# Question
Title: If someone becomes a split-brain patient, which side will "maintain" the continuity in their consciousness?
The brain injury might apparently produce two "independent" consciousnesses, and I'm wondering where the original person's "consciousness" would "transfer".

We had a debate on this over at Reddit some time ago, but it didn't really get resolved. What's **more** important is that Christof Koch (one of the top researchers in the field) explicitly said that splitting the corpus calloseum would produce two conscious minds in one skull.

> About two hundred million fibers that keep the two cortical hemispheres in constant communication. These are cut in split-brain patients, creating two conscious minds in one skull.

# Answer
> 21 votes
If by continuity you mean, "a feeling that I am who I was before the operation, (perhaps with some changes)", then it seems that each hemisphere would separately maintain continuity, in the same way patients after massive strokes and other sudden brain injuries don't usually feel "they are a different person".

Research by Turk et al. (2003) suggests it's just the left hemisphere, because only the left hemisphere has the 'interpreter' module.

However, other research by Turk et al. (2002) find that both hemispheres of a split brain patient recognize his own face, similar to Sperry et al. (1979). I think these face recognition tests tell us less about the 'feeling of self' than tests of access to autobiographical memories before the operation, and their emotional content, but I couldn't find any such studies.

A good review of the field instead was done by Uddin in 2011.

> Sperry, R. W., Zaidel, E., & Zaidel, D. (1979). Self recognition and social awareness in the deconnected minor hemisphere. Neuropsychologia, 17(2), 153–166. doi:10.1016/0028-3932(79)90006-X
>
> Turk, D. J., Heatherton, T. F., Kelley, W. M., Funnell, M. G., Gazzaniga, M. S., & Macrae, C. N. (2002). Mike or me? Self-recognition in a split-brain patient. Nature Neuroscience, 5(9), 841–842. doi:10.1038/nn907
>
> Turk, D. J., Heatherton, T. F., Macrae, C. N., Kelley, W. M., & Gazzaniga, M. S. (2003). Out of Contact, Out of Mind. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1001(1), 65–78. doi:10.1196/annals.1279.005
>
> Uddin, L. Q. (2011). Brain connectivity and the self: The case of cerebral disconnection. Consciousness and Cognition, 20(1), 94–98. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2010.09.009

# Answer
> 9 votes
The fact that these people don't exhibit a lot of change in behavior, and report no real difference after the operation (other than in contrived tests) suggests that our idea of a single conscious "self" is simply wrong.

This sort of question is probably never going to be answered to anyone's satisfaction, any more than you could answer questions about what happens if your brain is duplicated on a computer, or your body is destroyed and then recreated by a Star Trek transporter. Is your consciousness continuous after Scotty beams you up, or is it a completely new mind with copies of your memories, and your old self died back on the surface of the planet?

I don't think in any of these cases there is really a coherent question, but it only seems like it is. Our brain has a built in concept of "self" that is core to our thought process, necessarily so. A manmade autonomous vehicle would have the same -- it has to model it's environment, and must include itself in that model, but with appropriate differences, based on the fact that it controls itself in ways it doesn't control other things.

I think what is happening with this sort of question is that it is exploiting our tendency to erroneously assign a sort of tangibility to the idea of self, that extends beyond the actual context or perspective where it makes sense.

# Answer
> 8 votes
Consciousness research in Neuroscience is relatively new, so there isn't yet any consensus on how consciousness works precisely (or an agreed upon definition).

My understanding is that the current majority view is that consciousness is distributed throughout the brain (while I can't track down a reference), so transecting the Corpus Callosum won't "transfer" consciousness anywhere, it will remain everywhere, though presumably a little less coherent after the split. Keep in mind that there are many other pathways between the hemispheres besides the Corpus Callosum - such as thalamocortical circuits, those via the midbrain and brainstem and of course external sensorimotor feedback.

I agree with @rob - in that the question can't be answered satisfactorily now, though I think it can be once interpreted in the context of a future concrete definition of "consciousness" and an understand of its mechanisms.

# Answer
> 6 votes
The question:

> I'm wondering where the original person's "consciousness" would "transfer"

Presupposes a **Cartesian Ego**; or the idea that consciousness is something separate, ethereal, and indivisible. I recommend reading some Daniel Dennett and Derek Parfit to cure yourself of this common assumption; a good philosophical starting point is Parfit's "Reasons and Persons". Alternatively, if you want a more pop-philosophy/science treatment of the issue, consider Chapters 15 and 21 of Hofstadter's "I am a Strange Loop". In particular, pay close attention the the teletransporter intuition-pump.

Most neuroscientists (Christof Koch included) would find the cartesian ego assumption to be very naive. Thus, this whole discussion would be a pseudo-question for them. There is no indivisible units of "consciousness" to be transferred. To many non-dualists, consciousness is a folk psychology concept, that when pushed to the limit (such as the teletransporter examples, or perfect split-brain patients) becomes ridiculous. Much like conservation-of-mass (or Galilean transformation) is a good principle of folk physics (and classical mechanics), that becomes ridiculous when you move to the relativistic setting where you need to use mass-energy (or Lorentz transformation). There is no reason to believe your everyday intuition about concepts (be they physics or psychology) should hold in very strange settings that you have never come close to experiencing.

# Answer
> 0 votes
If only a small part of the corpus callosum is cut then the patient will still have only one main consciousness, but if too much of the corpus callosum is removed then consciousness will split in two.

Split brain surgery performed in early childhood may initially split the brain into two separate consciousnesses, but as the other connections between the hemispheres rewire there will eventually come a point where the brain as a whole integrates more information than each hemisphere does separately, and the two consciousnesses will recombine into one.

People born with agenesis of the corpus callosum rarely show any sign of having 'split consciousness'.

> Ettlinger, G., Blakemore, C. B., Milner, A. D., & Wilson, J. (1972). Agenesis of the corpus callosum: A behavioural investigation. Brain: A Journal of Neurology, 95(2), 327-346. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/brain/95.2.327
>
> Sauerwein HC, Lassonde M. (1997) Neuropsychological alterations after split-brain surgery. J Neurosurg Sci. 41(1):59-66.

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Tags: neuroscience, consciousness, brain-injury
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# Question
Title: What is the name of this common anti-pattern
When you work on a project, for instance a program in the computer science field, many people pause or "bypass" work on it to work on a side project, often smaller and often a "helper" project, whether being a website, forums, marketing or else.

This is a common-anti pattern that leads to an infinite cycle of getting increasingly far from the main and most important top priority product.

Now my question is what was the name of this problem? Surely there must be a scientific name and description for that.

# Answer
You could be talking about a number of issues. You could be talking about

* Freudian defense mechanism **repression**
* Distraction
* Procrastination or
* Deferring

Maybe you are talking about something else entirely.

The thing is not all observations necessarily need a "scientific" name for them in psychology or neuroscience and whatever the situation is, it would need a lot of background information to determine exactly what it is and how it manifests itself.

As it stands right now, the question could be deemed open to opinion, especially when Freudian and Neo-Freudian psychology is considered by some here to be pseudoscientific.
> 1 votes

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Tags: terminology, problem-solving
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# Question
Title: Csikszentmihalyi on drugs and their effect
This is an excerpt from pp. 169-170 of a book named *Flow: the psychology of optimal experience*, written by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi . It has become very difficult to understand the meaning of this
`* Unless consumed in highly skilled ritual contexts, as is practiced in many traditional societies, what drugs in fact do is reduce our perception of both what can be accomplished and what we as individuals are able to accomplish, until the two are in balance. This is a pleasant state of affairs, but it is only a misleading simulation of that enjoyment that comes from increasing opportunities for actions and the abilities to act.*` Please help me to understand the meaning of this paragraph. I asked the question on english language forums to understand its meaning but it does not seem to work as it is more of a psychology related question.

# Answer
Freely translated, the author says that...

*"Doing drugs is fine when performed under the guidance of experts in traditional, ritual contexts. Drugs reduce our perception of what is possible, and they reduce the perception of what we ourselves can achieve. Drugs do this until the two are in balance. This is pleasant. But, it is misleading and far greater joy can be achieved when one would stimulate the chances to achieve goals, and to enhance our possibilities to do great stuff."*

Honestly, I think this is a big mouthful of gibberish. But there you go.
> 4 votes

# Answer
Do note that he says in the very next paragraph

> Some people will disagree strongly with this description of how drugs affect the mind. After all, for the past quarter-century we have been told with increasing confidence that drugs are "consciousness- expanding," and that using them enhances creativity. But the evidence suggests that while chemicals do alter the content and the organization of consciousness, they do not expand or increase the self's control over its function. Yet to accomplish anything creative, one must achieve just such control. Therefore, while psychotropic drugs do provide a wider variety of mental experiences than one would encounter under normal sensory conditions, they do so without adding to our ability to order them effectively.

In other words, he is aware that what he is proposing is controversial. To summarize what I gather as **his main point, in my own words: drugs don't work for improving flow or creativity.**

As for evidence, he's not citing any in there. The book has a list of references at the end, and some inline citations, but not for this "fact". And if you ask me, he is completely glossing over ADHD or the use of the same class of drugs to improve "flow" in just about everyone. And to paraphrase a famous mathematician and well-known user of amphetamines... mathematics was set back for a month when he took a break from the drug. Of course there are good reasons not to take such drugs (side effects) but claiming they don't work is silly, if you ask me. (Note that this book of Csikszentmihalyi was first published in 1990, so while ADHD might not have been as widely known back then as it is today, it definitely was known in professional circles, ADD was introduced in the DSM-III in 1980.)

