# Question
Title: The mind as a state of matter or physical system?
**What examples of attempts to formalize a *principled* physical basis for consciousness and/or a general theory of the mind exist?**

I read a fascinating ArXiV preprint last year called Consciousness as a State of Matter. In this paper, physicist Max Tegmark proposed a formalization of consciousness in terms of a distinctive state of matter he termed **perceptronium**. Tegmark concludes that we may identify conscious systems by use of six principles, which he bases on Tononi's **integrated information framework** (Tononi, 2008), which I provide primarily for illustration:

1. **Information:** A conscious system has substantial information storage capacity.
2. **Dynamics:** A conscious system has substantial information processing capacity.
3. **Independence:** A conscious system has substantial independence from the rest of the world.
4. **Integration:** A conscious system cannot consist of nearly independent parts.
5. **Autonomy:** A conscious system has substantial dynamics and independence.
6. **Utility:** An evolved conscious system records mainly information that is useful for it.

(More accessible introductions may be found here and here.)

# Formalizing consciousness and the mind?

Tegmark's theory is prototypical of a number of recent jabs at a viable, **general theory of the mind** defined as what we might call *the physical system which causes behavior* that I am very excited about. I am also familiar with the somewhat related How Can the Human Mind Occur in the Physical Universe? (Anderson, 2007) as well as the general field of ecological psychology and radical embodied cognitive psychology, e.g. Chemero (2009). Because the content theory behind all of these are so qualitatively different, I would say the common denominator is more methodological and scope-related than strictly empirical, however.

Specifically, these jabs appear to represent **a move away from the near-universal dependence on linear models and non-overlapping research scopes**, and towards more unifying theories of mind, cognition and behavior. I have some limited awareness of strictly methodological articles such as this recent Psych Methods article which proposes topology as a general tool for the purpose (Butner et al., 2014).

I find that these theories and methodologies, while often flawed in obvious ways (though not necessarily more-so than any others are), raise difficult questions that traditional theories and methodologies do not seem to allow for (Butner et al., 2014 discusses this in some detail). I would be very interested to know more about both general theories and methodologies similar to what I have referenced here, which I hope is sufficient to clarify this complex question.

Formal generalizations allow us to see our fields' otherwise isolated findings in a wider perspective, and allow us to identify the forest we may otherwise miss for the trees. For example, an extremely interesting question raised by Tegmark's formalization is the following quote from the the Medium article:

> Tegmark points out that any information stored in a special network known as a Hopfield neural net \[a type of neural network which Tegmark deems to satisfy his principles\] automatically has this error-correcting facility. **However, he calculates that a Hopfield net about the size of the human brain with 10^11 neurons, can only store 37 bits of integrated information**.

I think this is a difficult problem for Tononi's content theory to solve in other ways than by claiming Tegmark is somehow not fairly representing the theory, and this line of reasoning potentially has serious implications for all information-based theories. It is often asserted that the brain has incredible computational power ... but we rarely formalize our understanding of what this means. What if we have it all wrong, and it's simply physically and/or mathematically impossible for such a computational system to exist?

# Question

**What examples of attempts to formalize a *principled* physical basis for consciousness and/or a general theory of the mind exist?**

(Please don't feel discouraged from giving answers based on anything I have referenced. I would not say the information I have provided for anything besides Tegmark's theory constitutes a remotely sufficient answer, so they are fair game.)

**Related questions**

# References

* Anderson, J. R. (2007). How can the mind exist in a physical universe.
* Butner, J. E., Gagnon, K. T., Geuss, M. N., Lessard, D. A., & Story, T. N. (2014). Utilizing Topology to Generate and Test Theories of Change.
* Chemero, A. (2009). Radical embodied cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: MIT press.
* Tegmark, M. (2014). Consciousness as a State of Matter. arXiv preprint arXiv:1401.1219.
* Tononi, G. (2008). Consciousness as integrated information: a provisional manifesto. The Biological Bulletin, 215(3), 216-242.

# Answer
<sub>**Note:** This is not intended to set a verbosity standard for answers, but to give a comprehensive example of what kind of information I am looking in order to further clarify the question. An answer including only a parallel of the *principles of ecological psychology* subsection would be sufficient, for example.</sub>

# Ecological psychology

Ecological Psychology (EP) is an extended cognition theory of the mind which draws on and massively extends Gibsonian ideas of direct perception into a full theory of behavior. EP rejects both representationalism and the idea that behavior is organized because some other entity (such as the brain) is organized, in favor of the idea that **the cause of behavior is an organized physical system unto itself**, called the mind. It therefore rejects that an organism can be described meaningfully in isolation from its environment. Instead, behavior, intelligence and consciousness are theorized to emerge from observable physical dynamics and interactions (Turvey and Carello, 2012).

> The rules that govern behavior are not like laws enforced by an authority or decisions made by a commander: behavior is regular without being regulated. The question is how this can be. — James J. Gibson, *The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979/1986)*.

## An ecological ontology

Ecological psychology proposes that the meaningful scale of analysis for behavior is not the organism, but the organism-environment system. These systems comprise **agents** (goal-directed autopoietic systems), **affordances** (opportunities for action), **effectivities** (action capabilities) and a **niche** (the set of affordances). Behavior emerges from dynamical organism-environment interactions, which are called perception-action cycles. An illustrative example from the literature is the matter of explaining the outfielder problem, i.e., of catching a ball in the air (Fink, Foo and Warren, 2009).

## Principles of ecological psychology

Richardson, Shockley, Fajen, Riley and Turvey (2008, see chapter 9) proposed six influential principles of ecological psychology, which I will cover here, but two special issues of the journal Ecological Psychology also dealt with the search for physical intelligence from first principles in depth (first and second special issue) if you want more information.

1. **Organism–environment systems are the proper units of behavioral analysis.**
    * Organisms cannot exist without an environment or vice versa; one term implies the other. Attempts to understand an organism or an environment as separate from the other are therefore meaningless.
2. **Environmental realities should be defined at the ecological scale.**
    * A theory of behavior entails a theory of environments. Substances, surfaces, places, objects, and events define the environment for ecological psychology, and therefore define opportunities for action.
3. **Behavior is emergent and self-organized.**
    * The mind is a lawfully nonlinear system which exhibits macroscopic emergent properties that do not reduce to local interactions between components.
4. **Perception and action are continuous and cyclic.**
    * Perception entails action and action entails perception. The perception-action cycle is understood as a continuous relation between the flow of an information array and the forces an organism produces as it acts.
5. **Information is specificational.**
    * Perception is direct rather than approximated or mediated by inferential processes. Understanding behavior will require going O-E system by O-E system, task by task, and empirically identifying the relevant specificational information—unique 1:1 correspondences in those O-E systems.
6. **Perception is of affordances.**
    * The distinction between conception and perception is false. Knowing is a relation between organism and environment, and affordances are perceived by identifying lawful information that invariantly specifies capabilities of a particular agent in relation to features of a particular environment state.

# Concluding remarks

Ecological psychology is a unique way to conceive of the mind, or perhaps it just seems that way to me subjectively because my background is predominantly cognitive. It fascinates me that their principles have drawn ecological psychologists in a completely different direction compared to cognitive psychologists, tending to focus on movement and locomotion rather than starting with memory and reasoning.

EP is a theory that I urge every cognitive scientist should familiarize themselves with, not so much because I think it's going to replace cognitive theory any time soon, but because it's truly a *fundamentally* different way to conceptualize behavior. It raises many important questions that are not often considered in the study of behavior, and gave me cause to critically consider some of my assumptions about the mind I did not realize I held.

# References

* Fink, P. W., Foo, P. S., & Warren, W. H. (2009). Catching fly balls in virtual reality: A critical test of the outfielder problem. Journal of Vision, 9(13), 14.
* Gibson, J. J. (1986). The ecological approach to visual perception. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. (Original work published 1979)
* Richardson, M. J., Shockley, K., Fajen, B. R., Riley, M. A., & Turvey, M. T. (2008). Ecological psychology: Six principles for an embodied–embedded approach to behavior. Handbook of cognitive science: An embodied approach, 161-187.
* Turvey, M. T., & Carello, C. (2012). On intelligence from first principles: Guidelines for inquiry into the hypothesis of physical intelligence (PI). Ecological Psychology, 24(1), 3-32.
> 6 votes

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Tags: methodology, consciousness, philosophy-of-mind, mathematical-psychology, dynamic-systems
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# Question
Title: Does the effect of naturalistic exposure on second language acquisition vary with age?
A while back, I watched the movie The Terminal and the main character played by Tom Hanks learns to speak fluent English while he is stranded in the airport for more than a year. Which seems somewhat superfluous as I was of the opinion that picking up a new language when you grow older is not easy. But Tom Hanks' character manages to speak English quite fluently given his background.

Dr Martha Young-Scholten of University of Newcastle mentions that the movie accurately describes how someone would acquire a second language under naturalistic exposure:

> Misrepresentations of complex issues such as adult second language (L2) acquisition are rife in the news media; one does not expect Hollywood to differ. Yet the 2004 film The Terminal (2004) gets it right. Stranded in a NY airport for a year, Tom Hanks’ character accurately depicts the early stages of acquisition and demonstrates how ample naturalistic exposure leads to advanced L2 proficiency. Hollywood also manages cultural nuances; initial communication fails because the authorities assume Hanks is attempting to immigrate when his purpose is one of pilgrimage.

**If an individual is forced to use a language he is almost unfamiliar with, would it help him make significant progress in acquiring that language, regardless of his age?**

# Answer
> 4 votes
<sub>(Unfortunately, the links appear to be broken, so I will reply to the title and bolded question.)</sub>

Being forced to use a language you are unfamiliar with as a language technique is known as **immersion learning.** I could not find direct comparisons of adults and children, but based on evidence from educational systems, it appears that early immersion does not change the helpfulness of immersion learning outcomes compared to late immersion, but interestingly, it does appear to change the *way* we obtain those learning outcomes (Harley and Hart, 1997).

