# Question
Title: Can rewards incentivise shortcuts to be taken which wouldn't be done otherwise?
With a rewards-based system, some may be so incentivised by these rewards that they end up losing the end goal of what is meant to be the aim of gamifying otherwise boring, repetitive activities.

Why do rewards manage to detract users from the example of good behaviours in a non-game environment, and how should implementers of gamified systems work around this issue?

# Answer
> 4 votes
### TL;DR

When a boring, repetitive task is being gamed for rewards, there are two things that you need to look at. First, the problem definition and whether it is accurately defined (keeping in mind that autonomy is not lost). Second, the conditions of the reward and what is the actual behavior that is being rewarded.

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There are two main factors influencing how effective or ineffective the system is for encouraging a certain behavior and they are:

* The Problem Definition
* The Reward Conditions

I will use two examples to discuss this problem:

* First, the task of folding and putting in envelopes 40 letters.
* Second, the task of proofreading 20 articles.

### The Problem Definition

The first and foremost thing to look at is the problem itself. We are well-aware of human tendencies well before we even start to define a gamified system and so, I feel, it is the responsibility of the designer to be smart in defining the problem.

In the first example, the task itself consists of folding letters, and then putting them into envelopes. In this, a person may fold a letter in any way, any number of times, and may even just stuff it into the envelope. One way of reducing individuals from succumbing into bad habits is to redefine the problem to: fold letter, put in envelope and *seal the envelope*. Just this small change will now make it less likely for people to stuff an unfolded letter into the envelope as they themselves have to close it as well.

However, it is important to remember that one of the biggest motivators for gamified systems is autonomy, and over-defining a task will reduce it, thereby reducing the motivation to participate *at all*.

In the second case, there are multiple avenues by which the actual task can be avoided (read a few pages, read a few papers, etc.). So, its pretty clear, that this task has significant chances of being gamed.

Now, we come to the second factor that affects good behavior in a gamified system and how it can be leveraged to regulate it.

### The Reward Conditions

The rewards being offered can be divided into three major types:

* Participation-Contingent: The reward is awarded if the individual simply starts the task. In the first case, if the person, just does even one envelope, then he is given the reward. Similarly, in the second case, if the individual proofreads even one paper, he is given the award. This as can be seen will be least effective and promoting good behavior over long periods of time.
* Completion-Contingent: The award is given to the individual if he completes the task, irrespective of the quality of the results. That is, all envelopes filled with letters folded (however they may be) and all articles proofread, not looking at accuracy or errors missed.
* Performance-Contingent: The individual is rewarded if the quality of the work done is above a certain fixed threshold. None of the envelopes have any bulges anywhere and seal easily, and 18/20 articles are error-free. This is the most effective in preventing individuals from falling into bad behaviors within the system.

Therefore, it is important to think clearly about what the reward is and what is actually being rewarded.

### Summary

Be aware of the task and what it requires an individual to do, and also, what a reward encourages and what is the minimum that needs to be done to get it.

# Answer
> 0 votes
Yes.

The biggest step of any gamification process is the design phase. It is very easy to design a system that sounds good but actually encourages people to do things that are contrary to what the end goal is. It's interesting because this shows that gamification works - but also that it is a powerful tool that can cause a lot of problems if not used carefully.

Ideally you want people to "game" the system. That term is often a pejorative but if you do things right, gaming the system leads to the outcome you want.

I generally recommend people start small and build up rather than try and design a fully blown out system from the get go because most likely you will get a lot of things wrong and have to change large swaths midstream. It's easier to build up from some basics.

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Tags: motivation, gamification
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# Question
Title: Which human instincts do gamification systems appeal to?
As a Stack Exchange user, I spent quite a while thinking about how they managed to trick me into putting so much effort into it. Reputation, badges, etc., are all virtually useless, yet I put great effort into gaining them.

I've come to the conclusion that the system at least partially exploits that I am not an entirely rational being but instead rely on instincts, for example by exploiting the urge to collect badges. What other instincts do gamification systems appealed to?

# Answer
> 8 votes
In general, I believe gamification taps into 2 main human behaviours. Competition & Pride (in that order)

Competition *should* drive more engagement and Pride *should* help breed loyalty (b/c their stature is linked on your projects stature)

**1. Competition**

* contests (top editor of week)
* leaderboards
* featured users

**2. Pride**

* badges
* achievements
* unlocked features

Various systems balance these differently, and of course it's also very subjective but I believe that when people first sign up, it's about competition, and after they compete (and win trophies) it's about Pride.

*Update: OCT-25-2013*

The above 2 drivers really refer to those users who indeed buy-in and engage with your gamifications - But if you run a public website where buy-in rate could be considerably low you may have many users simply exploring. Below are some considerations to keep these users involved in your gamifications and hopefully convert them to competitive patrons.