Of course it may come down to an argument what really is flow, creativity etc. As the flip side, psychiatrists hardly ever talk about flow in Csikszentmihalyi's terminology, preferring "attention" obviously.
> 4 votes

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Tags: social-psychology, drugs
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# Question
Title: How do we know what colors animals perceive?
Humans have three kinds of photoreceptors corresponding to different wavelength-spectra:

If say photons with wavelengths of around 530 nanometers hit the human retina, this would lead to the perception of the color conventionally called "green". The color "green", however, is subjective in the sense that it is bound to a certain cortical physiology.

So my question is: Given that we don't have access to how animals perceive color, as we can't infer such qualitative properties purely from physical stimulus properties, how can we conclude that some animals are, say, perceiving ultra-violet colors given certain items or wavelengths? What if they would perceive entirely different colors than known to us?

# Answer
> 5 votes
There are some levels of confusion in this in question, but basically we can test

* what wavelengths animals perceive (simple behavioral tests, e.g. training & testing them to distinguish a certain wavelength)
* inspect their cones to determine what wavelengths they could perceive. The latter doesn't necessarily imply that if an animal has say 4 different cones, it has tetrachromatic vision, because there's some degeneracy in some species, which unlike in humans (which have 3 types of cones and trichromatic vision) don't really use all their cones.

To give you a nearly random example of such a paper (this species doesn't have degeneracy), a (freely available) paper on chicks' vision:

> The colour vision of domestic chicks (Gallus gallus) was investigated by training them to small food containers decorated with tilings of grey and coloured rectangles. Chicks learn to recognise the colour quickly and accurately. Chicks have four types of single-cone photoreceptor sensitive to ultraviolet, short-, medium- or long-wavelength light. To establish how these receptors are used for colour vision, stimuli were designed to be distinguished only by specific combinations of receptors. We infer (1) that all four single cones are used, and (2) that their outputs are encoded by at least three opponency mechanisms: one comparing the outputs of ultraviolet- and short-wavelength-sensitive receptors, one comparing the outputs of medium- and long-wavelength receptors and a third comparing of the outputs of short- and long- and/or medium-wavelength receptors. Thus, the chicks have tetrachromatic colour vision. These experiments do not exclude a role for the fifth cone type, double cones, but other evidence suggests that these cones serve luminance-based tasks, such as motion detection, and not colour recognition.

If you want to get philosophical qualia discussions, akin to whether all humans describe the same color with same language, that's a whole different kettle of fish. I don't know of any studies like that in the absence of language. I'm guessing you might be familiar with the dress.

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Tags: neuroscience, perception, color
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# Question
Title: Is there a foveal explanation for the duck-rabbit illusion?
Myself when I look at the duck-rabbit image, I see a duck if focus on the left (i.e. the beak) or a rabbit if I focus on the right (the nose).

Is this how it works for most people, i.e. is the foveal shift what drives the change in interpretation? (I obviously meant to ask if there's an empirical study on this.) If so, is the duck-rabbit a part of a wider class of illusions that rely on smaller or larger changes in what's foveated?

# Answer
**Short answer**
Ambiguous figures do not necessarily depend on focus, they do depend on attention though.

**Background**
The figure you provide is huge. From a standard face-to-monitor distance of a meter or so, one indeed needs to scan the image. Under these conditions I agree with you, in that the perceived animal changes when you change focus. The ears become a bill when you focus on that part and you see a duck. Reversely, when you focus on the head, you see a bunny.

However, below I've pasted a smaller version of it (Fig. 1). If it is still too big take some more distance from your monitor and look at the center. You'll notice it will freely flip-flop between critters, also without shifting your gaze. I found another version depicted in Fig. 2. that, in my case, even more smoothly transitions from duck to rabbit and *vice versa*. Hence, foveal focus is not key.

Ambiguous images are not truly illusions; Many illusions rely on unconscious inferences in perception, while ambiguous figures illustrate the role of expectations, world-knowledge, and the **direction of attention**. For example, children tested on Easter Sunday are more likely to see the figure as a rabbit; if tested on a Sunday in October, they tend to see it as a duck or similar bird (source: Kihlstrom, University of California, Berkeley, see references there). Hence, by shifting your **attention** from one part to another, you may indeed evoke a flip flop and although this i medited by visual input and hence needs the retina, it nonetheless is a process induced by shifting your attention and hence a top-down process. Your suggestion of a foveal dependence would imply a bottom-up effect. It is not.

Fig. 1. Rabbit/duck ambiguity. Taken from OP above, source unknown

Fig. 2. Animated version of the ambiguous rabbit/duck figure. source: Tom van der Bilt, Nautilus issue 19, 2014
> 3 votes

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Tags: perception, vision
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title: Toulouse-Lautrec Syndrome

text:
# Question
Title: Toulouse-Lautrec Syndrome
According to HealthLine, Toulouse-Lautrec Syndrome, known clinically as Pycnodysostosis (PYCD) can cause

> difficulty with mental processes, though intelligence is not usually affected

GARD also list that it causes cognitive impairment within the heading *symptoms*.

How does the disease, known to cause bone deformities, also cause cognitive impairment, and what kind of cognitive impairment does it cause?

I have Googled *Toulouse-Lautrec Syndrome cognitive impairments* and *Pycnodysostosis cognitive impairments* with no results I have seen other than a case report (Girbal, et al. 2013) which states that in most cases cognitive development is normal.

## References

Girbal, I., Nunes, T., Medeira, A., & Bandeira, T. (2013). Pycnodysostosis with novel gene mutation and severe obstructive sleep apnoea: management of a complex case. *BMJ case reports, 2013*, bcr2013200590. doi: 10.1136/bcr-2013-200590 pmcid: PMC3794180

# Answer
> 1 votes
Since pycnodysostosis is caused by mutations that cause deficiency in Cathepsin K, it makes sense to look at animal models for the latter; there's a fairly recent study Dauth, 2011...

> Cathepsin K deficiency in mice induces structural and metabolic changes in the central nervous system that are associated with learning and memory deficits. \[...\]
>
> Cathepsin K is a mammalian cysteine peptidase that is sorted to endo-lysosomes and secreted into the extracellular space by certain cell types \[1\]. It is abundant in osteoclasts and has a prominent role in bone remodeling due to its collagenolytic activity \[2\]. Indeed, cathepsin K deficiency has been linked to bone disorders such as pycnodysostosis and osteopetrosis \[3,4\], while the excessive activity of this enzyme may lead to osteoporosis \[5\], making it a likely target for rational drug design \[6-8\].
>
> \[...\]
>
> Interestingly, pycnodysostosis patients suffering from lifelong absence of cathepsin K activity have been occasionally reported to exhibit, in addition to the abnormalities in bone development, alterations in the CNS such as hyperplasia of the pituitary, demyelination of the cerebrum, and imbalances between brain growth, vascular supply, and cerebrospinal fluid pressure, with complications including sensorineural deafness and frontal porencephalic cysts. \[66\]

Unfortunately the trail gets pretty difficult from there because the paper cited for the last para, while mentioning "mental retardation" as known symptom, block-cites some 5 papers for that; I checked out one of them (in JAMA) but that one doesn't mention anything mental, so... who knows which of the other case reports might have some cognitive details, if any.

I guess the incidence of cognitive issues might depend on the specific mutation, since GARD says that only 5-29% of PSYD actually have these cognitive abnormalities.

Research on animal models of some genetic diseases usually starts with a substantial mutation, i.e. something that's nearly sure to cause the desired disease effect. Later on milder variants are studies. (For example see how the animal models of Huntington's advanced) With pycnodysostosis, at least as far neuronal/behavioral effects go, it seems we're at the fist stage (i.e. they published the publishable "sure thing").

The highly cited paper of Gelb, 1996, which catalogued the (few) known mutations for pycnodysostosis alas does not correlate them with symptoms beyond the mere diagnosis of pycnodysostosis. In fact, this paper doesn't even mention any mental/cognitive effects in the patients studied... which were alas only two or three families.

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, genetics, cognitive-development, pathology
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# Question
Title: Long term cocaine use and personality change - Scientific references?
I've experienced cocaine addicts first hand and noticed the development of egoistic personality traits such as selfishness or loss of empathy in cocaine addicts. Are there any scientific references which support that observation?

# Answer
> 3 votes
I couldn't find a longitudinal study on this, which would be direct evidence, but it seems plausible due to circumstantial evidence:

* Just taking a dose to lowers the perception of facial sadness (expressed by others)

> Twenty-four healthy recreational cocaine users participated in this placebo-controlled within-subject study. \[...\] Findings show that cocaine impaired recognition of negative emotions; this was mediated by the intensity of the presented emotions. When high intensity expressions of Anger and Disgust were shown, performance under influence of cocaine 'normalized' to placebo-like levels while it made identification of Sadness more difficult. The normalization of performance was most notable for participants with the largest cortisol responses in the cocaine condition compared to placebo. It was demonstrated that cocaine impairs recognition of negative emotions, depending on the intensity of emotion expression and cortisol response.

* In a cross-sectional study users/addicts did perform worse than controls on game-theoretical selfishness

> The performance of healthy controls (n = 68), recreational cocaine users (n = 68) and dependent cocaine users (n = 30) in \[...\] social interaction paradigms (Distribution Game, Dictator Game) was assessed. \[...\] Decisions in the social interaction tasks of both cocaine user groups were more self-serving compared with controls as cocaine users preferred higher monetary payoffs for themselves.

* In cocaine users

> younger age-of-onset of cocaine use was associated with more pronounced empathy impairment \[...\]
>
> Mean explicit and implicit emotional empathy ratings of the multifaceted empathy test (MET) in cocaine users with an age of onset (AoO) of cocaine use ≤18 (n=27) and \>18 (n=73), and controls (n=68). Cocaine users with an AoO≤18 showed less explicit and implicit emotional empathy than controls and less implicit empathy than cocaine user with an AoO \>18. Error bars refer to SEM. \*indicates significant difference between groups (p\<.05)

With risk of being pedantic, this last study is also not direct evidence, because there could be some other factor (genetic or environmental) that causes someone to both take up cocaine use early in life and also cause them to exhibit lower empathy later in life (which is the only time when empathy was measured in this study design).

