# Question
Title: Are there any standard tests to measure psychopathy?
While looking into another question on how to measure the adoption of norms, I came to wonder whether there are any standard tests to measure psychopathy.

**What are the accepted standard tests to measure psychopathy?**

# Answer
> 13 votes
The Hare Psychopathology Checklist is considered the current gold standard for measuring potential psychopathy. If you're interested in psychopathology, the book *Without Conscience* by Robert Hare, Ph.D., is a fascinating read. He has a second book called *Snakes In Suits*, which I have not yet read, so I cannot recommend or not recommend it. Dr. Hare has a website with a lot of fascinating information and links about psychopathy.

Anyhow, the Hare Psychopathology Checklist is abbreviated as the PCL. There is the regular PCL (First Edition), the PCL-SV (Screening Version), the PCL-R (Second Edition - Revised - Adults), and the PCL-YV (Youth Version). ***Only a clinical professional specifically trained in administration of the PCL or PCL-R can give an accurate assessment and interpret the results.*** When I was working with offenders, I sent exactly three individuals to have a PCL-R assessment and all three times the offender came back as having exceptionally high psychopathy scores. When you work with offenders you learn what the psychopathy vibe feels like.

The *primary* purpose of the PCL, any version, is to determine if psychopathy is present. ***There is no perfect test to predict recidivism in any population***; there are simply risk factors that, when combined together, demonstrate a lesser or higher presumption of risk for recidivism, and risk is dynamic (see below). If I may quote from the Colorado Department of Safety, Division of Criminal Justice, Sex Offender Management Board, as I did in my answer regarding pedophilia, I think this sums up recidivism in psychopaths quite nicely:

* ***Risk is dynamic***. Treatment and supervision systems must be flexible enough to impose greater external interventions during periods of high risk and reduce interventions as offenders internalize and demonstrate risk management skills.
* The presence of certain character or personality disorders is a risk factor for sexual re-offense. ***Mental health science has no identified cure for personality disorders.*** As a result, long-term treatment and supervision may benefit adult sex offenders with personality or character disorders to maintain changes and refrain from sexual re-offense.
* Prediction of the risk of re-offense for sex offenders is in the early stages of development. Therefore, ***it is difficult to predict the likelihood of re-offense or future victim selection***.

**John Pick** listed the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale in his answer.

When working with offenders, we administered a self-answered test called the ASUS, which addresses risk factors. As well, we administered the Level of Supervision Inventory (LSI) which also looks for risk factors in offenders on community supervision (I'm being vague here because both the ASUS and the LSI are copyrighted material).

There are *hundreds* of articles on psychopathy and a variety of topics. The website HALO works with law enforcement in topics in forensic psychology, including psychopathology.

# Answer
> 8 votes
### References

> * Hare, R. D. (2003). Manual for the Revised Psychopathy Checklist (2nd ed.). Toronto, ON, Canada: Multi-Health Systems.
> * Miller, J. D., Gaughan, E.T., Pryor, L.R. (2008) The Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale: An Examination of the Personality Traits and Disorders Associated With the LSRP Factors. Assessment 15(4): 450-463.

# Answer
> 4 votes
From an article entitled Can You Call a 9-Year-Old a Psychopath? in the New York Times Magazine (May 11, 2012):

> Currently, there is no standard test for psychopathy in children...

The article also lists some assessments used by some practitioners for predicting adult psychopathy:

* Inventory of Callous-Unemotional Traits
* Child Psychopathy Scale
* Antisocial Process Screening Device, modified
* Psychopathy Checklist, youth version

In the article, some psychologists say diagnosis is impossible in children and best avoided, whereas other psychologists say early intervention is important.

If you are interested in learning about child psychopathy research and some of the researchers who are involved, the article is a good starting point. Of course, being a magazine article, it becomes anecdotal at times.

# Answer
> 2 votes
From this Are Prisoners More Psychopathic than Nonforensic Populations? Profiling Psychopathic Traits among Prisoners, Community Adults, University Students, and Adolescents by Daniel Boduszek, Agata Debowska, Nicole Sherretts, Dominic Willmott, Mike Boulton, Krzysztof Kielkiewicz, Katarzyna Popiolek & Philip Hylandpaper, paper, I found

The **Psychopatic personality traits scale** (PPTS; Boduszek et al. 2016a)

> is a personality-based self-reported 20-item measure designed to assess psychopathic traits in forensic and non-forensic populations. The scale was developed to measure four factors labeled affective responsiveness, cognitive responsiveness, interpersonal manipulation, and egocentricity. Each subscale consists of five items measured using “agree” (1) and “disagree” (0) format (i.e., a trait is either present or absent). Total scale scores range from 0 to 20, whereas subscale scores range from 0 to 5. Higher scores indicate increased levels of psychopathic personality traits (i.e., increased egocentricity and interpersonal manipulation and increased deficits in affective and cognitive responsiveness).

You can find the questionnaire, among other cool things :), in this paper

Introduction and validation of Psychopathic Personality Traits Scale (PPTS) in a large prison sample by Daniel Boduszek, Agata Debowska, Katie Dhingra, Matt DeLisi.

This is the questionnaire

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Tags: measurement, abnormal-psychology, test
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# Question
Title: What is the proper definition of psychopathy?
I've seen all those checklists of psychopathy traits, read many articles and watched several tutorials - they mention like dozens of characteristics, but never make it clear about the actual meaning of the word.

Is psychopathy the lack of emotion? Is it the lack of empathy? What's the most accurate definition of the term?

Also, a lot of things that I've seen are unclear and contradictory:

1. A lot of explanations mention "disregard to social norms" as an intrinsic trait - but it clearly contradicts the trait of "self-interest", because by committing crimes or disregarding norms they harm themselves just as much as they harm people around. That's exactly what some psychopaths respond to allegations that they are dangerous and may commit a crime: "there's absolutely no reason or benefit of committing crime, so why would I do it?"
2. A lot of explanations mention "superficial charm", while it's unclear how do you even measure that objectively and what does it have to do with mental disorders? Is the evaluating therapist just supposed to tick "yes" next to "superficial charm" if they personally were charmed by a psychopath, or what? And what does it even have to do with mental health: it's not like "charm" is an aura directly projected by brain.
3. It's very unclear about impulsiveness, aggressiveness and impulsivity: some mention them as intrinsic traits of psychopathy, while others claim that they have nothing to do with it. It's also unclear how do they fit together with lack of emotional response or self interest, because they have nothing to do with each other or even contradict each other.
4. Things like "manipulation", "lack of realistic goals" or "disregard to safety" seem like things that 90% of the population would qualify for, at least at some point. What exactly is so special about "psychopathic" disregard for safety that makes it stand out from the disregard rutinely demostrated by every chemistry freshman? Is it like they are incapable of understanding the very concept of safety, or what? Are they not only remorseless and aggressive, but also intellectually retarded? Does there exist a negative thing that psychopaths aren't?

In short, to the question of what psychopathy means, everyone says entirely different things, most of which either don't make sense or are self-contradictory. It seems like a blanket term for everything that's considered "evil" by society, but doesn't seem like a real mental disorder. Is it even one disorder, or a collective name for several unrelated disorders?

The only thing that I am clear about is that psychopathy is innate (in comparison to sociopathy, which is trauma-induced).

P.S. I have scientific background, but I am not a psychologist - so it's possible that everything in psychology is as "vague", and I just don't understand how does this area of science works (although, for example, bipolar disorder was clear enough to me).

# Answer
First of all, you need to delineate between two usages of the term "psychopathic". The popular one is as you defined, more or less. The *clinical* one can be found in the DSM of psychiatry. It *should* include the following criteria:

* inability to empathize with others and
* lack of remorse when their actions hurt someone else.
> 0 votes

# Answer
As the Wikipedia article on psychopathy makes clear, there are different definitions of psychpathy – and in fact there are different definitions of every scientific concept –, depending on which scholar you consult. This is not a problem, as every scientific publication will make clear which definition it uses.

The truth is that there is an ongoing discussion on what psychopathy is – and *if it exists at all!* It is no accident that both the International Classification of Diseases (**ICD-10**), which is the international standard diagnostic tool for medical and psychiatric conditions, and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (**DSM-5**), which is the international standard diagnostic tool for psychological disorders, **do not contain the diagnosis psychopathy**.
> 5 votes

# Answer
I have also read a lot of definitions of psychopathy and I've never found them contradictory, quite the opposite.

You could take the oldest(?) one.

> Psychopathy has been classically described as a severe personality disorder and a unitary construct associated with a variety of affective, behavioral and interpersonal impairments (Cleckley 1941).

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Regarding this last part of your question

"It seems like a blanket term for everything that's considered "evil" by society, but doesn't seem like a real mental disorder."

No.

Yes, they have lot of "evil" traits but some of them also have "non evil" traits. For instance:

> leadership, logical thinking, composure, creativity, fearlessness, money smart, focus, extroversion and management; and could contribute to a positive adjustment within a set environment (*The Durand adaptative psychopathic traits questionnaire: Development and validation*, 2017)

The Block Quotes above are from this paper Adaptive psychopathic traits: Positive outcomes in a college student sample by Jonathan Bronchain, Henri Chabrol, Patrick Raynal
> 1 votes

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Tags: personality-disorder
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title: Reporting d-prime results

text:
# Question
Title: Reporting d-prime results
I am currently working on research analysing yes/no responses in a recognition memory task. The false alarm rate is quite high so I have performed a d-prime test and collected d-prime values. Now that I have these d-prime values I do not know how to analyse/report these findings as I have a d-prime value for each individual participant. Some papers show a comparison using an ANOVA but I do not know how to conduct this comparison with the d-prime data or if this is what I should be doing, should I be using the mean of my d-prime values? How should I go about reporting my d-prime results?

