# Question
Title: How does the brain act on the information gained via eye saccades?
I've often heard that the process of saccading can be described as a statistical sampling technique. Specifically, the standard textbook definition of the function of saccades seems to be that the field of vision is too complexity to known in its entirety, so we look at a representative sample of it in order to form a generally adequate representation.

But this conceit seems to be made purely on a loose analogy to much more well defined problems than vision (e.g. anything soluble via Monte Carlo Method), and in the perception literature I haven't found any proposed mechanisms by which this integration of sampled information could occur.

So my question is this: If eye saccading is best thought of as a sampling process, then **how does he brain integrate the sampled information?** And if not, then what are some viable alternatives to **how the brain makes use of the sequence of images producing via saccading?**

# Answer
> 9 votes
A good place to start for a *high level* understanding of all perception and action is Jaoquin Fuster's **perception-action cycle**. As he says, it's a "cybernetic cycle linking the organism to its environment". He describes two moieties of the brain, posterior sensation moiety, and the anterior behavioral moiety. Information cycles between perception, interpretation (in the posterior moiety), action plans (in the anterior moiety), and actual movement. The movement is perceived, and the cycle continues. This is a good frame for thinking about how saccades work.

Your actual question then is opening a big ol' meaty can of worms. How the brain makes use of the sequence of images produced by the saccades, is actually two questions. First, how does the brain perceive images? Next, how are saccades relevant to this? In the context of the perception-action cycle, we're then looking at how the posterior moiety interprets visual information, and how the anterior moiety acts on that interpretation. Without writing 10,000 words, I'll try and give a thumbnail sketch of this. Then I'll try and circle it back to answer your specific question.

So, how does the brain interpret visual images? Here we only really need to understand that the posterior moiety creates **distributed and hierarchical** cell assemblies representing increasingly complex sets of features. Distributed because the cell assemblies are **sparse**, as in they consist of many scattered members each representing a different feature. In some way these are bound together to form the gestalt of the object. Hierarchical because cortical regions are connected in a way where successive regions integrate features from previous regions. So, basically a hierarchical set of cell assemblies are activated and thus the sensory information is represented in the mind.

One point before moving on: these **cell assemblies are temporal**. They represent information over time. It's not so obvious in vision, but for other sensory modalities it is. What does a single configuration of cochlear activations mean? Or a single configuration of touch sensors? Not much. It means vastly more in temporal sequence. A melody, or a hand patting your shoulder. Vision is not different, the confounding thing is that each individual configuration carries so much information it's easy to think of the visual system as a static system. But it isn't. Saccades themselves are helping create temporal information, by focusing on successive things. If you think in terms of the activity of the retina, instead of the static external scene, you'll see that saccades are an integral part of making visual information temporally dynamic.

Because of this, I don't think it is optimal to think of saccades as a procession of images. On the level of the retina, or V1, this might be true. But throughout the perceptual moiety, these images are bound together. Each saccade doesn't present a radically new image, it elaborates an already existing image within the mind. The higher hierarchical regions are binding the information from each saccade into a framework.

Ok, so if the posterior moiety understands the scene, how is it translated into an action (like a saccade)? I believe the answer is the **route through the basal ganglia**. The basal ganglia helps "select" motor behaviors. To put it very simply, the perceptual moiety is the input, and the output goes to the anterior motor moiety. Through mechanisms that are unclear, a transform is done where a saccade movement is disinhibited that will move the eyes to the bit of the scene that it wants to see next.

I realize I'm shooting kind of wide here, so let me know if you want to know about something more specific. I'm just not sure that your current question can be answered narrowly.

> Fuster, J.M. (1990). Prefrontal cortex and the bridging of temporal gaps in the Perception-Action Cycle. *Annals of the New York Academy of Science*, 608, 318-336.
>
> Felleman, D.J., & Van Essen, D.C. (1991). Distributed Hierarchical Processing in the Primate Cerebral Cortex. *Cerb Cortex*, 1, 1-47.
>
> Sakurai, Y. (1999). How do cell assemblies encode information in the brain? *Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews*, 23, 785-796.
>
> Engel, A.K., Konig, P., Kreiter, A., Schillen, T.B., & Singer, W. (1992). Temporal coding in the visual cortex: new vistas on integration in the nervous system. *Trends in Neurosciences*, 15, 218-226.
>
> Hikosaka, O., Takikawa, Y., & Kawagoe, R. (2000). Role of the basal ganglia in the control of purposive saccadic eye movements. *Physiol Rev*, 80, 953-978.

# Answer
> 7 votes
Let's begin by being clear about terminology and what is involved in eye movements at a basic level. Saccades are eye movements. Fixations are when your eyes are still. No visual information is gathered during saccades - we are functionally blind when making saccades. The easy way to demonstrate this is to try staring in a mirror and watching your own saccades. You can't do it!

Second, though Preece's response is very detailed from a more neurological perspective, I'd like to offer an answer from the perspective of eye movement researchers. The easy way to get into eye movement research, and the perspective of eye movement researchers, is to read something like the Scholarpedia article on the topic: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Eye\_movement . If you'd like to read actual papers, head over to some of the reviews by Keith Rayner that are cited in that link. They are very detailed and thorough and will serve as a good starting point.

Next, your point of "Specifically, the standard textbook definition of the function of saccades seems to be that the field of vision is too complexity to known in its entirety, so we look at a representative sample of it in order to form a generally adequate representation," is only really half of the story, and its worth being explicit about what this actually means. The reason that we fixate objects in the world around us is to use our fovea to gain a high-quality, colour, high-resolution inspection of those objects. Visual acuity (and colour vision) drops off in the periphery very rapidly.

Now.. to get to your question! What you are *really* asking about is something called **trans-saccadic integration** or **trans-saccadic memory**. It's all about how we piece together and integrate the information gained at successive fixations at different points in the world around us. David Irwin and colleagues have done extensive work along these lines, and a good starting point is the wikipedia page and its references: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transsaccadic\_memory

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, perception, vision, eye-movement
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# Question
Title: How can I find open access journals for cognitive science research?
What **open access** journals that publish research in cognitive science/psychology exist?

Apart from PLOS ONE, are there any other open access journals that publish research in cognitive science/psychology?

**Where should I start looking for them?**

# Answer
> 12 votes
The Directory of Open Access Journals is a great place to start when searching for Open Access Journals in any field.

You can browse through journals for the specific subject areas like Psychology or Neurology, or you can search for journals or articles containing certain keywords.

The DOAJ lists articles in multiple languages as well, not just English journals.

# Answer
> 3 votes
Another resource is Sherpa/Romeo which aims to be a site to help you "find a summary of permissions that are normally given as part of each publisher's copyright transfer agreement".

For example, here's what it says about Journal of Applied Psychology.

> * Author's Pre-print: author can archive pre-print (ie pre-refereeing)
> * Author's Post-print: author can archive post-print (ie final draft post-refereeing)
> * Publisher's Version/PDF: author cannot archive publisher's version/PDF
> * General Conditions:
>     + Pre-print on a web-site
>     + Pre-print must be labeled with date and accompanied with statement that paper has not (yet) been published
>     + Copy of authors final peer-reviewed manuscript as accepted for publication
>     + Post-print on author's web-site or employers server only, after acceptance
>     + Publisher copyright and source must be acknowledged
>     + Must link to APA journal home page or article DOI
>     + Article must include the following statement: 'This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record.'
>     + Publisher version cannot be used
>     + APA will submit NIH author articles to PubMed Central, after author completion of form
>     + Wellcome Trust authors may comply using Paid Option.

That said, I'd always double check the accuracy of the information on the site with the actual journal home page and the actual publishing agreement that you sign.

# Answer
> 3 votes
One thing that hasn't yet been mentioned: if you find a paper you want that's not open access, many researchers nowadays put pdfs of their work on their personal sites. The easy solution is therefore to google the name of each author, starting with the first, plus something like "Publications", or if they have a common name, add "Publications, Psychology" to the search terms. Google scholar seems to often be able to do this and help you hunt down the papers easily as well.

Finally, let's not forget that you can just email the first author and they'll send it back to you.

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, publication-process
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# Question
Title: Why aren't sleep measures consistently measured as mediators/moderators of cognitive performance?
Knowing that sleep quantity and quality affects cognitive performance across many domains, why aren't pre-test sleep measures or intra-test measures of arousal a standard part of all cognitive test paradigms?

# Answer
> 7 votes
Measures of arousal surely do play a role in subject performance on a wide variety of cognitive tasks. Generally, scientists can safely ignore this factor as it is assumed to introduce *random noise* between participants. From a hypothesis testing perspective, scientists are much more worried about factors that introduce *systematic bias*, or factors that skew performance in one condition but not another.

As an example, consider a psychologist that is testing whether some intervention has an effect on performance. If we assume that arousal levels throughout the sample are randomly distributed, it should not affect our ability to detect an effect of our independent variable. In fact, there are potentially infinitely other factors that may affect performance on a cognitive task. To name a few: prior experience, mood, fatigue, cognitive load, intelligence, or attention. Each one of these factors in turn is the result of numerous other incidental variables (for instance, my mood may be affected by the weather, or how long it's been since I've eaten).

It would be infeasible to test for all of these factors, but again, if we assume that each measure is randomly distributed throughout a sample, it won't make a big difference-- in fact, it's somewhat statistically convenient:

Many psychological measures are normally distributed, which allow us to run statistical tests that assume normality (e.g., t-tests!) The reason this is so is because what we are measuring is actually the sum of many *independent and identically distributed* (i.i.d.) variables-- such as arousal, experience, attention, etc. The Central Limit Theorem tells us that the sum of all of these factors lead to a normally distributed measure.