> Evidence is found to support the main hypothesis that in late immersion starting in adolescence there will be a positive relationship between L2 \[second language\] outcomes and an analytical dimension of language aptitude, whereas in early immersion beginning in grade 1 a positive relationship will hold between L2 outcomes and memory ability. **A further hypothesis that early immersion students will have higher language aptitude as a result of their early L2 exposure is not supported by the findings**.

This would appear to at least partially satisfy the question. Since the question is about a fictional movie, I'll go out on a limb here and say that speculatively, an unrelated earlier study might be helpful in explaining why this could be the case.

Newport (1990) reported support for the hypothesis that language learning abilities decline because of the expansion of nonlinguistic cognitive abilities. It's conceivable this allows individuals increasing freedom to avoid using second language, but these nonlinguistic abilities may be unhelpful in cases of extended immersion learning as depicted in The Terminal.

## References

* Harley, B., & Hart, D. (1997). Language aptitude and second language proficiency in classroom learners of different starting ages. Studies in second language acquisition, 19(03), 379-400.
* Newport, E. L. (1990), Maturational Constraints on Language Learning. Cognitive Science, 14: 11–28. doi: 10.1207/s15516709cog1401\_2

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Tags: learning, language, aging
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# Question
Title: What is understood about interactions between personality types or traits?
There are several psychological tests based on Jungian typology (e.g., MBTI, Insights & DISC) which extrapolate findings about personality into how those types interact (e.g., interaction styles). It is claimed that these tests can predict cooperation, conflict, and so on. However, there are also several three and five dimensional personality tests which are presumably more accurate.

My questions are:

1. Is there any research on interactions between personality traits based on the Big 5, EPQ, or 16PF?
2. Are interactions between Jungian types scientifically supported or is it an example of the Forer effect?

# Answer
> 3 votes
## Do the Big Five traits interact?

I have given a general overview of the Big Five model in a previous answer. The Big Five model of personality is based on a statistical analysis of a person's tendency to agree or disagree with short descriptive statements. The principal object of this analysis is to identify independent factors that can explain variation in participants' responses to these statements. In some sense, they are designed not to interact.

Because of the descriptive nature of, and the methodology employed in, the construction of the Big Five, the factors do not have notion of interaction in the sense that Jungian types might, and do not "drive" behavior in the same sense. It's theoretically meaningful to talk about interactions between Jungian types, because types are associated with not only particular behavioral patterns, but particular manifestations of behavior.

Factor analytic theories such as the Big Five or 16PF, on the other hand, are not associated with particular manifestations of behavior. It isn't meaningful to talk about how a person A who is high on neuroticism might interact with a person B who is high on Agreeableness, because we can readily imagine an almost infinite number of ways in which those traits might manifest over persons, situations and time.

There may still be **statistical interaction** between Big Five traits with respect to some outcome variable (e.g., high conscientiousness *and* extraversion may predict higher income than the sum of both in isolation), but these notions of interaction should not be confused.

## Are interactions between Jungian types scientifically supported?

This question has effectively been covered a number of posts here on Cognitive Sciences. The short version is that Jungian type theories such as the MBTI are not well supported by the empirical research literature, but we don't know if it is an example of the Forer effect. You may find the following questions interesting.

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Tags: measurement, personality, jung
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# Question
Title: Is there an open-source / free official Myers-Briggs assessment I can adopt?
## Background

I've got an idea for a web site that uses one's Myers-Briggs type as part of the value.

I've seen various web sites offer "quick quizzes" to assess one's MBTI, but I'm not sure how legitimate / effective / ethical it would be to utilize one of these "knock-off" assessment techniques. I haven't decided any of the business angles yet; for now it's just a cool idea, so I can't speak to whether it would be commercial, non-profit, etc.

## Questions

* Is there an official "test of record" or set of questions that I can use in my application that is reasonably open or inexpensive? I'd like to get results that are as accurate as possible but I'm just one guy on a shoestring budget.
* Could I run into legal trouble from the Myers-Briggs institute over this? How open are they with the methodology for this assessment? While I'm strapped for cash, I also have no desire to be a jerk; I'm admittedly ignorant on how this realm of science/industry views these matters.
* Is there any need for an official MBTI interpreter (other than privacy ethics, etc. which of course I would be respecting as the founder of said web site)?
* How much accuracy does one lose in using a quiz that isn't "personally reviewed"? That seems to be the main purpose of a "licensed MBTI interpreter" as far as I've been able to see with some quick research.

# Answer
I was alerted to your post here and would like to respond to a non-technical side of the question. I'm an Intellectual Property Assistant for CPP, Inc., publisher of the MBTI® assessment tool. I help protect the instrument's trademarks and copyrights, and ensure ethical use of the instrument.

The names MBTI®, Myers-Briggs®, and Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® are all registered trademarks, and they refer to a particular, copyrighted product: the *Myers-Briggs Type Indicator* assessment tool. There is no open-source version of the MBTI assessment. Also, it would not be correct or legally appropriate to use the trademarks to refer to a different product, such as one of the personality assessments which may be found online. (Some of them already infringe on the MBTI trademarks, so don't be fooled into thinking that's OK!)

I'm glad to read that you're aware of the legal and ethical implications of your idea. I hope what I've said helps, but if you have any more questions, I'll check back here and try to answer them.

My impression is that the actual MBTI assessment is *not* appropriate for what you're considering, but if you'd like more information about the instrument, its development, psychometric data, and so on, I'd recommend the Myers-Briggs Foundation (www.myersbriggs.org), CAPT.org, or CPP.com. In the meantime, I hope what I've written will provide some clarity about the legal/IP side of things.

*MBTI, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and Myers-Briggs are registered trademarks or trademarks of the MBTI Trust, Inc., in the United States and other countries.*
> 11 votes

# Answer
The IPIP may provide what you are looking for.

> This IPIP Website is intended to provide rapid access to measures of individual differences, all in the public domain, to be developed conjointly among scientists worldwide.

In general, the scientific literature tends to focus more on a dimensional approach based on the Big 5 model of personality than the type approach. There are strong correlations between MBTI and Big 5 measures.

The IPIP website provides measures of the Big 5. The following table from Furnham (1996) summarises some correlations across a few studies between the NEO Big 5 and the MBTI.

You can find a listing of some of the multi-construct measures including Big 5 measures on the ipip website.

### References

* Furnham, A. (1996). The big five versus the big four: the relationship between the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and NEO-PI five factor model of personality. Personality and Individual Differences, 21, 303-307.
> 14 votes

# Answer
The **Open Extended Jungian Type Scales** is a open source alternative to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

> The Open Extended Jungian Type Scales was developed to be an open source alternative to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The OEJTS was developed by empirically selecting items that differentiated among persons who identified as one of the Myers-Briggs personality types along one of the four dichotomies. After a detailed review of psychological type, including a survey of 2230 persons about what differences the dichotomies entailed a pool of 278 items was generated. Using 25,568 participants who were experienced with psychological type and knew their personality type, this pool was reduced down to 48 items, twelve for each scale.
> 7 votes

# Answer
Interesting that you mention ethics. Regardless of the validity of the MBTI (or rather lack thereof - try searching the web for independent professional opinions rather than just listening to the Myers-Briggs Foundation marketing), my main problem with it is that I personally believe it is foremost a money-making scam.

The Myers-Briggs Foundation will not let you do the test unless it is delivered by a certified practitioner, supposedly to safeguard against it being administered incorrectly. Only certified practitioners are allowed to purchase copies of the test.

However, I have personally done the formal test before as part of a professional development workshop and know from experience that the test itself no more difficult to administer than countless other free online personality tests. The seminar bundled with the test also requires no particular skill to deliver, and the content could be summarised in a few pages of reading. In spite of this, the cost to undergo MBTI "certification" ranges in the order of $1000.

Furthermore, after making such a fuss that one cannot undergo the MBTI without help from someone "qualified" with thousand-dollar certification, the Myers-Briggs Foundation then actually does offer the MBTI online, just like countless other automated online personality tests, only this one costs $50.
> 4 votes

# Answer
As stated above, everything related to MBTI is trademarked, but the theory behind it, based on Jung's personality types, have no such limitations as far as I know.

There are a few differences between the two (having to do with the functions I believe), but for a "quick and dirty" version like the one it sounds like you need for your site, it should do fine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality\_type http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological\_Types
> 1 votes

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Tags: social-psychology, test, personality
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title: A measure of creativity from mind maps

text:
# Question
Title: A measure of creativity from mind maps
I have an experiment with 500 students who where asked to solve a general problem.

Each student had the assignment to find as many solutions as possible to the problem in 15 minutes. Solutions where submitted in the form of mind maps (where each node represents a possible solution and connections between nodes are also possible). 500 maps are available for evaluation. All the students were previously trained about the use of mind maps.

The objective would be to get a reliable proxy of each student creativity from their outputs. I'm not sure if this is possible or if the approach is just wrong and one should use a more accepted test to measure creativity. No other test scores are available for this sample.

We are thinking about different approaches such as:

* counting the number of generated ideas;
* using experts to evaluate the characteristics of the creative outputs.

Is there any paper related to the issue? Or any accepted method that could be used to evaluate creativty of the students?

# Answer
> 8 votes
You are not far off from one of the classic tests of creativity! The Torrance Test of Creative Thinking scores for **fluency** (number of responses) as well as **originality** (statistical rarity of responses) and **elaboration** (level of detail) on a variety of different tasks--some of which are similar to your mind-mapping task. The validity of the TTCT has been examined with several long-term studies, so there is a fair amount of data on its measurements as well as the form of the test itself.