# Answer
d-prime values are usually fairly well normally-distributed. So you can use any parametric test relying on the normality assumption (in facts you should always z-transform fractions before to use a parametric test on them). If you have only 2 conditions you can use a classical t-test. From your question it seems you have only 1 value per participants so that would probably be an independent t-test. If you have more than 1 comparison an ANOVA would be the typical test to use.

For reporting results it is a bit tricky. d-primes are not that intuitive for people. So you might want to report fraction correct in the text, but run your tests on d-primes. For the same reason you might want to plot your results as fractions. Below is an example of wording (but refer to a statistical textbook for conducting and reporting statistical tests). Note that it is fine to report means and standard deviations of fractions. However parametric tests should always be conducted on z-scores. I know people use fractions in tests all the time but it is **wrong**.

> The mean recognition rate increased from NN% to NN% between the conditions ... and ..., for a mean improvement of NN ± NN% (SE). This difference was significant in an independent t-test on z-transformed recognition rates: t(N)=N, p
> -1 votes

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Tags: data, analysis, task-analysis
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# Question
Title: What is the name of inattention/autopilot phenomenon that results in 'swapping out' errors
Suppose I am doing the laundry while simultaneously taking out the trash, so am carrying a bag of dirty clothes in one hand and a bag of rubbish in the other. I might be on autopilot where I lift up the lid of the garbage bin, throw my laundry into it and turn to walk away before then realising what I have done: thrown the wrong bag one into the bin i.e. "right idea, wrong object".

I know that it's some sort of inattention effect that is studied in cognitive psychology, but can somebody tell me what the correct name for this phenomenon is?

**edit** Dual-task interference is closer to the concept I'm looking for

# Answer
> 1 votes
The Stroop Effect is more for rapid-fire tasks and task switching.

Unconscious Thought Theory may be related.

Absent-mindedness can lead to automatic behaviors or automatisms.

Highway hypnosis is similar, where you don't remember the task you've done even though it's correct.

Otherwise, making a mistake due to habit/habituation?

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, attention, multi-tasking
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# Question
Title: Humans don't understand the accumulation of small numbers - what is this phenomena called?
I find that if you tell someone to give you `20$` vs. giving you `1$` everyday for 20 days - people react differently.

Similarly humans have a hard time comprehending the fact that small changes in their behaviour everyday may eventually lead to big consequences.

# Answer
> 2 votes
Humans have loads of cognitive biases.

The one you have in mind could either be so called 'denomination effect', the tendency to care about large currency denominations and be less careful with smaller currency denominations. For example, not to care about the .99 part in a US 9.99 price tag.

It could also be the less-is-better effect. Small amounts of something are preferred than one big lump-sum. For example, buying something in 10 installments of US 110 is chosen instead of one scary US 1000 price tag.

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, cognitive-neuroscience, bias
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# Question
Title: Why is swearing such an in built part of the mind?
My wife suffered from a Traumatic Head Injury several months ago. She had 2 Brain surgeries due to bleeding of the brain. As a result, she is unable to speak words other than yes, no, don't know and there. She has to learn through Speech and Language Therapy how to say each word. However, right from the start, she's been able to easily say sentences such as "For fucks sake Scott" and "Fuck off". Is there something about swearing that is built in?

# Answer
> -2 votes
The mind is a large landscape as you are finding. Speech centers where new or current ideas are formed into words rely on other areas where conversion elements have already been worked out some time ago. Ready made phrases for non-new ideas and reliable conversation can be brought up with little or no effort. With these peppered into speech one can sound as if they are otherwise fully conscious and thinking about what they are saying.

You can see this when speaking with people when they cannot stop adding the same phrase to their sentences. Such as "...if you know what I mean." Though a complex phrase it has its own quick 'subroutine' to send it to the mouth. After hearing this over and over you would guess that the speaker is not as self aware as you first suspected. This can reflect the effort made as they cast about for ideas and how to express them.

The foul language which would be rare in earlier days probably reflects her frustration and anger with her difficulties in forming speech. Normally there are filters to prevent using bad language if only to spare feelings of listeners. These can also be compromised when the effort is to get *any* speech together. You can think of her speech as letting you in on parts of her internal, normally private, dialogue as she struggles to express herself.

With patience this should improve as she re-maps her speech abilities along with the boundaries of what to say and not say.

I suggest you read *The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat* by Oliver Sacks to see how disparate the areas of the mind can be. Good luck to you both.

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Tags: speech
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# Question
Title: Where to find information regarding the effect of ion concentration in the brain on behaviour?
Hopefully this is the right area. but for some background, for a school project I'm currently trying to design a medically accurate zombie. I have half a semesters knowledge of basic physiology, and part of the class is that I do more research into areas that are relevant to my project, and I'm wondering where I can find any info, or if you have any insight.

You see, we're in groups, and so far we've designed it so that the infection is spread by fungi, other members of the group are working on how it crosses the blood brain barrier, how it spreads, etc. I'm looking at behaviour.

One thing we've considered is that the fungi destroys parts of the brain like the frontal cortex, so the victim loses their personality, and some similar ways that it makes the victim more zombie-like. One idea I've been trying to work with is that the fungi alters the concentration of ions in the brain. The problem is, I can't find much research that is accessible to someone with my knowledge. I've found some articles like this one: https://europepmc.org/article/pmc/pmc3628083?client=bot#free-full-text , that describe the effect of one ion concentration on one aspect of neuronal behaviour.

I guess what I'm really asking is whether there is one source that puts a lot of these facts together so someone without a medical degree could understand it, possibly with some additional research? I just want to know a list of ions in the brain that can modify neuronal behaviour, what that would look like, and how that works.

Is there a source like this that exists? Am I able to access it? Do I have any misconceptions about this subject?

Please let me know, any help or input is greatly appreciated.

# Answer
> 1 votes
The 'ion concentration in the brain' is a really general concept. A biochemist (I did Biochemistry in a, seemingly, previous lifetime) might approach this question by taking a brain, freeze drying it, then homogenize it and determine ion concentrations.

However, the effect of ion concentrations in the brain plays out its role in a much more confined space, namely across the cell's membranes. The *differences in **ion gradients*** across the neuron's membrane is what determines its responses. Further, different ***brain areas*** govern different responses. Gross changes in ion concentrations in the prefrontal cortex for instance will exert wildly different effects than the same procedure in the brain stem.

If you want to go this way, you should perhaps confine yourself to a specific area of the brain, and to a specific way of disregulating **ion homeostasis**. Or veer away from the idea entirely.

What you'd rather could use as a source of inspiration are ***zombie ants***. These ants are 'zombified' by the fungus *Ophiocordyceps unilateralis*, which infects *Camponotus leonardi* ants that live in tropical rainforest trees. Once infected, the spore-possessed ant will climb down from its normal habitat and bite down on a leaf and then die.

The fungus can only flourish at a certain temperature, humidity, location and distance from the ground. By hijacking ants they re-locate themselves to ideal spots. in fact, 95% of the ants found their way to the north side of a plant, about 25 centimeters above the ground, in an environment with 94 to 95 percent humidity and with temperatures between 20 and 30 degrees Celsius (Harmon, 2009).

Note, however, that the underlying pathophysiological underpinnings are entirely different from your original ion homeostasis idea.

Zombie ant. source: Wikipedia

**Source**
**-** Harmon, *Sci Am,* Fungus Makes Zombie Ants Do All the Work, July 2009

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Tags: neuroscience, neurophysiology
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# Question
Title: Why is toilet paper out of stock around the world during the coronavirus outbreak?
Ok, I am not going to fuss around the issue. The question is simple, but the internet is oozing with self-proclaimed behavioral scientists answering the question and it's hard to find a good, scientific answer to the query, so here goes:

Why are the toilet paper shelves out of stock around the world?

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A lot of articles on the internet seem to lead back and quote this article from "The Conversation". Their slogan is "Academic rigour, journalistic flair", but I don't know the site and so what do you think of it?

# Answer
> 2 votes
In simple terms, demand for toilet paper increased and supply was unable to scale up.

* The supply chain for toilet paper is unable to rapidly scale up production to the levels required to meet the large increase in demand.
* Most supermarkets (at least where I live) seem to be unwilling to increase the prices of toilet paper in order for supply and demand to equalise. Presumably, if the price of toilet paper in supermarkets was increased by 4 or 5 times (or perhaps more), we would eventually reach a point where toilet paper would be in stock. However, supermarkets would be accused of price gouging in a crisis, which would be bad for publicity (as well as people unable to afford toilet paper).

So why did demand increase?

* Toilet paper is not perishable. Thus, people can buy huge amounts of toilet paper and they will eventually be able to use it.
* There are few substitutes for toilet paper. There are items like tissues, paper towels, wet wipes, and bidets, but these are not great substitutes for most people, and in some cases, these are out of stock also. In contrast, while food is essential, people are able to eat a wide range of different foods.
* Toilet paper is also an essential item. For most people the perceived cost of being without toilet paper is quite high. Thus, if people perceive there is a chance that they could run out, this is more likely to trigger an increase in their demand (to stock up).
* As noted below, more people are using toilet paper at home rather than at outside the home (e.g., work, school, etc.).

Presumably, the increase in demand is triggered by the sum of the knowledge and motives of the many economic actors in a society.