**3. Exploration (Look Before Leap Users)**

* public profiles (customizations, badges)
* public leaderboards
* faq / knowledge-base for details on rewards

# Answer
> 7 votes
The most comprehensive analysis of human motivation to participate in gamified systems I've come across is the Octalysis framework by Yu-Kai-Chou

He highlights 8 Core Drives of Gamification and also gives a more holistic view of human motivation. People do not only play for the sake of winning and designing a system with only that perspective in mind will not yield very long term benefits.

* **Epic Meaning & Calling**

This is the Core Drive where a player believes that he is doing something greater than himself or he was “chosen” to play.
* **Development & Accomplishment**

This is the internal drive of making progress, developing skills, and eventually overcoming challenges.
* **Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback**

This is when users are addicted to a creative process where they have to repeatedly figure things out and try different combinations
* **Ownership & Possession**

This is the drive to “want” something. When a player feels ownership, she innately wants to make what she owns better and own even more.
* **Social Influence & Relatedness**

This drive incorporates all the social elements that drive people – including: mentorship, acceptance, social responses, companionship, as well as competition and envy.
* **Scarcity & Impatience**

This is the drive of wanting something because you can’t have it.
* **Curiosity & Unpredictability**

Generally, this is a harmless drive of wanting to find out what actually happens. Many people watch movies or read novels solely because of this drive.
* **Loss & Avoidance**

This drive is based upon the avoidance of something negative happening

You can find more on the framework here - http://www.yukaichou.com/gamification-examples/octalysis-complete-gamification-framework/

# Answer
> 3 votes
I read once that a sticky application needs to impact one of more of the seven deadly sins. Pride, Envy, and Greed and probably your main go to's when evaluating gamification. Some or all may apply to different people and systems to varying degrees.

**Pride** This is probably the main one that everything stems from. People love being seen as experts. They want to excel and win when it comes to competition. Standard gamification works great here.

**Envy** This is tied pretty closely to Pride. The desire to get what other people have is exacerbated by gamification, which enables people to feel envious of others and drive them to better performance.

**Greed** You've got some achievements - but do you have them all? Something drives people to collect and complete and accumulate and hoard. I'm not sure what it is but it does seem to be a fairly strong human trait.

# Answer
> 2 votes
### Overview

According to a **White Paper** that Bunch Ball came up with, Gamification appeals to the following human desires:

* Reward
* Status
* Achievement
* Self Expression
* Competition
* Altruism

Below are my thoughts on each one. The **White Paper** describes each one in more detail.

### Reward

People like getting rewarded. This is one of the most basic things gamification provides: rewards. On Stack Exchange sites, rewards take three forms:

1. Reputation Points
2. Badges
3. Privileges

Of these three, privileges are probably the most powerfully motivating reward.

Even though Reward is one of the most basic things about gamification, it is also one of the most abstract. Rewards aren't a stand-alone motivation. For a reward to be valued by the recipient, the reward itself must meet another desire. The desires that rewards meet are usually status, achievement, or competition.

### Status

Julius Caesar once said, "*I would rather be first in a small village in Gaul than second in command in Rome."* While not all would agree with such a sentiment (There's also the "Big fish in a big pond" adage), it does show the value many people put in status. People naturally want to be looked-up-to, to be considered higher up on the ladder, to feel like they have more ownership of a place. In Stack Exchange sites, status is conferred most obviously in the privileges one gains with the site by reaching certain reputation thresholds. When a user has enough reputation to edit almost anything and make new tags, that user will feel a deep satisfaction that he is high up in that site's community.

Status. It's powerful. Don't underestimate it!

### Achievement

Most people likes achieving things to show how great they are. On Stack Exchange sites, this is expressed as badges. If you are good at asking really useful questions that everyone else wants an answer to, you can get badges for good questions. You also get badges for writing good answers. If you achieve writing the answer most useful to the one who asked the question, you get +15 reputation when it's accepted.

Personally, the achievement I want most on Stack Overflow is to earn "tag" badges for technologies that I want the world to know I'm good at -- Java, for example.

### Self Expression

This one is probably not as central to Stack Exchange sites. The idea is, the more you participate, the more you can customize how you look on that site. For example, maybe a site will let you decorate your profile with custom bling or flare as a type of achievement or award.

### Competition

This one is probably the most obvious. When you see that you are rising up on the leaderboard, or that someone lower than you is starting to draw even with you, it stirs up your competitive spirit and urges you on to do better to maintain your lead or take the lead from someone else. (This can also lead to problems if not balanced out -- for example, not upvoting a good question or answer that was useful to you because you're trying to outpace the person who posted it. But that's another topic.)