Torrance, E. P. (1981b). Empirical validation of criterion-referenced indicators of creative ability through a longitudinal study. Creative Child and Adult Quarterly, 6, 136-140.

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Tags: measurement, psychology
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# Question
Title: How to measure verbal and visual working memory?
I need a task which can measure verbal also visual working memory. I am not going to run the test, this is just for theoretical interest. Which tests can be used in this research?

# Answer
> 5 votes
Conway et al. (2005) gives a really nice overview of tasks to measure working memory capacity (WMC). I would refer to that publication for details about the tasks. I'll summarize two tasks below that are related to your question.

**Verbal Working Memory**. A classic way to measure verbal working memory is a reading span task. The task involves presenting sentences to a subject who makes a judgment about whether the sentence is coherent or not. The subject must also remember some key word (e.g. the last word) in the sentence. The subject reads several such sentences, and then has to recall all of the key words in order. The more sentences that the subject can read, the higher their verbal working memory.

**Visual Working Memory** Visual/spatial working memory can be tested in a similar way, but with spatial stimuli instead of sentences. One such task is a rotation-span task. In this task, you see a rotated letter, like this:

You have to make a judgment about whether the letter is in the correct orientation (if it were upright, would it be normal or flipped?). After you do that, you then see something like this:

You have to remember what direction the arrow was pointing. You then repeat the process several times, alternating between letters and arrows, until you are asked to recall the order of orientations for all the arrows you saw.

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Tags: memory, working-memory
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# Question
Title: Can observing neutral objects prime the brain to integrate them into new ideas in the waking state?
I'm aware of a few concepts, primarily from dream research, which indicate that dreams feature or integrate observed objects from the past several days into dream content.

For example, seeing a bike commercial can make a person dream of riding a bike; finding a molten piece of chocolate in one's pocket can make one dream of something brown and sticky. The colloquial term for this phenomenon is "day residue", invented by Freud.

Anecdotal evidence from my own life makes me question if something similar happens in the waking state. **Do events from the past few days "prime" the brain to create new ideas based on those events?**

Have there been studies that demonstrated that exposing a person to emotionally neutral objects causes them to come up with ideas related to those objects in the next few days? For example, is seeing art supplies more likely people to start an art project?

# Answer
There is some support for a short-term **day residue effect** in the literature, but no support for a more extended **dream-lag effect**.

Nielsen and Powell (1992) published a test of the day residue effect (incorporation of material from the immediately preceding day) and the dream-lag effect (incorporation of material from 6–8 days prior). Based on dream journals and self-reports of daily events, **they found evidence to support the day residue effect, but not the dream-lag effect**.

A short 2005 Nature article by the same first author provides a review of the literature for memory's general relationship to dreaming, and includes a very nice summary of the different theories that are in play right now (Nielsen and Stenstrom, 2005).

## References

* Nielsen, T. A., & Powell, R. A. (1992). The day-residue and dream-lag effects: A literature review and limited replication of two temporal effects in dream formation. Dreaming, 2(2), 67.
* Nielsen, T. A., & Stenstrom, P. (2005). What are the memory sources of dreaming?. Nature, 437(7063), 1286-1289.
> 2 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, dreams, ideation, creativity
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# Question
Title: Is critical thinking associated with IQ?
I consider myself a person with reasonable intelligence. In my job, I require a lot of critical thinking. I am good at think laterally, but sometimes I feel I missed important critical evaluations of a simple problem. Then, I start to doubt my own intellect and rationality.

**Is critical thinking associated with IQ?**

# Answer
> 4 votes
Critical thinking is an ill-defined concept in the cognitive sciences, so this question most likely has as many answers as there are measures of IQ and critical thinking. An accessible introduction to the literature is available here, with the general cognitive conception of critical thinking given as follows:

> ... the mental activities that are typically called critical thinking are actually a subset of three types of thinking: reasoning, making judgments and decisions, and problem solving. I say that critical thinking is a subset of these because we think in these ways all the time, but only sometimes in a critical way. Deciding to read this article, for example, is not critical thinking. But carefully weighing the evidence it presents in order to decide whether or not to believe what it says is.

With that said, there appears to be some empirical support for a relation between cognitive ability/IQ and critical thinking ability, at least within a dual-process theoretic framework. Sá, West and Stanovich (1999) reported:

> Participants high in cognitive ability were able to flexibly use prior knowledge, depending upon its efficacy in a particular environment. They were more likely to project a relationship when it reflected a useful cue, but they were also less likely to project a prior belief when the belief was inefficacious.

I've provided a link to the PDF my references, since they refer directly to cognitive ability rather than IQ, and the equivalence is only made clear in their Method section.

## References

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Tags: learning, intelligence, problem-solving, iq, creativity
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# Question
Title: Is there a part of the human brain responsible for triggering imagination, fantasy and coming up with unusual stories?
I'm trying to understand if there's **a specific process or part of the human brain which, when activated, causes the person to daydream, engage in fantasy or come up with ideas that are far from common reality?** In other words, what is the trigger that initiates imagination process?

### Examples

1. Looking at the clouds and guessing their shapes - there's no animals, unicorns or majestic castles in the sky - there are clouds, but the brain still comes up with unusual explanations.
2. Thinking about "What would I do if I was teleported back in time" or "what if I had super powers". I'm interested in what causes this slip into daydreaming.
3. When a person in love is fantasizing about a romantic partner and attributes all kinds of traits to them. Once again, some kind of trigger modifies thinking pattern.

### Question

The phenomenon I'm talking about might be related to when people suddenly start to think about all kinds of stuff, real or imaginary upon going to bed (which prevents them from falling asleep).

It seems to me that all of these share a common theme, and I'm trying to learn if they are bound by some physical process or part of the brain.

This question is related to this question about factors that trigger creative thought in humans

# Answer
> 5 votes
**There is no known specific process or part of the human brain which, when activated, causes the person to daydream, engage in fantasy or come up with ideas that are far from common reality**. Instead, imagination is a broad-based activity which involves and overlaps with many brain regions and cognitive processes.

The cognitive neuroscientific basis of imagination is believed to comprise a core network of brain regions, which seems to utilize parts of a vast and broad-based set of other regions for different purposes. There are too many of these to list, but **the main activity seems to revolve around the frontal lobes, parietal lobes and the hippocampus**. Interestingly, and consistent with the idea of memory as a generative process, the brain regions involved in imaginary events appear to be highly related to the regions involved in episodic memory retrieval for real events.

Hassabis, Kumaran and Maguire (2007) report relevant fMRI evidence on imaginary scene construction:

> Our results show that when subjects construct new fictitious scenes an extended brain network involving the **hippocampus**, **parahippocampal gyrus**, **retrosplenial cortices**, **posterior parietal cortices**, and **ventromedial prefrontal cortex** is active. Critically, we show using a conjunction analysis that this network is not specific to the construction of new fictitious experiences, but **is also engaged when subjects remember both previously imagined experiences as well as their own real personal experiences**. The implication is, therefore, that this distributed network supports cognitive operations engaged in common during the three main conditions in our experiment, most likely the (re)construction, maintenance and visualization of complex scenes.

These are *associations*, however. The results should not be taken to support the idea that there exists any process/brain region or set of brain regions which, if stimulated, will **cause** a person to daydream or engage in fantasy, only that **these regions are active when people do so.** This is always true for neuroimaging studies, but this is doubly true when the results involve a dozen or more areas.

## References

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Tags: cognitive-neuroscience, behaviorism, ideation
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# Question
Title: Can we explain the tendency of investors dollar cost averaging in terms of loss aversion?
For those unfamiliar with the term Dollar cost averaging (DCA)

> is an investment strategy for reducing the impact of volatility on large purchases of financial assets such as equities. By dividing the total sum to be invested in the market (eg \\$100,000) into equal amounts put into the market at regular intervals (eg \\$1000 over 100 weeks), DCA reduces the risk of incurring a substantial loss resulting from investing the entire "lump sum" just before a fall in the market.

Dollar cost averaging appears to perform worse than lump sum investment. If this is the case, then why do a lot of people engage in dollar cost averaging instead of lump sump investment?

My own guess is that dollar cost averaging "allows you to sleep better" at night because the chances of making catastrophic losses are smaller than lump sum investments; in other words, loss aversion is at work here.

Am I right? In other words, I have two intertwined questions here

1. Does dollar cost averaging have a lesser chance of blowing up?
2. If yes, is this why people prefer it?

# Answer
> 3 votes
It seems that despite the idea's intuitive appeal, **the evidence is currently mixed with respect to whether loss aversion can explain dollar cost averaging strategies.** Most research I can find seems to be financial and normative, pertaining to whether the strategy performs well more than behavioral and descriptive concerns for why people engage in the strategy.

An uncommonly direct study of this exact question reported, in no uncertain terms, that we cannot explain the tendency of investors dollar cost averaging in terms of loss aversion (Leggio and Lien, 1995).

> Using prospect theory to create an alternative utility function that does not require investors to be strictly risk averse, we empirically test Statman’s conjecture for four investment strategies and for alternative stock investments. **We find loss aversion still does not explain the existence of the dollar-cost averaging investment strategy.**

Unfortunately, at least for our sense of certainty, this claim was challenged in a later study by Dicht and Drobetz (2011), which suggested the exact opposite: according to them, prospect theoretic *can* explain dollar cost averaging strategies with loss aversion within short time scales.

> Overall, our results indicate that the popularity of **dollar cost averaging can be explained within the framework of the Tversky and Kahneman’s cumulative prospect theory**, at least for short time horizons.