* Some people might be rationally thinking that it would be wise to stock up on toilet paper if they might be going into lockdown soon.
* A desire to stockpile will further increase when people see that if they don't stockpile, they are more likely to run out of toilet paper. Presumably, international media and social media would help ignite the stock-piling and then the empty shelves and the associated media coverage further increase demand. So, shortages create even more shortages.
* I'm not really clear on whether third parties are stockpiling toilet paper to sell at inflated prices. But it seems like normal rational behaviour (perhaps selfish when taken to extremes) can explain what is going on without the need for reference to such third party actors.

So, I'm inclined to think that normal rational economic behaviour combined with failures in the supply chain and an unwillingness to raise prices in response is the main explanation.

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Tags: social-psychology, decision-making, behavioral-economics
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# Question
Title: How do people with DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) experience dreams?
For people without DID, dream experiences include having other characters in one's dreams behave in ways one can't predict or control, sometimes there can be a "switch" into lucid dreaming where more control can be exhibited.

Since people with DID already have *alters* in waking life (ie, identities the *host* can't directly control and switch amongst), how does this manifest in dream states? That is, are in-dream characters the same as alters, or different ones?

Bonus questions:

* How often do perspective-switches happen for people with DID?
* How does communication between alters take place in the dream world?

# Answer
> 1 votes
Unfortunately, I was not able to find empirical literature on this question, as it does not appear to have been studied much - for example:

> References to dreams in the multiple personality literature are rare and tend to be brief.

So we are limited to clinical reports. In 1994, Deirdre Barrett collected 3rd-hand accounts of dreams from 23 DID (MPD) patients. The study method that she used is not very good quality however, so any conclusions would be premature, but it does provide some possible hypotheses as to the nature of these patients' dreams, as summarized in this table:

In particular, alters appear as characters in dreams (4) of more than half of the patients in this survey. Item (5) lists a few patients reporting dreams experienced from multiple perspectives (ie, multiple alters) simultaneously:

> ... for these 26% of patients with dreams in category 5, two or more personalities reported dreaming at the same time and experiencing each other as characters.

Another interesting item (9) lists patients who reported experiencing multiple different dreams by different alters. Note that some of the dream reports (2) were not actually dreams, but were perceived as such by the alter recounting them.

More case reports are reviewed in another paper, and Barrett has written extensively on this subject. She summarizes:

> These included memories of childhood traumas and content of recent fugue episodes. A few of the dreams were undisguised recreations of actual episodes, especially for recent repressed events.

and:

> No characteristic of the dreams of dissociative disordered patients in this survey is so distinctive as to never be found in those of other dreamers.

Empirical data (based on mentation) would be more reliable for drawing conclusions. Barrett and others have hypothesized that rather than alters appearing in dreams, characters in dreams may be used as inspiration (prototypes) for dissociated identities.

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Tags: abnormal-psychology, consciousness, dreams
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# Question
Title: Can eye tracking be used as a form of biofeedback?
I'm an occasional meditator and I've noticed that conceptual thought often produces eye movements, and I'm curious if anyone has tried using eye movements as a form of biofeedback. The Muse headset for example tracks EEG data and plays it back to the user as sound. I'm curious if it would be possible to set something like that up with eye-tracking using consumer-grade technology, and if any research has been done on eye tracking as a form of biofeedback.

# Answer
> 2 votes
There is a well known relationship between pupil dilation and multiple cognitive processes such as attention, surprise, task difficulty etc. It remains unclear which specific process modulates pupil dilation, but it is a fairly large (but slow) effect that can easily be picked up by consumer-grade eye-trackers. See below an example of a paper using pupil dilation to decode which letter a patient is attending in a human-computer interface system.

Similar effects have been reported with microsaccades (the tiny movements your eyes make even when you are fixating, see comprehensive review below). However microsaccades are hard to detect and most likely beyond the capabilities of a consumer-grade eye-tracker.

There are studies trying to link larger eye-movements to cognitive processes. This idea goes as far back as Yarbus' work, who was the first to record eye-movements in freely-looking observers. See a famous image from his work below. Similar techniques are being used by advertising companies today to try to predict consumers preferences. It is hard to tell how valid these techniques are in the industry. But there is also some very good work looking at these questions in academia, see for example a paper from Laurent Itti's lab below.

Finally preferential-looking is a classical technique in developmental studies (with children). For example you display 2 stimuli, one containing depth the other one not, and if the children are looking more often at one or the other then you know they perceive a difference, even at an age where they are too young to explicitely report their percepts.

References:

Mathôt, S., Melmi, J. B., van der Linden, L., & Van der Stigchel, S. (2016). The Mind-Writing Pupil: A Human-Computer Interface Based on Decoding of Covert Attention through Pupillometry. PloS one, 11(2), e0148805.

Rolfs, M. (2009). Microsaccades: small steps on a long way. Vision research, 49(20), 2415-2441.

Borji, A., & Itti, L. (2014). Defending Yarbus: Eye movements reveal observers' task. Journal of vision, 14(3), 29-29.

Yarbus, A. L. (2013). Eye movements and vision. Springer.

Kowler, E. (1990). The role of visual and cognitive processes in the control of eye movement. Reviews of oculomotor research, 4, 1-70.

Hayhoe, M. M. (2004). Advances in relating eye movements and cognition. Infancy, 6(2), 267-274.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential\_looking

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, neuroscience, cognitive-neuroscience, vision, eye-movement
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# Question
Title: Why does IQ have a truncated normal distribution?
I know that the IQ statistic is designed to give it a mean of 100 and that you'll certainly never find someone with an IQ below 1 or above 300, but that tells us very little about the variance or general shape of the distribution. So why is it that every graph of IQ scores that I've seen appears to be a truncated normal distribution? Is it some property of the test design, some property of the test subjects, or some deep theorem in statistics that I've overlooked?

# Answer
> 3 votes
IQ isn't *normal*, it's *normalized* to have mean 100 and standard deviation 15, usually via a percentile method.

The reason IQ looks roughly normal is because intelligence (however it is defined) is a complex trait. Complex traits are predicted to have a roughly normal distribution based on the central limit theorem: a sum of many individual factors (including genetic and environmental ones) will tend to be distributed normally in a population, even if the underlying factors themselves are not normal.

There is no real concrete measure "IQ": it isn't measuring a real-world physical property the way you measure mass or length. Instead, you use tests intended to get some measure of that abstract trait, and then normalize individuals based on the group statistics. Actual tests administered to measure IQ will have a minimum and maximum score: you can at worst get every question wrong, at best get every question right.

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Tags: intelligence, statistics, iq
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# Question
Title: Neurologic coherence between numbers and colors?
I came across a *magic* trick on YouTube that made me curious (starting from 10m15s). Maybe it has something to do with synesthesia? But let me first describe the trick in short.

It involves two persons. One from the audience and of course the magician itself. The magician holds a card with a pyramide of numbers on it, like this:

```
    5
   5 5
  5 5 5
 5 5 5 5
5 5 5 5 5

```

Then the magician asks the person to read out loud the numbers several times (five, fifty five, ...). The magician informs the person beforehand, that he is going to ask a question later on. And that he wants the person to answer it right away.

Then after a minute or so, the magician asks: "Think of a vegetable and tell me it's name". According to this trick there is a 70% chance that the person answers *carrot*. And the second most given answer is *tomato*.

Now, why is that? The magician explains this with a neurological coherence between numbers and colors. Would that be some form of *mild* synesthesia that a lot of perople have? So that (statistically seen) the neurological representation of number is similar to the perception of a specific color?

Please bear with me, I am total laymen on this topics!

# Answer
In some sense yes, we all have some mild synesthesia and tend to associate some shapes with some colors/names etc. There is a famous experiment from Ramachandran showing that when asked to identify 2 shapes, one called "bouba" and the other one "kiki", almost everybody reports the rounder shape as "bouba" and the sharper one as "kiki". It's unclear why, it's a classical chicken or egg problem. It could suggest that language reflects to some extent the visual appearance of objects. Or that from experience we match the visual appearance of objects with sounds they are (randomly) often associated with. In any case, if one takes the time to conduct polls and measure how often a stimulus is associated with another stimulus one can, at least in some situations, predict to a fairly large degree what people will think.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki\_effect
> 2 votes

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Tags: color, synesthesia
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# Question
Title: Psychology behind dumb child doing good in academics
This is my first question in this forum and hence forgive me if the question is amateurish. I was always interested in what a psychology expert will say about this.

Consider a boy who is dumb from his childhood. Here dumbness means, he is terrible at making decisions in the immediate situations. Very shy from childhood. Sometimes people make fun indirectly, and he does not get that at that moment. Sometimes other persons try to draw information from him which may harm him, and he innocently tells everything ... etc.

But on the other hand, that same boy turned out to be good in school. Good at the undergraduate level and doing well even in postgraduation also.

This leads me to the question, why do some boys turn out to be so dumb? It seems like it is genetic rather upbringing problem. I will appreciate a deeper and literature based answer.

# Answer
Most people confuse shyness with introversion, and the difference is that shy people do it out of *fear*, while introverted people do it out of the urge to be *alone*.

Being shy is a bad thing.

Being an introvert is NOT a bad thing.

People also confuse *Dumbness* with *Gullibility*.

Gullibility is a failure of ***social*** intelligence, which is again a clear sign of high introversion, and they do that because they're a better judge of character.

Simply put "Intelligent people are more likely to trust others, while those who score lower on measures of intelligence are less likely to do so"

*I couldn't do better than this.*

source:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140316133840.htm
> 0 votes

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Tags: abnormal-psychology, educational-psychology
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# Question
Title: What psychological methods exist for dealing with uncertainty?
Curious in finding out if there have been any psychological studies done on uncertainty & what the results of those studies have been.