It is still important to know when and how sleep measures may affect performance. In knowing that information, scientists can watch out for situations in which arousal may cause systematic bias between conditions, a potential confound. But in general, it often just doesn't really matter for the tests we are conducting.

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, measurement, methodology, sleep
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# Question
Title: What are the purported mechanisms of eidetic memory and why is it comorbid with autism?
Eidetic memory, often called "photographic" or "flashbulb" memory, is often associated with amazing feats of recall. Is the mechanism behind this phenomenon an aberration of the visualization of a scene or the way that such visual information is encoded into long-term memory?

We often associate such accurate recall with those that exhibit savantism. Kim Peek, the model for the character in Rain Man, is not autistic, but according to an overview article (actual reference pdf here), 50% of savants are autistic. Is there any neurophysiological or anatomical reason why this might be true?

# Answer
From my very brief skim of the field, it seems like the consensus is that savants have access to the kind of low-level information processing which non-savants do not. I'll summarize one such theory in some detail, since it's the one that I've happened to read. But I'm not an expert in this field and this is just one of the theories, the rest of which I haven't studied. I'll provide some pointers to the other theories at the end.

Snyder (2009) speculates that "savants have privileged access to lower level, less-processed information, before it is packaged into holistic concepts and meaningful labels". This is something that everyone would in principle have the potential for: savants are accessing information that is present in everyone's brain, but not normally available for introspection. As some supporting evidence for this idea, Snyder notes that savant-like abilities can sometimes be artificially induced in healthy individuals by inhibiting a part of the brain, and that savant abilities are known to appear spontaneously and suddenly in childhood or as a result of brain injuries. Once acquired, savant abilities typically do not improve by training.

> I have argued that the extraordinary skills of savants are latent in us all and that they can be induced artificially owing to the inhibiting influence of low-frequency rTMS, that is, by turning off part of the brain, not by exciting it. My hypothesis is that savant skills are facilitated by privileged access to raw, less-processed sensory information, information that exists in all brains but is inaccessible owing to top-down inhibition. Thus, autistic savants tend to see a more literal, less filtered view of the world. Their ‘skill’ or performance does not depend on active learning, but simply on an effortless ‘reading off’ of this less-processed information.

Snyder does not explicitly draw the connection between this and memory, but I would infer the connection to be as follows. Non-savants mostly consciously process information that has been packaged into holistic, high-level concepts, and it is these high-level concepts that are stored into memory. When we try to recall something that happened, we cannot recall specific details, because they were never stored into memory in the first place. Savants think more in terms of low-level details, so that's also what gets stored in memory.

As for the autism connection, Snyder proposes that a lack of high-level concept formation and seeing things mainly in terms of low-level detail is what autism essentially *is*. High-level concepts allow us to order the world and understand it, and autists are lacking in those kinds of concepts.

So why are all autists not savants? There are many varieties and degrees of autism, and it is conceivable that a lack of high-level concept formation could be caused by many different things. Some of those things could also cause more widespread damage to other systems. Snyder's suggestion is that autist savants represent autism in its "purest" form, uncontaminated by other disorders. (And why are all savants not autists? Presumably because they have access to both low-level *and* high-level concepts.)

How well-supported is this theory? Writing in the same issue as Snyder, Happé & Frith (2009) note that Snyder's hypothesis is "controversial", but note that a lot of other theorists also propose explanations which seem to imply some sort of focus on low-level processing:

> Several authors in this issue offer hypotheses for why autism should be associated with talent, with remarkable consensus that the ability to process local information plays a key role. Happé & Vital (2009) suggest that detail-focused attention and memory predispose to the development of talent, both in the general population and in autism. Baron-Cohen et al. (2009) suggest that superior sensory acuity across modalities underlies such detail focus, which in turn fosters the tendency to explore and master closed systems (e.g. the calendar). With the enhanced perceptual functioning theory, Mottron et al. (2009) propose that locally orientated processing and, specifically, detection of patterns in the environment, underlies the high incidence of savant skills in autism. Plaisted Grant & Davis (2009) also emphasize the qualitative differences in perceptual and cognitive processing in ASD, and make tentative links to underlying neural systems. These very different theorists share the view that an ability to attend to and process featural information plays an important part in predisposing to special skills of a savant sort. This view is upheld, for example, in a detailed case study of a prodigious mnemonist and calculator with Asperger syndrome and synaesthesia who shows a preference for local processing and an unusual pattern of brain activation while remembering digits (Bor et al. 2007).

Likewise, Neumann et al. (2010):

> One way to approach the question of how savants achieve their astonishing abilities is to investigate their brain activity during savant skills demonstration. Most theoretical accounts act on the assumption that some lower-level (perceptual) information processing mechanisms are enhanced in contrast to \[41,7\], or at the cost of higher-level operations \[65,20,56,16\]. Thus, single aspects of perception or lower-level information processing are preferentially processed or accessed resulting in a local or early processing bias that is benefiting for the development of savant skills. This is associated with an enhanced memory trace for these features \[41\]. Treffert \[61\], assuming different brain mechanisms, postulated a model that implies compensatory right-hemispheric functioning after left-hemisphere damage and reliance upon lower-level procedural memory due to damage of higher-level memory.

So at least some version of this theory seems to be right. See the references below if you want to look more into the other theories.

**References**

Happé, F. & Frith, U. (2009) The beautiful otherness of the autistic mind. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 364(1522):1345-1350. http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/364/1522/1345.full

Neumann N, et al. The mind of the mnemonists: An MEG and neuropsychological study of autistic memory savants. Behav Brain Res (2010). http://ki.se/content/1/c6/10/06/19/Neumann\_2010\_BBR%5B1%5D.pdf

Snyder A. (2009) Explaining and inducing savant skills: privileged access to lower level, less-processed information. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 364(1522):1399–405. http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/364/1522/1399.long

**References cited in the quote from Happé & Frith:**

Baron-Cohen S., Ashwin E., Ashwin C., Tavassoli T., Chakrabarti B. (2009) Talent in autism: hyper-systemizing, hyper-attention to detail and sensory hypersensitivity. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B. 364, 1377–1383. doi:10.1098/rstb.2008.0337.

Bor D., Billington J., Baron-Cohen S. (2007) Savant memory for digits in a case of synaesthesia and Asperger syndrome is related to hyperactivity in the lateral prefrontal cortex. Neurocase. 13, 311–319. doi:10.1080/13554790701844945.

Happé F., Vital P. (2009) What aspects of autism predispose to talent?. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B. 364, 1369–1375. doi:10.1098/rstb.2008.0332.

Mottron L., Dawson M., Soulières I. (2009) Enhanced perception in savant syndrome: patterns, structure and creativity. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B. 364, 1385–1391. doi:10.1098/rstb.2008.0333.

Plaisted Grant K., Davis G. (2009) Perception and apperception in autism: rejecting the inverse assumption. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B. 364, 1393–1398. doi:10.1098/rstb.2009.0001.

**References cited in the quote from Neumann et al.:**

\[7\] Bölte S, Hubl D, Dierks T, Holtmann M, Poustka F. An fMRI-study of locally oriented perception in autism: altered early visual processing of the block design test. J Neural Transm 2008;115(3):545–52.

\[20\] Happé F. Understanding assets and deficits in autism: why success is more interesting than failure. Psychologist 1999;12:540–6.

\[56\] Snyder AW, Mitchell DJ. Is integer arithmetic fundamental to mental processing?: the mind’s secret arithmetic. Proc Biol Sci 1999;266(1419):587–92.

\[41\] Mottron L, Dawson M, Soulieres I, Hubert B, Burack J. Enhanced perceptual functioning in autism: an update, and eight principles of autistic perception. J Autism Dev Disord 2006;36(1):27–43.

\[61\] Treffert DA. Extraordinary people. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, Inc.; 2006.

\[65\] Waterhouse L. Speculations on the neuroanatomical substrate of special talents. In: Obler LK, Fein D, editors. The exceptional brain.NewYork: The Guilford Press; 1988. p. 493–512.
> 13 votes

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Tags: memory, abnormal-psychology, autism, savant-syndrome
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# Question
Title: Why is it common for people to default to a single causal source to explain new phenomena?
I am constantly bombarded by allegations that almost every relatively unusual event is the result/proof of some conspiracy/plan set by a specific powerful entity.

The typical reasoning behind such claims follows:

"X happened because there is Y beneath it, and this event is the very proof of this fact!"

Here are some examples:

* " Homosexual marriages are quite common today, because armageddon is approaching!" "
* " Our country can't develop further, because USA, China and other developed countries are afraid of us!"
* " 9/11! Whom else might have done this? of course the Saddam/Usama Bin Laden/Iran/Pakistan/etc!"
* " Oh Have you recognized the verses on this song when you play it backwards? This is the proof of Satanists!"
* " Oh look at these cards published in 1995. This is the exact life we are living in today. Damn you illuminati!"
* " Omg I can see it, Here is the proof that Jesus was real. How else a face would appear on a toast? What is that you are holding? A Tortilla. May I look at that a bit closer? Ohhh, again!"

What is the name of this attitude of over-reductionism everything to some specific thing? A cognitive bias? Defense Mechanism? Straw man? Reduction ad Absurdum? Even maybe Chewbacca Defense \[ This question encompasses the title of the question as well.\]

Secondly, is there any term for "that specific thing" people reduces everything to? I want to be able to say "you associates everything to illuminati, because illuminati is your X" What term may I use here for X?

UPDATE: Other question of mine sounds related to this one. If you are intrigued by this question, check that one as well: Why are people inclined to praise or fear the unknown?