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Tags: addiction, drugs
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title: Voltage Clamp Method

text:
# Question
Title: Voltage Clamp Method
I don't understand some points of the voltage clamp method. In the resting state, Command voltage and membrane potential are both -65mv. If the command voltage increases to 0mv, current is injected into an axon, so membrane potential become over than the threshold and sodium is going to flow into the axon.
I learned that current is the flow of electrons, so if the command voltage is changed into 0mv, electrons flow into an internal membrane. It implies that membrane becomes more negative, but it contradicts the fact that membrane potential becomes 0 mv. Is there anything I misunderstood?

# Answer
> 0 votes
In voltage clamp, you measure current.

If you voltage clamp the cell near it's resting potential, you need little current to hold the cell.

If you want to voltage clamp the cell depolarized or hyperpolarized relative to rest, you need to inject current (positive or negative). How much current you need to inject depends on the membrane properties of the cell, and the leak conductance. Therefore, measuring the current as a function of the held voltage tells you about these membrane properties.

As you depolarize the cell, yes, you will open voltage-gated conductances, but these conductances also often inactivate (sodium channels especially). That said, yes, if you depolarize a cell and channels open or close, you will record those changes in your voltage clamp. *However, you will never get an action potential if you have a good clamp.* The whole point of voltage clamp is that you hold the voltage constant. Action potentials are positive feedback increases in voltage. If you clamp a cell at -40mV, even if -40mV is normally above threshold in a current-clamped cell, the cell will stay at -40mV. It doesn't really make sense to think about action potential thresholds in voltage clamp, they don't exist because the threshold phenomenon (voltage positive feedback) is blocked by clamping the voltage.

One of the benefits of voltage clamp is that you can (somewhat indirectly) measure the flow of certain ions. If you set the voltage equal to the reversal potential for some ion, you know the current for that ion is exactly zero. This allows you to make inferences about how much current is flowing (and knowing voltage you can calculate conductance) at other voltages.

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Tags: neuroscience
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# Question
Title: what causes this auditory persistence illusion?
Related question: aftereffects of auditory adaptation

When the radio is turned off in the middle of a song, sometimes I can still hear the song playing very quietly for tens of seconds after the radio has been turned off. It happens for repetitive songs that I have heard many times before. A couple of friends said that they have never experienced this, so there are presumably considerable differences between individuals in susceptibility to this illusion.

What causes this illusion?

# Answer
It sounds like you are describing an earworm, which is a piece of music that repeats in your head even though it is not actually playing. This is a rather common occurrence, and matches your experience of it happening only with songs you're familiar with, and especially so for repetitive songs. What makes songs get stuck in your head is not fully understood, but research has shown that has to do both with qualities of the song (certain melodic elements, intervals, tempos and repetitions are more likely to be earworms), as well as qualities of the listener (having a musical background, obsessive-compulsive tendencies, and being in a non-focused mental state increase likelihood of experiencing earworms).
> 1 votes

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Tags: perception
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# Question
Title: fMRI repetition time (TR) and stimulus duration
I realized that in many neuroscientific experiments, the duration of the stimulus (say the duration of a grating stimuli displayed to subjects) is considerably shorter than the "TR" (roughly speaking the time between consecutive fMRI data acquisitions of the same cortical location) - an example would be a stimulus duration of 500 ms and a TR of 1.5 seconds.

My question: Does this not mean that some measurements have a very low signal-to-noise ratio, or can this approach be justified by the BOLD responses relatively long duration?

# Answer
> 1 votes
(f)MRI does not have good temporal resolution. If that is needed something like EEG or MEG is used, but the latter have low spatial resolution (hard inverse problem). Also note that the low temporal resolution of fMRI is *due* to BOLD response time (i.e. it's not just the case that the current fMRI technology sucks)

> fMRI’s temporal resolution is limited by hemodynamic response time; typically the BOLD response has a width of ~3s and a peak occurring ~5–6s after the onset of a brief neural stimulus. This is much slower than the underlying neural processes, and temporal information is thereby heavily blurred.

Without getting into the specifics of the experiment (what's that you're actually trying to measure) it's impossible to say whether fMRI (=BOLD) would be inappropriate.

Also noise and blur are not the same issue; loot at some illustrations and it should be obvious without getting into math.

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Tags: fmri
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# Question
Title: How do you predict a cognitive bias theoretically using dual process theory?
Disclaimer: I am a complete layman in psychology, with no education in the field whatsoever. This question was prompted by my reading Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow", in which he discusses the model of System 1 and System 2 extensively.

I thought many of the cognitive biases and other psychological effects were fascinating to read about, and I really enjoyed it. But every time he brought the "two systems" into the discussion of a particular cognitive bias (such as the affect heuristic or hindsight bias), it felt like he was using it as a post hoc explanation of how the effect could be described by certain characteristics of the two systems. It was never clear to me how you can show that the dual process *implies* the existence of the discussed effect.

I think he did a far better job showing how certain psychological effects result from prospect theory. It's easy to show, for example, how prospect theory implies the endowment effect, as shown in the given link. Even though knowledge of the endowment effect existed before prospect theory, it's easy to see how the endowment effect could have been *predicted* by prospect theory. You can even *prove* that it would exist, given the utility function of prospect theory and the right axioms.

But I'm confused about how you can do the same with dual process theory, and the cognitive biases that it supposedly explains. **How can you use dual process theory to predict the existence of a cognitive bias?** Are there examples of cognitive biases that were, or can be explicitly predicted using DPT?

If this is just a poorly framed question--if predicting cognitive biases is not one of the purposes of the theory--then what is the purpose of dual process theory?

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EDIT: I want to make a few clarifications here. My concern is neither with the predictive success of DPT - or other theories to which I compare it - nor is it with whether the things that DPT can predict have already been discovered before DPT. The example I used - prospect theory, and its "prediction" of the endowment effect - is both retroactive (the effect was known before the theory), and according to the answer by Fizz, has questionable predictive verification. However, the manner by which you can use the theory to make the prediction is quite clear. If we assume the value curve given by prospect theory, and the claim of prospect theory that a person's perceived value of a gain or loss is relative to their current position rather than absolutely dependent on the final state, then it follows logically that an individual's perceived gain in value for acquiring something is lower than their perceived loss in value for losing the same thing. This can be answered in theory, on pen and paper, given the framing of the scenario and the axioms of prospect theory.

With dual process theory I want to understand:

1. what kind of predictions it can make about human behavior
2. *how* to make those predictions using the theory

Since this is seemingly a very celebrated modern theory of human behavior, I just want to know how it's *used*. I don't mind if every known consequence of dual process theory was discovered before the theory, nor do I mind if the method is not as rigorous as that of a physics theory.

# Answer
> 3 votes
Well, whether something is truly predicted or a post-hoc explanation can be difficult to disentangle in this area. What you're asking for is that dual-process theory predicts the existence of a new type of bias previously unobserved. And that's a tall order because observational psychology has been around for a log time.

Probably the area in which I buy the dual-process explanations the most is belief bias; dual-process theory predicts that our intuitions (T-1 processes) bias us for plausible conclusions (and against implausible ones), even if the reasoning (T-2 process) is faulty (and respectively correct).

Predicting an entirely new type of bias is not the only way to test dual-process theory. One can test it quantitatively by looking at known biases and verifying experimentally if the timing affects the level of bias. And in the case of belief bias, that seems to be the case.

The purpose of any scientific theory is to explain some aspect of the real world. Just because we don't continuously discover (qualitatively) new facts based on that theory doesn't invalidate it as scientific theory.

In psychology in general, experimental data is fairly easy to come by, so evidence often leads theory. It's not like in modern physics where you predict the Higgs boson and it takes decades to discover it in actual experiment. Or you predict the string structure of the universe, but it's unlikely we'll ever be able to test that.

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By request, here's the introductory / "theoretical" part of the paper:

> \[Dual-process\] theories posit two distinct processes of reasoning that compete for control of the response that participants make in reasoning tasks. Heuristic or System1 processes are characterised as rapid, implicit, associative, and heavily contextualised, whereas analytic or System2 processes are described as slow and sequential but capable of abstraction and generalisation. Note that a key difference is the speed of processing. The reason for this is that analytic processing is a sequential process requiring use of central working memory and is constrained by its limited capacity. By contrast, heuristic processes operate through massively parallel implicit systems that exert an unconscious influence on responding. In support of this distinction is evidence of substantial correlations between general intelligence and working memory capacity with abstract deductive reasoning but not pragmatic, belief-based reasoning (Stanovich, 2004).
>
> While a mass of evidence has been recorded supporting the idea that there are two different processes of reasoning, more research is needed to confirm the characteristics that theorists have attributed to the cognitive systems that may underlie these observations. A relevant methodological innovation reported by Roberts and Newton (2002) is the rapid-response reasoning task. The idea is that by constraining participants to respond within a short period of time, the slower analytic process of reasoning will be differentially inhibited. For example, on the Wason selection task, there is a well established non-logical tendency, known as ‘‘matching bias’’ (Evans, 1998), to select cards that match the explicit content of conditional statements, regardless of the presence of negations. Roberts and Newton (2002) showed that measures of matching bias were significantly increased when a rapid response version of the selection task was compared with a free-time version. This is as dual-process theory would predict, since any influence of analytic reasoning to inhibit the bias would be suppressed by the requirement to respond quickly.
>
> A central phenomenon in dual-process accounts of reasoning is that of ‘‘belief bias’’—the tendency to evaluate the validity of an argument on the basis of whether or not one agrees with the conclusion, rather than on whether or not it follows logically from the premises. The phenomenon is one of the earliest reported in the psychology of reasoning (Wilkins, 1928) but the modern study of the effect dates from the paper of Evans, Barston, and Pollard (1983), which established the phenomenon with all relevant experimental controls. Evans et al. showed that participants’ evaluations of conclusions were substantially affected both by the logical validity of the arguments and by the believability of the conclusions. With the help of protocol analyses Evans et al. characterised the effect as involving a within-participant conflict between logic-based (analytic) processes and belief-based (heuristic) processes. Such a conflict is to be expected in view of contemporary dual-process theories. In support of this, it has been shown that participants high in general intelligence are more able to resist belief biases (Stanovich & West, 1997) and that logical and belief-based responding are neurologically differentiated (Goel & Dolan, 2003).
>
> In this study, we extend the rapid-response methodology of Roberts and Newton (2002) to the study of belief bias in syllogistic reasoning. Using a conclusion-evaluation paradigm with problems similar to those of Evans et al. (1983), we compare performance under rapid-response and free-time tasks. We predict that the participants required to respond rapidly will show (a) an increased level of belief bias and (b) a reduced level of logical responding.