There seems to be a complex, time-dependent relationship between dollar cost averaging and loss aversion. It's plausible that loss aversion drives the tendency to engage in dollar cost averaging over particular time scales or for particular classes of investors, but ultimately, we don't have the evidence to say.

## References

* Leggio, K. B., & Lien, D. (2001). Does loss aversion explain dollar-cost averaging?. Financial Services Review, 10(1), 117-127.
* Dichtl, H., & Drobetz, W. (2011). Dollar-cost averaging and prospect theory investors: An explanation for a popular investment strategy. Journal of Behavioral Finance, 12(1), 41-52.

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Tags: social-psychology, decision-making, economics, rationality
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# Question
Title: The "Backwards Bike" and implications for how we think
Here's a video of a guy learning to ride a "backwards bike", if you turn the handles left, then the wheel goes right. It took the guy forever to learn to ride a backward bike. He kept remarking that "any disturbance would make is brain switch back to the old 'normal' bike control system".

Later in the video, he did something amazing. He tried to ride a normal bike and apparently no longer could. Then after about 20 minutes worth of trying and failing utterly, suddenly the understanding of a normal bike snapped back into his mind, and in the span of about 30 seconds he could ride the bike easily. How did that sudden change happen? What state was his mind in that he couldn't reach back to the old system? And then what suddenly happened so that he was able to?

More generally, is there any research in this area? I think it would be awesome to hook up an EEG to someone and watch as they make this mental leap from one control system to another. Has this ever been done?

Note here (because there appears to be some confusion) that I'm not so much interested in brain plasticity or negative transfer. Those are interesting in their own right, but for this question I'm most interested in the "switch back" phenomenon. Why was the individual somehow blocked from reaching the normal bike control system, and how did this barrier so suddenly and so drastically disappear? Apparently there are now two systems in his brain, and they are somehow quarantined from one another. What mechanism makes this possible? And why would such a mechanism be beneficial?

I realize now that I have experienced the same phenomenon with language. I studied Spanish in high school and was pretty good at it. But after learning Japanese it's difficult to "jump" back into Spanish speaking mode. And if I'm in Spanish speaking mode it's hard to jump back to Spanish.

# Answer
While both prism adaptation and negative transfer are pointers to the right direction, I'd see this as a question concerning **brain plasticity** (you may want to tag the question with that, I don't have the required points to create a new tag).

The guy *could indeed* learn to ride the reverse bike, but he would have to work hard on it, and would have a hard time reversing to normal bikes later on, as you report.

Take a look at wikipedia's Perceptual adaptation page:

> Experimental support\[edit\] In the 1890s, psychologist George M. Stratton conducted experiments in which he tested the theory of perceptual adaptation. In one experiment, he wore a reversing glasses for 21½ hours over three days, with no change in his vision. After removing the glasses, "normal vision was restored instantaneously and without any disturbance in the natural appearance or position of objects."
>
> Modern version of inverting mirrors with harness. On a later experiment, Stratton wore the glasses for eight whole days. By day four, the images seen through the instrument were still upside down. **However, on day five, images appeared upright until he concentrated on them; then they became inverted again.** By having to concentrate on his vision to turn it upside down again, especially when he knew images were hitting his retinas in the opposite orientation as normal, Stratton deduced his brain had reprocessed his vision and adapted to the changes in vision.

So people look at the world *literally* upside-down, but then adjust abruptly.

A good read about this is On Intelligence, and in my research with chess experts I have argued for a cognitive model of "experience recognition" in here and here.

An amazing video of the beginning of the learning process is here: Amy hears sound for the first time. At about 1m45s you can clearly see that she is confused about about her sensations---she doesn't have the experience of hearing, and her brain is just now trying to make sense of what this new influx of surprising information means and how it should be processed.

Or look at this small girl, who has had **her entire left hemisphere taken out of her brain**, with few behavioral problems.

As a thought experiment, imagine you could suddenly "feel" the radio waves flowing all around us. At first you'd be extremely confused. Yet, after some time, you'd be able to discern people turning off their phones on a plane, turning on their gps, or the "silence" in rural areas. **If you had the experience for a long enough time,** you would be able to ground it to meaningful events surrounding you.
> 6 votes

# Answer
Pending Josh's better prism-adaptation-based answer, I believe the general cognitive term for this is **negative transfer**.

**Most** of the time, when people learn something new or improve their skills in one domain, we observe related improvement in related skills and domains. **Sometimes**, however, it's the other way around―typically motor activities. A relevant previous question here on CogSci was based on negative transfer in writing, "By learning to read and write upside down, what did I do to myself?", where Jeromy's answer should be of interest.
> 1 votes

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Tags: cognitive-neuroscience, cognitive-modeling
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# Question
Title: What are the most used statistical methods in WM research besides (generalized) linear modeling?
I mean, by cognitive psychologists. I skimmed over a few articles from *Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience* and *Trends in Cognitive Science* and concluded that ANOVAs and t-tests are mostly used (without effect sizes). I'm sure that there are more scientific journals of cognitive psychology than these two, and I guess, that there are also more advanced statistical tools than comparing groups. For example, in social psychology, structural equations modelling and mediation analysis are in fashion.

When asking this question, I had **working memory** in mind. Common methods to measure working memory empirically are, among others: dual task paradigms, n-back tasks and composites of simple memory measures. The main statistical tools that are applied to these measures seem to be mainly ANOVAs, t-tests, and other variations on traditional linear modeling, but what are the alternatives?

**What are the most used statistical methods in WM research besides (generalized) linear modeling?**

# Answer
It is difficult to overstate the extent to which analysis of variance-based linear modeling based for different groups dominates the cognitive sciences. A recent methodological review of the psychology literature suggesting that these analyses are used to test hypotheses in as much as 95% of studies (citation pending me recovering it). There *are* alternatives in working memory, but they often have more limited empirical support due to the dominance of the aforementioned analyses.

# Hierarchical models

One alternative that doesn't veer *too* far from established practices is to use a hierarchical modeling approach, as you suggest. For example, Lee and Webb (2005) proposed a Bayesian hierarchical modeling of working memory which accounted for both individual differences and aggregated group data. The main benefit here is to take advantage of both individual- and group-level variability, but we ultimately end up with a linear model.

> **Many evaluations of cognitive models rely on data that have been averaged or aggregated across all experimental subjects**, and so fail to consider the possibility of important individual differences between subjects. **Other evaluations are done at the single-subject level**, and so fail to benefit from the reduction of noise that data averaging or aggregation potentially provides. To overcome these weaknesses, **we have developed a general approach to modeling individual differences using families of cognitive models in which different groups of subjects are identified as having different psychological behavior.** Separate models with separate parameterizations are applied to each group of subjects, and Bayesian model selection is used to determine the appropriate number of groups.

# Topology

An emerging, but currently more niche approach is to use topology. **Topology is making some exciting inroads in the psychological methodology literature** (e.g., Butner et al., 2014), but so far has not managed to see substantial use in the empirical WM literature. However, there are a few early birds who've made some attempts to capture WM within a topological context, namely **Glassman's work on a "theory of relativity" for working memory** (Glassman, 1999; Glassman, 2003).

In the succeeding excerpt, he explains why human verbal memory capacity is 3-4 items from a topological perspective:

> Thus, a moment’s WM is hypothesized here to reside in myriad activated cortical planar “patches,” each subdivided into up to four amoeboid “subpatches.” Two different lines of topological reasoning suggest orderly associations of such representations. **(1)** The four-color principle of map topology, and the related K4 is planar theorem of graph theory, imply that if a small cortical area is dynamically subdivided into no more than four, discretely bounded planar subareas, then each such segment has ample free access to each of the others. **(2)** A hypothetical alternative to such associative adjacency of simultaneously active cortical representations of chunk-attributes is associative overlap, whereby, in dense cortical neuropil, activated subpatches behave like Venn diagrams of intersecting sets. As the number of Venn-like coactive subpatches within a patch increases, maintaining ad hoc associativity among all combinations requires exponentially proliferating intersections. **Beyond four, serpentine subpatch shapes are required, which could easily lead to pathologies of omission or commission.**

# Others

I am tangentially aware of related attempts to develop a theory of (working) memory as a form of foraging behavior, but not sufficiently to give a summary of it. Hopefully, the link is instructive.

## References
> 2 votes

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Tags: methodology, statistics, working-memory
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# Question
Title: Is there a specific name for the emotion I'm feeling?
I looked around and it doesn't seem to match the definition of guilt NOR shame.

I made up a lie that works this way:

1.Tell people someone I made up is "special," "unique," and a variety of other things.

2.Lock myself in a paradigm where I both know and don't know I am this person in some way to gain approval or represent my true feelings under the guise of this person expressing them.

3.When people speak of this person, I can somewhat "feel" what that person would. So if I feel like a massive loser, I lie and tell people that "X" person did something amazing so that when they talk good about them, I can somehow know it links back to me even though I won't admit it to myself.

I've been lying to myself for years and doing it so much that I sometimes hardly realize that it's untrue, or have trained myself so much that it's like it was true and I am conditioned to not admit it's false to myself. Whatever "X" person does, I can take credit, so it gives my life some meaning, even if it's not real and I won't consciously admit it or have deluded myself into accepting this.

But I've been doing this with my mother lately and I fear I can't tell her the truth about all of the lies and fake stuff I've told her about this person, and it's making me feel bad but I have no idea how to categorize this emotion. Is it just simply "bad emotional feeling?" Is it guilt and shame? I have no idea. My emotions have always been a mystery to me since I never know what I'm feeling.