# Answer
I don't quite know an agreed upon word for this type of thing, but I do know what you're talking about.

At a very basic level, we use previous beliefs to interpret new information. In a way, it's at the core of how we perceive at all. I don't necessarily see these types of fallacious thinking as exceptions. Their belief about the order of the world is different, and so they interpret individual events differently. The examples you listed seem like instances of this happening.

If anything, it's just simplistic thinking, or a tendency to over-synthesize information. Illuminati type conspirators need to bring a bunch of disparate information into a model that makes sense, so they form connections between things that don't really connect. It probably doesn't help that they expose themselves to a lot of information presented in a way that strongly suggests some sort of Illuminati presence.

But don't forget that we do the same thing. Many times, the difference is that those around us also agree with the assumptions we make, so we don't even notice.
> 3 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, social-psychology
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# Question
Title: What is a more modern interpretation of the terms egosyntonic/egodystonic?
Egosyntonic thoughts/ideas are those that are consistent with self-image, and egodystonic thoughts are recognized as inconsistent.

For example, in obsessive compulsive disorder, the patient will often recognize that their behaviors are strange or absurd, but convincing a patient with severe symptoms of schizophrenia that their thoughts are potentially aberrant is not an easy task.

The "ego" of these two concepts, as it were, seems to be an earmark of a Freudian frame of reference, which I think that most scholars can agree is a dog that's had its day. The concepts of egosyntonic and egodystonic still have some utility. Is there any terminology or characterization that frames these concepts in terms of cognitive psychology?

# Answer
> 11 votes
Cognitive dissonance theory seems to be exactly what you're looking for. It seeks to explain how and why people hold incongruous or dissonant beliefs. I guess egosyntonic beliefs would be consonant with self, egodystonic would be dissonant. Anyway, I'll just link you to the Wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive\_dissonance

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, abnormal-psychology, schizophrenia
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# Question
Title: Does super-intelligence necessary lead to consciousness, self awareness, freewill or emotion
After seeing this talk, the question popped in my mind. The idea is that as soon as a system is complex enough or intelligent enough, it able to act on its own. It seems to be a common belief. For example, you can find it in the movie *Terminator*, where skynet, an advanced computer, becomes self aware and decide to eradicate humanity. The same is true with the HAL in *2001: A Space Odyssey*, where the computer decides to act despite receiving the opposite orders from the astronaut.

I believe what is said in this ted talk, where Antonio Damasio explains that consciousnesses is not a great product of the neocortex, but rather a trick achieved by other older parts in the brain (essentially the brainstem). If, in addition, you believe that human intelligence and cognition takes place in the neocortex (as in the Memory-prediction framework model, introduced in On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins), it doesn't make sense that intelligence is linked to consciousness, self awareness, freewill or emotion.

So my question is: is there any scientific evidence for this link, is there any paper about it ?

# Answer
> 19 votes
As the other response noted, a lot of the answers will depend on how you define the terms. Here, I will use Legg & Hutter's (2007) definition of intelligence, where an agent is intelligent if it can achieve a large variety of goals in a large variety of environments. For instance, a chess-playing robot is great at achieving the goal of winning at chess when it is in the environment of a chess game where nobody cheats or does anything else odd, but it fails miserably at just about everything else. So it has low intelligence. In contrast, a human can achieve many different goals in many different environments, from hunting food in a rainforest, to repairing solar panels while wearing a space suit on Earth's orbit. So a human has a considerably higher intelligence. See the paper for a formalization of this intuitive definition.

Note that a system can be exceedingly complex, or good at one thing, without necessarily being intelligent in this sense. Complexity does not imply intelligence by itself. But let's suppose that a system were intelligent in this sense? Well, let's tackle each of your terms in turn.

**Self-awareness.** One widely-used definition for self-awareness is being "aware of themselves as a differentiated and unique entity in the world". For instance, Rochat (2003) discusses the development of self-awareness in babies and very young children:

> All parents also notice an important change at around 2 years of age when children manifest ‘‘self-consciousness,’’ the so-called secondary emotions such as embarrassment or pride in very specific situations such as mirror exposure or competitive games (Kagan, 1984; Lewis, 1992). Prior to the second year, an infant placed in front of a mirror will typically smile, coo, and explore in apparent delight of the perfect contingency between acted and seen movements bouncing back at them from the polished surface of the mirror (Amsterdam, 1972). By 2 years, the specular image is associated with radically different behaviors. Toddlers become typically frozen and sometime behave as if they wanted to hide themselves by tucking their head in their shoulders or hiding their face behind their hands. They show embarrassment. This is a robust phenomenon and one is naturally tempted to ask what it means psychologically for children in their development. \[...\]
>
> It appears indeed that by 2–3 years young children do start to have others in mind when they behave. The expression of embarrassment that children often begin to display in front of mirrors at around this age is the expression of such ‘‘self-consciousness.’’ They behave not unlike criminals hiding their face to the cameras. Their behavior indicates a drive to vanish from the public eyes, as if they came to grip via the experience of their own specular image of how they present themselves to the world. Not only do they discover in the mirror that it is themselves, they also realize that it is themselves as perceived by others. The malaise might come from the realization of a fundamental discrepancy between how the child represents herself from within, and how he or she is actually perceived by others as reflected in the mirror.

So self-awareness implies an understanding of the fact that there is such a thing as a "me", which is separate from the world as a whole, and which others will perceive differently than it will perceive itself. There can also be varying levels of self-awareness, ranging from the level 1 self-awareness that newborn infants have ("immediately after birth, infants are capable of demonstrating already a sense of their own body as a differentiated entity: an entity among other entities in the environment") to level 5 self-awareness involving a theory of mind and an understanding of the fact that others may have false beliefs about something while you yourself have a true belief of it.

Would a superintelligence necessarily need to be self-aware, in any of these senses? I'd say that it would. While there are lots of goals that could plausibly be solved without any kind of self-awareness (proving mathematical theorems, for instance), many seem impossible to solve without it. Pretty much any social activity requires you to have a model about others as distinct from yourself, as well as an ability to model their beliefs and attitudes towards yourself. So in order to really be capable of solving many goals, you need to be self-aware. On the other hand, if it was a narrow intelligence that had been built to *only* solve theorems of math, it probably wouldn't need self-awaraness.

**Emotion**. There are many theories of emotion. For instance, the *Information Principle* says that *emotional feelings provide conscious information from unconscious appraisals of situations* (Clore et al. 2001). Your brain is constantly appraising the situation you happen to be in. It notes things like a passerby having slightly threatening body language, or conversation with another person being easy and free of misunderstandings. There are countless of such evaluations going on all the time, and you aren't consciously aware of them, because you don't need to. Your subconscious mind can handle them just fine on its own. The end result of all those evaluations is packaged into a brief summary, which is the only thing that your conscious mind sees directly. That "executive summary" is what you experience as a particular emotional state. The passerby makes you feel slightly nervous and you avoid her, or your conversational partner feels pleasant to talk with and you begin to like him, even though you don't know why.

So this theory says that emotions are both a source of information about unconscious appraisals, and a way to bias your behavior on the basis of circumstances. For instance, in happy moods (when things are presumably going well), we tend to rely more on our pre-existing routines and heuristics, while in sad or frustrated moods (when things aren't going so well), our minds switch to a more analytical mode of thought where we're more likely to take apart our existing beliefs and routines to find whether there's something wrong with them (Schwarz, 2010).

Would a superintelligence have something that we would consider to be akin to "emotions"? I would think that it might or might not, depending on its architecture. Thinking for a moment about humans, maybe a human with a vastly larger working memory capacity wouldn't need to have the subconscious appraisals packaged into summaries in the form of emotions, but could just constantly review their un-summarized conclusions while also thinking about other things. Maybe such a human could also learn to consciously control the style of their information processing, and adapt either heuristic or analytical thought as seemed reasonable. Arguably, such a human wouldn't need emotions. So it seems plausible that a superintelligence wouldn't necessarily have them either.

**Free will.** Okay, now we are getting into tricky territory. There are lots of definitions about free will, so I'll merely say that the computational theory of mind seems to be the majority view in cognitive science. If you accept the computational theory of mind, then you also consider the human mind to be a kind of a computer executing certain algorithms. Then on most accounts, if you would consider a human to have free will, you would probably also consider a machine intelligence to have free will, and vice versa.

**Consciousness.** This is another vague term, and people mean different things by it. Copeland (1993) notes at least three possible meanings:

1. *Baseline sense*: an entity is conscious if it is capable of perceiving the world via sense organs of some sort, and if it is capable of performing inner activities such as reasoning, deliberating, judging, hypothesing, planning, and so on.
2. *Consciousness as internal monitoring*: an entity is conscious if it is capable of observing and reporting on itself. For instance, I am not simply thinking looking up Copeland's definitions and typing a summary of them: I also know that I am doing so, and can think about this fact.
3. *Phenomenological consciousness*: an entity is conscious if there's something that being that entity "feels like". Pain and pleasure are not *just* algorithmical responses that modify an entity's behavior: they *feel* painful or pleasant. This is the hardest category to really express in words, but hopefully everyone understands what's meant.

A superintelligence would most definitely need to be conscious in the baseline sense: if it couldn't collect information from the world and make plans on that basis, it wouldn't be much of an intelligence. It would probably also need be conscious in the sense of being capable of internal monitoring, for otherwise it might not really be self-aware, and we already concluded that self-awareness is necessary for (broad) intelligence.

What about phenomenological consciousness? Chalmers (1995) has a pretty convincing (to me) thought experiment, where he says that a human who was changed into a robot, replacing one neuron at a time with an artificial one, would remain phenomenally conscious. But that argument presumes that the human retains their *mental* architecture unchanged. If we built a mind that had an entirely different mental architecture as humans did, would it exhibit phenomenal consciousness? There are lots of arguments, but the essential gist is that nobody knows.