---

And regarding prospect theory; quoting from Wikipedia page on it:

> Critics from the field of psychology argued that even if Prospect Theory arose as a descriptive model, it offers no psychological explanations for the processes stated in it.

So I don't see how it is any less of a reverse-fitting of (arguably more math-oriented) description to prior data.

Furthermore, the endowment effect is not even certain to exist, if wikipedia is correct (There are some failed replications, no meta-analysis that I can find.) There are a lot of other (possible) theoretical explanations given for it there as well. In fact there is more theory than there are experiments. Also, being much closer to economics, it's generally more likely to have mathematical models for it.

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, social-psychology, bias, dual-process
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# Question
Title: How does cognitive science explain distant intentionality and brain function in recipients?
Achterberg and colleagues' (2005) study,

> Concluded that instructions to a healer to make an intentional connection with a sensory isolated person can be correlated to changes in brain function of that individual.

Personally, I have also experienced (many) similar things. For example, if I get a "feeling" something is wrong with a close family member, I shortly receive a call about that person.

How does cognitive science explain these changes in brain activity and cognitive state, based on others thoughts and cognitive states—all in the context of physical distance or isolation?

**Reference:**

Achterberg, J., Cooke, K., Richards, T., Standish, L. J., Kozak, L., & Lake, J. (2005). Evidence for correlations between distant intentionality and brain function in recipients: a functional magnetic resonance imaging analysis. *Journal of Alternative & Complementary Medicine: Research on Paradigm, Practice, and Policy, 11*(6), 965–971.

# Answer
**Pseudoscience based on false premises and misuse of statistics**, I'd say at first glance...but let's take a closer look at this article. First, I'm seeing among the references a lot of articles from journals with "alternative" in their titles, and other sources that strike me as either vaguely fishy or otherwise somewhat tangential. Not what I'd hope to get from an article claiming evidence of "distant intentionality".

Next, the one, lonely paragraph in which Achterberg and colleagues (2005) offer their own half-hearted explanation:

> Given that **there are no known biological processes that can account for the significant effect of the DI protocol**, the results of this study may be interpreted as consistent with the idea of entanglement in quantum mechanics theory \[(Einstein, Podolsky, & Rosen, **1935**)\]. Entanglement has been confirmed to occur between photons, and many have speculated that certain highly organized macroscopic systems, including the brain, exhibit the property of entanglement with other complex systems **\[citation needed\]**. In a recent study evidence was found for nonlocal connections between separated preparations of human neurons \[(Pizzi, Fantasia, Gelain, Rossetti, & Vescovi, 2004; **wrong title listed in reference section**)\]. These findings, plus the current study correlating brain activity in two sensory-isolated humans do not fit the classic model of physics and can be interpreted as consistent with entanglement at the macroscopic level. \[Emphasis added.\]

Some **pseudoscientific warning signs** to note here:

* The direct acknowledgement that biological science can't explain their results
* One incredibly outdated reference from a physics journal about quantum entanglement
    + Einstein and colleagues' ***1935*** article! Hardly the modern authority on quantum mechanics.
* "Many have speculated," with no citation as to who these "many" are or why anyone should care
* One other reference to proceedings from a society for optical engineering...In their reference section (not visible in the version I've linked in my own references here), Achterberg and colleagues (2005) omit the last two authors' names and replace the word "separate" with "human" in the title for this article's entry. I've referenced it below properly, and provided a link; see what you think of it.
* Hardly any other attempts at explanation to be found throughout the very brief article.
    + Wouldn't you expect more effort and enthusiasm on their part if they really, honestly believed in this themselves, *and* actually knew what they were talking about? I sure would...

As for that significant effect that just can't be explained no matter how hard the authors (don't) try, why not scrutinize **their entire results section** and see what's to be made of it, since it's so comically short:

> ## RESULTS
>
> The FSL software produces a quantitative table of cluster results that includes: cluster size, probability for each cluster, $z$ scores, $x\ y\ z$ coordinates of the cluster in Talaraich space and contrast of parameter estimates (see Table 1). If a cluster is significant in a group analysis it means that there were specific brain regions in which the combined subjects had enough activation to raise the $z$ score above the noise level threshold.
>
> In other words, if all of the subjects had random activation at different places in the brain, then there would be no group activation. **One of the two clusters was highly statistically significant** $(p = 0.000127)$. Significant areas of apparent activation in the group analysis and total number of pixels activated for the group are reported in Table 2. A scan representing the group activation as a whole appears in Figure 2.

That's seriously the entire results section. There's actually a lot more work in the methods section to set up the analyses...but evidently this is all that came of it and is fit to report? I don't understand that decision, because Table 2 (also not visible in the version I've linked) seems to list two very small $p$ values, and a lot of other inscrutable statistical information. Then again, it's not clear to me that the authors even paid that much attention to what they were writing here, because the $p$ value from the table that they seem to refer to in the results section is actually one order of magnitude higher than they say in the results (i.e., the table lists $p = 0.00127$: three zeros, not four).

Setting all these qualms aside, consider one more—maybe the most important: the authors seem to be claiming evidence of a process they don't understand (we might as well call it "quantum magic") based on a single $p$ value. I'd bet that's only good enough to convince people who really don't understand what it means in the first place. If you want to give these statistics some serious thought, I'd recommend starting with Wagenmakers (2007) and colleagues (2011). The first of these explains a wide variety of problems with $p$ values as they are commonly (mis)used and (mis)interpreted. The second takes a particularly close look at some much higher-profile quackery that made it into one of the biggest journals in my field (Bem, 2011). Bem's pseudoscientific article caused quite a stir, because it claimed even better evidence of *precognition*, and because Bem actually had a decent reputation as a social psychologist going into this fiasco...but now his Wikipedia page has this sad blemish of a section, and it's all quite unsympathetic, as you can see for yourself. Maybe this is the price of bringing bad work into the spotlight; there but for the grace of obscurity and mediocrity go Achterberg and colleagues (2005).

Still, Bem's (2011) a much better story in pseudoscience, as far as they go. If you're looking for the light reading version, you can find it in my article for *WhatTheFreud.com*, a website for psychology articles that a colleague / friend / former bandmate of mine made. That reminds me, I owe him another article...Maybe I'll try to dig up and synthesize some theories that could explain why so many of us are so desperate to believe in magic that we'll believe the first person who can throw a sufficiently confusing set of numbers at us and claim that they support just the right kind of magic we want to believe in (e.g., for your anecdotal reasons; not that I blame you for wanting to believe). Maybe I'll try to find a study of the harm journals do by having such shoddy standards for the work they accept...or maybe I'll just try to keep it light and write one about the Sokal affair. Now there was a guy who knew what it really means to get published in some random journal somewhere: it means you can successfully convince some small group of people that you know more than they do, and not necessarily anything more.

**References**
\- Achterberg, J., Cooke, K., Richards, T., Standish, L. J., Kozak, L., & Lake, J. (2005). Evidence for correlations between distant intentionality and brain function in recipients: A functional magnetic resonance imaging analysis. *Journal of Alternative & Complementary Medicine: Research on Paradigm, Practice, and Policy, 11*(6), 965–971. Retrieved without figures, tables, or references from http://stpresskit.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/evidence-for-correlations.pdf.
\- Bem, D. J. (2011). Feeling the future: experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100*(3), 407–425. Retrieved from http://caps.ucsf.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/bem2011.pdf.
\- Einstein, A., Podolsky, B., & Rosen, N. (1935). Can quantum-mechanical description of physical reality be considered complete? *Physical Review, 47*(10), 777.
\- Pizzi, R., Fantasia, A., Gelain, F., Rossetti, D., & Vescovi, A. (2004). Non-local correlation between separated neural networks. In E. Donkor, A. R. Pirick, & H. E. Brandt (Eds.), *Quantum Information and Computation II. Proceedings of SPIE, 5436*, 107–117. Retrieved from http://air.unimi.it/bitstream/2434/30203/2/spie2004.pdf.
\- Wagenmakers, E. J. (2007). A practical solution to the pervasive problems of $p$ values. *Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 14*(5), 779–804. Retrieved from http://www.brainlife.org/reprint/2007/Wagenmakers\_EJ071000.pdf.
\- Wagenmakers, E. J., Wetzels, R., Borsboom, D., & Van der Maas, H. (2011). Why psychologists must change the way they analyze their data: The case of psi. *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100*, 426–432. Retrieved from http://mpdc.mae.cornell.edu/Courses/MAE714/Papers/Bem6.pdf.
> 8 votes

# Answer
I recently heard Marjorie Woollacott, a 'neuroscience professor' with tenure at the University of Oregon, praising this paper. (I think she has a book she's promoting). This drew me to look into its claims, and thence to StackExchange. There's a reasonable review of such phenomena (and the associated research) here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3870293/. If anything, they may however be a bit too kind to Achterberg et al. I agree with the incisive criticism already posted on StackExchange, but thought it worthwhile to add to the following.