### Altruism

The noblest of all our desires. Even without the virtual rewards, the competiton, and the excitement, people tend to feel good about themselves when they've helped out someone else or aided someone in becoming better at what they do. (This is also why I dislike seeing rude comments or answers from people with a know-it-all attitude on Stack Overflow towards people who are new to the site and didn't research or make their question specific enough. It suggests to me that the person making such a remark had little Altruism in them.)

Altruism also gives you motivation to upvote someone else's post if it's good -- that person helped you by posting a question or answer you needed, and you help them back with an upvote.

### Interactions of Desires and Mechanics.

Here is a diagram from the **White Paper** that shows how these desires and the the mechanics of gamification typically interact.

The green dots signify the primary desire a particular game mechanic fulfills, and the blue dots show the other areas that it affects.

Link to the White Paper:
**http://www.bunchball.com/sites/default/files/downloads/gamification101.pdf**

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Tags: behaviorism, gamification
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# Question
Title: How can we determine an appropriate rate of decay for our scoring algorithms?
We build scoring algorithms for different customers in an enterprise environment. Typically they tend to measure most goals in either weekly, monthly, or quarterly intervals. We use a scoring algorithm to score individuals based on performance relative to goals and other metrics.

We assume that the rate of decay should vary based on the goal interval they primarily use. Meaning, a company focused on weekly goals should have a faster decay rate than one focused on quarterly goals.

What's a good way to determine how quickly to begin the decay process based on past performance relative to metric interval length?

# Answer
The game League of Legends utilised an Elo Rating System which incorporated within it a decay system. The decay worked on a user score and reduced it dependent on both user performance and time. Here, user score was an indicator of skill level and was used in another formula to calibrate the actual scores they received from other in-game activities. So, while this system may not be directly applicable in a customer engagement scenario, its worth looking into first.

The system calculated score based on this formula:

`Ra_Old = Ra_New + K(Sa-Ea)`

The sytem had various category of players such as:

* Bronze: Between 0 and 1149 (Team: 0-1249) (Top 100%)
* Silver: Between 1150 and 1499 (Team: 1250-1449) (Top 68%-13%) Majority of Active Player Base
* Gold: Between 1500 and 1849 (Team: 1450-1649) (Top 13%-1.5%)
* Platinum: Between 1850 and 2199 (Team: 1650-1849) (Top 1.5%-0.1%)
* Diamond: 2200 and above (Team: 1850+) (Top 0.1%)

and varying decay rates based on certain player properties:

* Elo decayed at a rate of 50 Elo for Diamonds, 35 Elo for Platinums, 25 Elo for Golds, 10 Elo for Silver, and 0 Elo for Bronze for every 4 consecutive weeks of inactivity and every 7 days thereafter.
* For normal rating, inactivity was defined as no activity in any queue.
* For ranked rating, inactivity was defined as no activity in the specific queue
* Ranked decay only applied to people who were ranked above 1400 rating.
* The decay timer was reset after a game was played in that specific queue.

The major changes that will be required in the case of performance scoring will be:

* Less aggressive scoring than in this system
* Decay rates calibrated to maintain a bell curve distribution centred depending on the level of competition you wish to achieve.
* A bell curve spread such that the leaders are not out of reach of the majority of players as that may end up demotivating the users.
> 3 votes

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Tags: performance, io-psychology, gamification
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title: Are points still a relevant mechanic?

text:
# Question
Title: Are points still a relevant mechanic?
When talking about gamification people's mind almost immediately go to points. It is probably the quintessential mechanic.

However, thinking of games, it's no longer heavily used. It's still in use but doesn't seem to be a main driver in most games. While people may have cared about high scores in Pac-Man or Donkey Kong, many modern games either don't use points at all or have them but players seem to not really pay too much attention to them.

Have their been any studies regarding the efficacy of using points in a gamified system or their performance against any alternatives?

# Answer
> 3 votes
Hmm. It's possibly I'm misunderstanding, in which case I will happily retract my answer. But does *gamification* really apply to, well, games? I thought the idea behind gamification was to take user engagement elements present in games and add them into non-gaming situations to increase user retention/satisfaction etc.

So I would say that if you're making a game, you're not using gamification. You're making a game, which inherently has some of these characteristics. After all it's called gamification because the concepts were borrowed from games, right?

That said, to answer your question, I think points are still valuable in games when they're used as currency. When you can use the points to *get* stuff, that adds a whole new level of value.

# Answer
> 2 votes
The level of gamification in games has risen far beyond what we have applied in other real world situations, which is why gamification has such great potential. Much of the point systems have been masked by things like a superior avatar, indirectly showing your proficiency of the game.

To answer your questions, I am unsure of studies looking at points in a gamified system.