**Indepedent goal-directed behavior.** But there's one more thing that your question seems to be implying, which wasn't fully covered by any of the terms above. You seem to also be asking whether an intelligent system might *start doing things which conflict with the desires of its creators*.

The answer seems to be yes. Omohundro (2008) argues that even a chess-playing robot, if it were intelligent enough and if it were not designed carefully enough, "will resist being turned off, will try to break into other machines and make copies of itself, and will try to acquire resources without regard for anyone else’s safety". Suppose that the robot has "winning at chess" as its goal. Now, it will exhibit these behaviors because, if it is turned off it might not be able to play any more chess, if it can make copies of itself those copies can continue to play chess even if some were turned off, and extra resources will help it in making sure that it can always win at chess. Omohundro also mentions a number of other drives which will arise as natural subgoals of almost any other goal.

Armstrong et al. (forthcoming) have an extensive discussion about "Oracle AI", an artificial intelligence which would be built to be safe, as it was built to only answer questions and not do anything else. But even this is harder to do than it might seem. Even trying to program the Oracle AI to want to stay within a specific physical box requires a number of definitions about what constitutes its physical location and what constitutes the Oracle AI itself (is it still staying within the box if it makes remote copies of itself?), and it might plausibly discover theories of physics in which those definitions became meaningless. Note that all of this presumes that we actually understand the OAI well enough to *be able* to specify its goals with such detail. If we don't, then that plan fails right away. Probably the best existing review article about this topic is Muehlhauser & Helm (forthcoming).

**References**

Armstrong, S. & Sandberg, A. & Bostrom, N. (forthcoming) Thinking inside the box: using and controlling an Oracle AI. http://www.aleph.se/papers/oracleAI.pdf

Chalmers, D.J. (1995) Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia. In Metzinger, T. (Ed.), *Conscious Experience*. Imprint Academic. http://consc.net/papers/qualia.html

Clore, G.L. & Gasper, K., & Garvin, E. (2001). Affect as information. In Forgas, J.P. (Ed.), *Handbook of affect and social cognition* (pp. 121–144). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Copeland, J. (1993) *Artificial Intelligence: A Philosophical Introduction*. Blackwell.

Legg, S. & Hutter, M. (2007) Universal Intelligence: A Definition of Machine Intelligence. *Minds & Machines*, 17:4 391-444. http://arxiv.org/abs/0712.3329

Muehlhauser, L. & Helm, L. (forthcoming). The Singularity and Machine Ethics. http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Muehlhauser-Helm-The-Singularity-and-Machine-Ethics-draft.pdf

Omohundro, S. (2008) "The basic AI drives," in Wang, P. Goertzel, P. and Franklin, S. (eds.), *Proceedings of the First AGI Conference. Frontiers in Articial Intelli- gence and Applications*, Volume 171 (IOS Press) 483-494. https://selfawaresystems.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/ai\_drives\_final.pdf

Rochat, P. (2003) Five levels of self-awareness as they unfold early in life. *Consciousness and Cognition*, 12, 717-731. http://www.psychology.emory.edu/cognition/rochat/lab/5%20levels%20of%20self-awareness.pdf

Schwarz, N. (2010) Feelings as information. In Van Lange, P. & Kruglanski, A. & Higgins, E.T. (Eds.), Handbook of theories of social psychology, Sange. http://people.ict.usc.edu/~gratch/CSCI534/schwarz\_feelings-as-information\_7jan10.pdf

# Answer
> 8 votes
Great question. It really hits cognitive science in some tender spots, though. None of those terms you listed in the question have any sort of consensus within the field. The only one we are approaching an understanding of is probably emotion. Consciousness and free will are... tricky. I honestly don't believe there will ever be an agreed upon definition of consciousness that satisfies. It's just a term, and it does not spring from study of the brain. It's like if physics were still tied to trying to explain things in terms of the "ether". There is no physical evidence of this "ether", and so it has been abandoned. But it might be hard for people to abandon consciousness as easily, for obvious reasons. I understand the essence of what you're asking, but it's really not easy to answer. I'll try though.

The first thing to understand, is that the brain has *evolved*. This means that over a long time, tiny exceptions built up to create our brain and thus our minds. They are unreasonably messy. Speaking of any artificial system in terms of our own mental system is pretty much a mistake (at best), or deceptive (at worst). To say that the internet becomes self-aware is to go too far in anthropomorphizing it. Our minds are inherently tied into the crazy messy brains that produce them. Even our idea of free-will is not some omnipresent universal phenomena, it's just an artifact of how our brains are constructed. We make choices under certain measurable conditions, it isn't magic. For the most part, free will is only *virtually* true.

Your question assumes certain things that are really hard to articulate, but which are not exactly true. Intelligence and cognition sort of happen in the cortex, as in Hawkins model, but it's really not the full story. If you built a big HTM system like Hawkins describes, it would be inert. Consciousness, free-will, emotion, and self-awareness are not properties of the cortex, they are properties of the brain (of which the cortex is a part), and the body as a whole. We are self-aware because we have apparatus that can perceive ourselves. If you built an HTM system, and fed it weather data, it would not become self aware because it would not be perceiving itself. It would not have emotion because there would be no systems impelling the system to act in one way over another. The factors you list are related to "intelligence" as defined by cortical size, but they do not solely depend on it.

I think the fallacious assumption in your question is very related to the idea that living things exist on an evolutionary ladder. And that we are the "highest rung" on that ladder. As if we let other creatures evolve more, they would become more like us. It is a sort of deterministic belief that as we construct increasingly intelligent machines, they will become more like us. Make them smart enough, and they will begin exhibiting things that we exhibit. It's simply not true. We eventually will be able to build systems that could be considered self-aware, or having free-will, or whatever, but it will be because we intentionally design it to do so. These properties will not emerge on their own.

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Tags: intelligence
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# Question
Title: Does any evidence show that Smartphone users have poorer memory?
An ages old complaint is that new technology harms memory. Why remember something when you can look it up?

In a course on Human Memory I distinctly recall an interesting discussion on phones and memory, and an interesting point came up; even though smart phones mean we no longer remember *phone numbers* as often as we used to we have to remember *passwords*, userids and other trivial bits of information which keeps our encoding skills sharp. However I don't recall and *studies* to support this hypothesis.

**Are there any recent studies to suggest whether users of portable digital tools like smartphones actually perform worse on any memory-related psychometrics?**

And no I'm not talking about these extremely questionable Cellphones Harm Memory in Mice stories the media has picked up on. I'm not concerned with electromagnetic radiation's effects on the brain, but rather the effect of having easy access to external information.

# Answer
> 21 votes
One relevant study by Sparrow et al. (2011) that came out last year in Science was on the "Google effect": When subjects expected that they'd be able to have later access to information, their memory was poorer for it. We can extrapolate to smartphones -- if individuals know they have information at their fingertips, they don't need to worry so much about retaining that information.

<sub> Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, and Daniel M. Wegner (2011) Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips Science 1207745 Published online 14 July 2011 \[DOI:10.1126/science.1207745\] (Free PDF) </sub>

# Answer
> 6 votes
As far as I know, there doesn't seem to be any straight-forward answer to this question.

The research mentioned in Andy's answer does affirm that there is a loss in memory but there is a difference between searching Google and looking a phone number on smartphone. In case of Google search, you most probably select a link at the fourth or fifth variation of your search. But in case of smartphones, you are just going to have a look at the address book to get your phone-number.

Keeping in view the wider context of the question, cognition is most probably regarded as an action happening within the mind. Simply put it, we reach a decision by using our cognitive skills alone without any reference to any external source at the time of decision. This is not the case.

If an external source is always going to aid our process of cognition, it could well be constructed a part of our cognition provided we can always have access to it and could replicate the cognitive process in an exact manner. From your question, the address book in a smartphone can be considered part of our wider memory provided we can always have access to it and hence can be regarded as aiding in our cognition.

Since it is difficult to draw a line between the internal and external cognition processes, generally checking an external source for information seem to imply a loss of memory. It must be noted that memory isn't lost only the memory about the phone numbers is lost since you have created a reliable external cognition source that could look phone numbers for you.

The seminal article, The Extended Mind, by Clark (1998), gives a much better explanation and would open up other avenues for thinking within this context.

<sub> Clark, Andy & Chalmers, David J. (1998). The extended mind. Analysis 58 (1):7-19. (HTML) </sub>

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, memory
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# Question
Title: What is the cognitive cost of switching contexts?
A common reason to use Conventions and standards in Human Computer Interaction is to limit the cost of Context Switching.

I searched to find *general* evidence of the cognitive costs of context switching but didn't find much, just specific articles like this that don't have very useful or generalizable results.

What is the cognitive cost (time spend, cognitive load ect) of switching contexts, such as switching from mouse input to keyboard input?

# Answer
Depending on your exact definition of what you call a *"context switch"* there is some research available. There is plenty of research on a more high-level (multi-tasking) definition of context switches. Usually when I read about context switches they refer to this higher level concept, unlike the study you linked to which compares the cost of switching between two separate views of the same data.

**Organizational contexts**

Existing research suggests that people organize their work in terms of much larger and thematically connected units of work. González and Mark (2004) introduced "the concept of working spheres to explain the inherent way in which individuals conceptualize and organize their basic units of work. People worked in an average of ten different working spheres. Working spheres are also fragmented; people spend about 12 minutes in a working sphere before they switch to another."