Have there been any frameworks or methodologies on combating uncertainty from a psychological perspective? Assuming uncertainty is a negative experience for most people.

# Answer
> 2 votes
When uncertain about a decision and you are aiming for an optimal outcome, Hastie and Dawes (2009), suggest that the choice be 1) based on your current assets (money, physiological state, psychological capacities, relationships, and feelings). 2) It is based on the possible consequences of the choice. 3) When the consequences are uncertain, their likelihood is evaluated using the basic rules of probability theory. 4) It is a choice that is adaptive to the constraints of those probabilities and the values or satisfactions associated with each of the possible consequences of the choice.

As for some of the mechanisms at play when making a decision the authors provide some advice, such as focusing on the future and not the past (sunk costs), avoiding cohesive conclusions based on random data or what you "know" (texas sharpshooter and conjunction fallacies, respectively). They also point out that fast somatic markers (emotion, feeling, mood, and evaluation) typically shrink large choice sets, which contain fewer options but allow a more thoughtful cost-benefit evaluation. They use overemphasized happiness as an example of this being a bad idea and suggest taking a more thorough look at other aspects of a decision. Along with that they also recommend spelling out many of the relevant events and really thinking through the "reasons for" and "reasons against" the occurrence of each event which can help increase the quality of judgments under ignorance.

They also list some common decision-making procedures that have no relation to rational choice. 1) Habit, or choosing what we had chosen before. 2) Conformity, or making the choice you think most other people would make. 3) religious principles or cultural mandates, choosing as we have been taught by our parents and authorities.

There is also Kahneman (2011), who found that our brain has two modes one really fast and the other slow and deliberate, we tend to rely on the fast mode more than we should in decision making and the many bias and heuristics that come with faster choices can make us more confident in our decision-making but may not give us the most optimal outcome.

The two references provided overlap and seem to work off of each other in one way or another. They both come to the conclusion that optimal decision making is made more deliberately than based on some of the fallacies and biases that we tend to rely on for quick choices in our day-to-day. None the less, they do provide excellent examples of understanding and knowledge of how to deal with uncertainty.

**References**:

Hastie, R., & Dawes, R. M. (2009). Rational choice in an uncertain world: The psychology of judgment and decision making. Sage Publications.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

# Answer
> 1 votes
What do you mean by uncertainty? Is it internal or external? I am heavily a category learning person, so I begin there. Even like that, there are many ways you can approach this:

**Uncertainty can be when you encounter something novel and have to generalize your experience to complete a task or make sense of things**. People can behave systematically in those situation, many times irrationally. A good example is the inverse base-rate effect. One theory says that this behaviour results from the way you allocate attention in the new situation. Have a read or a google scholar search. I selected some papers

I fun new one I liked:

* Don, H. J., Beesley, T., & Livesey, E. J. (2019). Learned predictiveness models predict opposite attention biases in the inverse base-rate effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Animal Learning and Cognition. https://doi.org/10.1037/xan0000196

The big old ones, very influential papers in the field:

* Kruschke, J. K. (1996). Base Rates in Category Learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 22(1), 3–26.
* Medin, D. L., & Edelson, S. M. (1988). Problem structure and the use of base-rate information from experience. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 117(1), 68–85. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.117.1.68

At the moment, this approach does not combat uncertainty. The inverse base-rate effect results from specific psychological mechanisms. That is to say, the way you generalize your experience to something yet unseen.

**Uncertainty can be probabilistic**. You can encounter events that might have many outcomes. When you see those events, you simply don't know what outcome will occur. But you might have some probabilistic knowledge - meaning one outcome is more probable. This has been shown for example to affect the way you explore the environment, including the choices you have. People in reinforcement learning study these topics a lot. Here is a really fun paper:

* Boldt, A., Blundell, C., & De Martino, B. (2019). Confidence modulates exploration and exploitation in value-based learning. Neuroscience of consciousness, 2019(1), niz004.

Here, uncertainty results from learning and the way you organize the information you process. Here is an interesting study from learning:

* Jones, P. M., Zaksaite, T., & Mitchell, C. J. (2019). Uncertainty and blocking in human causal learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition, 45(1), 111.

In this sense, uncertainty can be battled by simply learning more and gathering more information.

Another approach to this is that of the Drift Diffusion Model (DDM). DDM treats uncertainty as internal noise (the noise generated by the way the brain accumulates information). If uncertainty (the internal noise)is high, then you will make more errors, will be slow at gathering information. Here is yet another paper:

The same is true here. Over time, your experience will help you reduce uncertainty. This is done by simply skewing your knowledge toward making a correct response when you encounter the same situation.

**Uncertainty is a bad experience.** I think it is **simply not true**. You have to remember that people are quite adept at dealing with whatever things come at them. The above references show you that people employ interesting strategies and behave in a very specific way in the face of uncertainty. If you want to make it a bad experience, you have to add something else as well: stress; pressure; threat; etc...

I think the way to go about it is to see how people generalize what they know to new situations, because uncertainty often arises from not knowing.

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, perception, emotion, measurement
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# Question
Title: Is there a way that an infection could target a specific area of the brain?
My question is in regards to a fungal infection, but I am open to learning about viral or bacterial infections. That being said, is it possible that a fungus/virus/etc could target a specific area of the brain? For example, causing swelling in specifically the amygdala, or attacking neurons *only* the prefrontal cortex. My knowledge of neuroscience is limited, so I was wondering if there are proteins that only occur in some areas, or differing levels of extracellular ion concentrations that an infectious agent could use to localize an attack on the brain in a way that was beneficial for the disease to spread.

I'm trying to see if there is a way that a fungal infection could attack the amygdala and/or prefrontal cortex in order to induce aggression in a victim and cause it to spread faster.

Any help or additional input is appreciated.

# Answer
There are many variation in terms of proteins or peptides across the cortex, as well as structurally (layers etc), and how it is connected to the rest of the body (axonal projections, blood vessels, etc) but basically all areas are constituted of the same basic building blocks. So most viruses will tend to affect some areas more, but I don't think an infection could ever be targeted that accurately to a specific area (let's say affect Broca's area and cause a very specific aphasia). For example rabies travels back to the brain from muscles, so it will reach the primary motor cortex first. But then it will diffuse from there. This is even more true for bacterial infections which as far as I know don't even target neurons specifically. Usually a bacterial infection will start somewhere else like an open wound, teeth or the ears. I don't think a bacteria could jump directly to the brain (I might be wrong). For example when a syphilitic infection reach the neurosyphilis stage, it has already propagated to most of the body. The neurosyphilis tends to affect frontal and parietal lobes first but that's far from an accurate targeting. I believe fungal infections are more similar to bacterial infections and don't tend to target neurons specifically.

This is not my area of expertise so if anyone with better knowledge cares to answer I would be interested as well.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3679988/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurosyphilis
> 3 votes

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Tags: neurophysiology, physiology, pathology
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title: Prepare for a counseling session

text:
# Question
Title: Prepare for a counseling session
I'm a college student, and I utilize the free counseling service on campus. Once a therapist told me to register for a shorter session because he didn't think I needed 1 hour and he wanted to be more available for other students.

How should one prepare for a counseling session? Writing down questions? I always feel like not bring enough things to talk about in my sessions make my therapist "unhappy".

I feel like I've asked two separate questions. Anyway, any specific or broad advice is welcomed.

# Answer
> 1 votes
*Proviso*: What I write below is simply general advice and does not establish a psychologist-patient or psychologist-client professional relationship.

Here are some general suggestions for individual psychotherapy discussion topics:

* **Tell your counselor** how you are feeling, for example, "I feel nervous before sessions because I'm not sure what to talk about" or "I'm afraid that if I don't bring up enough topics you won't like me, or you will be bored with me."

+ In my personal experience as a client in psychotherapy, this is both the **most difficult** *and* the **most helpful** of all the suggestions I'm writing in this post.
* **Ask your therapist** for advice on how to prepare for counseling sessions.
* If you feel that your counselor is not listening or does not seem to care or is simply not helpful, **ask to see another counselor**. Depending on the setting (college counseling center, private therapist, mental health agency), you might be asked to explain why you want to see another therapist. If that is the case, write down your reasons, without censoring what you write. You can decide later how blunt (direct) you want to be.
* Read **self-help books** on behavior change; goal-setting; developing good habits; etc.
* For my own personal growth (and as a psychologist) I really like **worksheets** because they get me thinking about questions that I would not have considered otherwise. Here are some (all free):

+ Change Plan Worksheet \- created for substance abuse treatment, but they apply to almost any problem or goal.
    + Personal Values Card Sort \- this is one of my favorites. If you download it, get your scissors out as you need to cut up the little rectangles printed on each page. You create three piles for the cards: **Not Important to me**; **Important to me**; and **Very Important to me**. After you cut out all the "cards", go through them one at a time and put them on one of the three piles. Back in the day they called this "values clarification".
    + The Personal Values Cardsort (and similar cardsorts) have helped me a lot personally and many of my psychotherapy patients over the years have also find them to be very helpful.
    + PsychPoint Therapy Worksheets \- this site is designed primarily for mental health professionals, but most of the worksheets are not complicated. Look over the worksheets first before downloading them because *you can download only three worksheets*. (You can download more if you are a licensed mental health professional and want to subscribe for $99 USD per year.) \[I am not affiliated with this website or its owner.\]
    + Complete a worksheet before a counseling session, make a copy of your completed worksheet, and give it to your counselor at the beginning of the session.