As Carl Sagan (and others) have pointed out, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. We're all now familiar with the—in many ways far less extraordinary—claims about neutrinos travelling faster than light that resulted in a storm of controversy in 2012, resulting in resignation of a good physicist (https://phys.org/news/2012-03-italian-physicist-faster-than-light-resigns.html); the problem was a tiny fault with a cable. Were they true, the claims in Achterberg's article would be even more fundamentally disturbing. How could the electrical or other (?) activity of one mind affect another in a highly insulated environment? This makes absolutely no sense from a physical point of view, especially at a distance in a warm environment of ~300K. To invoke "quantum entanglement" is naive at best.

At the very least we need to explore other more mundane explanations for the finding. Several are all-too-easy to identify. The abject failure of randomization is clear: the same sequence was presented to all subjects. Presenting the same sequence to all subjects and then applying time series analysis—without having a control group that were NOT 'subject to distant healing'—strikes me as hugely naive, for the following reason. If there is the slightest common set of behaviours that correlate across individuals, along the lines of e.g. "Gee it's noisy in here" ... "I'm settling down" ... "I'm bored" ... "I'm a bit sleepy" or whatever, presenting the same sequence to all individuals will generate a spurious correlation. This is so likely, and so poorly accommodated that we don't even need to look at the other flaws in the study—the paucity of data, the authors' failure to explore mundane explanations for their results (apart from acknowledging that there were three people in the room who knew when the 'on' and 'off' periods were), and the remarkable heterogeneity of 'healing methods' that in combination seem to be so 'overtly' effective.

We are led to the inevitable conclusion that this *is* pseudoscience, poorly done. Sorry Professor Woollacott, but your desire to believe has led you beyond the evidence. You are not alone. We can however all learn from your failure, which is the only good reason to point it out.

My 2c.
> 0 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, cognitive-neuroscience, theoretical-neuroscience
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# Question
Title: What are a digital dementia and a pseudo debility?
I'm a fan of Psychology.

I'd like to know what "pseudo debility" is. Unfortunately, I don't know what it means in English. This is my free translation from Russian.

I've encountered the terms "pseudo debility" and "digital dementia" on resources that popularize science. But I still haven't found a generally accepted definition.

This "pseudo debility" is the simplification and flattening of delirium in the modern world. In the past, delirium was more saturated, unique and striking imagination.

I'd like to know:

* What is it?
* Who invented and studied it?

## Links

# Answer
> 3 votes
"Digital dementia" seems to be (from de.wiki link) an idiosyncratic (and pejorative) term used to describe a high dependence on portable electronics like smartphones, notebooks. See e.g.

From the absence of sources you provided, I don't know what "pseudo debility" might be, but based on your def "simplification and flattening of delirium in the modern world" it doesn't sound terribly related to "digital dementia" in the sense used by Manfred Spitzer.

# Answer
> 1 votes
Digital pseudo debility is used by a popular Russian psychiatrist Andrey Kyrpatov to describe a dependence, addiction to information on smart phones, ipads, etc. people think they are getting smarter when in reality they exhibit all signs of dependence . He also describes in medical terms what exactly happens in a brain of an addicted person. So digital dementia is the closest to digital pseudo dibility. https://snob.ru/selected/entry/99993 Translated excerpt from the article : “ Only one thing differs from clinical debility and pseudo-debility: there is no way to make/force, under any circumstances, a clinical moron to think; the state of his grey matter won’t allow that. But the "gray matter" of information psevdodebil is safe, and, in principle, his brain can be trained. But why? No, why not to train him, and why should he train it? What's the point? What is the motivation? Will he somehow be respected for this in a special way? Or, on the contrary, will they shame that he is a fool? Or he will not survive without it? Not.”

What is pseudo debility? By Andrey Kurpatov https://www.erarta.com/ru/museum/news/report/detail/news-02928/

Kill the idiot inside you. Information pseudo-debility and digital dementia.https://cont.ws/@adviser095/913341

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Tags: definition
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# Question
Title: Is there a reliable memory-retention guidance chart?
As discussed here reliability of some charts are dubious. I would like to use such a chart for studying purposes and am looking for something peer-reviewed or as factual as possible. Does it exist?

# Answer
> 1 votes
I think you can use this graphic:

It is taken from an article from WIRED, Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm. It talks about Piotr Wozniak and his spaced repetition software SuperMemo.

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Tags: learning, memory
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# Question
Title: Is sign language handled differently by the brain than spoken laguage?
The human's ability to process language in the abstract is somewhat linked to our ability to both produce and understand sounds (see Broca's area), with that in mind, is Sign Language handled similarly by the brain? Is there any fMRI research that could corroborate that?

# Answer
> 4 votes
For a broad meaning of "similarly", the answer is yes, the processing of sign language has substantial similarities with that of spoken language, in terms of brain areas involved. There are also some differences; the latter issue is a vast and still somewhat controversial research area; from the conclusion of a 2007 review:

> Where differences can be shown between sign and speech they can, on the whole, be ascribed to the different input modalities of the language system—auditory for spoken language, visuospatial for signed language. The specialization of cortical networks for language processing does not appear to be driven either by the acoustic requirements for hearing a spoken language or by the articulatory requirements for speaking. It seems likely, therefore, that it is the specialized requirements of language processing itself, including, for instance, compositionality, syntax, and the requirements of mapping coherent concepts onto a communicable form, that determine the final form of the specialized language circuits in the brain. Even the disagreements in the literature, especially those concerning the relative importance of the RH \[right hemisphere\] in processing sign, do not trouble this basic insight. It is probably more constructive to pose a somewhat different question: How might signed language use specific brain specializations that are unlikely to be involved in spoken language processing?

And for an illustration of the similarities/differences the review has this:

> Color-rendered images of the brain depicting (group) fMRI activation. (a) Regions activated by BSL \[British Sign Language\] perception in deaf and hearing native signers (first and second columns, respectively) and by audiovisual speech perception in hearing nonsigners (third column). For language in both modalities, and across all three groups, activation is greater in the left than the RH and perisylvian regions are engaged. \[The rows are the hemispheres.\]

And a more recent (2015) study perhaps more elaborately addressing your question (of similar regions):

> sign language constructions—even those similar to gesture—engage language-related brain systems and are not processed in the same ways that nonsigners interpret gesture. \[...\]
>
> It is already established that a very similar, left-lateralized neural network is involved in the processing of many aspects of lexical and syntactic information in both spoken and signed languages. This includes the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) (classically called Broca’s area), superior temporal sulcus (STS) and adjacent superior and middle temporal gyri, and the inferior parietal lobe (IPL) (classically called Wernicke’s area) including the angular (AG) and supramarginal gyri (SMG). Likewise, narrative and discourse-level aspects of signed language depend largely on right STS regions, as they do for spoken language.

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Tags: neuroimaging, psycholinguistics
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title: Dissecting human reaction time

text:
# Question
Title: Dissecting human reaction time
It's claimed that the average human reaction time in response to a visual stimulus is 0.25 seconds (https://backyardbrains.com/experiments/reactiontime). This article by Mcleod (1987) may be a better, more reliable benchmark for my question, as it comes from a more reputable source and states both the low and high bounds of tested human reaction times (p. 49):

> Traditional laboratory estimates suggest that **it takes from 200-300 ms to pick up visual information** about an uncertain event in the outside world and to use this to initiate an appropriate action

**Do we know/have any way of knowing what percentage of this time is taken up by any given part of the reaction process?** aka how much time is the eye converting what it sees, how much is the nerve signals doing their job and reporting to or from the brain, how much time does the brain spend processing, how much is the time the muscles take to contract, etc.?

I've been recently studying reaction times, so would be really interested in the breakdown of this total given time between the various processes involved. Can anyone help me out with this?

<sub> McLeod, P. (1987). Visual reaction time and high-speed ball games. Perception, 16(1), 49-59. </sub>

# Answer
Complex reaction times have been extensively studied and broken down into underlying processing stages. Sternberg (1969) \[Acta Psychologica, 30, 276-315.\] was one of the first systematic attempts at using reaction time to understanding cognitive processing. For simple reaction times (like responding to a brief sound or light), Botwinick (1966) \[Journal of Experimental Psychology, 71(1), 9-15.\] split reaction time into pre-motor and motor components and found the motor component accounted for 50 ms of a simple reaction time task that took about 250 ms. I am not aware of anyone who has split apart the remaining 200 ms into addiitional stages.
> 2 votes

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Tags: reaction-time
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# Question
Title: What is the most accurate name for the effect where people find excuses for flaws by leaders?
A lot of the time, especially in political behaviour, people are likely to ignore the flaws of a leader or in some cases to somehow spin some bizarre positive angle.

For example, corruption of public finance being spun as "it is good because it shows how entrepreneurial the person is".

Even if not to that extent, this is an effect that is seen a lot, a strange kind of defence.

While many terms come to mind, rose tinted glasses, excusing, shifting the burden, none of these exactly describe the psychological phenomenon here.

What is the phenomenon called?

# Answer
> 3 votes
Confirmation bias is certainly at play here, but I'd narrow that down a bit. It doesn't have a Wikipedia page (yet) but Dan Kahan has been focusing on a variation of motivated reason he calls "Identity-protective cognition". (See Misconceptions, Misinformation, and the Logic of Identity-protective Cognition for a full discussion.)