I am a healthcare professional and a major issue with health is compliance. Health and fitness apps like FitBit and Nike+ use points to a very great extent. I believe using a point system is the easiest way to gamify a system, even if it is for the short term, which might be enough to get someone jump started on being healthy in the long run.

# Answer
> 2 votes
I disagree with the premise the question.

Some of the most popular casual games in the world use the classic points systems that have been used since the 90s. Angry Birds, Plants vs Zombies, Bejeweled, Subway Surfer are played by millions of players worldwide and they all use a classical points system. Also, many users regularly share their scores on social networking platforms and compare/compete with others. So, points systems are not on their way out as far as the non-hardcore gaming audience is concerned.

Secondly, game systems are far less prone to change than gamified systems. Stack Exchange gets updates and changes every few weeks. Games do not undergo significant changes for months or years. This means that points as a metric serves a very different role in gamified systems than in games.

In gamified systems, points can be a metric for various things ranging from participation, skill, engagement, quality of participation, social status, connections and more (discussed in Gamification By Design, Chapter 3). The same cannot be said for conventional modern games.

Third, one of the reasons for the success of gamified systems at present is the familiarity with game mechanics that the 80s and 90s generation had. To be specific, points systems, since they were the one consistent game mechanic in that era of games along with levels. This familiarity is what makes adoption of gamified systems easy for most audiences, and hence, they serve as more than just a performance metric.

> Have their been any studies regarding the efficacies of points in a gamified system or their performance against any alternatives?

While there are implementations of systems that do not use points, there does not seem to be any research on the effectiveness of points systems as a whole.

# Answer
> 1 votes
Points are a method, and as with everything else in life, there are trends and differences of appeal/use for different populations.

Points provide a way to clarify value. And they are used to show relative importance between actions in a system.

As a method it's very effective: users can quickly compare assigned value to specific events, and then choose how they invest their time to get what they want.

If the point system becomes too complex, people can become disinterested: the effectiveness of representing value dissipates (people can't associate likely events with points). And maybe that's why it's trending down in some games right now, because the point systems aren't simplified enough.

A good comparison is between Mario points and SE points:

Assume that you get Mario points for ending a level quicker, jumping and hitting the end flag highest, and for killing each Oomba.

That's simple. You know that it rewards diligence and dexterity.

Now look at SE. How do people get points? The least random way seems to be up-votes. But I know that those votes can come from various people, some smart, some immoral, etc.

The system in Mario is much simpler than in SE.

Summary: points are a method; in principle it has value; must be applied correctly to avoid complexity that significantly diminishes the value.

# Answer
> 1 votes
The only reason I'm answering this right now is for points. (oooh, so meta).

But seriously, StackExchange is built on the relevance of points. Most users would post some things even without points, but almost all of them answer quick and easy questions primarily for the points (whether they admit it or not). That is why the FGITW (fastest gun in the west) problem is such a problem on SO.

# Answer
> 0 votes
I disagree with the Premise of the Question.

Points are essential for measurement - which is at the core of Gamification.

While Badges are simple YES or NO, Points give the ability to measure stuff at a continuum. Points also form the basis of Leader-boards, Levels, XP, etc...

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Tags: performance, gamification
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# Question
Title: Are there specific game mechanics that correlate with addictions?
Are there specific game mechanics that have a high correlation with addictions or with the characteristics of addictive behavior?

Should such mechanics be avoided or can they be used with other checks in place?

# Answer
> 7 votes
This article identifies the key gameplay elements (of Candy Crush Saga) that keep players engaged and excited for the next level. A few key quotes are:

> Players experience Beginner’s Luck when they start the early levels, which allow them to easily get three stars for matching candies and crushing them.

This is essentially enticing a user with a quick reward (e.g. an easy to earn badge) to quickly get them **hooked on the idea of earning more.**

> This is the Free Lunch that makes them feel like they are **getting bonuses due in part to their performance.**

These could be rewards unlocked as they progress (e.g access to moderator tools on SE).

> a Leaderboard which includes where you rank amongst your friends.

Relatively self-explanatory, but being compared to other users (particularly friends) can be a major motivator to maintain bragging rights.

> Last Mile Drive where the player **keeps on playing because they're so close to the goal** and they've already invested too much time and energy in the game to quit.

This is an important one in terms of addiction; once you've drawn a user in with other methods, it can get to the point where they have to keep going or else feel they have wasted their time. Of course, with gamification there *isn't* an end level; you want your application to be used indefinitely.

With all the above said, I think the important thing is not *what* you implement, but rather, **how** you implement it. Try to avoid badges such as 200 consecutive logins, and use analytics to watch out for any addictive behaviour.

# Answer
> -1 votes
Like drugs, games activate the reward center of the brain, and this in turn releases dopamine, making you feel good. That's what causes any addiction.