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Tags: clinical-psychology
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title: Doubt on definition of emotion

text:
# Question
Title: Doubt on definition of emotion
I am currently reading Psychology and Life by Richard J. Gerig, where emotions are defined as

> A complex pattern of changes, including physiological arousal, feelings, cognitive processes, and behavioral reactions, made in response to a situation perceived to be personally significant.

I am not able to understand why anything other than feelings should be part of emotion. Isn't physiologica arousal, behavioral reactions and cognitive processes side effects of emotions rather than being part of emotion itself? For e.g. when you feel angry your heart rate increases. Why including factors (other than feeling) in definition make sense? I think this is also related to unlearning what has been already wrongly learnt where I am treating emotion just as feeling but nothing more.

# Answer
> 2 votes
You are asking some very important questions. And your skepticism is a sign of a **scholar** in my book. ;o)

I agree with you that the definition provided by your textbook falls short.

Emotion is a huge topic. It might help to narrow the scope of your question.

I also suggest carefully defining a word like "feelings". For example, how are *feelings* and *emotion* different? (if they are).

Here is an article that will give you an introduction to contemporary research on emotion:

Critchley, Hugo D. and Sarah N. Garfinkel. "Interoception and emotion." *Current Opinion in Psychology* 17 (2017): 7–14. \[Open access\]

> **Abstract**: Influential theories suggest emotional feeling states arise from physiological changes from within the body.
>
> Interoception describes the afferent signalling, central processing, and neural and mental representation of internal bodily signals. Recent progress is made in conceptualizing interoception and its neural underpinnings. These developments are supported by empirical data concerning interoceptive mechanisms and their contribution to emotion.
>
> Fresh insights include description of short-term interoceptive effects on neural and mental processes (including fear-specific cardiac effects), the recognition of dissociable psychological dimensions of interoception, and models of interoceptive predictive coding that explain emotions and selfhood (reinforced by structural anatomical models and brain and experimental findings).
>
> This growing grasp of interoception is enriching our understanding of emotion and its disorders.

Wikipedia has a good article on interoception.

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Tags: emotion
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title: Energy supply to brain

text:
# Question
Title: Energy supply to brain
I wonder if the energy delivered to brain per unit time to maintain brain processes is limited and fairly constant? Is all provided energy fully used?

# Answer
> 2 votes
There is very little change in the overall brain energy metabolism with task.

This question has been answered previously at Biology.SE: https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/839/how-does-the-brains-energy-consumption-depend-on-mental-activity

The top-voted answer there cites this review:

Raichle ME, Mintun MA. BRAIN WORK AND BRAIN IMAGING. Annual Review of Neuroscience 2006 Jul;29(1):449-476.

which states:

> the local energy consumption increase owing to a typical task-related response could be as little as 1%

Although this may not seem intuitive, it does start to make sense when you consider the way energy is used by the brain and how brain activity changes over time. Active processing results in changes in patterns of brain activity: which *neurons* are active, not which *regions*. There is always a baseline level of activity happening in the brain, even in areas not involved in the current task.

Additionally, most of the energy used to support neurotransmission is by the sodium/potassium pumps that maintain ion concentration gradients. These pumps are always active, working against passive leak as well as neuronal activity.

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Tags: neuroscience, theoretical-neuroscience
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# Question
Title: Why can't we do the things we know instantaneously?
In the following video eventhough people know that when handlebar of the bicycle is turned left the wheel of that bicycle is turned towards right and vice versa, they can't ride that new bicycle instantaneously without any practice. Why is that so? Why can't we do something even though we know how it works? what is the scientific explanation behind it?

Detailed video link

Short video

One more hypothetical question relating to this. Let us consider a boy who never swam in his life, if theoretically came to know each and every aspect of swimming ,learning for several years. If one day after these years he fell into a large swimming pool, can he decently swim by applying his theoretical knowledge.

This is not a thought experiment as in philosophy.I want to know **scientifically how** his **knowledge and doing** of swimming **correlate**?

# Answer
Motor learning is a complex process (Wolpert & Flanagan, 2010). Oftentimes the process is broken up in elements (Weaver, 2015):

* a cognitive phase;
* an associative phase;
* an autonomous phase.

The process you describe as having the 'knowledge' is part of phase 1, namely cognitively analyzing what is needed to do the job. However, the associative phase is necessary, where one actively practices and obtains feedback through observation and instructions by a teacher of what is correct, and what still needs work. Lastly, the motor behavior needs to be automated, such that it can happen without conscious control (Weaver, 2015).

This process needs a lot of time and hence the scene in the Matrix where Neo learns Kung Fu in a split second is obviously not possible. In fact, mastering martial arts, and in fact any skill, leads to profound changes in the brain, including gross structural changes that can only happen over the course of days, weeks, or even months. For instance, jugglers have been shown to increase gray matter over time in specific areas of the brain (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Expert jugglers show increased gray matter volume in several brain areas, including the secondary visual cortex and the hMT +/V5 (Gerber *et al*. , 2014)

**References**
**-** Gerber *et al*., *NeuroImage* (2015); **95**: 320-5
**-** Weaver, *PLoS Biol* (2015); **13**(12): e1002313
**-** Wolpert & Flanagan, *Curr Biol* (2010); **20**(11): R467-72
> 2 votes

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Tags: neuroscience, cognitive-neuroscience, brain, brain-training, brain-development
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# Question
Title: Synchronization of perception of sensory information
I am not an expert (actually I am not even psychologist/neuroscientist or anything like it).My question is:

Since light and sound comes to, respectively, our eyes and ears at different times and "visual input" and "sound input" take different times to be processed (and as far as I know, even some traits of vision - like color, motion, shape - take different time to be processed), how does our brain gives rise to the counscious experience of simultaneity (in the case of actual simultaneity, of course)?

How do we experience this synchronization of stimulus (which, of course, can include others senses, like touch and proprioception)? What would be a time line of that? Because it makes a bit confuse. Aren't we experiencing reality in real time (except for the fact that stimulus take time to get to our senses)?

# Answer
> 1 votes
The question you ask is the topic of a very active line of research.

First you are right that light (~300.10^6m.s-1) and sounds (~350m.s-1) reach an observer at different times, as a function of distance. You are also right that visual and auditory inputs are processed at different speeds by the brain, with auditory signals being faster. The auditory system is much better, in general, at processing things quickly. Take for example the fact that the auditory system processes sounds between 20 and 20,000Hz (the auditory bandwidth), while the visual system saturates at ~30Hz (which is why movies are at 60Hz). It doesn't necessarily means you get "aware" of sounds faster than vision but this is true as well. You can react to sounds in 50-150ms, and visual stimuli in 150-250ms.

So how does your brain fuses sounds and vision, and do you get "aware" of this percept relative to "real" time? Your brain needs to make an inference, that is to guess whether a sound and a visual input are generated by the same source. Your brain uses the probabilities of sounds and visual inputs to co-occur to guess whether they should be fused or not. This is called causal inference (scientific review paper below). If a visual and auditory inputs are too discrepant in space (where they come from) or time, your brain will assume they have different sources. If they more or less match, your brain will assume they come from the same source and combine them, which provides some advantages to locate that source, for example, as you now have 2 pieces of information. When you become "aware" of the sound/visual input/combined percept, relative to the "real" world is as far as I know unknown and difficultly testable (how would you estimate when some one becomes aware of an external stimulus when all you have are external stimuli to compare to). This can probably be addressed but as I said it is an ongoing field of research (below a review on the topic).

There is a phenomenon you will probably find interesting (original paper below). Because the brain uses the general statistics of the world to decide whether to fuse or split sound and vision, it is possible to change that. Some scientists have adapted observers to a specific mismatch between sound and vision. After some time of observing a consistent delay, let's say a beep happening consistently 100ms after a flash, the observers were asked to tell whether a beep and a flash happened simultaneously. What scientists have found consistently (there are many studies looking at this phenomenon) is that before adaptation people are mostly accurate. But after adaptation the observers report (in that example) the flash as happening roughly 100ms before the beep (as they were adapted). There are some limits to that, people can't adapt to too big a delay etc. But it is a robust phenomenon. If you are old enough to have experienced bad streaming services, where sound was often mismatched to images, you will remember thatafter some time you got not so annoyed with it. This is the reason, you just adapted to the delay. Scientists have also tried to see if this is distance-dependent but results are still inconclusive (different studies found contradictory results so far).

Shams, L., & Beierholm, U. R. (2010). Causal inference in perception. Trends in cognitive sciences, 14(9), 425-432.

Hanson, J. V., Heron, J., & Whitaker, D. (2008). Recalibration of perceived time across sensory modalities. Experimental Brain Research, 185(2), 347-352.

Sugita, Y., & Suzuki, Y. (2003). Implicit estimation of sound-arrival time. Nature, 421(6926), 911-911.

# Answer
> 2 votes
**Short answer**
The brain actively integrates and synchronizes sensory inputs, up to the point that it actually delays one modality to match it with another.

**Background**
Your question is all about **intersensory asynchrony** and **sensory integration**.

A well-known example where the two stimulus modalities you mention in your question (light and sound) are perceived as separate, while they are in fact coming from the same event, is a thunder heard *after* lightning. This is caused by the fact that sound travels at a speed much slower than light, and hence a thunder can lag lightning by seconds (Fig. 1).

source: NASA

In many instances, however, a multimodal perception is actually perceived as being synchronous, while they are in fact offset in time due to differences in physical characteristics of the stimuli. Take the storm as an example - when it is far away, the thunder is perceptually dissociated from the lightning, because the sound lags the light by seconds. But when the thunderstorm is close enough, the auditory crack and visual lightning are perceived as synchronous, while in fact they are still offset because of the sound travelling so much slower than light.