# Answer
> 1 votes
This sounds a little bit like a mild form of Depersonalization. From Wikipedia:

> The core symptom of depersonalization disorder is the subjective experience of "unreality in one's sense of self", and as such there are no clinical signs. People who are diagnosed with depersonalization also experience an almost uncontrollable urge to question and think about the nature of reality and existence as well as other deeply philosophical questions. **Individuals who experience depersonalization can feel divorced from their own personal physicality by sensing their body sensations, feelings, emotions and behaviors as not belonging to the same person or identity.** Also, a recognition of self breaks down (hence the name). Depersonalization can result in very high anxiety levels, which can intensify these perceptions even further. Common descriptions: Feeling disconnected from one's physicality; feeling like one is not completely occupying the body; not feeling in control of one's speech or physical movements; and feeling detached from one's own thoughts or emotions; experiencing one's self and life from a distance; a sense of just going through the motions; feeling as though one is in a dream or movie; feeling "weird" being alive; and even out-of-body experiences.

Does the above describe your feelings?

If so, you may want to talk to a professional, play sports, and lower your overall anxiety levels.

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, social-psychology, emotion, measurement, cognitive-modeling
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# Question
Title: Who first used the term 'heuristic' in a cognitive science context?
I seem to recall that Herbert Simon borrowed the term from computer science, but I cannot remember the initial paper in which he made use of this borrowing.

A google scholar search reveals some papers from 1957-1958, for instance this one, but I really felt there was something from earlier in the 1950s.

# Answer
A nice summary about heuristics can be found in:

Gigerenzer, G., & Gaissmaier, W. (2011). Heuristic Decision Making. Annual Review of Psychology, 62, 451–482.

In this review "satisficing" (accepting a good enough option) is referred to an earlier reference than the 1958 you cite: Simon, H.A. (1955). A behavioral model of rational choice. Q. J. Econ. 69:99–118.

In their (Gigerenzer & Gaissmaier) history part they also refer to Einstein using the term in his 1905 paper on quantum physics, stating that the view he presented was "incomplete but highly useful".
> 10 votes

# Answer
His very first use of heuristic beyond computer science (he won the Turing award in Comp. Science) is from 1946.

The Proverbs of Administration Herbert A. Simon, *Public Administration Review*, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Winter, 1946), pp. 53-67

> If so, the evidence that it is an error has never been marshalled or published-apart from loose heuristic arguments like that quoted above
> 6 votes

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Tags: reference-request, decision-making
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title: Can hypnosis stop cigarette smoking?

text:
# Question
Title: Can hypnosis stop cigarette smoking?
Alas, advertisements or commercials for "hypnotherapy" to stop any number of bad habits from smoking to weight gain are almost unavoidable now days.

Are there any actual unbiased studies or hard statistics on whether or not hypnosis is effective at curing an addiction to nicotine, or breaking the habit of cigarette smoking?

# Answer
> 12 votes
**Green and Lynn (2000)** conducted a meta analysis of 59 experiments investigating the efficacy of hypnosis on smoking cessation. Their conclusions were:

1. There is mixed, inconclusive evidence for whether hypnosis is any better than placebos.
2. Hypnosis treatments were generally confounded with educational interventions and cognitive/behavioral interventions, making it impossible to isolate hypnosis as the causal source of positive results.

In short, their conclusion is:

> Hypnosis cannot, as yet, be regarded as a well-established treatment for smoking cessation

**Barnes et al. (2010)** ran a meta analysis ten years later, and came to the same general conclusion. There is no evidence that hypnotherapy for smoking cessation works better than no treatment at all. They found that claims of success in the literature are generally uncontrolled studies, and that:

> The effects of hypnotherapy on smoking cessation claimed by uncontrolled studies were not confirmed by analysis of randomized controlled trials.

**References**

Barnes, J., Dong, C. Y., McRobbie, H., Walter, N., Mehta, M., & Stead, L. F. (2010). Hypnotherapy for smoking cessation. *Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews*. doi:10.1002/14651858.CD001008.pub2

Green, J., & Lynn, S. J. (2000). Hypnosis and suggestion-based approaches to smoking cessation: An examination of the evidence. *International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis*, *48*(2), 195-224.

# Answer
> -2 votes
Hypnosis is a state of human consciousness involving focused attention and reduced peripheral awareness characterized by an enhanced capacity for response to suggestion. It is however a non-permanent state so even if when you are hypnotised you don't have the impulse to smoke, once the hypnosis is over you'll be back to normal life. Freud was the first who studied this by studying a woman who could not move her arm in any way and when she was hypnotised she could, when the effect was over, she couldn't move it again. So, theoretically it's possible, but you should be in a permanent state of hypnosis, which obviously isn't the best think a person could experience.

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Tags: addiction, hypnosis
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# Question
Title: Can bipolar disorder be considered a malfunction of the "love circuit" in the human brain?
I've not so long ago read a book on depression by a Russian psychiatrist Vladimir Levi. The book's title can be roughly translated as "Not only depression, but a pursuit of mood". I have not been able to find an english translation, so I cannot quote it directly.

In that book, the author lists several examples of love-related depression, where a person who drops out of a love relationship experiences symptoms of moderate to severe depression.

This got me thinking - love is often portrayed as the "ultimate goal" in religion, popular culture, movies, etc. The psychiatrist above provides examples that losing love can result in depression. Another condition that is characterized by dramatic uplift in mood and outlook on life is the hypomania stage of Bipolar Disorder. Bipolar disorder is characterized by multiple episodes of hypomania/mania and depression over the course of a lifetime.

Putting both phenomena together, it appears to me that there are similarities, and I'd like to ask these questions:

-**Does bipolar disorder use the same mechanisms/pathways in the brain that "love" does?**

-If so, **can bipolar disorder be considered a malfunction of the "love circuit" in the human brain?**

UPDATE: I found this article on neurochemistry of loVe on Wikipedia

> Chemically, the serotonin effects of being infatuated **have a similar chemical appearance to obsessive-compulsive disorder**; which could explain why people experiencing infatuation cannot think of anyone else.\[12\] For this reason some, such as anthropologist Helen Fisher, assert that taking SSRIs and other antidepressants impede one's ability to fall in love.

From the article on love:

> Studies in neuroscience have involved chemicals that are present in the brain and might be involved when people experience love. These chemicals include: nerve **growth factor**,\[8\] testosterone, estrogen, **dopamine**, norepinephrine, **serotonin**, oxytocin, and vasopressin.\[9

From the Wikipedia article on bipolar disorder causes

> A review seeking to identify the more consistent findings suggested several genes related to **serotonin** (SLC6A4 and TPH2), **dopamine** (DRD4 and SLC6A3), glutamate (DAOA and DTNBP1), and **cell growth and/or maintenance pathways** (NRG1, DISC1 and BDNF), although noting a high risk of false positives in the published literature.

# Answer
## A Love Circuit?

The idea that there is a "love circuit" has little evidence (for or against it). But in general studies that look at "love" (however defined) reveal broad activation across multiple intrinsic neural networks that are involved in many different cognitive processes (in favor of a constructivist view of emotions).

Consider the image from a meta-analysis (Cacioppo et al., 2012) of functional imaging studies on sexual desire and love:

**Both sexual desire and love are associated with greater activation of the insula, hypothalamus, ventral striatum, VTA, amygdala, thalamus, hippocampus, anterior cingulate, and other limbic/cortical areas.** These regions are involved in interoception, memory, conceptualization, core affect, somatosensory integration, motivation, salience detection, and more.

Note, however, that these areas are not specific to love; instead, they are involved in emotional experience more broadly (fear, disgust, anger, happiness, etc.; Touroutoglou, Lindquist, Dickerson, & Barrett, 2015). It's still possible that the above pattern of activation is unique to love; however, this has not been tested (to my knowledge)--nor does it seem plausible in light of other evidence (i.e., Touroutoglou et al., 2015).

Because these brain areas are involved in many cognitive processes, we might imagine that dysfunction in at least some of them is associated with bipolar disorder.

## Bipolar Disorder

Consider the image below from a meta-analysis (Chen, Suckling, Lennox, Ooi, & Bullmore, 2011) of functional imaging in bipolar patients:

Compared to healthy controls, bipolar disorder seems to be associated with decreased inferior frontal gyrus activation in response to cognitive or emotional tasks and increased limbic activity (amygdala, hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus, basal ganglia) in response to emotional tasks.

## Conclusion

As you can see, there is some overlap with the areas activated for love/sexual desire and bipolar disorder (e.g., limbic structures).

However, this is not compelling evidence that BD somehow involves dysfunction in a "love circuit," as the limbic system is involved in all emotions, not just love. If anything, this suggests that BD is associated with dysfunction in emotion regulation/processing/reactivity (and executive function more broadly; Robinson et al., 2006).
> 7 votes

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Tags: abnormal-psychology, psychiatry, bipolar-disorder, love
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# Question
Title: What is the correlation between self-monitoring and the Big 5 factors of personality?
Self-monitoring as a trait refers to a tendency "to closely monitor an audience in order to ensure appropriate or desired public appearances". It is commonly measured using the Revised Self-Monitoring Scale (e.g., Snyder and Gangestad, 1986)

### Questions

* What is the correlation between self-monitoring and the Big 5 factors of personality?
* To what extent is there overlap?
* Which Big 5 factor is most related to self-monitoring?

### References

Snyder, M., & Gangestad, S. (1986). On the nature of self-monitoring: matters of assessment, matters of validity. Journal of personality and social psychology, 51(1), 125.

# Answer
I did a quick search and found the following:

**Barrick et al (2005)** (see Table 1). In a sample with a little over a hundred MBA students they obtained the following correlations with self-monitoring:

* Conscientiousness r = -.24
* Extraversion r = .31
* Agreeableness r = -.08
* Emotional Stability r = -.10
* Openness r = .23

**Kring, Smith, and Neale (1994)** (see Table 3): Correlations with self-monitoring were (I think in a sample of 300+ undergraduates):

* Surgency (somewhat similar to extraversion): .51
* Agreeableness: r = .06
* Conscientiousness: r = -.15
* Emotional Stability: r = .37

This would suggest that self-monitoring has only a weak relationship with the Big 5.