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Tags: gamification, addiction
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# Question
Title: Are there physical techniques to relieve eye strain?
I asked a question about eye strain Does looking into a mirror relieve eye strain in a similar way to looking at distant objects?.

Are there any physical exercises or techniques that can help to alleviate eye strain?

Is there any evidence to support this, if so please provide citations?

# Answer
> 2 votes
**EYE RELAXATION**

1. Sit comfortably, close your eyes and cover them with your palms. Be sure that both palms are cupped and do not press on the eyes. Imagine the blackness getting darker and darker. Rest in this manner for five minutes at a time, at least thrice a day.
2. Stand upright in front of an open window, preferably overlooking greenery. Keep your feet a foot apart, let your arms hang loosely at the sides and be as relaxed as possible. Gently oscillate your body from side to side like a pendulum.
3. Raise your heels alternately, keeping toes firmly on the ground. Gently swing the whole body to and fro without bending at the waist or hips. Start the exercise with eyes open. Swing like this for a minute and then close your eyes gently, while still swinging. Imagine the apparent movement of the window as clearly as possible.
4. Open the eyes after a minute and continue this exercise for 10 minutes, alternately closing and opening the eyes. Repeat this exercise at least thrice a day.
5. Close your eyes and, facing the sun, move your head slowly from side to side. Sun rays cause a rushing of blood to the eyes, relaxing optical muscles and nerves. Do this exercise for 10 minutes thrice a day.
6. Take a handful of cold water and, bending forward, splash your eyes rapidly, several times. Do not forget to hold water in your mouth while splashing eyes as this cools them down to their nerve ends and freshens them a great deal.

**EXERCISES FOR EYE MUSCLES**

1. Sit erect in a comfortable position. Keep your head and neck as relaxed as possible. Gently move your eyes up and down 10 times. The motion should be very slow, uniform and effortless, without moving the head or neck. Let your eyes see as far up and as far down as possible without causing strain. As the eye muscles relax, you will be able to look lower and higher. Repeat this exercise five to six times in a sitting. You can add to the relaxation by resting your eyes in your palms in-between.
2. Sitting in the same posture as before, move your eyes from side to side. Repeat 10 times. The motion should be very slow, uniform and effortless without moving the head or neck. As in the earlier exercise, you will able to move them farther and more easily with practice. Repeat this exercise five to six times.
3. Move your eyes gently and slowly around in a circle five times, alternating between clockwise and anti-clockwise motions. Rest for a second and repeat the process five times. Remember that it should be done slowly and effortlessly.
4. Sit on a terrace where you can see far off objects on the horizon. Look at a distant object and then look at the tip of your nose. Look from one to the other object 10 times. Close your eyes for a second and resume the exercise. Repeat five times and rest your eyes.

The following exercises may be used to alleviate eyes strain

```
Bhastrika Pranayam (Breath holding exercise)– 2 to 5 minutes.
Kapalbhati Pranayam (Skull shining breath exercise).
Bahya Pranayam (External breath exercise).
Anuloma – Viloma Pranayama (Alternate nostril breathing exercise).

```

All these can be found here

**Yoga**\- The name popular in West is actually a derivation from the word **YOG** (which is a Sanskrit word with meaning '**to combine together**'). Yog means to combine one's being with the Supreme Power. Sage Patanjali (Pronounced as Paa+ ta + n + ja + li) brought together postures and techniques of breathing together and created Yog Sutra. (The thread of Yog).

This actually transcended from the ideology that a healthy person can understand the meaning of God and compassion better. Therefore, it aims at relieving a man of the diseases so that a healthy body can provide shelter to a healthy soul.

But Yog is trying to handle a Lion. It should be practiced under the guidance of a learned Yog teacher...

# Answer
> -1 votes
Here's a good set of eye exercises, and a quote from its intro:

> When your eyes get tired and you start feeling the eye strain, but still have some work to do, use the Exercises For Eyes. Regular eye exercises can help you to improve eyesight and prevent eye diseases such as nearsightedness and farsightedness.

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Tags: vision, eye-movement, health-psychology
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title: Are colors real?

text:
# Question
Title: Are colors real?
We know that we distinguish colors when they fall on our photo receptors in our eyes and neurons pass its signals to our brain to recognise them as the specific colors. How accurate is it? For example, is there any experiment which can *measure* whether the color that we see is the real color that is reflected by that object?

I am thinking in terms of relativity. We might be interpreting a color red as red simply because our eyes and neurons and brain interpret it as red. If this is the case there might be more colors than primary colors can make up which our eyes cant interpret it as a different color itself.

My question is, **is there any experiment which can tell us the color we see is the only and real color which is reflected by the object?**

# Answer
> 5 votes
> is there any experiment which can tell us the color we see is the only and real color which is reflected by the object?