So why does the brain sync perceptions into 1 event, and sometimes not? This has to do with the **window of integration**. Vroomen and Keetels (2010) conclude in their review on this topic that a stimulus asynchrony in the case of auditory beeps and visual flashes can be between **25 and 50 ms** and still be perceived as coming from the same event.

The window of integration between more complex stimuli can be much greater. For example, the window for **speech and visual information** can be as large as **203 ms**. Such large windows of integration point toward higher processes playing a role in the brain. Only temporal lags **below 20 msec** are expected to go **unnoticed because of hard-wired limitations** on the resolution power of the individual senses.

Hence, Vroomen and Keetels (2010) argue there must be **higher processes** at work in the brain that actively synchronize percepts that are offset in time, but seem to belong to one and the same event. One such mechanism is referred to as *temporal ventriloquism*, which means that a *perceptual modality is **actively shifted in time** to match it with another modality*. This effect is most pronounced in visual stimuli. Visual perceptions are in fact *actively adjusted in time* to match a sound or tactile stimulus. Likely visual percepts are shifted preferably by the brain, because the visual system is the slowest of all the senses.

**Reference**
Vroomen & Keetels, *Att Percept Psychophys* 2010; **72**(4): 871-84

# Answer
> 2 votes
The synchronization of sensory information is called multisensory integration:

> Multisensory integration, also known as multimodal integration, is the study of how information from the different sensory modalities (such as sight, sound, touch, smell, self-motion, and taste) may be integrated by the nervous system.

This is the most salient example of neural "binding".

The examples provided are of "temporal binding" - eg, when you touch your nose and your toes at the same time, the signal from your toes takes much longer to reach your brain, and yet, you experience the simultaneity just fine. However, binding encompasses all aspects of conscious experience, such as object recognition, motor response, language processing, decision-making, emotion, etc, all of which can happen at different times and in different parts of the brain, but yet be experienced as unitary.

The question of how this happens is called the binding problem, or to be more specific:

> Secondly, there is the *combination problem*: the problem of how objects, background and abstract or emotional features are combined into a single experience. The combination problem is sometimes called BP2.

Many hypotheses have been proposed that you can read about on Wikipedia, and some neuroscientific hypotheses as well, but in general, this problem is currently unsolved.

The inevitable corollary of neural binding is that our sense of the real-time present is mostly composed of events taking place in the recent past - sometimes referred to as the "specious present". How far in the past, or more specifically, the "temporal binding window" is highly variable, differs between individuals, and is affected by mental disorders, training, etc. It is also not so much a window as a probability distribution, but certainly extends to the hundreds of milliseconds.

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Tags: neuroscience, sensory-perception, time, stimulation
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# Question
Title: What is the condition called when someone believes that robots should be treated as though they are human?
There is a movement calling for the "humanitarian treatment of robots" where robots must not be "sexually molested", must be spoken to with kind words and be treated, generally, like sensitive humans. This is likely because people are incapable of separating human from robot when they look at a robot made up to look human.

This question came up when there was a video of Boston Dynamics engineers shoving a robot and knocking it over went viral.

What is this condition where this inability to separate the two manifests? Perhaps the bonus question is: What is the phobia called where one fears that these groups will gain enough momentum to make it law?

# Answer
> 3 votes
The term ***robot humanization*** can be used to describe a psychological trait for considering certain robots to be human-like.

Life-like humanization of robots has been the aim of artificial intelligence (AI) research for many years, and we seem to be getting there with a robot called Sophia.

> Using artificial intelligence, Sophia can communicate with people and even use facial expressions to convey emotions - and looks eerily human as she does so (ITV, 2017).

A YouTube video of a 2019 interview with Sophia on UK television programme *This Morning* can be seen at https://youtu.be/5\_jp9CwJhcA

The pros and cons of AI being used to humanize robots have been debated for quite a while (Giger et al. 2019). One con is that the more a robot is humanized, the less likely people are to sacrifice it in favour of a fellow human (Nijssen et al. 2019).

## References

Giger, J. C., Piçarra, N., Alves‐Oliveira, P., Oliveira, R., & Arriaga, P. (2019). Humanization of robots: Is it really such a good idea? *Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies, 1*(2), 111-123. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbe2.147

Nijssen, S. R. R., Müller, B. C. N., van Baaren R. B., & Paulus, M. (2019) Saving the Robot or the Human? Robots Who Feel Deserve Moral Care. *Social Cognition, 37*(1): 41 https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2019.37.1.41

ITV. (2017) *Meet Sophia, the eerily human-like robot...* Retrieved from https://www.itv.com/goodmorningbritain/news/sophia-the-robot-freaks-our-piers-morgan-and-susanna-reid

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Tags: terminology
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# Question
Title: Are there any definitions of the perception & JND of the colour of light approximately like how the Weber Law defines it for the brightness of light?
As I understand it, the greater light levels are the more we require in order to detect a difference. I've also read this holds true for colour saturation. However, I can't seem to find any information that accounts for hue or the wavelength of light.

# Answer
> 3 votes
It depends how you define colors. Color-spaces are always 3D. The most obvious colorspace is based on the 3 types of cones you have (LMS) however it is not very sensible as you have no idea what your cones are. A slightly more sensible one is the CIE 1931 XYZ colorspace, which is a linear transformation of the LMS colorspace. One axis of this space was specifically chosen to match brightness perception. So if you take a plane orthogonal to this luminance axis you can define a point by 2 coordinates which can be (or not, again depending of what coordinate system you use) saturation (how far you are from neutral gray) and hue (the angle from neutral gray). You can measure thresholds, or Just Noticeable Differences (JNDs) around different points of this plane. Those are called McAdams ellipses (after the scientist who first performed this experiment). They look like this:

As you can see the size and orientation of these ellipses vary widely depending on where you are in this space. So it is not really true that Weber's law applies to color perception. Not to saturation and certainly not hue. At least not when you measure chromaticity in terms of physical units.

In facts in color perception the reasoning is somewhat inverted. What colorspace should you use, considering a physics-based colorspace, such as CIE XYZ, accounts so poorly for what we subjectively perceive? More recently different colorspaces have been designed that distort the XYZ colorspace non linearly such that these ellipses become more circular (e.g. the CIE Luv color-space). In that case whether Weber's law applies or not totally depends on how you defined you colorspace. But we know that Weber's law is a general law in perception and applies to all percepts such as motion, depth, you name it, and also more abstract percepts such as numbers. So it is sensible to design a color-space where saturation respects Weber's law. However for hue Weber's law is not meaningful, as it is an angle.

MacAdam, D. L. (1942). Visual sensitivities to color differences in daylight. Josa, 32(5), 247-274.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacAdam\_ellipse

# Answer
> 1 votes
Most obervers can differentiate about a million different colors (Halsey & Chapanis, 1951). Generally this is referred to as the JND of hue. The difference between the definition of color and hue is minimal; basically, white, black and grey are considered colors, not hues. Anyway, a Google Scholar search using the keyword 'JND + color' didn't come up with much, but 'JND + Hue' did the job for me.

I have added a few interesting, classic references below. A search with 'JND + Hue' yields many more.

<sub>**References**
**-** Halsey & Chapanis, *JOSA* (1951); **41**(12): 1067-8
**-** Holtsmakr & Valberg, *Nature* (1969); **224**: 361-2</sub>

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Tags: perception, reference-request, psychophysics, color
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# Question
Title: Why use a quasi experimental design when you can do an experiment?
I read about quasi-experimental design and the variations it has such as **pre-test post-test non-equivalent groups**, and also **experimental designs**. Having compared these two, I ascertained that the difference between this variation of quasi-experimental design(**pre-test post-test non-equivalent groups**) and **experimental design** is randomization. However, what I couldn't understand was:

Why should quasi-experimental design even exist when we can do randomization easily and the randomization has more benefits than matching the participants?

Honestly, I search for the answer but I couldn't find any, and obviously that is why I'm asking a question, yet if you find any alike question I would be happy if you refer me to it. I genuinely appreciate it if you refer me to at least one resource as well. The reference book for the discrimination between these two designs: Introduction to Research Methods and Data Analysis in Psychology, Third Edition by Darren Langdridge and Gareth Hagger-Johnson

# Answer
> 3 votes
The first paper I found searching for "advantages of quasi-experimental design" was this one:

Schweizer, M. L., Braun, B. I., & Milstone, A. M. (2016). Research methods in healthcare epidemiology and antimicrobial stewardship—quasi-experimental designs. Infection control & hospital epidemiology, 37(10), 1135-1140.

Most of the benefits are pragmatic: less cost, potential for retrospective analysis, bypassing ethical considerations that present barriers to randomized trials, etc.

An example of the type of quasi-randomized design I've often been involved in myself is when the data have already been collected in normal medical practice. Sometimes these patients are difficult if not impossible to consent: an intensive-care unit population, for example. Those patients are very sick and their imminent needs are live-saving care; there may not be time to obtain consent for a randomized trial. However, if practices and policies change over time or are different in different facilities, you can use a quasi-experimental design to determine whether those changes or differences in standard of care have an important impact or not.

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# Question
Title: Reliable channel or method for self-study of Psychology
Out of interest, I've been reading some psychology topics online recently (I have zero background in psychology). For example, Maslow theory in depth. On and off, I come across terms that sound like having same meaning. So I need to search their explanation, in order to learn their differences, if any. More and more often, I run into situation where different psychology related websites giving slightly different explanation, or sometimes, even conflicting explanation. So, I'm often confused and unable to determine which explanation is the right one.

Is there a de-facto reliable source to learn psychology (except attending school), where knowledge and explanation given are considered as truth? Or... is the field of Psychology itself still full of ambiguity nowadays?