> Individuals spend part of their day on a set of activities that is not connected with any specific working sphere but rather related to the management of all of them. We call these activities metawork. People spend an average of *44 1/2 min. per day* conducting metawork, and similar to working spheres, this work is also conducted in shorter chunks of about six and a half minutes at any one time.

Czerwinski et al. (2004) from Microsoft Research found "that the reinstatement of complex, long-term projects is poorly supported by current software systems" by conducting a diary study.

> Beyond simply remembering, successful prospective memory requires recall at the appropriate moment in time. Increasing numbers of interruptions and items to be remembered can wreak havoc with both aspects of *prospective memory*, and hence, can reduce an office worker’s daily productivity.
>
> ...
>
> Subjects reported that more complex tasks, especially those that lasted longer and included more documents, were more difficult to switch to. Tasks that required “returning to” after an interruption were rated significantly more difficult to switch to than others.

<sub> Victor M. González and Gloria Mark (2004) "Constant, constant, multi-tasking craziness": managing multiple working spheres. DOI=10.1145/985692.985707 (Free PDF)
Mary Czerwinski, Eric Horvitz, and Susan Wilhite (2004) A diary study of task switching and interruptions. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '04). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 175-182. DOI=10.1145/985692.985715 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/985692.985715 (Free PDF) </sub>
> 6 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, performance, hci
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# Question
Title: Why does the human visual system produce a bright patch after staring at a bright light source and looking away?
If a person looks at a bright light source, such as a light bulb or perhaps the sun for a period of time, and then looks away and closes their eyes, they typically see a bright patch in the shape of the light source for a period of time. The amount of time varies, but can last for many seconds. What explanation can be provided for this effect?

# Answer
The persistence that you observe when you look at a bright light for a short period of time is called flash blindness. The phenomenon is related to your retina's response to the burst of light. Quoting from the Wikipedia article:

> Flash blindness is caused by bleaching (oversaturation) of the retinal pigment. As the pigment returns to normal, so too does sight. In daylight the eye's pupil constricts, thus reducing the amount of light entering after a flash. At night, the dark-adapted pupil is wide open so flash blindness has a greater effect and lasts longer.
> 16 votes

# Answer
The human eye is an interesting device. One of the most amazing things it does is to adjust for the brightness, and it can do so over 10 orders of magnitude.

From a signal processing perspective it can be explained as follows:

There are a few different ways that this is done, but the most basic way is a high pass filter, with a cutoff of about .25-.3 Hz. So, if you look at a bright source of light for a period of time, then you will see the signal as too bright, until the filter can reset back to a zero mean signal. After that, the image will go away.

There are of course many subtleties, but that is the primary effect.

To illustrate this, I've included 2 plots, the first of a signal changing over a long period of time between 2 extreme values, the second of one changing quickly over time. These plots came from a class which I took and learned how to model the neuron of a fly's eye, which behaves very similar to a human eye. The signal at 0.5 corresponds to a gray type signal value, it's an artifact of some of the other processing steps. This is a complex model, but the crux of it is a high pass filter with a time step of 3 seconds. Time prior to 40 is to allow the filter to normalize prior to injecting a signal, it prevents having to know the initial conditions very well of the system.

The second figure shows what happens with a more typical transient time, on the order of 10 Hz. Note that the signal is passed through almost without any delay.
> 11 votes

# Answer
In your eye there are light receptors of two types: rods and cones. Rods are sensitive to the level of brightness, but cannot discern color, while cones are not very light sensitive, but they allow for color perception. Both of these are types of photoreceptors which transduct physical light.

The physical response of rods and cones to light isn't immediate, and therefore there's a certain transient response of each photoreceptor to light. When the light you're looking at is too bright, some of your photoreceptor cells go into a kind of "saturated" state, and it takes a long time, because of that transient behavior, for them to stabilize back to "seeing" darkness again.
> 6 votes

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Tags: perception, vision, sensation
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title: Asaccadia adaptation

text:
# Question
Title: Asaccadia adaptation
Can asaccadia (i.e., lack of saccades, due to neuronal or muscular damage) be overcome? Do other muscles (e.g., neck) compensate? Are the resulting gaze patterns the same as for saccades, and are they involuntary the way saccades are?

Conversely, in normal vision, is the saccade-fixation system specially wired, or is it merely the optimal way to visually examine the world?

# Answer
Hmm... Saccadic eye movements typically occur several times per second. I doubt that one's neck can move with such frequency.

In normal vision, saccades are necessary because of the anatomy of the eye. There is a region of the retina called the fovea, where the density of cones peaks sharply. In fact, there are virtually no cones outside the fovea, and the density of rods also falls off as we move away from the fovea. This means, that at any given moment we only see a very small region in the center of the field of view in color and at a high resolution. If you stick out your arm in front of your face, and look at your thumb, your thumbnail would fill your fovea. Everything else is the periphery, which is blurry and gray.

So why do you have the illusion that you always see a vivid picture of the world in full color? Because of the saccades. Your eyes constantly move, and sample the visual field at a high resolution. Multiple fixations produce multiple images which are clear and colorful in the center, and blurry in the periphery. Your visual system integrates these images into a seemingly coherent and vivid view of the world.

Google "change blindness" to see demonstrations of this illusion.
> 3 votes

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Tags: vision
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# Question
Title: Are there sex differences in inter-rater consistency of attractiveness ratings  of opposite-sex faces?
Is there any research that assesses whether males or females judge faces of the opposite sex with a greater internal consistency? That is, is the standard deviation of attraction ratings for a specific opposite sex face on average smaller when looking at a specific gender?

# Answer
There is a very large literature on this, and it features many subtle points, but I will try to summarize some general themes.

In general, subjects are very **consistent at ranking pictures of others** for attractiveness (thus, eliminating the popular notion of "beauty is in the eye of the beholder"). For instance Cunnigham et al. (1995) found a correlation of .9 between individual rating and the average rating of pictures of women. This correlation remains high even if the rater and photo are from different cultures. Further, **men and women tend to find the same features good-looking** (i.e. heteresexual men and women, deem similar women as good-looking). Johnston & Franklin (1993) let 20 male and 20 female subjects use a genetic algorithm to generate female faces that they deemed good-looking. With the exception of the lower lip (females preferred a larger lower lip) there was no statistical differences between the qualities of the faces produced by male and female subjects.

However, **women have a higher variance in ratings of sex-objects** (opposite sex for heterosexual, same-sex for homosexual females) than men (Jankowiak et al. 1992; Townsend & Wasserman 1997). But this should be taken with a grain of salt because attractiveness **rankings have much higher variation when ranking males as opposed to females**. Schulman & Hoskins (1986) found that ratings of female photos had statistically significant lower variance than male photos for both male and female raters. Thus, the effect could partially be in that both sexes are worse at judging attractiveness of males.

Of course, the hardest is judging attractiveness in oneself. Rand & Hall (1983) found that females has a .5 correlation between their self-perception of attractiveness and the rating of male judges. Men are much worse, with only a .1 (almost chance) correlation between self-attractiveness ratings and the ratings of female judges.

The story gets even more complicated, because women respond differently to how they load features when producing ratings depending on if they are looking for a short-term or long-term partner (Widerman & Dubois 1998) and even where they are in their menstrual cycle (Penton-Voak & Perrett 2001).

Due to the complicated interaction of all these factors (and more!) **I don't think there is (yet) one final and definitive answer** to your question.

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### References

* Cunningham, M., Roberts, A.R., Berbee, Anita, P., Druen, P.B., & Wu, C. \[1995\] ""Their ideas of beauty are, on the whole, the same as ours": Consistency and variability in the cross-cultural perception of female physical attractiveness." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68: 261-279.
* Jankowiak, W.R., Hill, E.M., & Donovan, J.M. \[1992\] "The effects of sex and sexual orientation on attractiveness judgments: An evolutionary interpretation." Ethology and Sociobiology 13(2): 73-85.
* Johnston, V.S., & Franklin, M. \[1993\] "Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?" Ethology and Sociobiology 14(3): 183-199.
* Penton-Voak, I.S., & Perrett, D.I. \[2001\] "Male facial attractiveness: Perceived personality and shifting female preferences for male traits across the menstrual cycle." Advances in the Study of Behavior 30: 219-259.
* Rand, C., & Hall, J. \[1983\] "Sex differences in the accuracy of self-perceived attractivness." Social Psychology Quarterly, 46: 359-363.
* Townsend, J.M., & Wasserman, T. \[1997\] "The perception of sexual attractiveness: sex differences in variability." Archives of Sexual Behavior 26(3): 243-268.
* Wiederman, M.W., & Dubois, S.L. \[1998\] "Evolution and Sex Differences in Preferences for Short-Term Mates: Results from a Policy Capturing Study" Evolution and Human Behavior 19: 153-170.
> 15 votes

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Tags: social-psychology, physical-attraction, sex-differences, reliability
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# Question
Title: Are there any open access journals in the cognitive sciences with impact factor >1
Impact factors are scores assigned to journals which indicate how often, on average, articles are cited. Impact factors are published in Journal Citation reports of Thomson Reuters.

These reports however, do not indicate whether journals are open access or not.

I would like to know if there **is any open access journal** in the cognitive sciences with **impact factor \>1**.

# Answer
> 8 votes
Frontiers is an example of a collection of different open access journals where you find some high-impact publications within the cognitive science field. They have A LOT of journals within the neuroscience and the psychology field.