The answer whether there have been experiments identifying frequency of light with color perception is yes. Innumerable if we start with identifying the colors of the rainbow, which are one to one frequency correlated. That is the way I interpret as "real" identification of frequency to color perception.

Here is an article that sets up correspondences between frequencies and color perception, which does depend on the cells of the retina.

The majority of people agree to the colors of the rainbow, some see more definitions and color blind people see less or even only grey.

# Answer
> 13 votes
Usually, for something to be 'real', we want it in some reasonable manner to be objective or (because that is extremely vague) at least very consistent across subjective observers. Unfortunately, colour does not satisfy this.

1. **Physical basis.** As explained very well by @Stop\_forgetting\_my\_account: Physics does not have colour, it just has a continuous spectrum of wavelengths. Even when you look at the sensitivity of the 3 types of cones in the retina it is not discrete, but continuous. The categories of colours (i.e. "that's red", "that's blue") are produced by perception and these discrete-ish categories form the basis of colour qualia. Scientists can study these categories by asking participants if various stimuli feel like the same colour.
2. **Biological variation.** As I mentioned in the previous point, most people have 3 types of cones, and a typical colour-matching experiment need 3 dials to tune a colour to be indistinguishable (by them) from one they see presented to them. However, there are colourblind individuals where 1 (or more) of the cone types are not expressed; such individuals only need two knobs to match a presented colour, and thus they will identify certain colours as the same though most people would experience them as different colours. Finally, there is the rare condition of tetrochromacy (much more common among women than men) where an individual has 4 different types of cone cells. For most of these individuals, this does not result in being able to reliably distinguish colours that trichromats perceive as the same, and they are called non-functional tetrochromats. However, there have been reported cases of functional tetrochromats; such individuals are able to reliably distinguish colours that would be identical to trichromats.
3. **Cross-cultural variation.** Regier & Kay (2009; see also reference within) discuss how these arbitrary boundaries between colours are language-dependent. Thus, the nuances of colour do not meet the psychological definition of a human universal even within people with the same biology.
4. **Intra-personal variation.** The buck doesn't stop there. Gilbert and colleagues (2006) showed that the language dependence is supported in the right visual field (across from the 'language center' of the brain) but not the left. In other words, when I present colours in one part of your visual field, you experience them one way, and when I present them to the other, you then experience them in a fundamentally different way. This isn't an artifact of some physical property of your eyes, but of how your brain perceives colours (i.e. feedback from higher-order parts of the brain).

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## Related posts and references

# Answer
> 7 votes
It appears that throughout your question you are touching on multiple questions and topics. I will address them in a series of quotes and responses, beginning with the title:

> Are colors real?

They are not physical things. Colors are a form of *perception* (an abstraction). They exist in your head. In physics the perception of colors is caused by light waves; a form of radiation.

> We know that we distinguish colors when they fall on our photo receptors in our eyes and neurons pass its signals to our brain to recognise them as the specific colors. How accurate is it?

Color perception is subjective. It is affected by all the matter that would affect the interpretation of colors - your eyes, nervous system, and brain. Accuracy would require a benchmark to weigh relativity from. How can you benchmark the difference between your perception of colors and something else's perception of color when there is no way to record how much somebody perceives color? You cannot say that Bill sees this much redness, that much green, and 5% less purple than normal without a strong benchmark.

> ...There might be more colors than primary colors can make up which our eyes cant interpret it as a different color itself.

Because colors are defined as combinations of light waves at certain frequencies, what you're suggesting is that there are more combinations of light waves than what humans can see - everything beyond the visible light spectrum.

> My question is, is there any experiment which can tell us the color we see is the only and real color which is reflected by the object?

There is only one actual color (aka combination of light waves) from a certain object that you will see at any given time. If, however, you are asking if the color you perceive is the color you should perceive, then the answer is no. You can't without a very strong benchmark to base your observations upon and a method for determining the accuracy of color interpretation in a given organism (because it requires a way to measure all the components that make up or affect perception)

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Tags: vision, sensation, color
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title: Audio Inculcation and Learning

text:
# Question
Title: Audio Inculcation and Learning
Suppose I have an audio file of a lecture of a professor explaining something to be learned - a physics concept for example, and I listen to the audio file over and over again, much like how people listen to music while working.

How effective is audio inculcation - listening to an audio file over and over again, even though I'm doing something else and not actively listening to the audio - for learning? How does this affect the subconscious?

Can this tactic be used to change behavior: For example, recording a voice of saying "Do not go on Facebook. Facebook is bad.," and listening it to it over and over again, much like one would do with music.