--- update 4/19 (summary)

My study approach is by keep searching and reading from multiple websites until I reach a point where I feel somewhat confident to take a guess. All along I've been uncomfortable with this approach because I find it not as productive as I wish, and the outcome may not reflect the truth.

My understanding from input of @AliceD and @Chris Rogers is that, it seems that to learn psychology in informal way for non-pro purpose (in my case, for personal growth, to understand myself better), this is the logical and viable way, even though it is not as intuitive as I've been hoping. And for those who suspect they have mental health problem, the best is to reach out to registered mental health professional for help.

# Answer
> 2 votes
Reading is a great way of studying Psychology. Many just accept what they are told by friends etc. without looking into the subject a bit deeper, which can be a problem.

There are even debates within our meta site concerning the reliability of some online psychology articles. One example is Is Psychology Today a credible source?

I fully encourage you to challenge narrative put across in newspapers, social media, popular psychology articles etc. by reading the source of the studies where possible. Google Scholar is a friend for that.

As discussed in the comments, the only possible problem with just reading to learn — as with many areas of scientific study — is that it is best (where you can) to get some practical knowledge along with the theoretical knowledge in order to fully understand all the concepts involved.

This is best through structured learning in psychology courses, but if you are reading a subject you have first hand knowledge of, you could do some self-reflection to learn some of the practical side, either alone, or through the help of a fully trained and registered therapist.

As @AliceD points out in his answer, there are times in the study of psychology where you will find slightly different concepts (interpretations of the studies).

> To search for the book of truth, as you seem to do, is in vain. It hasn't existed, does not exist, and will not exist. In fact, the best sources are meta-studies that compare the available data critically and come to a consensus, rather then stating them as facts.

There **is** no one book of truth on the subject of psychology. And, while some concepts are completely out of wack with the facts found in the studies, there can legitimately be different concepts born out of some psychological studies. This is purely because they simply cannot be fully proved through scientific measurements through brain scans and the like. See my meta post answer regarding pseudoscience within psychology for more on that.

The problem is that some concepts **are** complete quackery and some (especially in social media and newspapers) are complete lies or slight twists in the truth. All of which can be weeded out by going to the studies and reading what they actually found and how.

When finding conflicts in ideas which you cannot resolve through Google Scholar searches etc. you could bring the conflicts here for resolving.

Ask lots of questions where needed. That's what this site is for. I must point out however, that there is one caveat I will give regarding use of Psychology.SE.

If the psychological concepts you are talking about relates to psychological problems you or someone you know may be facing, for a number of reasons outlined in this meta post we can not, and will not, give advice or potential diagnoses for any specific individual. If you have a question regarding your mental health, you should see a doctor or fully trained and registered therapist.

# Answer
> 2 votes
Psychology can be said to be an empirical science which is built up out of the elements of experience (Avelin, 1933).

Assuming Psychology in general is empirical, its principles can be investigated by experiments, *e.g.*, through the gold standard of clinical research, namely randomized controlled clinical trials (RCTs). Such studies are generally considered to be reliable, yet they are not always accurate, as they are still prone to all sorts of troubles, to name a few see Fig. 1.

All these potential sources of error can lead to false conclusions and hence different studies may yield conflicting evidence. As such, the 'truth' may be out there, but often it is represented in the scientific community by consensus, rather than fact. Different people may adhere to different beliefs, and rely their views on a select number of results, rather than the consensus. As such, even reputable textbooks may convey a biased message.

To search for the book of truth, as you seem to do, is in vain. It hasn't existed, does not exist, and will not exist. In fact, the best sources are meta-studies that compare the available data critically and come to a consensus, rather then stating them as facts.

Fig. 1. source: Sessley & Imrey (2015)

**References**
**-** Avelin, *Nature* (1933); **132**: 841–3
**-** Sessley & Imrey, *Anesthesia-analgesia* (2015); **121**(4): 134-42

# Answer
> -1 votes
If you are curious about psychology you can find articles about almost anything in "PsychologyToday". I'm a second year psychology student with high GPA and i find it really helpful for my assignments and also i read articles almost everyday.

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# Question
Title: In Integrate-and-fire models, why can we assume spike arrivals to be random?
I'm reading through some notes on integrate and fire models and it says that we assume that spike arrivals are random.

Why exactly can we make this assumption?

Is it because experiments haven't shown otherwise thus far?

# Answer
> 2 votes
Assuming random spike arrivals is just a *convention* that is chosen, not an assumption of some natural system. It's not a property of integrate-and-fire models. Probably whoever chose this convention did so for some demonstration (teaching) purposes. It may also be chosen to model "neural noise" which is a shortcut for "all the other stuff going on in the brain besides that which we are studying". In that context, it's common to model the effect of a consistent incoming signal on a random background.

An equivalent might be to see how an electronic filter would respond to either an impulse or to white noise: you could learn something about the filter (such as its ability to attenuate certain frequencies, or a certain response pattern to an impulse) by looking at either of those responses.

Similarly, by feeding noisy/random input to a integrate-and-fire neuron, you can find how changing parameters of your model neuron changes its output properties.

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Tags: theoretical-neuroscience, computational-modeling
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# Question
Title: Consistent neuroanatomy coordinates naming
I'm studying brain anatomy but I find coordinates systems are not consistent among books, lecture notes and internet.

**There are 3 plane directions**

* horizontal
* coronal
* sagittal

**And 6 directions**

* superior
* inferior
* anterior
* posterior
* medial
* lateral

What I actually find is that the same "view" of the brain often have different names, and different views have the same name. I wanted to get rid once and forever to all ambiguity.

**How do I call a radiograph taken on**:

* horizontal plane and looking from superior direction?
* horizontal plane and looking from inferior direction?
* coronal plane and looking from anterior direction?
* coronal plane and looking from posterior direction?
* sagittal plane and looking from medial direction?
* sagittal plane and looking from lateral direction?

**How do I call a radiograph taken from**:

* above the brain without "cutting" it?
* below the brain without "cutting" it?
* the front of the brain without "cutting" it?
* the back of the brain without "cutting" it?
* the left side of the brain without "cutting" it?
* the right the brain without "cutting" it?

Another anomaly is that left/right is different. Other directions are from a point external to the body to another point external to the body (in example, superior seems to go from below the feet, to above the head), while medial, seems to indicate going from the center of the body, to the left or right side.

# Answer
I'm not familiar with radiography, only MRI, but I assume conventions are similar. By convention images are always shown as if in front of the subject, or looking at the subject's feet (from below). There might be specific names for the direction of the cut (from top or from below) but they are not common (I've never heard them). Usually to avoid ambiguity you would always present cuts in the standard orientation. You can describe the cut ("coronal" or "axial") but images are usually self-explanatory.

For planes there are multiple names being used. The most common, in my experience, are axial, sagittal and coronal. But you will occasionally see respectively horizontal, medial and frontal. The 3 axes orthogonal to these planes and their associated orientations are the superior/inferior axis, the left/right axis and the anterior/posterior axis. Again, these cuts will usually always be shown from front, or from below. If, for any reason, someone decided to present a different orientation that would be specified explicitly. The sagittal cut is unambiguous, but usually you'll see it with the patient pointing left.

I don't know the name of an image "without cutting it", but I would assume it is just a "projection". And I would assume that unless specified explicitly orientations would be the same as cuts. Indeed, the orientation conventions used in modern imagery have been inherited from the old-age radiographic plates. While drawings are usually depicted as seen from top because it makes more sense to look at a brain from the top during a dissection.

Left/right is useful to describe the overall orientation of a subject, but not of an area in the brain (area X is to the right of area Y is true only in one hemisphere), so these directions are replaced by medial/lateral for brain locations. For some reason superior/inferior are also replaced by dorsal/ventral, I don't know why. For example the dorso-lateral PreFrontal Cortex is the "outer-top" part the the PFC. The ventro-lateral PFC is the "outer-bottom" part. And the ventro-medial PFC is the "inside" of the PFC (that you cannot see looking directly at the brain). Even weirder anterior/posterior are kept, but rostral/caudal are also used. To make it even more confusing these 2 axes do not perfectly match (rostral points toward the front for the anterior parts of the brain but down for the posterior parts of the brain). The axial plane for the brain is defined by the interaural axis and the lower ridge of the eye sockets. Brain coordinates are usually (at least in the scientific literature) reported by their position on the antero-posterior and medio-lateral axes. The origin of the system is the midpoint of the interaural axis.

Unfortunately there is more terminology that you'll find. For example referring to other parts of the brain, like "occipital". Different reference system are often mixed, like Caudal IntraParietal vs. Anterior IntraParietal. So long story short, there is no consistent coordinate system. It is truly unfortunate that terms used to disambiguate brain locations are themselves source of confusion.

Here is an example of macaque MRI with from top-left rotating counter-clockwise, an axial cut, a sagittal cut and a coronal cut. I labeled directions for clarity.
> 1 votes

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# Question
Title: What is the relationship between self-perceptions and actual driving ability?
I've often heard it said that almost everyone thinks that they are a better than average driver. If this is true, it could be explained by a number of theories. Some of these are outlined in this Wikipedia article on illusory superiorty.

I had a few questions:

* Has anyone researched the actual correlation between self-perceived and other measures of driving ability?
* Has anyone developed a model of the degree to which any bias is due to different causes (e.g., different values of speed versus safety; perceptual differences of others versus self; etc.)?

# Answer
The results are mixed.

It's well known that in general people will consider themselves above average in most areas, and driving is no exception Do expert drivers have a reduced illusion of superiority?