This is what Frontiers themselves says about impact factors of their journals:

> Thomson ISI requires at least three complete years of publishing, plus a few of other criteria, before issuing an impact factor for a specific journal. In the case of Frontiers, this condition has so far been met by only three of our Neuroscience journals. Impact factors are issued for the preceding year involving complex criteria that evaluate the previous three years' citations.
>
> The impact factor for Frontiers in Human Neuroscience was 1.58 in 2009 and 1.94 in 2010, indicating substantial growth year over year. We expect to see this growth in Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience (2.58 in 2010) and Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience (3.58 in 2010), as well as a number of impact factors issued to other Frontiers journals in 2012. We expect these impact factors to continue to rise in 2012 as well as to have Thomson ISI issue several more impact factors to Frontiers journals in June 2012.

So, in this case "Frontiers in Human Neuroscience", "Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience" and "Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience" would probably be three good answers to your question.

# Answer
> 6 votes
Relatively specific for Judgement and Decision Making the Journal (Impact factor: 1.632) of the JDM Society might be of interest.

Additionally the Directory of Open Access Journals might be of interest.

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Tags: publication-process
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# Question
Title: Are autonomy, mastery, and purpose the most important motivators?
I've watched the amazing TED talk where Daniel Pink lays out the contrarian notion that greater extrinsic motivators are unimportant (and sometimes detrimental) in comparison to three intrinsic motivators: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose.

But is he wrong? I've only found some criticisms of the study he based the former on (that greater material rewards do not work for "cognitive" tasks) on a similar discussion board. That's not what I'm really concerned about, though.

My main question is: **Are the three motivators of autonomy, mastery, and purpose the most important aspects to motivation?**

# Answer
That was an interesting TED Talk, I enjoyed it. Motivation is a very complex, but fascinating thing to think of. You're asking if those three things he listed are the most important aspects to motivation, but I'm not sure the answer can be straightforward. So let's talk about what motivation *is* first, before talking about how those three things relate to motivation.

We can think of motivation as simply the urge for an organism to do something. But what determines *what* things the organism wants to do? Activities are done in the pursuit of value. Value itself is an internal thing; determined by the individual and the context the individual finds himself in. Actually defining "value" is a can of worms we don't need to open here. The point is, when a person finds an activity or object valuable, they will pursue it. I think of it from the perspective of neurobiology, and if you're curious you can look into Samejima et al. (2005), and Kawagoe et al. (1998).

So, let's think of the two types of motivators he listed, extrinsic or intrinsic. In the context of value, an extrinsic motivator is when value is placed on an external object. The motivation is to acquire the reward, and the actual activity is made into an obstacle to obtaining it. With intrinsic motivators, value is placed on the activity itself, so the behavior is to perform that activity. An excellent demonstration of this is in what's called the over-justification effect. Lepper et al. (1973) tested children under different reward situations, and found a significant drop in a coloring activity when a big prize was promised beforehand.

So, to get back to this guys three criteria. Autonomy makes sense right away; when a person can choose their own activity they will choose one they find valuable. Additionally, because they chose it, they will likely value it further. This was shown in a kind of funny/sad study by Brehm (1956), where housewives were allowed to choose an item they would supposedly get for free. Their ratings of the value of each item swung significantly towards the item they chose, when compared to their initial ratings. They were never actually given the item, causing one woman to cry.

Mastery is a little more complex. The *amount* of effort a person is willing to spend on a task is proportional to the magnitude of the reward. By mastery, Pink is actually talking about progress. Consider those little window file transfer boxes, and how they estimate the total time something will take. They look at the current rate of progress, and use that to estimate the total. People do the same thing. If they are making no progress on a topic, they calculate the amount of effort required to complete it to be monumental. If they are making rapid progress, the amount of effort seems far less. Expectancy-value theory has some interesting things to say on this topic, read Wigfield and Eccles (2000).

Purpose is probably the most esoteric, but it is still perfectly possible to understand. Purpose is a feeling that the activity has value in a larger context. Again, value is an internal thing. It is something we construct. Part of the value we assign to an activity is based on the results that activity will have. Feeling that our actions have absolutely no value in a larger context could destroy the value we place in that activity itself.

I like his three criteria, but there are many ways to understand thing like motivation. Like I said in another thread, these psychological constructs are not absolute. They are just ways of thinking of how we work. There are no laws, and no *right* way to deconstruct them. These three criteria is just one way to deconstruct motivation.

**References**

Brehm, J.W. (1956) Postdecision changes in the desirability of alternatives. *The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 52*(3),384-389. \[DOI\]

Kawagoe, R., Takikawa, Y. & Hikosaka, O. (1998). Expectation of reward modulates cognitive signals in the basal ganglia. *Nat Neurosci. 1*(5), 411-6. \[PDF\] \[DOI\]

Lepper, M.R., Greene, D. Nisbett, R.E. (1973) Undermining children's intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward: A test of the "overjustification" hypothesis. *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 28*(1),129-137. \[DOI\]

Samejima,K., Ueda, Y., Doya, K., Kimura,M. (2005). Representation of action-specific reward values in the Striatum. *Science 310*(5752), 1337-1340. \[DOI\]

Wigfield, A.,Eccles, J.S. (2000). Expectancy–Value Theory of Achievement Motivation. *Contemporary Educational Psychology, 25*(1),68–81. \[DOI\]
> 10 votes

# Answer
Motivation has sometimes been defined as ‘the willingness to put effort into achieving goals’-if we dissect this statement- goals are important (clear, well-defined, achievable, SMART, inspiring , valuable etc) , efforts are important (Can I put the needed efforts -self-efficacy; can the efforts lead to outcome- outcome expectancy; are the efforts themselves enjoyable-enjoying the journey ) and the willingness is paramount (do I really want to invest in this goal, what is my goal commitment given the expectancy X value).

If we follow the above, then clearly many things are important for remaining motivated- from clearly defining and setting appropriate goals to getting appropriate and timely feedback- are efforts leading to outcome- to confidence in ones ability to Pull this off.

Viewed another way many of the above things can act as motivators- or at least the absence of them prove demotivating. We may pause here and reflect on Herzberg's differentiation between hygiene factors (like pay) the absence of which demotivates people and Motivators (like achievement and recognition) the presence of which pulls you towards your work and make you productivity, happy and engaged - or rightly motivated

Dan Pink extends and modifies the Self determination theory of Deci and Ryan which explores motivation as applied to workplace.

The original SDT focuses on factors of Autonomy, competence and relatedness that lead to more engaged and motivated workforce. Daniel Pink replaces relatedness (a factor assessing whether your work provides opportunity to build relationships and connect with people) with purpose (the ability to find higher meaning behind daily work by connecting the dots).

I like both the original SDT framework and how Dan Pink puts it and believe that all the four factors of Autonomy, Mastery, Relatedness and Purpose are required to motivate your workforce (pull factors); while the presence of hygiene factors like good pay etc are required to prevent them from being demotivated (push factors). In my own experimentation as a senior manager in Cisco, I have found that these factors do drive performance a notch high.
> 1 votes

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Tags: performance, motivation, positive-psychology
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# Question
Title: Why do higher incentives lead to lower performance for non-rudimentary tasks?
I have watched a number of times this excellent video where Dan Pink discusses the science of motivation. The video states that the higher incentives, the lower performance for non-rudimentary (not easy and quick) tasks.

* Why is this true for non-rudimentary tasks, but not for rudimentary tasks?
* Does anyone know any theory, which can help explain this?

# Answer
> 13 votes
A theory which I believe explains this is the ground-breaking work that Carol Dweck has done on mindsets and how they relate to performance.

To recap, People can have either a fixed mindset where they view abilities as fixed, are more driven by performance goals and use helpless strategies when confronted with tasks beyond their capabilities. If given a choice between task beyond their capability and one beneath their capability they will choose latter. If forced to do a task beyond their capability, they will not persist too long and give up early- and not put too much effort as putting efforts shows that they don't have the talent.

The other mindset is a growth mindset which sees abilities as malleable, are more driven by learning goals, and use mastery or hit-and trial and persistent strategies when confronted with a task beyond one's capability.

It has been shown that one can be put into a growth or a fixed mindset by very easy manipulations like praising for effort rather than talent.

Given that fixed mindset is also performance driven, there is a high probability that rising the stakes high focuses one on performance goals at the cost of learning goals and primes one with a fixed mindset. Ask any person preparing for a high stakes exam whether he wants to learn the subject matter or get good score and you'll see what mindset a high stakes competition entails.

Given that performance motivation or fixed mindset is detrimental for hard task (task just beyond ones abilities); its no wonder that performance deteriorates as rewards loom large for non-rudimentary tasks.

# Answer
> 20 votes
I think you have to be careful with the proposition that "rewards do not increase performance on non-rudimentary tasks". The experiments that Dan Pink cites involve experiments where participants are in a room and are supervised by an experimenter while they complete a task. This social pressure by the experimenter may well be enough for participants to be focused and diligent in completing the task.

But in the real world:

* people often have **time to prepare for situations that involve high stakes rewards**. For example, performance on exams often have major rewards tied to their outcome. A major goal of exams is to motivate students to study hard for the subject matter.
* **effort and time on task is often not fixed**. Employees can do overtime if the task is hard but the rewards are good (or if the pay implies that the extra effort is expected). They can engage in less off-task behaviour.
* **people choose the tasks they do at all**. When people choose a career, it is assumed that among many other things, that many will consider the probability of getting a job and the likely salary and conditions (i.e., rewards). When a person chooses to work for a particular employer, salary relative to other potential employers is often an important factor. Thus, rewards can influence whether an individual engages in a particular activity at all.

Thus, I think one needs to be careful when generalising the meaning of these experiments to work and other contexts.

In terms of theories that might explain the results:

* The Yerkes-Dodson curve and related models suggest that the relationship between arousal and performance is an inverted-u relationship and that the peak of the inverted u varies with task difficulty (i.e., greater arousal is optimal for simpler tasks).