Confirmation bias can creep in under many circumstances, but we have an especially strong motivation (very often non-conscious) to promote arguments which align with our own self-identity. The person making the kind of claim you're pointing to probably either feels quite strongly about the issue (a economic libertarian discussing the primacy of market-oriented policies, for example) or the person making the claim (a "tribal" leader, perhaps).

An earlier and more limited aspect of this is the Asch effect. As the wikipedia page on argument from authority notes —

> In repeated and modified instances of the Asch conformity experiments, it was found that high-status individuals create a stronger likelihood of a subject agreeing with an obviously false conclusion, despite the subject normally being able to clearly see that the answer was incorrect.

# Answer
> 1 votes
It's definitely a form of confirmation bias "the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses". But this is a fairly broad category of cognitive biases.

And in this case it is probably motivated rather than unmotivated confirmation bias. The somewhat obvious distinction being:

> I also make a distinction between what might be called motivated and unmotivated forms of confirmation bias. People may treat evidence in a biased way when they are motivated by the desire to defend beliefs that they wish to maintain. (As already noted, this is not to suggest intentional mistreatment of evidence; one may be selective in seeking or interpreting evidence that pertains to a belief without being deliberately so, or even necessarily being aware of the selectivity.) But people also may proceed in a biased fashion even in the testing of hypotheses or claims in which they have no material stake or obvious personal interest. The former case is easier to understand in commonsense terms than the latter because one can appreciate the tendency to treat evidence selectively when a valued belief is at risk. But it is less apparent why people should be partial in their uses of evidence when they are indifferent to the answer to a question in hand. An adequate account of the confirmation bias must encompass both cases because the existence of each is well documented.

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Tags: social-psychology, terminology, political-psychology
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title: Involuntary misspelling while writing

text:
# Question
Title: Involuntary misspelling while writing
I'm a native Spanish speaker. In Spanish, the verb "to accept" is "aceptar". When I write it down, or type it on my phone, I tend to write "haceptar" (the H in Spanish is mute, so it'd be pronounced the same way), even though I know it isn't spelled with an H. This also happens to me with some other specific words I can't remember right now.

I thought this happened only to me, but today I found the same word misspelled the same way on a blog over the internet.

I directly tied this «condition» to the concept of a "lapsus", but I couldn't find anything about it.

I want to find a name for this, and I also want to know if it's some specific words that cause it on everyone or it's just casual coincidence.

PS: It's funny that I \[almost\] always realise I've misspelled the word just before sending it (if it was in a text message), so I always go back and correct it. But it's a hateful process, mostly when I've written a long text or used "aceptar" multiple times...

**Edit:** I have come up with an example in English as well. When I try to handwrite or type the word "rhythm", I tend to spell it "rythm" (even knowing it doesn't go that way). In this case the H is also mute (and I'm starting to see a pattern: every mistake I make is with a mute H).

# Answer
TLDR: if it's a "graphotactic" mistake that children could make (and it is), adults could make it under time pressure, distraction etc. A technical term for your kind of error is "phonologically plausible error" (PPE)

This is rather speculative, but I suspect that having two different spelling sets/rules for things that sound the same is the main reason. There's an obvious source of confusion there that we must constantly fight. That's another reason why some linguists argue for phonemic writing (roughly one spelling for everything that sounds the same.) Spanish

It may even have something to do with the so-called dual process theories of cognition (intuitions vs "deep thought"). If you have to apply multiple rules, it takes more time to discern which, and under time pressure you're more likely to make such mistakes.

Why would you prefer the more elaborate spelling version instead of the simpler one, I don't know. It has been observed that children tend to do the opposite:

> by kindergarten, many children begin to apply their existing phonological knowledge of pronunciation combined with emerging orthographic knowledge to produce invented spellings. Hence, *pack* might be spelled as *pak* (Treiman & Bourassa, 2000), which then preserves the minimal phoneme representation, known as the phonological skeleton (Bourassa & Treiman, 2003).

The paper I quoted that from also discusses cluster interaction of vowels and consonants, which are also a source of spelling errors in children. That seems related to what you experience, except all the examples there are shortening/simplifying, e.g. misspelling *sand* as *sad*, because the *n* is hard(er) to hear.

What is also observed in children are more complex errors related to the \[mis\]application of more complex rules, e.g. *press* misspelled as *ppres*:

> As beginning spellers learn sound-letter correspondences, particular patterns of orthographic features become evident (Cassar & Treiman, 1997). One such pattern involves consonant doubling, which occurs when children understand that a word contains a doubled consonant but do not recognize its positional constraints. In written English, doubled consonants occur in medial or final positions after a short vowel but cannot occur in the initial position e.g., *press*. However, young children might mark the doubled consonant in the wrong position, such as *ppres* (see also Wright & Ehri, 2007), indicating an emerging awareness of the need for a doubled consonant and illustrating that beginning spellers are still mastering word-specific knowledge about positional constraints leading to integration of phonological and orthographic knowledge (Bourassa & Treiman, 2007; Cassar & Treiman, 1997).

Your example seems to be a misapplication of a more complex rule regarding the writing of silent consonants. No such examples are discussed in that paper, as far as I can tell. I'll try to find some more research on this but anecdotal evidence is that silent consonants are a frequent source of spelling errors in English as well.

The closest example in English I found is in a rather obscure thesis:

> The first level of misspelling is when a letter in a word is completely omitted or extra added. For example, in the word ‘ransom’ the misspelling is depicted as ‘ransome’ with an extra ‘e’ letter at the end. Silent letters might affect the correct spelling in terms of leaving them out.

This involves a vowel and in the final, not initial position, but it's conceptually the same "overcorrect" process as adding an initial silent consonant.

And I found something similar for French:

> Children are sensitive to the fact that many French words include a final silent consonant, which sometimes leads them to add a silent consonant erroneously to words that do not include such letters.

Since this apparently happens a lot in French, it has been more seriously studied, including what type of root words lead to this overapplication more often etc. (See link for details).
> 1 votes

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Tags: language, writing
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# Question
Title: Is there any research of spelling errors from a dual-process theory perspective?
Checking the rather comprehensive but somewhat dated 2008 review of Evans on dual-process theories, I didn't see anything about \[mis\]spelling.

But it seems to me an obvious thing to investigate from a dual-process perspective, because (in theory) the more elaborate rules you have to apply the more mistakes you're likely to make under time pressure.

So has anything like this been attempted?

Note that this is a little more sophisticated than simply asking if writing (never mind typing) faster results in more errors. You'd have to discern what's the likely cause of the errors, i.e. under time pressure, do you make more errors of the kind that require more complex "graphotactic" rules?

# Answer
> 1 votes
Well, it turns out there is some related research, but there are complications because spelling & writing is harder to investigate (compared to syllogisms, for instance)...

> Spelling relies on two sets of processes, depending on word frequency (for a review, see Tainturier and Rapp, 2001; Bonin, 2003). For frequent words, the letter sequence is directly retrieved from the orthographic lexicon via the lexical route. For rare or unknown words, the letter sequence is arrived at indirectly, through a process of phoneme–grapheme conversion (assembled route). The resulting orthographic representation is stored in a graphemic buffer (Caramazza et al., 1987; Hillis and Caramazza, 1989) until its graphomotor execution (i.e., initiation and implementation of motor programs and neuromuscular execution). Although the orthographic representation obviously needs to be retrieved or calculated prior to execution (i.e., during the writing latency; Bonin et al., 2002), **Delattre et al. (2006) have shown that the orthographic processing of irregular and infrequent words is still generally incomplete at this stage, and therefore, continues during the graphomotor execution, thus, increasing handwriting duration. According to the authors, these results can be interpreted within the dual-route model.** When a conflict arises between the outputs of the lexical and assembled spelling routes, it takes time to resolve, and the central processing of this conflict then cascades onto the graphomotor execution.

So yes, there is a posited "dual-route" model for spelling/writing, and yes, it's based on timing experiments... although these did not involve time pressure (or counting spelling errors by type), but rather is based on timing the writing of well-known vs obscure words. Whether this "dual route" neatly matches more conventional dual-process accounts of cognitions is a bit unclear to me.

The complications come from the fact that spelling and writing form a cascading process:

> Three factors seem to determine the temporal course of the central processing of spelling. The first one concerns the word’s lexical characteristics. The less frequent and/or regular the word, the longer the central processing takes and the more likely it is to be cascaded. The second factor concerns time pressure. Until now, the cascading phenomenon has only been observed for the production of successive words under time pressure (Delattre et al., 2006; Lambert et al., 2011; Maggio et al., 2012). Producing a single word without any time constraint should minimize cascading, by allowing the spelling process to be completed during the pause (i.e., latency) preceding execution. Third, according to capacity theory, the ability to cascade processing depends heavily on the writer’s development and expertise (Berninger and Swanson, 1994; Alamargot et al., 2010). Because handwriting is not yet fully automatized in younger writers, especially those still in primary school (Bourdin and Fayol, 2000; Olive et al., 2009), they have to prevent overloading by segmenting and sequentializing the higher processes and are therefore, unable to engage in parallel, or cascaded, processing (see Olive and Kellogg, 2002; Alamargot et al., 2007).

Interestingly Kahaneman was also involved in formulating capacity theory. And it seems related to models of divided attention, which he also was involved with.

Anyway, if this is correct, an interesting conclusion is that if you have produce the spelling under time pressure and in a medium that you have little experience with (say you seldom handwrite, or you seldom type) then you are more likely to make spelling errors in that medium not simply because of mechanical issues, but also because it puts a sort of cognitive/time pressure even on processes that you have trained in (spelling).