The positive relationship with extraversion makes sense given that self-monitoring is related to an aptitude and an interest in adaptive social interactions.

### References

* Barrick, M. R., Parks, L., & Mount, M. K. (2005). Self‐monitoring as a moderator of the relationships between personality traits and performance. Personnel Psychology, 58(3), 745-767.
* Kring, A. M., Smith, D. A., & Neale, J. M. (1994). Individual differences in dispositional expressiveness: development and validation of the Emotional Expressivity Scale. Journal of personality and social psychology, 66(5), 934.
> 7 votes

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Tags: social-psychology, personality
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# Question
Title: In the theory of planned behaviour, what is the general term that captures attitudes, norms and perceived behavioural control?
The theory of planned behaviour is a model of behaviour that in simple terms assumes that attitudes, norms, and perceived behavioural control influence intention, and intention and actual control influence behavior.

I'm writing a paper that includes a measures of personality and a measure of the theory of planned behaviour. I sometimes need to refer to the variables attitudes, norms, and perceived behavioural control as a set. In particular, I often need to distinguish these variables from the personality variables. However, it typically seems a bit verbose to have to say "attitudes, norms, and perceived behavioural control" all the time.

**Question:**

* What is a general word or short phrase to capture attitudes, norms, and perceived behavioural control?
* **Update:** Even if it is better to generally refer to the three variables individually, what term describes this set of variables or what makes them distinct from other kinds of psychological variables like personality, intention, etc.?

# Answer
**McFarland and Ryan (2006)** have an article applying the theory of planned behaviour to job applicant faking behaviour.

They use phrases:

* "components of beliefs that influence intention"
* "attitudes, subjective norms, and PBC"; i.e., they abbreviate perceived behavioural control (PBC) to make the phrase shorter
* "the TPB predicts the intention to fake"; i.e., they use the "theory of planned behaviour" as a proxy for "attitudes, subjective norms, and PBC". Technically, the TPB is a theory that describes relationships between a set of variables. So this may work, but it is not using TPB as a proxy for attitudes, subjective norms, and PBC.
* "beliefs": as in "relationship between beliefs and the intention to fake". This is a slightly simplification of the TPB. Attitudes are not just beliefs, but when presented in context, this seems clear.
* "antecedents of intention": as in "relationship between antecedents of intentions and intention to fake". Presumably this works in contexts where the only predictors of intentions are attitudes, subjective norms, and PBC, but doesn't work if you have other types of antecedents.

**Courneya et al (1999)** have an article on personality, theory of planned behaviour and exercise behaviour. They refer to the TPB variables as:

* "social-cognitive constructs"

### References

* Courneya, K. S., Bobick, T. M., & Schinke, R. J. (1999). Does the theory of planned behavior mediate the relation between personality and exercise behavior?. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 21(4), 317-324.
> 3 votes

# Answer
I understand the sentiment, but keep it verbose―it's not a good idea to literally mince words when it comes to key variables without a more concrete reason than aesthetics.

Making up a novel term to group the variables just for this paper will put distance between your paper and the rest of the literature, make it harder to search (for/in) digitally, and effectively makes it more difficult to read. It makes the paper *shorter*, but not *conciser*.
> 2 votes

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Tags: social-psychology
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# Question
Title: Why do con artists like Frank Abagnale Jr. not feel guilt?
I just finished watching a video of Frank Abagnale Jr discuss his life history. Who knows if its true, but it is an amazing story. For those who don't know, Frank Abagnale is one of the most infamous con artists in history according to Wikipedia.

What really strikes me about his story is the following: he seems to have an extraordinary memory and storytelling ability. Couple this with good looks, height, and a face that looks older than he is and you can see how he would have the tools to be con artist. But those are also skills that can be used for many many many other disciplines and could have been put to good uses. He could have been a salesman or any number of things.

Some criminals seem really messed up psychologically. He doesn't come across as that. He seems to have an intact psyche that isn't riddled with some abused past. But he is missing some basic emotions like guilt. For instance, he decided to work in a hospital without even considering the safety of patients around him and, according to Wikipedia nearly killed an infant. Another instance is that he took control of a plane when he didn't know how to fly one, obviously putting all the passengers and his own life at risk. That seems insane! Only until he actually gets in a situation where lives are at stake did he really realize what could happen. Thus, he also seems to have no imagination for the consequences of his actions. He would tell strings of lies basically continuously and never think twice about it, never considering the consequences for businesses of the money they lost.

What part of the brain fails such that a person would act that way? What goes wrong?

# Answer
> 5 votes
> Cognitive science generally does not try to explain individual behavior, but rather the behavior of all people. We can meaningfully speak about what may cause a deficient ability to feel guilt and remorse, or other features that *characterize* an individual, but we cannot speak directly about the individual's behavior outside an applied or clinical context. Therefore, and **I cannot stress this enough: please do not read this answer and then start looking for signs of APD in individuals.**

# Antisocial Personality Disorder

Deficient ability to feel guilt and remorse is a cardinal trait of **antisocial personality disorder**, or APD (American Psychiatric Association, 2000), which may offer a tentative framework. APD is a complex personality disorder with many different facets and characteristics that, at least at face value, seems to describe a behavioral pattern matching the popular image of a con man, such as Frank Abagnale Jr. surely represents in the popular mind.

## Diagnosing APD

Under the DSM-IV-TR definition, satisfying the APD diagnostic criteria requires an individual to A) be over 18 years old, B) exhibit evidence of conduct disorder before age 15, C) not exhibit antisocial behavior exclusively during manic or schizophrenic episodes, and D) exhibit **at least three of the following seven symptoms** suggesting a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others occurring since 15 years old:

1. Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by **repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest**.
2. Deceitfulness, as indicated by **repeated lying, use of aliases or conning others for personal profit or pleasure**.
3. **Impulsivity or failure to plan ahead**.
4. Irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by **repeated physical fights or assaults**.
5. **Reckless disregard for the safety of self and/or others**.
6. Consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by **repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations**.
7. Lack of remorse, as indicated by **being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated or stolen from another**.

It's worth noting that the DSM-IV-TR and DSM-V definitions of APD differ somewhat. Because the DSM-V is still so recent, most empirical research at time of writing has used the DSM-IV-TR definition. How well the new definitions correspond with the old ones is ultimately an empirical question, so I will focus on the DSM-IV-TR literature here to avoid speculating.

## Cognitive neuroscience of APD

A number of neurocognitive deficits have been identified in patients with DSM-IV-TR antisocial personality disorder. As with most mental disorders and cognitive functions, it's difficult to pin down any one region or set of regions and say "here is where X is." However, Blair and Frith (2000) reviewed three common trends, **reporting support for the latter two**:

> ... \[1\] an impairment in executive functioning implicating **prefrontal cortex**, \[2\] an impairment in executive emotion's processing implicating **orbito-frontal cortex**, and \[3\] an impairment in emotion processing implicating the **amygdala** ...

### Amygdala

CG illustration of the amygdala's location

One of the main regions commonly associated with APD and antisocial behavior, and in particular with its remorselessness criterion, are **the amygdala** (Blair and Frith, 2000). However, while the amygdala's heavy involvement in emotional processing is well established (Kandel, 2013), and a veritable sea of studies support an emotional processing deficits and abnormalities in the amygdala for general antisocial behavior (e.g., Coccaro et al., 2006; Narayan et al., 2007; Veit et al., 2002) over different antisocial disorders, I couldn't find any direct investigations of amygdaloid activity in APD patients.

### Orbitofrontal Cortex

Model and sagittal MRI of the orbitofrontal cortex

The other region commonly implicated in association with APD and antisocial behavior is **the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC)** (Blair and Frith, 2000). For example, Völlm et al. (2004) reported fMRI evidence for a go-no-go task suggesting that APD patients exhibited reduced OFC activity for response inhibition as compared with controls. Dinn and Harris (2000) reported that "APD subjects showed greater neuropsychological deficits on measures sensitive to orbitofrontal dysfunction in comparison to control participants." **The OFC seems to be associated with increased impulsivity and risk-taking via deficient response inhibition**.

# Did Frank Abagnale Jr. have APD?

At this point, one may be tempted to answer, "Clearly, he did!" and start looking for APD in oneself, or others. This would be a mistake. Identifying APD in a person requires a considerable amount of well-structured information about that person. Nothing could illustrate that we lack such information here better than Abagnale's own words:

> In 2002, Abagnale himself addressed the issue of his story's truthfulness with a statement posted on his company's website which said in part: "**I was interviewed by the co-writer only about four times. I believe he did a great job of telling the story, but he also over-dramatized and exaggerated some of the story.** That was his style and what the editor wanted. He always reminded me that he was just telling a story and not writing my biography."

