stimuli is presented, the state of the network will stabilize to the same position.

One reference is Chartier S, Boukadoum M. (2006) A bidirectional heteroassociative memory for binary and grey-level patterns. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, 17(2):385-96.

# Answer
> 3 votes
As explained in Denis Cousineau's answer, there are many recurrent neural networks who's activities can be described as attractors. However, I would like to highlight two cases in particular, the Neural Engineering Framework, Conceptors and FORCE trained networks.

In the Neural Engineering Framework case, a recurrent neural network can approximate any dynamical system, including chaotic attractors. See these notes for a derivation and a demonstration. The networks can achieve certain stable states, for example when emulating a memory.

Conceptors are similar to the Neural Engineering Framework, except they questionably swap out recurrent weights to generate different patterns.

In FORCE training, a chaotically spiking reservoir can be trained to approximate seemingly any desired dynamical system.

In all these cases, assuming you have a system that can be seen as a transition between various stable states, I don't see why each state wouldn't be possible to map onto the node of a graph.

# Answer
> 1 votes
**Only a nonlinear recurrent system can have interesting attractors**: i.e., feedforward networks cannot have any attractor, and linear dynamical system can only have one (stable) fixed point (i.e., point attractor).

The relevant area of math is dynamical systems theory.

---
Tags: neural-network
---


# Question
Title: What is considered an error in the sustained attention to response task (SART)?
The traditional SART task requires key presses to all digits appearing on the screen. However, the key press should be withheld if the digit is a 3

When aggregating the collected data, what is considered an error?

Is it simply the number of times the key was pressed when a 3 is on the screen? Or does it also include incorrectly withheld key presses (i.e. when the digit is anything other than 3)?

# Answer
> 2 votes
Both are errors indeed. Pressing when a 3 is shown is called a false alarm, and not pressing when a three is shown is a miss. Correct responses are (1) hits (pressing when anything but a three is shown) or (2) correct rejections (not pressing with a three).

These classifications are used in signal detection theory (Wiki). More specifically, they are used to calculate sensitivity and bias.

Sensitivity, or d-prime (see also other questions on CogSci, e.g. Calculating d-prime), is the metric for how well one can distinguish targets from distractors. Bias, on the other hand, is:

> the extent to which one response is more probable than another (Wiki)

---
Tags: cognitive-psychology, experimental-psychology, attention
---