The introduction of the Delattre paper also has some more interesting observations related to the complexity of the rules, particularly with respect to the how phonemic the orthography is and some empirical support from of specific forms of dysgraphia:

> The dual-route model of spelling production (e.g., Ellis, 1982) proposes that two processing systems operate in parallel: a lexical route that retrieves spellings of known words from a memory store of word-specific knowledge and a nonlexical (or assembled) route that generates spellings using a process of sublexical sound-to spelling conversion. The assembled spelling route would be efficient in languages whose orthographies have predictable or consistent orthographic-to-phonological correspondences (such as Turkish, Italian, and Japanese kana) but would be considerably less effective for English and French, whose orthographies are characterized by highly inconsistent relationships (e.g., the vowel /i:/ is spelled in many different ways in English words, as in eel, tea, theme, thief, Keith, people, me, key, quay, ski, etc.). There are many irregular and some almost arbitrarily spelled words in English (e.g., pint, yacht) and French (e.g., fraise, monsieur). The lexical route would work for all known words (irrespective of regularity) but could not provide spellings for new words or nonwords. The assembled route would work for nonwords but would often produce phonologically plausible errors (PPEs), particularly to irregular words, such as yacht (YOT) and monsieur (MESSIEU).
>
> Evidence consistent with the dual-route model comes primarily from studies of the spelling performance of neuropsychological patients with acquired central dysgraphia (for reviews see Barry, 1994; Tainturier & Rapp, 2000). The separation of the dual routes is supported by the double dissociation between surface dysgraphia (e.g., Beauvois & De´rouesne´, 1981; Hatfield & Patterson, 1983) and phonological dysgraphia (e.g., Shallice, 1981). Surfacedysgraphic people accurately spell more regular than irregular words (for which they make many PPEs) and are interpreted as having an impaired lexical route that forces overreliance on their preserved assembled route. Phonological-dysgraphic people have a marked impairment of nonword spelling but have relatively preserved word spelling and are interpreted as having an impaired assembled route but an intact lexical route.
>
> Although the lexical and assembled spelling routes are proposed to be separate, there are at least two lines of evidence to suggest that they interact at some level in normal spellers. First, observation of spelling errors in free writing (e.g., Ellis, 1979; Hotopf, 1980) suggests that assembled spelling plays some role in writing; people sometimes make PPEs (e.g., Ver-knickers ayfasia) and may produce different alternative spellings on different occasions (which suggests that not all errors reflect inaccurate spelling knowledge). Second, there is experimental evidence showing lexical influence on assembled spelling; there are lexical priming effects on nonword spelling (e.g., Barry & Seymour, 1988; Campbell, 1983; Perry, 2003). For example, the nonword /vi:m/ is more likely to be spelled as VEAM after hearing the word team, as VEEM after the word deem, and as VEME after the word theme.
>
> Dual-route models of spelling have been expressed in symbolic terms (e.g., Barry, 1994) but also as more interactive (Rapp, Epstein, & Tainturier, 2002) and connectionist (Houghton & Zorzi, 2003) models. Although single-route models of spelling have been proposed (e.g., Brown & Loosemore, 1994; Bullinaria, 1997; Olson & Caramazza, 1994), Houghton and Zorzi (2003) have argued that these are currently unable to account for the full range of empirical data.

I quoted all this here because the Wikipedia article on spelling has basically zero psychology or neurology information.

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, language, writing, dual-process
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title: Omitting word(s) when typing

text:
# Question
Title: Omitting word(s) when typing
\[Reraising a recently asked question that was closed here, but in more cogsci fashion, I hope.\]

Some people are more inclined than others to omit a word when typing, but still be unaware of its unintended absence on a (first) proofreading. In human-computer interaction (HCI) this is called a "misperception error". (according to Jan Noyes, *Designing for Humans*, p. 147, Psychology Press 2002... but that's about all the book says on the topic).

So what else is known?

* First of all, is it also called something else, perhaps more specific, because "misperception error" is very general, so it's hard to turn up any research on this particular error using these terms in pubmed.
* What is the prevalence among general population? It can't be something that hard to study, say among students, the low-hanging fruit of psychology and HCI studies, so I suspect some study on prevalence exists.
* What are some abnormal psychology correlates? I would venture a guess dyslexia and ADHD, but how much more common is it in such sub-populations than in neurotypicals?

I would gladly break this into separate questions if deemed necessary, but I suspect all of the above can probably be answered from one or two papers specifically on this topic.

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I found a paper on a similar auditory phenomenon, which has some generally applicable ideas:

> the application of signal detection theory (SDT) allows perceptual performance to be understood in terms of both sensitivity (the ability of a system to distinguish signal from noise) and response bias (the system’s bias, independent of sensitivity, for responding either positively or negatively)

So obviously there is a stronger response bias in proofreading your own typing than another's... which probably means that general statistics for "filling in" missing words in a sentence need to upward adjusted for proofreading your own typing.

Even more interesting, and perhaps a little worrisome for those exhibiting this,

> This theory is supported by behavioural evidence showing that the influence expectation exerts over auditory perception is stronger in those who hallucinate \[...\] This theory is also supported by evidence that the prediction error signal, which communicates the discrepancy between expectation and actual sensation \[...\] is reduced in those who suffer from schizophrenia \[...\].

It remains to be seen if misperception of non-existent words due to semantic expectation correlates to some kind of predisposition for visual or other kind of hallucination. It seems a bit more far fetched.

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Perhaps it's also worth noting here that simply proofreading familiar text, which the subject has read before in the correct version, but which is then modified by the injection of spelling errors, actually improves the detection rate of spelling errors. So not all kinds of familiarity with the text predispose to proofreading errors, at least not to proofreading spelling errors (missing or extra words were not tested in that study).

# Answer
> 9 votes
In his 2003 psycholinguistics book, John Field has summarized (pp. 70-72) his own typing errors and combined them with an older corpus of Hotopf.

Missing words were among the frequent errors, but alas no numerical frequencies are given.

But what he says he noticed is that short function words like "are" or "it" (these are his examples) are more likely to be omitted. And regarding the type of words more likely to be omitted he says:

> An important factor appears to be the difference between lexical and function words. The latter seem very susceptible to error: they are sometimes omitted or duplicated, and it is quite common in rapid typing for one function word to be substituted for another, even when they are not phonologically identical. This leads one to the conclusion that function words may be processed differently from lexical ones. It seems possible that the writing process accords a higher level of attention to lexical items.

Although he doesn't say this, the full-context examples that he gives for omission seem to have another property, namely that short words get omitted close to each other (compare with duplication)

> * though these \[are\] not frequent
> * that \[it\] is possible

And if you're curious about the related issue(s) he mentions, among the frequent duplication examples are "the the", "that that", and "of of". Among the substitutions are "the" instead of "that", "of" \<- "for", "doe" \<- "do", "were" \<- "where", "for" \<- "from". He continues:

> Finally, notice that some writing slips provide evidence of a planning process operating at a level higher than the word. When writing a particular word, we already have the next few words stored in our minds, ready for production

The examples for these are more interesting

> * importan topic
> * these given (= give) insights
> * using bothing (= both) approaches
> * difference (= different) intelligence tests
> * neighbourshoods

This is more qualitative than quantitative, but for lack of anything better, I put it in the answer box.

So if Field is correct, there's an anticipatory process in writing that causes a number of spelling errors, not all of them omissions.

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Tags: abnormal-psychology, reading, human-factors, typing
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# Question
Title: Why do you sometimes write down one word while actually intending to write another?
I've caught myself writing (typing) "possible" instead of "possibly" a few times over the past few days, while I do intend to write "possibly". Only upon rereading the sentence I notice my mistake.

It is not a typo. I am able to touch-type on a qwerty layout on which 'e' and 'y' are both written using a different hand, and different fingers. The keys are two keys apart from each other.

A simple google search for *"psychology writing wrong words"* didn't show up any immediate relevant results. I did read about a Freudian Slip, but it seems highly unlikely I would make such a mistake due to an *"unconscious ('dynamically repressed'), subdued, wish, conflict, or train of thought"*.

Is there any psychological phenomenon explaining why I would make such an error?

# Answer
> 15 votes
The speech error taxonomy on Wikipedia that Jeromy Anglim links to in his answer is pretty comprehensive. If you're interested in learning more, I would suggest reading some articles by Gary Dell (e.g., Dell, 1986). He is, in my opinion, *the* expert in this domain. He has used neural networks to explain speech errors of different types.

When mentally planning the next word in a sentence, we must choose the appropriate lemma. By selecting the units in a neural network that correspond to a certain lemma, it spreads activation to the corresponding morphemes, which in turn spreads activation to its corresponding phonemes. When the activation of a phoneme unit exceeds a certain threshold, it is selected for utterance (e.g., spreads activation to the motor units that allow us to speak).

However, this model is susceptible to retroactive and proactive interference: if we have just spoken another word that requires a different morpheme, its activation may exceed that of the target morpheme because of (for instance) undue attention or neural noise.

The same model can predict typographic errors as well: phonemes spread activation to orthographic units, which spread activation to the proper motor units which control our fingers.

Interestingly, speech errors rarely violate the rules of syntax, morphology, or phonology (even though they may make little sense semantically). Psycholinguists can use this fact in order to infer the structure of linguistic rules without having direct, conscious access to them.

Dell (1986). A Spreading-Activation Theory of Retrieval in Sentence Production. Psych Review, 93, 283-321. Retrieved from http://129.237.66.221/P800/dell1986.pdf

# Answer
> 4 votes
A few thoughts (this is not my area):

* This article on speech errors on Wikipedia is informative. The article provides a review types of speech errors. The classification of speech errors is presumably similar to writing errors.
* What I take from the article, and other research on errors, is that there is plenty of structure to errors. I think an information processing perspective would be more helpful in explaining writing errors than a Freudian perspective.
* Taking an information processing perspective on your specific example ("possible" versus "possibly"), it makes sense that these words could be confused on the basis of their semantic and spelling similarity.