# Answer
> 2 votes
This LOP diagram explains it pretty well, acoustic information is remembered moderately well as it has moderate processing done on it to help you remember it, but as you can see, semantic is the best way to remember stuff, something is semantic if it's understood well or has meaning to you, so the best way to learn it is it to make sure that you understand it!

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Tags: learning, educational-psychology, conditioning
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# Question
Title: Do cultures differ in the perception of emotions from body expression?
In their classic study, Ekman and Friesen (1971) identified seven facial expressions recognised by people universally across all cultures as depicting certain emotions: happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust and contempt. This is quite solid paradigm, but recent studies showed some cross cultural differences. For example Western Caucasian observers tend to look fairly evenly across all areas of the face, whereas Eastern Asian observers focus their attention toward the eye region (Jack et al., 2009).

> Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1971). Constants across cultures in the face and emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 17(2), 124-129.
>
> Jack, R. E., Blais, C., Scheepers, C., Schyns, P. G., & Caldara, R. (2009). Cultural confusions show that facial expressions are not universal. Current biology, 19(18), 1543-8.

While facial expression literature on the topic is vast, there is very limited research into cross cultural differences in perception of emotions from dynamic body expression. There have been some attempts to look at the static body posture (Kleinsmith et al., 2006), but virtually nothing on the dynamic body expressions. Ok, there is one study by Sneddon et al. (2011) but their stimuli contain facial expression together with movement, and I am specifically interested in the research where participants only view body movement/expression.

> Kleinsmith, A., De Silva, P. R., & Bianchi-Berthouze, N. (2006). Cross-cultural differences in recognizing affect from body posture. Interact. Comput., 18(6), 1371-1389.
>
> Elfenbein, H. (2003). Universals and Cultural Differences in Recognizing Emotions. Current Directions in Psychological, 159-164.
>
> Sneddon, I., McKeown, G., McRorie, M., & Vukicevic, T. (2011). Cross-cultural patterns in dynamic ratings of positive and negative natural emotional behaviour. PloS one, 6(2).

**Is there any (published) research that has been done on comparing cross cultural differences in the perception of emotions from body movement?**

# Answer
The following article **PERCEPTION OF EMOTIONS FROM FACES AND BODIES AND THE INFLUENCE OF CONTEXT** by Charlotte Sinke (I have quoted the aims and outline from) examines in depth interpretation of dynamic body language and cross cultural differences. It discusses the availability of studies with static images, facial expressions and voice and the relationship between these in perception and cross cultural differences. Although this doesn't examine a large range of cultures, it's interesting and provides a good resource of cited articles.

> **Research aims and thesis outline**
>
> Previous emotion research has mainly focused on the perception of facial expressions. Only in recent years, bodily expressions are being studied. This has been done by using pictures of isolated bodies. However, in our daily life, bodies are not static and do not appear in isolation. Therefore, the stimuli used in Chapter 5 and 6 are dynamic. There is reason to believe that the perception of faces and bodies might be influenced by the context it is in. This can be the physical environment, the culture, or other people. The question therefore is how a face or a body, being emotional or not, is processed differently in specific contexts. Since everything that we do involves in some way other people, it is interesting to find out how the brain responds to an interaction between two people and whether it notices subtle differences in body language that can indicate whether a threat is going on. A final question was how attention can play a role in this perception.
> Across cultures the expression of basic emotions is remarkably similar. However, emotion perception can be influenced by other factors, like the (social) context. Whether people from different cultures are differently influenced by this will be discussed in Chapter 2. More specifically, Dutch and Chinese students were tested on whether they show differences in the recognition of facial but also bodily expressions and whether they are differently influenced by context. The studies described in this chapter are purely behavioural.
> Moving away from cultural differences, in Chapter 3 the influence of context on face processing is investigated using fMRI. Chapter 4 elaborates on the data from this study. Here, the activation of extrastriate body area is discussed in relation to its response to threatening scenes specifically.
> The study performed in Chapter 5 moves from static pictures to dynamic movies of two people interacting. This interaction was either threatening or teasing. A difference is made in whether participants actively try to guess what goes on in each situation or perform an unrelated task. Chapter 6 expands on perceiving threatening social interactions by using two different attention levels and letting the participant focus on only one of the two protagonists (always one of them being angry at the other) in each movie.
> Finally, in Chapter 7, the insights gathered from the preceding chapters are summarized.

Charlotte Sinke

PDF

Interesting quote:

> *“Every phase of movement, every small transference of weight, every single gesture of any part of the body reveals some feature of … inner life.” ~ Rudolf Laban ~*
> 2 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, emotion, cross-cultural-psychology
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# Question
Title: Why do we anchor our happiness to short term situational comparisons rather than large scale events?
Why does our happiness seem to be most affected by recent, short term happenings rather than the high level trends of our lives?