With respect to Abagnale himself, therefore, cognitive science does not have anything to say about his story, because we don't have any way to independently verify most of it. We can probably surmise that some of it is accurate, some of it is not, but we can't empirically say which is which. **People don't necessarily need to be pathological in order to be jerks.**

# References

* American Psychiatric Association (2000). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th ed., Text Revision). Washington, DC: Author.
* Blair, J., & Frith, U. (2000). Neurocognitive explanations of the antisocial personality disorders. Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health.
* Coccaro, E. F., McCloskey, M. S., Fitzgerald, D. A., & Phan, K. L. (2007). Amygdala and orbitofrontal reactivity to social threat in individuals with impulsive aggression. Biological psychiatry, 62(2), 168-178.
* Dinn, W. M., & Harris, C. L. (2000). Neurocognitive function in antisocial personality disorder. Psychiatry research, 97(2), 173-190.
* Kandel, E. R., Schwartz, J. H., & Jessell, T. M., Siegelbaum, S. A., Hudspeth, A. J. (Eds.). (2013). Principles of neural science (Vol. 5). New York: McGraw-Hill.
* Narayan, V. M., Narr, K. L., Kumari, V., Woods, R. P., Thompson, P. M., Toga, A. W., & Sharma, T. (2007). Regional cortical thinning in subjects with violent antisocial personality disorder or schizophrenia.
* Veit, R., Flor, H., Erb, M., Hermann, C., Lotze, M., Grodd, W., & Birbaumer, N. (2002). Brain circuits involved in emotional learning in antisocial behavior and social phobia in humans. Neuroscience letters, 328(3), 233-236.
* Völlm, B., Richardson, P., Stirling, J., Elliott, R., Dolan, M., Chaudhry, I., ... & Deakin, B. (2004). Neurobiological substrates of antisocial and borderline personality disorder: preliminary results of a functional fMRI study. Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health, 14(1), 39-54.

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Tags: emotion, cognitive-neuroscience, abnormal-psychology, empathy
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# Question
Title: Do different methods of testing memory for character sequences result in different brain activation?
Assume a certain sequence of N characters, displayed on a screen one by one, that should be memorized. The speed of the display is such that it doesn't produce much extra stress. You may assume that the test person might vary display speed within a reasonable range.

There are several ways to test memory:

1. A multiple choice format that presents several control sequences.
2. A control sequence where you should point out differences from a given sequence.
3. A control sequence, displayed character by character, and the opportunity to push a button as soon as you spot a difference.
4. Write down what you've memorized.

Do these different ways of testing activate different parts of the brain? If so, where in the brain do these differences occur?

# Answer
> 3 votes
**Yes, they do, but not all of these are different methods for testing memory.**

Because of the way you've set up the stimulus presentation here, these are effectively all serial verbal working memory tests where the neurocognitive basis may differ or not depending on a number of unstated factors such as stimulus modality or type (e.g., Polyn et al., 2005), that I suspect you are uninterested in. Not all of these tasks would traditionally be considered memory tasks, either--everything involves memory to some extent, and in some cases it is more your choice of a complex stimulus, rather than the test as such, that adds the memory dimension.

I'm going to focus this answer on the test format (i.e., the retrieval aspect) where possible, and clarify where not.

## 1. Serial recognition

A multiple choice format that presents several control sequences along with the stimulus sequence corresponds to a serial matching recognition memory test. Habeck et al. (2005) reported fMRI evidence for increased activity in the cerebellum, thalamus and part of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) regions, plus decreased activity in a broad set of other regions, on a relevant delayed match-to-sample task.

> Areas of increasing activation across set size were found in the bilateral cerebellum, left lateral PFC (BA 9,46,47), and thalamus. Areas decreasing in activation were more widely distributed and located in parietal, frontal, temporal, and limbic lobes as well as basal ganglia (see detailed listing in Table 3).

## 2. Parallel recognition

A control sequence where you should point out differences from the stimulus sequence, assuming I am reading that correctly, corresponds to what I'm going to call a parallel recognition memory test, except I don't believe there have been any studies along these lines for serial memory. Usually, this is studied in the context of visual rather than verbal recognition memory, but even here, the neurocognitive evidence is sparse (probably because visual memory gets very little attention compared to verbal memory). Mazumder et al. (2015) reported the following from a "spot-the-difference" task in a recent chapter, which was primarily about novel EEG feature extraction methods:

> The results also suggests that the brain activation is dominant at the frontal, parietal and temporal region.

## 3. Go/no-go

A control sequence, displayed character by character, and the opportunity to push a button as soon as you spot a difference, corresponds to a complex go/no-go task. This is traditionally an attentional task, which of course involves memory, but does not in itself differentiate between retrieval processes. For posterity's sake, a large meta-analysis of go/no-go fMRI studies reported that neural activity for this task is largely task-dependent, but also finding support for an association with a small set of regions (Simmonds, Pekar and Mostofsky, 2008).

> The simple and complex tasks demonstrated distinct patterns of concurrence, with right dorsolateral prefrontal and inferior parietal circuits recruited under conditions of increased working memory demand.

## 4. Free recall

Just writing down what you've memorized corresponds to a free recall test (cf. cued recall). Free recall of serial items has often been studied within the context of the primacy and recency effects, referring to the dual tendencies for items at the beginning and end of a sequence to have markedly higher retention and/or faster response times than items in the middle of that sequence. Depending on the item's serial position, different brain regions may show increased activity (Zhang et al., 2003).

> Recalling the middle item was associated with more extensive activation in the left parietal and visual cortex, basal ganglia, and dorsal cerebellum. Recalling items from different serial positions also resulted in different activation time courses in the bilateral primary auditory cortex, left prefrontal cortex and left premotor cortex.

## References

* Habeck, C., Rakitin, B. C., Moeller, J., Scarmeas, N., Zarahn, E., Brown, T., & Stern, Y. (2005). An event-related fMRI study of the neural networks underlying the encoding, maintenance, and retrieval phase in a delayed-match-to-sample task. Cognitive Brain Research, 23(2), 207-220.
* Mazumder, A., Ghosh, P., Khasnobish, A., Bhattacharyya, S., & Tibarewala, D. N. (2015). Selection of Relevant Features from Cognitive EEG Signals Using ReliefF and MRMR Algorithm. In Advancements of Medical Electronics (pp. 125-136). Springer India.
* Polyn, S. M., Natu, V. S., Cohen, J. D., & Norman, K. A. (2005). Category-specific cortical activity precedes retrieval during memory search. Science, 310(5756), 1963-1966.
* Simmonds, D. J., Pekar, J. J., & Mostofsky, S. H. (2008). Meta-analysis of Go/No-go tasks demonstrating that fMRI activation associated with response inhibition is task-dependent. Neuropsychologia, 46(1), 224-232.
* Zhang, D. R., Li, Z. H., Chen, X. C., Wang, Z. X., Zhang, X. C., Meng, X. M., et al. (2003). Functional comparison of primacy, middle and recency retrieval in human auditory short-term memory: An event-related fMRI study. Cognitive Brain Research, 16, 91–98. 10.1016/S0926-6410(02)00223-9

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Tags: memory, measurement, cognitive-neuroscience, test, working-memory
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# Question
Title: How respected is Viktor Frankl's logotherapy among modern psychologists?
Is Viktor Frankl's logotherapy still a live option in modern psychology, or is it considered outdated? I've heard it referred to as the "third Viennese school of psychotherapy", but my wife's introductory psychology textbook (Psychology, 10th ed., David Myers) does not mention Frankl at all.

Is this omission "incidental," or does it accurately reflect a mainstream view that Frankl's work is no longer relevant?

# Answer
I can't say whether Viktor Frankl is respected by modern psychologists on average, or how respected he is. Anecdotally, I have heard of both Frankl and logotherapy, but not enough to know much more than that they exist. The real question, though, is whether there is any empirical support for logotherapy, and overall, **the evidence (for or against logotherapy) I could find is very limited**.

## Empirical support for logotherapy

At the very least, there has been a limited amount of recent research. Psychometrically, a 2004 review of logotherapeutic measures reported that the Purpose-in-Life test (PIL), the Life Purpose Questionnaire (LPQ), the Seeking of Noetic Goals test (SONG), and the Meaning in Suffering Test (MIST) were internally consistent (Schulenberg, 2004).

Logotherapy also appears to have some empirical support as a treatment for a few specific issues, such as reducing self-reported suffering in adolescents with terminal cancer (Kang et al., 2009), reducing self-reported sense of meaninglessness in people with paralysis (Julom and de Guzmán, 2013), and assisting with the treatment of PTSD (Southwick, Gilmartin, Mcdonough and Morrissey, 2006).

## References

* Julom, A. M., & de Guzmán, R. (2013). The effectiveness of logotherapy program in alleviating the sense of meaninglessness of paralyzed in-patients. International Journal of Psychology and Psychological Therapy, 13(3), 357-371.
* Kang, K. A., Im, J. I., Kim, H. S., Kim, S. J., Song, M. K., & Sim, S. (2009). The effect of logotherapy on the suffering, finding meaning, and spiritual well-being of adolescents with terminal cancer. Journal of Korean Academy of Child Health Nursing, 15(2), 136-144.
* Schulenberg, S. E. (2004). A Psychometric Investigation of Logotherapy Measures and the Outcome Questionnaire (OQ-45.2). North American Journal of Psychology.
* Southwick, S. M., Gilmartin, R., Mcdonough, P., & Morrissey, P. (2006). Logotherapy as an adjunctive treatment for chronic combat-related PTSD: A meaning-based intervention. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 60(2), 161.
> 4 votes

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Tags: abnormal-psychology, psychiatry, positive-psychology
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# Question
Title: Do distractors create false learning in multiple choice questions?
I use quizzes in teaching, but have started to worry that they do more harm than good.

Here's why: We have all learned from "the testing effect" that the act of taking a test is part of the practice that leads to learning.

Say I give my students a multiple choice quiz, immediately after a lecture, to practice. And let's say question looks like this:

"Who wrote The Blank Slate?

\[\] Steven Pinker

\[\] Jessie Pinkman

\[\] Mr Pink"

A student that did not pay much attention at class, may vaguely recognise the second name, so he checks the middle box and moves on.

**Has the student now reinforced the incorrect option, and thus created a net negative learning?**

And then, as a part two of the same question:

Does it make a difference if the test is done on the same day as the lecture, when the new knowledge is still fluent, or after sleep, when the new knowledge is consolidated (and weak memories culled)?