# Answer
> 3 votes
As an addition to Jeromy's answer, I would like to point out that I sometimes think of them as muscle memory flaws. I have no evidence to back this up, but I'll explain my reasoning. The suffix 'ble' is quite common in English language, so when you type the 'bl' for ('bly' in 'possibly'), without thinking you add the 'e' instead of the 'y', because your fingers are used to the pattern of 'ble'. Of course you can type the (perhaps) less common 'bly' but then you'll need a bit more attention, to inhibit the 'bly'.

Does this sound reasonable?

# Answer
> 2 votes
John Fields in his 2003 psycholinguistics textbooks says:

> Note that the *there -\> their* example is not a spelling error - the writer is fully aware of the difference between the two forms; but, under the pressure of writing, one form (often the more frequent one) is substituted for the other.

And he is correct about the relative corpus frequency of those words (google ngram below):

If we apply the same theory to *possibly -\> possible*, the difference in relative frequency is even greater:

This idea of higher-frequency word "takeover" (my term) is backed up by some more empirical research, but contradicted by others:

> With regard to lexical properties, some studies of spontaneous speech errors (del Viso et al., 1991; Kelly, 1986) as well as errors arising in cases of acquired spoken language deficits (Blanken, 1990, 1998; Gagnon et al., 1997; Martin, Dell, Saffran & Schwartz, 1994) have reported that error responses are biased to be higher in frequency than their targets. However, a number of other studies have found no such effect (spontaneous errors: Harley & MacAndrew, 2001; Vitevitch, 1997; experimentally induced errors: Dell, 1990; aphasic errors in spoken production: Best, 1996; written production: Romani, Olson, Ward, & Ercolani, 2002).

Another interesting issue is that written errors seem to cross syntactic category boundaries more often than speech errors:

> In addition, a large number of studies have reported very high rates of syntactic category preservation in spoken errors produced both spontaneously (Abd-El-Jawad & Abu-Salim, 1987; Arnaud, 1999; Berg, 1992; del Viso et al., 1991; Fay & Cutler, 1977; Fromkin, 1971; Garrett 1975, 1980; Harley, 1990; Harley & MacAndrew, 2001; Leuninger & Keller, 1994; Nooteboom, 1969; Rossi & Defare, 1995; Silverberg, 1998; Stemberger, 1985) as well as subsequent to neurological impairment (Best, 1996; Berg, 1992; Blanken, 1990; Dell et al., 1997; Gagnon et al. 1997; Martin et al., 1994; but see Blanken, 1998). Some studies of written errors have reported that the tendency to preserve grammatical category is weaker in written than in spoken production—and is perhaps non-significant (spontaneous: Hotopf, 1980; aphasic errors: Romani et al. 2002).

Perhaps this partly explains why people don't seem to make this *possibly -\> possible* substitution in speech. (One is an adjective, the other an adverb.)

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And as far terminology goes, this is sometimes called an "atomic typo", at least among writers:

> Another kind of typo—informally called an "atomic typo"—is a typo that happens to result in a correctly spelled word that is different from the intended one, and since it is spelled correctly, the spellchecker cannot find the mistake. Examples include "unclear" instead of "nuclear", "you" instead of "your", "Sudan" instead of "sedan" (leading to a diplomatic incident in 2005 between Sudan and the United States regarding a nuclear test code-named Sedan), "Untied States" instead of "United States", and "the" instead of "they". The \["atomic typo"\] term was used at least as early as 1995 by Robert Terry.

And regarding speech errors (which a lot of answers here point to). Depending whether you are willing to call typos spelling errors or not (Field won't), this is or isn't a (written) malapropism. There's not complete consensus whether accidental pronunciations (or typos) that produce word substitions should be called that:

> Definitions differ somewhat in terms of the cause of the error. Some scholars include only errors that result from a temporary failure to produce the word which the speaker intended. Such errors are sometimes called "Fay-Cutler malapropism", after David Fay and Anne Cutler, who described the occurrence of such errors in ordinary speech. Most definitions, however, include any actual word that is wrongly or accidentally used in place of a similar sounding, correct word. This broader definition is sometimes called "classical malapropism", or simply "malapropism".

And I'm not entirely convinced Wikipedia has this issue right

> Under the name of malapropisms, Fay and Cutler (1977) have examined a variety of speech error. However, malapropisms in the classical sense are not speech errors: they are what the speaker intended to say and would be willing to repeat. This paper analyzes 158 classical malapropisms in English. Though some probably result from imperfect learning, most represent errors of storage in the mental lexicon. Statistical assessment of the examples indicates that they most resemble the ‘tip of the tongue” phenomenon, rather than slips of the ear or malapropisms in the Fay/Cutler sense.

Anyway, what seems to be a reasonable conclusion here is that "atomic typos" include the written equivalent of Fay-Cutler malapropisms.

The UPenn Language Log discusses a recent example of the latter, which is a bit long to reproduce here with the accompanying discussion in full. But the point there is that "committed of a crime":

> is an "error" because if you showed the writer the sentence and invited him to review it, he would (I surmise) say "oops" and correct "committed" to "convicted". In contrast, a (classical) malapropism, as deployed by one of the Mrs. Malaprops of the world, is a case where the speaker or writer has entered the wrong word into their mental lexical, and would not be aware that they're making a mistake even if they had the opportunity to review what they said or wrote.
>
> The error in this case is "phonological" because *committed* and *convicted* are both three-syllable words with medial stress, whose initial and final syllables are almost the same. And the error is "semantic" because someone is convicted of having committed an offense, so that there's a close relationship in the psychological space of meanings.
>
> Why do I think that this case is a Fay-Cutler malapropism, i.e. a (written form of a) speech error?
>
> For one thing, if we look at a somewhat edited collection, namely the COCA corpus of 425 million words of recent American English, the pattern "committed of a crime" gets no hits, while "convicted of a crime" gets 99, and "committed a crime" gets 236. \[...\]
>
> the substitution has the general lineaments of a Fay-Cutler-type speech error: same number of syllables, same stress pattern, same lexical category, same first and last syllables.

So we can also call *possibly -\> possible* "a typo with the general lineaments of a Fay-Cutler-type speech error". Ha ha. Linguists need more roundabout terminology. Actually not all the criteria are met: in particular, it's not the same lexical category in the case of *possibly -\> possible*, but rather adverb -\> adjective. I don't know if Fay & Clutler would have allowed for this.

This how they actually defined their notion of malapropism

> First, the erroneous intrusion is a real word-not the intended word, of course, but not a meaningless string of phonemes either. Second, the target and error seem to be unrelated in meaning. Finally, there is a close relation between the pronunciation of the target and the pronunciation of the error.

So *possibly -\> possible* doesn't quite fit that definition because the words are semantically related. It goes to show how difficult it is to come up with a good categorization of errors.

And since (rereading your question) you think the word "typo" does not apply to this; linguists use "slip of the keyboard". These include two sub-categories (cf. Field, p. 70)

> * motor errors, where there is a failure in the signal that the brain sends to the hand or in the contact between hand and keyboard
> * lexical errors, where the wrong written form has been selected

You seem to think that "typo" only describes the first sub-category. But the Wikipedia definition of typo excludes spelling errors (that are a result of ignorance). And since your \[lexical\] error is not a result of ignorance, it's not excluded, so it is a typo.

What you probably mean to say is that it is a "nonspecified substitution". That means that neither key adjacency nor left/right mirroring were the cause. These two are common causes of "motor" (in the sense of Field) substitutions in typing.

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, language, writing
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# Question
Title: What is the matrix of self and the outside world, evil and good?
I remember that there is a matrix in my textbook when I studied the basic psychology in colleage. The four 4 quadrants are 1) self is good and the outside world is also good; 2) self is evil but the outside is good; 3) self is good but the outside is evil; 4) self is evil and the outside is also evil. I have searched it for days but cannot find it.

Could anyone please tell me what that matrix is? Thanks!

# Answer
This may not totally match your description (the person's worldview, the evilness of the viewed objects), but it's quite analogous to the **table of style of attachment**, so I put it here.

I do notice that the major topic in the attachment theory is about relationship, while the topics in your description seem to be about moral in general, but I suspect that yours discusses about interpersonal relationships as well.

The image is captured from the book Interpersonal Communication: Everyday Encounters, 8th Edition. The original research is Butzer & Campbell, 2008.

One minor note: I see that many people use the word "matrix" as a synonym of "table". Technically, a matrix is a table of numbers, but not a table of ideas.
> 4 votes

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Tags: self, moral-psychology, recognition
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# Question
Title: How long does it takes for the feeling of vengeance to fade away by time?
Psychologically, how long does it take for a person to forget the feeling of vengeance over other person or community?

For example, imagine this scenario: There was a city which was sacked by army and a soldier enters into a house. That house had a family of 4 members, a married couple with their son and daughter. The soldier killed the couples and the son before the eyes of the daughter. Then he took her as a sex slave in his house for 15 years.

As you know, at the beginning, the girl will have lot of vengeance over the soldier .That is she wants kill the soldier to avenge her family's death. But due to tight security she can't do it.

Now my question is, does the feeling of revenge exists for the whole 15 years OR eventually fade away? If later is true, then how long does it take for the vengeance feeling to fade away?

# Answer
It depends on the individual (and possibly the trauma). Stockholm Syndrome, where captives *develop a psychological alliance with their captors as a survival strategy during captivity* can onset very quickly (in the *original case* 6 days). There are also cases where people are actively trying to escape and do not feel a bond with individuals.
> 1 votes

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Tags: social-psychology, perception, emotion, personality
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