# Answer
> 15 votes
There is a fundamental concept in motivation illustrating this effect- a bunch of studies have been done which I don't have the time of digging up citations for now, but the central findings are as follows:

* If the incentive (external reward) for a non-trivial task becomes too salient, the individual is driven to complete the task for that reward and will not, *generally* utilize the same extent of cognitive resources in solving that task.
* Conversely, if an individual genuinely wants to solve the problem/complete the task out of pure self-motivation, they will utilize a greater share of cognitive resources in solving that problem.

The different perceived locus of causality in intrinsic motivation leads to a different set of cognitive processes being activated generating differences in performance.

A good summary article you should read is (Ryan & Deci, 2000) in Contemporary. Edu. Psyc.

# Answer
> 8 votes
One thing to think about is what's meant by "performance." In basic cognitive tasks (e.g., memory experiments), changing the payoff matrix (and thus motivational factors) often influences bias but not discrimination -- in other words, upping the ante, so to speak, makes individuals more conservative (or careful) but doesn't much change their overall performance. One example: When incentives are low, an individual might attempt to answer 10 questions and get 5 correct; when incentives are high, an individual might attempt to answer 20 questions and get 10 correct. In a sense the latter is performing better -- after all, he or she is getting 10 more questions correct -- but is also making more mistakes.

Just another way of thinking about things.

# Answer
> 7 votes
High incentives (especially related to time needed to finish a task) makes one very concentrated but at the same time leaves little opportunity to look outsid the box (i.e. to develop a creative approach, sometimes needed to complete a non-rudimentary task).

For a popular science/economics talk, see also: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan\_pink\_on\_motivation.html

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Tags: motivation, performance, io-psychology
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title: Combinatorial woes

text:
# Question
Title: Combinatorial woes
I am interested in the creation of chunks (aka configural nodes) from smaller chunks and input features (only interested in System 1 cognition).

Unitization studies (e.g. Goldstone (pdf)), suggest that we start with generic features, and slowly combine them into more specific chunks. As we do this unitization, we wouldn't store all of the learned combinations --- a mere 10 input features can be combined in 3.6 million configurations!

Simon suggested generic elements get overwritten by more specific ones at each exposure. but what would you do with the predictions/rules learned about a given chunk? Transfer them to the newly created specific chunk? What if they do not apply at that more specific level?

Nosofsky was suggesting a rule-plus-exception model, where the more generic elements are always stored and their predictions are recorded as general rules; When those predictions are broken, more specific chunks are stored to explain the exceptions to these rules. What does it mean for predictions to be broken? In a probabilistic environment like ours, sometimes a prediction is correct, sometimes it isn't -- updating the weight of the prediction seems much more reasonable than deeming it invalid in favor of an 'exception'.

When do I chunk two co-occurring features? When do I chunk those two with a third? Do I delete the 2-feature chunk in favor of the 3-feature? What do I do with the memories associated with the deleted chunk?

# Answer
> 3 votes
Recently Tom Griffiths and I worked on the problem of how to use distributional cues from the raw sensory data given by the environment to form representational units (features). The basic idea is to form a probabilistic model over possible feature representations. The model uses the observed data and a bias towards simpler feature representations (those with fewer features) to infer a feature representation. The tricky thing is forming a probabilistic model over the complex, infinite-dimensional space of feature representations and once that is defined, the practical part of inferring the feature representation given a set of observed objects.

For more details on how to do this, what it means theoretically, and experiments testing some predictions of the approach, take a look at our recent article in cognitive psychology, doi.

Also, if you're interested, we've done some work looking at inferring transformation-invariant features, pdf. We're nearly ready to submit a larger article on this line of work. Send me an email if you're interested.

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Tags: learning, cognitive-modeling
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# Question
Title: Can response time be incorporated into signal detection theory?
In signal detection theory, one typically uses "signal" and "no signal" responses to analyze the data (that is, the analysis is based on a discrete choice for each trial, generating the four possible outcomes "hit", "miss", "false alarm" and "correct rejection").

Is there any standard way to also incorporate response time into the signal detection analysis?

# Answer
> 16 votes
I'd suggest checking out the Linear Ballistic Accumulator (Donkin et al., 2011) model for a scenario like this. While LBA can be used to model any number of alternatives in a speeded choice task, to model signal detection you'd want to model just two accumulators, one for the "signal" response and one for the "no signal" response. With this scenario, response bias will manifest as a difference between the accumulators in terms of their distance from starting point to criterion, while discriminability will manifest as the mean drift rate (which will probably be the same across the two accumulators).

**References**

Donkin, C., Brown, S., & Heathcote, A. (2011). Drawing conclusions from choice response time models: A tutorial using the linear Ballistic accumulator. *Journal of Mathematical Psychology*, *55*, 140-151.

# Answer
> 10 votes
In addition to Mike's answer, see the Ratcliff diffusion model E.g.:

Ratcliff, R., & Rouder, J. N. (1998). Modeling response times for two–choice decisions. Psychological Science, 9, 347–356.

Ratcliff, R., & Tuerlinckx, F. (2002). Estimating parameters of the diffusion model: Approaches to dealing with contaminant reaction times and parameter variability. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9, 438–481.

# Answer
> 6 votes
You should probably also check out: Pleskac & Busemeyer (2010). Two-stage dynamic signal detection: A theory of choice, decision time, and confidence. Psychological Review.

Also, I believe Busemeyer has a dynamic signal detection theory paper but I don't know that it has been published. The Pleskac & Busemeyer paper probably draws on this unpublished manuscript.

# Answer
> 3 votes
I believe you may be looking for Fuzzy SDT which allows for the incorporation of response time into SDT, among other things:

Hancock, P.A., Masalonis, A.J., & Parasuraman, R. (2000) "On the theory of fuzzy signal detection: theoretical and practical considerations" Theor. Issues In Ergon. Sci. 1(3):207-230 pdf

# Answer
> 3 votes
As per self-regulatory theory people can have two types of regulatory focus: promotion and prevention.

**Promotion focus** is an eagerness-strategy where if we draw an analogy with SDT, one is more eager to detect signals even though there may be a few false alarms. One is ok with errors of commission. This type of motivation will reflect in seeded responses and is in direct opposition to accuracy that is modeled by the other preventive focus.

In **preventive focus**, you are more vigilant and on-guard , more focused on avoiding failure or in terms of SDT, ready to miss the signal but not miss out a correct rejection. The more cautious approach will lead to less fast repose but more accurate response bias.

Thus, the way I think speed or response time is to be incorporated in SDT is by pitting it against accuracy and it measuring and indicating the propensity to detect signal even at the cost of false alarms.The more the response time is less for a subject the more eagerness or promotion related focus he has - of detecting signal or achieving success.

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Of course this is lay mans integration of response time/ speed with SDT; if you are looking for more mathematical models , perhaps the other answers will work better.

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Tags: reference-request, methodology, experimental-psychology, statistics, signal-detection
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# Question
Title: Is it a good idea to play an instrument while studying? If so, what are the benefits?
We've all heard that listening to classical music and such while studying can be beneficial, but I was wondering about actually playing an instrument? If I were to absentmindedly play my accordion while reading a textbook, would it have any benefit to either my absorption of the material or ability to play music without having to focus on it? Or is this just a bad idea?

Specifically, have there been any studies relevant to this, or is there any other data on the subject?

# Answer
> 2 votes
Multitasking research suggests that people can't really multitask. I don't have any evidence to back this up, but I suspect that it's much better for your instrument skills than your studying. The accordion detracts from your focus and attention while you work, perhaps even if it doesn't feel like it. At the same time, though, that exercise may improve your ability to, say, sing and play at the same time.

# Answer
> 1 votes
There is a reason why (at least where I'm at) it it illegal to hold and talk on a cell phone while driving. Not that hands-free talking really makes any difference.

One loses efficiency or what-have-you when attention needs to be shared amongst different activities that require cognitive control. By shared I mean more that time slices need to be divided amongst the activities. Attention is really a fascinating thing.

I can mindlessly listen to music while studying. But I know that I really don't pay much attention to the music, especially because most often I choose to listen to songs I know well and really like.

But.

Can one really "mindlessly" play the accordion? Other than the physical movements that can in a sense be automatic, can one really determine what notes to play "mindlessly"? I am trying to picture a musician who has painstakingly spent hours upon hours memorizing a piece of music and I guess one's playing can reach the point of almost "mindless" playing.

Even if so, I think the attentional resources that studying demands would not allow enough attentional resources for playing an instrument...

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, learning, music
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# Question
Title: Is there a psychological model or theory that describes strangers in the vicinity unknowingly causing discomfort?
The closest thing I found to this is social anxiety or agoraphobia, which is a fear of socializing or a fear of public places, respectively. However, I think the idea that strangers can cause discomfort by default is more a symptom of avoidance personality disorder. What is the difference between agoraphobia and avoidance personality I wonder.

Agoraphobia seems more like avoidance personality disorder than social anxiety disorder, and yet more often agoraphobia is confused with social anxiety disorder than vice versa. At least, if you go to Wikipedia, more information is found about social anxiety disorder than avoidance personality disorder.

My curiosity stems from the fact that a huge part of having avoidance personality disorder must involve seeking treatment, yet I read in a lot of places that people who suffer from it fail to seek treatment. Since treatment of avoidance personality disorder seems to be so ubiquitous, it would be very easy for somebody with the disease to find somebody to help. So what's the reason that it's not diagnosed more and if perhaps it is diagnosed more often and I just don't know about it, what explains why there is no widely understood treatment?

# Answer
> 6 votes
I think the answer to that question can be teased out if one knows the reason *why* the presence of or noticing strangers in the vicinity leads to feelings of discomfort.