> Expert police drivers rated themselves as superior to equally qualified drivers, to the same degree as novices, Cohen’s d = .03 ns. Despite their extensive additional training and experience, experts still appear to be as susceptible to illusions of superiority as everyone else.

Drivers' Ratings of Different Components of Their Own Driving Skill: A Greater Illusion of Superiority for Skills That Relate to Accident Involvement also suggests that good appreciation for hazard perception results in higher self-percieved safety even when skill is controlled for:

> Also, ratings of hazard-perception skill related to self-perceived safety after overall skill was controlled for. We suggest that although drivers appear to appreciate the role of hazard perception in safe driving, any safety benefit to be derived from this appreciation may be undermined by drivers' inflated opinions of their own hazard-perception skill. We also tested the relationship between illusory beliefs about driving skill and risk taking and looked at ways of manipulating drivers' illusory beliefs.

Age differences in male drivers' perception of accident risk: The role of perceived driving ability suggests that younger (male) drivers consider themselves equal to older drivers, youunger drivers are involved in more accidents:

> Although young drivers' estimates of accident involvement in the next year were higher than those of older drivers, young drivers gave lower ratings of accident risk for specific driving situations which demanded fast driving reflexes or substantial vehicle-handling skills. Young drivers rated their own risk of an accident and driving abilities as being the same as for older drivers. However, they saw their peers as being significantly higher at risk and having poorer abilities than themselves.

The article Confidence in, and self-rating of, driving ability among older drivers suggests there **is no correlation** between confidence and driving performance **for older drivers**. This seems to go against most results but other studies were not focused on older drivers.

> No relationship was found between confidence and adverse driving events or driving performance. Understanding the relationship of confidence and self-rating of driving ability to driving patterns, adverse events and driving performance may provide additional insights into identifying older drivers at increased risk for problems and formulating intervention strategies to help lower risk.

Overall it appears that **young drivers** are likely to have excessively high confidence in their own ability. There isn't much evidence to suggest that higher or lower confidence actually correlates with a specific skill level. Older drivers seem to have better driving skill and less overconfidence, but I have not seen results controlling for age and correlating driving ability with confidence except the study on older drivers which showed *no correlation*.
> 6 votes

# Answer
I was recently reading a study by Roy and Liersch (in press).

To quote the abstract:

> We examined whether people recognized that others might disagree with their high self assessments of driving ability, and, if so, why. Participants in four experiments expressed a belief that others would assess them as worse drivers than they assessed themselves. This difference appears to be caused by participants’ use of their own, idiosyncratic definition of driving ability. In Experiments 2 and 3 participants reported that others would supply similar assessments of their ability when the skill was less ambiguous. Results of Experiment 4 indicate that participants recognize that there may be more than one way to view driving performance. Participants appear aware that others likely disagree with their self-assessment of driving ability due to differences in how others define driving ability

Thus, the authors take seriously the concept of *idiosyncratic definitions of ability*. However, they acknowledge that such a perspective does not explain the whole effect, whereby in the discussion they write:

> While previous research (Dunning et al., 1989; Dunning et al., 1995; Dunning & McElwee, 1995; Dunning et al., 1989; Hayes & Dunning, 1997; Santos-Pinto & Sobel, 2005) and the current studies suggest that people might assess themselves as above average because they focus on their idiosyncratic definitions of ability, it is important to note that this cannot explain the bias in full. Even though the average participant thought that others would have a lower view of their ability, participants still thought that others would view them as being an above average driver, typically scoring them around the 60 th percentile or higher. Unfortunately, we cannot determine how biased the participants in the present studies were since their actual ability level was not measured (e.g., Kwan et al., 2004). In fact, it is possible that the young adults in our study were actually more skilled than average.

### References

* Dunning, D., Meyerowitz, J. A., & Holzberg, A. D. (1989). Ambiguity and self-evaluation: The role of idiosyncratic trait definitions in self-serving assessments of ability. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 1082-1090.
* Dunning, D., Leuenberger, A., & Sherman, D. A. (1995). A new look at motivated inference: Are selfserving theories of success a product of motivational forces? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 58-68.
* Dunning, D. & McElwee, R. O. (1995). Idiosyncratic trait definitions: Implications for self-description and social judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68, 936-946.
* Hayes, A. F. & Dunning, D. (1997). Construal processes and trait ambiguity: Implications for self-peer agreement in personality judgment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72, 644-677.
* Roy, M.M. & Liersch, M.J. (in press). I Am a Better Driver Than You Think: Examining Self-Enhancement for Driving Ability. PDF
* Santos-Pinto, L., & Sobel, J. (2005). A model of positive self-image in subjective assessments. American Economic Review, 95, 1386-1402.
> 1 votes

# Answer
Even simple survey data seems to prove this point. There cannot be 80% of people having "above average" driving skills.

> 80% of respondents rated themselves “above average” as drivers.

References: McCormick, I.A., Walkey, F.H & Green, D.A. (1986) Comparative perceptions of driver ability— A confirmation and expansion. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 18,205-208
> 0 votes

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Tags: performance, attribution
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# Question
Title: How to quantitatively measure strength of friendship using observable factors?
Is there any quantitative measure associated with the strength of a friendship or relationship? Ideally it should be able to be calculated based on observable factors, but should not require interaction with the subjects, just observation.

Note: Specifically I am analyzing fictionalized novels.

# Answer
It's not my area, but a quick Google revealed this one.

The McGill Friendship Questionnaire - Respondent's affection (MFQ-RA). Item and validation information is available on the site.

It also mentions that it takes inspiration from "the Friendship Questionnaire" and the "Friendship Qualities scale". So they might also be worth checking out.
> 1 votes

# Answer
Using Dunbar's number, and the inherent trade off that the more friends one has (quantity) the less time they can spend with each (quality). Time spent could be assumed to equate to friendship strength.

I will note, however, that there is in fact a secondary level (of quality) to the time itself whereby how effectively one uses it with different friends, however using the above method it would be assumed all time is spent equally effectively.
> 1 votes

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title: List of conflicts humans can have

text:
# Question
Title: List of conflicts humans can have
I am searching a list of conflicts humans can have.

Here I found some 7 types of conflicts

* Person vs Person
* Person vs self
* Person vs. Fate/God(s)
* Person vs. Nature
* Person vs. Society
* Person vs. the Unknown/Extraterrestrial
* Person vs. Technology/Machinery

But the refer to literature, not to psychology.

This wikipedia page contains a list: Conflicts (Social science) But this is just a list of unrelated articles.

Is there a valuable book/article which provides an overview over the different conflicts humans can have?

# Answer
In regards to a list, if there is anything like that it is simply internal and external conflicts (which encompasses your list, as well as deals with overlapping components of your list).

Furthermore, there are three major paradigms of sociology, one of which is conflict theory. This examines stratification (ie through classes) and inequality (ie of resources), largely being credited to Karl Marx. In general, the paradigms are different lenses with which to examine issues in society (gender, class, race, etc.).
> 1 votes

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# Question
Title: Predisposition toward organizing information in a hierarchical manner?
I understand someone why we like hierarchical social structures today. They are present across virtually all cultures and we've used them for a very long time.

However, it appears we also gravitate toward organizing things in hierarchies as well, not just people. When we study topics, we draw diagrams of hierarchies. When we write textbooks, we subdivide information into ranges of topics and them smaller ranges, and then the individual concepts themselves. We put our paperwork in folders, in filing cabinets, which are arranged in shelves, which are arranged in rows of shelves, and so on...

Recently we've spent more time exploring other structures like networks with nodes, but our default still seems to be hierarchies.

It's not just organizations and governments that we organize this way, but also information. Why is this?

Regarding the utility of hierarchies in organization information, binary search trees in computer science allow finding indexed information very quickly (Adamchik, 2009). However it is common knowledge that we have been organizing information hierarchically long before the advent of computer science. So did we realize this intuitively?

Perhaps this predisposition bleeds over in some way from social hierarchies? Could our other predisposition to see human intention in inanimate objects have led us to use the same structure for information (Coolidge, 2016)?

**References**

Adamchik, V. S. (2009) *Binary Trees*. Retrieved from: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~adamchik/15-121/lectures/Trees/trees.html

Coolidge, F. L. (2016). Why People See Faces When There Are None: Pareidolia. *Psychology Today*. Retrieved from: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-think-neandertal/201608/why-people-see-faces-when-there-are-none-pareidolia

# Answer
> 1 votes
This is not out of desire, it is out of necessity of abiding a feature of information and knowledge itself. Quite frankly, this goes into a bit of data science and information theory (I personally learned of this through data visualization. Nonetheless, I still think it is a relevant question).

According to Richard Wurman in his book, *Information Anxiety*, **“information may be infinite, however… the organization \[or structuring\] of information is finite.”** Furthermore, “Each vantage point, each mode of organization will create a new structure. And each new structure will enable you to see a different meaning, acting as a new method of classification from which the whole can be grasped and understood.”

The three main ways of organizing information are as follows (please note that those within parenthesis are my personal examples, the rest are more main/established ones):

1. Location
2. Categorical
a. (similarity/relatedness)
b. (problem/solution)
c. (cause/effect)
3. Hierarchical
a. Alphabetical
b. Time
c. (deductive/inductive order)
d. (importance)
e. (simplicity/complexity)

In relevance to hierarchical information and psychology though, it is worthwhile to note that both foundations of language and logic are found through the alphabetical category. These, in turn, are fundamental features of the human mind and are, in large part, also means through which the mind makes connections. Also, tendencies towards hierarchical information could also be explained through using time as an anchor to which to describe things in relation to such as the past, present, and future.

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