Part three: Does it make a difference if the quiz is on paper, and thus gives no direct feedback, or online, and can indicate the correct answer?

I have searched Google Scholar extensively, but not found anything on this.

# Answer
To answer your initial statement: no, I don't think they do more harm than good. The testing effect has been shown *overall* to improve scores compared to traditional studying (though only for long term memory, see (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006) for an interesting discussion), implying that it is doing more good than harm. This study assumes an overall positive effect without feedback to learners on whether they were right or wrong, and where students who incorrectly retrieved do not "learn" or maintain memory (Kornell, Bjork, & Garcia, 2011). Providing feedback to learners on correct and incorrect responses, however, will increase retention even for students who did not correctly retrieve, and may be one of the best ways for these students to learn (Kornell, Hays, & Bjork, 2009).

**Part 1:** So far as negative learning from selecting an answer, this directly relates to your third question (as mentioned above). Students who got answers correct (successful retrieval) are hypothesized to better maintain memory, while students who didn't will not better maintain (Kornell et al., 2011). Though this seems obvious, remember that retrieval rates naturally decrease over time (the goal is to maintain a high retrieval rate).

**Part 2:** In a word, yes. Given this, they each measure different things (and should be used for different purposes). Personally, I use a "post-lecture" quiz as an "exit-ticket" (sorry, background with high school freshman) to quickly check where misconceptions lie. These quizzes are reviewed prior to students leaving the class in order to *identify and address misconceptions* (formative assessment). I've found that waiting can allow more connections to be made (and thus, higher level responses), but if the material is not encoded correctly *false* connections can be made (reinforcing incorrect information).

**Part 3:** Not reviewing the quiz is hypothesized to create a "bifurcation" where those who got answers right better remember, and those who did not get the answers right steadily decrease (again, a natural pattern in retrieval over time). The "testing effect" exists because *overall* students are theorized to do better, but again, there will be a split in student growth between those who remembered and those who didn't (Kornell et al., 2011). Reviewing the quiz immediately (if paper, go over the answers right after the quiz!) is hypothesized to help *all* students, regardless of whether they initially got the correct answer or not, and thus would be the recommended method to improve students' knowledge retention (Kornell et al., 2009).

To summarize: review after taking quizzes acts much like a "studying" effect (where those who got right *and* wrong answers can learn), while quizzes without review are hypothesized to split learning (those who correctly recall retain, and those who fail to correctly recall don't retain). *Both* groups are able to be helped through quizzing and reviewing answers.

**References**

Kornell, N., Bjork, R. A., & Garcia, M. A. (2011). Why tests appear to prevent forgetting: A distribution-based bifurcation model. Journal of Memory and Language, 65(2), 85–97. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2011.04.002

Kornell, N., Hays, M. J., & Bjork, R. A. (2009). Unsuccessful retrieval attempts enhance subsequent learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35(4), 989–998. doi:10.1037/a0015729

Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01693.x
> 6 votes

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Tags: memory
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# Question
Title: Why do people look in the face or eyes while communicating?
While communicating, people tend to direct their gazes to the face (particularly eyes) of people. Why don't rather we look at their neck or just their chest or even their hair while communicating with people? What are we looking for?

A sign, a hint about that person's thoughts. Obviously that is the case ,but on the other hand, I think there is something more about that. Take those movie scenes in which people's head cut off their shoulder and they are still alive. I think the whole body doesn't seem human to me, whereas the head seems definitely so. Is it just a stable reference point that we've picked after centuries, or is it a native property specialized for a certain purpose of human kind?

# Answer
> 7 votes
Eye contact is one of the principal cues humans use to evaluate where other people direct their attention. A special issue on the use of eye tracking in the Infancy journal and other studies reported that infants' eyes are useful measures of attention over a range of task domains including object perception (Johnson, Slemmer, & Amso, 2004), faces (Hunnis & Geuze, 2004), and categorization (McMurray & Aslin, 2004).

This relationship between eyes and attention begins developing as early as within the first couple of neonatal weeks (Lohaus, Keller and Voelker, 2001). For the same reason, eye- and gaze tracking are central measures in many areas of the cognitive sciences, including developmental (neuro)psychology, perception and working memory.

**Because gaze is such a good general indicator of attention, mutual eye contact between myself and someone indicates that we are both attending to one another**, if not always, then at least often enough to depend on.

# References

* Lohaus, A., Keller, H., & Voelker, S. (2001). Relationships between eye contact, maternal sensitivity, and infant crying. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 25(6), 542-548.
* Hunnis , S. and Geuze , R. H. 2004. Developmental changes in visual scanning of dynamic faces and abstract stimuli in infants: A longitudinal study. Infancy, 6(2): 231–255.
* Johnson, S. P., Slemmer, J. A., & Amso, D. (2004). Where Infants Look Determines How They See: Eye Movements and Object Perception Performance in 3‐Month‐Olds. Infancy, 6(2), 185-201.
* McMurray , B. and Aslin , R. N. 2004. Anticipatory eye movements reveal infants' auditory and visual categories. Infancy, 6(2): 203–229.

# Answer
> 5 votes
I don't have a complete answer, but I'll add on to Christian's comment.

I'm not really familiar with an evolutionary account of facial expressions, but folks like Adam K. Anderson have implied that the original use of facial features for sensory sampling have been co-opted for social use (e.g., to indicate attention, which Christian pointed out, or affect, etc.; this is a common argument for the evolution of basic emotions like disgust and fear, e.g., Fridlund, 2004).

In general, I think Christian is spot on about why we make eye contact during conversations. However, I will note that we don't *just* look at the face while communicating (e.g., Barrett, Mesquita & Gendron, 2011). After all, the face is situated in a **context** and is attached to a **body**. That is, social and emotional cues are not interpreted based on the face alone. For example, Hanna and Brennan (2007) point out:

> An interlocutor’s eye gaze is a signal with its own dynamic characteristics that must be integrated with speech or action in order to be useful.

Also, social rules about eye contact during conversation may be dependent on the culture (e.g, Senju et al., 2013).

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Tags: developmental-psychology, attention, communication, eye-movement
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# Question
Title: How does the brain break down visual information for processing? What "channels" is visual input broken into?
Some time ago I remember reading about how the human brain breaks down visual information into a number of individual "channels".

For example, one channel might focus on edges and lines, another might focus on being a contrast map, while another provide a color information overlay. Each "channel" being a much more simplified part of the entire visual input.

From what I understood, modern research into the visual cortex has provided some insight into what the channels might be and how they're broken down. *If* my understanding of current research is correct I was hoping to find some more detailed information explaining how the visual information is broken down and processed (articles at the technical level of Scientific American are fine, so long as they detail the types of "channels" present).

My desired take-away from this is to brainstorm ideas for how I might better pre-process an image into feature data for a standard neural network learning algorithm, based on the human experience.

# Answer
> 8 votes
The human visual processing system receives input from the eyes, and then passes it through a number of areas of the brain that break it down, process it in various different ways, recombine it, and break it down again several times. I'm assuming this question is only about the visual cortex, general theories about how information might be broken down for processing there, and only concerning parallel-processing (channels), as opposed to sequential specialization (layers), otherwise the answer should fill up a textbook.

**Main pathways through visual cortex:**

The traditional understanding of the visual cortex divides it into 2 main pathways:

> Each V1 transmits information to two primary pathways, called the ventral stream and the dorsal stream.
>
> * The ventral stream begins with V1, goes through visual area V2, then through visual area V4, and to the inferior temporal cortex (IP cortex). The ventral stream, sometimes called the "What Pathway", is associated with form recognition and object representation. It is also associated with storage of long-term memory.
> * The dorsal stream begins with V1, goes through Visual area V2, then to the dorsomedial area (DM/ V6) and Visual area MT (middle temporal/ V5) and to the posterior parietal cortex. The dorsal stream, sometimes called the "Where Pathway" or "How Pathway", is associated with motion, representation of object locations, and control of the eyes and arms, especially when visual information is used to guide saccades or reaching.

The "what" and "where" pathways are also sometimes referred to as the "perception" and "action" pathways, respectively.

Another common theory about the visual cortex identifies at least 3 modules: Motion, colour, and form. Evidence for these proposed modules comes largely from lesion studies and related disorders of the visual system. In general, an impairment in one module doesn't seem to affect the others, suggesting that these specializations are processed independently and in parallel. However, it is not clear if they form distinct pathways through the visual cortex.

There is also evidence for a long-term memory pathway (visual-perirhinal-hippocampal stream) that feeds memory information from and to the visual cortex. Many other pathways have been postulated; this field of research is very active, consensus on further detail remains elusive for now.

**Complications to such models:**

Such "pathway" models of the visual cortex are limited by a number of factors:

Furthermore, as mentioned, the visual cortex is only part of the visual system. Significant processing happens earlier - you mentioned about edge detection, some of that appears to already be happening by the time signals reach the visual cortex. And more processing happens later as well, in the parietal and temporal cortices for example, such as facial recognition.

**Implications for artificial neural networks:**

The visual cortex may not be ideal inspiration for ANNs, especially since it only handles a not-very-early part of the process, such that the signals it receives have already undergone significant modification from the raw stimuli. Additionally, its pathway structure is fairly complex, and not fully understood. There have nonetheless been attempts to simulate parts of the visual cortex and compare to non-biologically inspired networks.

The LGN \- an area of the brain involved earlier in the process - may be more amenable to some inspiration and simulation, as it is a simpler structure with clearer functions and pathways. It handles some of the functions you described at a more basic level, including some edge detection, colour processing, contrast, and various other aspects of perception such as depth, brightness, and movement, albeit with many of the same caveats as mentioned for the visual cortex.

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Tags: vision, neural-network
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