What do you mean by "in the vicinity"?

Social psychologists have studied what is called **proxemics**. If we simplify it, one can say that they study the concept of "personal space". Mostly focused on two people interacting with each other, but there is also research on what is called cognitive spatial mapping.

I can think of multiple "diagnoses" that can be tossed around and played with. Schizoid personality disorder. Schizotypal personality disorder. A mild form or some pervasive developmental disorder (Asperger syndrome, for example). If the discomfort is not rooted in a fear of embarrassment or feelings of social ineptitude, it is harder to proximate the root of the discomfort, harder to put a label on it.

On a tangential note, going back to the topic of proxemics, people tend to have social conventions on what the appropriate distances away from others are; given the environment, closeness of the relationship, distance between or amongst people and yourself, etc. It is interesting to note that the same phenomenon (uh, exaggerated word) occurs in social interaction in a virtual world sort of setting. A well-known example is the study of proxemics in Social Life. When someone does not follow convention or simply violates another's personal space, even in Social Life, it generates discomfort. But I digress. Sorry, tangential ramble.

# Answer
> 4 votes
The technical term for having a fear of strangers is **Xenophobia** (this term also applies to having a fear of foreigners or immigrants).

The DSM lists Social Anxiety as one of three types of phobias. Social phobia, DSM 300.23, is an irrational anxiety elicited by exposure to certain types of social or performance situations; it can lead to avoidant behavior.

Agoraphobia with a history of panic disorder, DSM 300.21 and agoraphobia without a history of panic disorder, DSM 300.22, is an irrational anxiety toward being in places from which escape might be difficult or embarrassing. Note: the DSM is moving away from having agoraphobia as a diagnosable psychiatric disorder.

For those interested, the third phobia the DSM lists is called a Specific Phobia, DSM 300.29. A specific phobia is a persistent and irrational fear in the presence of a specific stimulus, which commonly elicits avoidance of that stimulus, i.e., withdrawal. There are five subtypes for specific phobias:

* animal type - cued by animals or insects
* natural environment type - cued by objects in the environment, such as storms, heights, or water
* blood-injection-injury type - cued by witnessing some invasive medical procedure
* situational type - cued by a specific situation, such as public transportation, tunnels, bridges, elevators, flying, driving, or enclosed spaces
* other type - cued by other stimuli than the above, such as of choking, vomiting, or contracting an illness

Thank you to The Phobia List and The Anxiety Pit for the above information on agoraphobia, social anxiety, and specific phobias.

Although agoraphobia is not considered a codable disorder anymore -- I believe it is slated to be removed from the DSM V -- here is the diagnostic criteria for agoraphobia from the DSM IV (current version):

> **AGORAPHOBIA**
>  1. anxiety about being in places or situations from which escape might be difficult (or embarrassing) or in which help may not be available in the event of having an unexpected or situationally predisposed Panic Attack or panic-like symptoms.
>  2. The situations are avoided (e.g., travel is restricted) or else are endured with marked distress or with anxiety about having a Panic Attack or panic-like symptoms, or require the presence of a companion.
>  3. The anxiety or phobic avoidance is not better accounted for by another mental disorder, such as Social Phobia, Specific Phobia, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, or Separation Anxiety Disorder.

Here is the diagnostic criteria for Avoidant Personality Disorder:

> **AVOIDANT PERSONALITY DISORDER**
>  Individuals with this Cluster C Personality Disorder, DSM 301.82, are socially inhibited, usually feel inadequate and are overly sensitive to criticism. A pervasive pattern of social inhibition, feelings of inadequacy, and hypersensitivity to negative evaluation are present, beginning by early adulthood and manifest in a variety of contexts, as indicated by four (or more) of the following:
>  1. Avoids occupational activities that involve significant interpersonal contact, because of fears of criticism, disapproval, or rejection.
>  2. Is unwilling to get involved with people unless certain of being liked.
>  3. Shows restraint within intimate relationships because of a fear of being shamed or ridiculed.
>  4. Is preoccupied with being criticized or rejected in social situations.
>  5. Is inhibited in new interpersonal situations because of feelings of inadequacy.
>  6. Views self as socially inept, personally unappealing, or inferior to others.
>  7. Is unusually reluctant to take personal risks or to engage in any new activities because they may prove embarrassing.

If I were to compare agoraphobia to avoidant personality disorder, I would say agoraphobia is about the ***perceived physical safety*** of the person with agoraphobia, which when threatened causes intense emotional distress. With avoidant personality disorder I would postulate that the disorder revolves around the individual's ***perception of how they are perceived***, rather than on their physical safety. A person with agoraphobia might be anxious and frightened to leave the house because they might be involved in a car accident. A person with avoidant personality disorder may be reluctant to leave the house and go to a new social situation for the fear of personal rejection.

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Tags: terminology, abnormal-psychology, psychiatry
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# Question
Title: How do Hemispatial Neglect patients react when told of their disability?
Hemispatial Neglect patients are known to have Anosognosia meaning they don't recognize their disability. These patients neglect either their left or right field of vision entirely, as if they couldn't see anything on that side of their body.

How do these patients react when directly confronted with the fact of their disability? Hemispatial Neglect can be treated as it is an issue of attention not lack of sensation. Are these patients able to focus on the neglected area (before treatment) if explicitly told to do so?

Wikipedia notes a delusional form of the disorder:

> Neglect may also present as a delusional form, where the patient denies ownership of a limb or an entire side of the body. Since this delusion often occurs alone without the accompaniment of other delusions, it is often labeled as a monothematic delusion.

So some patients may outright deny that the neglected side of their body exist, but this does not seem to exist in all cases of the disorder.

# Answer
> 6 votes
It’s probably best to ask clinicians since papers usually don’t go into very specific details about patient interactions, but in general this is what I can conclude based on a bit of research. Neglect often co-occurs with other impairments as there can be a range of causes (such as stroke) arising from damage to various brain structures; so it should be considered “as a cluster of deficits characterised by lateralised spatial bias” (Manly, 2002). Besides severity of neglect, these co-occuring impairments would also affect the type of reactions neglect patients may show.

Patients with neglect due to right-hemisphere damage show hypoarousal, flattened affect, and emotional indifference (Heilman et al., 1978) which may explain why many are unconcerned about their disorder (anosodiaphoria) and act indifferent toward their disorder (Denes et al., 1982). Similar to emotional impairment, there is also a strong associated lack of awareness of their disorder (anosognosia) among neglect patients (Eslinger et al., 2002; Buxbaum et al., 2004). Sometimes, even after improvement due to therapy and training, patients may still not acknowledge their impairment (Manly, 2002). Patients that are unaware of the disorder usually react with denial (Bisiach, 2007; Berti & Rizzolatti 1992). In one study, which uses mirrors to flip objects in the left visual to the right, patients “behave as if the object were behind, or in, the mirror — as if the left side of their world did not ‘exist’” (Turnbull, 1997). Neglect is more likely associated with right-hemisphere damage compared to left, and both anosodiaphoria and anosognosia occur at higher rates in neglect patients with right-hemisphere damage compared to left (Stone et al. 1993).

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Tags: abnormal-psychology, neurology, brain-injury
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# Question
Title: What is the difference between IQ and Executive Function?
I was reading an article today that stated that people with high IQ's that have trouble with social skills, memory, being punctual (on time), emotional control, and "growing up" are likely to have issues with Executive Function.

My question is, what is the difference between Executive Function and IQ?

# Answer
> 10 votes
As I mentioned in my comment: IQ is a measurement that is believed to correlate with certain aspects of 'intelligence'. Executive function is "an umbrella term for cognitive processes such as planning, working memory, attention, problem solving, verbal reasoning, inhibition, mental flexibility, multi-tasking, initiation and monitoring of actions." The two are not directly comparable.

However there are measures of executive function through tests like Wisconsin card sorting, verbal fluency, and trial making, cognitive estimates test, verbal fluency for animals, simplified six element (Burgess et al., 1998; Ardila, Pineda, & Rosselli, 2000). Burges et al. (1998) found that these load on 3 main factors: inhibition, intentionality, and executive memory. Ardila et al. (2000) found that these tests do not correlate well with IQ tests and concluded that traditional intelligence tests are not an appropriate metric for executive function.

However, Mahone et al. (2002) studied normal and ADHD children and found that some measures of executive function (Rey Osterrieth Complex Figure, Variables of Attention – Visual Test, Letter Word Fluency) correlated moderately with IQ. In fact IQ scores accounted for a greater proportion of variance in the EF measures (~10% of the variance) than the diagnosis of ADHD (~0.4% of the variance). They also found that measures of executive function at average IQ differ between children with ADHD and those without. However, this effect disappears for children with above average IQ.

To me this discrepancy suggests that we don't know how to measure executive function very well. This is to be expected, since a huge umbrella term like executive function is a tell-tale sign that we are lumping a lot of things we don't understand well together under one umbrella until we learn more.

### References

* Ardila, A., Pineda, D., & Rosselli, M. \[2000\] "Correlation Between Intelligence Test Scores and ExecutiveFunction Measures." Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology 15(1): 31-36.
* Burgess, P.W., Alderman, N., Evans, J., Emslie, H., & Wilson, B.A. \[1998\] "The ecological validity of tests of executive function." Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society 4: 547-558.
* Mahone, E.M., Hagelthorn, K.M., Cutting, L.E., Schuerholz, L.J., Pelletier, S.F., Rawlins, C., Singer, H.S., & Denckla, M.B. \[200\] "Effects of IQ on Executive Function Measures in Children with ADHD." Child Neuropsychology 8(1): 52-65.

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, intelligence, terminology, measurement
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