For example, a person has begun their life in a very humble or even disadvantaged position: poor education, a lack of parental involvement, and an exposure to drug addiction. This same person, through through their own fortitude manages, to change their life trajectory so that they have a comfortable job, a home in a safe part of town, and many loving friendships. Why then, despite having overcome such odds, are they still likely to be happy or unhappy based on small, localized daily situations, like getting into a disagreement at work or having a friend cancel plans.

To phrase the question a different way, why do large scale personal achievements often have less impact on our moment to moment satisfaction than whatever we're experiencing *right now?*

# Answer
> 4 votes
Research on well-being has explored happiness from different temporal perspectives.

Much of the literature looks at how people respond to measures of life satisfaction, quality of life, and measures of tendencies to experience positive and negative emotion. These tend to reflect longer term evaluations and emotional experiences. This shows up in for example, the relatively stability that individuals show on such measures. For example Fujita and Diener (2005) examined longitudinal data over 17 years and found substantial correlations in life satisfaction over that period of time.

There are a variety of concepts such as the hedonic treadmill and set point theory which propose that people have a general tendency when it comes to well-being. General daily experiences can lead people to deviate from their set-point, but that with the exception of a few extreme events (e.g., divorce, major trauma, etc.) people tend to return to their set point.

That said, there is another line of research that looks more at the moment to moment affective experience. Such research has often employed experience sampling methods (e.g., Kuppens et al, 2010) and this clearly shows more of what you are talking about: i.e., the way that mood fluctuates in relation to the little daily hassles and pleasures that we experience.

One perspective is that the global assessment and momentary moods serve different functional purposes. Momentary moods help to guide our response in particular situations. For example, a stressful situation may call for increased vigilance or attention. An experience which elicits negative emotions maybe one to avoid. In contrast, global assessments of life satisfaction are much broader and all encompassing and may help to guide us in our broader life plans.

### References

* Fujita, F., & Diener, E. (2005). Life satisfaction set point: stability and change. Journal of personality and social psychology, 88(1), 158. PDF
* Kuppens, P., Oravecz, Z., & Tuerlinckx, F. (2010). Feelings change: accounting for individual differences in the temporal dynamics of affect. Journal of personality and social psychology, 99(6), 1042. PDF

# Answer
> 0 votes
Suppose a man plants a tree hoping that one day he would rest under the tree, eating fruits along with his wife and kids. He tells himself:- I'll be very happy that day.

Now, once he tells himself that he "WILL" be happy, his happiness gets postponed. Now every time he seeks pleasure in some other thing, he starts wishing- "Had my plant grown by now, I would have seated in its shade and enjoy this ever more."

After days and days spent waiting for that specific day, there are fleeting moments of love, affection and happiness that he misses out.

Now one day, he is finally sitting under that tree, eating fruits with his wife and child. His dream has come true. But this time if his children misbehave with him, his dream setup will cripple and he'll mourn why is his special moment being ruined? Therefore his long term goal didn't bring about happiness. The tree brought comfort and fruits. When kids misbehaved, man was still seated with comfort under the tree. But whether that comfort brings happiness or not, that comes from the heart of the person.

Human being strives to perfection, and perfection does not exist. Therefore one who wants to be happy should give up on his drive for perfection. Perfect setting doesn't bring about happiness

Instead of delaying his happiness, if that man had thought that, together, I and my family sow the seed, let us celebrate together. Then, when the seedling originates, he should be happy. And finally when tree would grow, he must seek pleasure that it has grown.

Happiness isn't mechanical, generally its aspects are:- physical(first), emotional(second) and spiritual(third) in that order of relevance.

A person should set his agenda, his goals because they give comfort. Happiness is what person gives to himself.

SUMMARY:- Therefore grow a tree, (it's an environmental bliss), sit under it, enjoy fruits but don't delay your happiness. Goals of life should facilitate happiness, should not refrain man from being happy till that goal completes. Happiness like every other wonderful things in the world, come in small packages. They are floating around you. Grab them and have fun

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Tags: social-psychology, emotion, personality, well-being
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# Question
Title: How to interpret the meaning of "crossed arms"?
If my conversational partner (in western europe) crosses his arms, while I am talking;

How can I determine if he is:

* showing **signs of rejection** and/or detachment
* or if he chose this position for **another reason**? (habit, reserved personality, low self-consciousness or just hiding a stain on his shirt...)

**Are there clues that can help me to interpret his posture correctly?**

# Answer
Crossing arms may not necessarily mean detachment or rejection. However, more often than not, that's the usual implication. It can mean different things for different people and, furthermore, in different situations.

Some people cross arms to make themselves secure, perhaps when they are intellectually or physically overshadowed. Or maybe when they are pushed a little on the emotional front or on areas out of their comfort zone. In short, it may be their way of putting their guard up.

Others may conceive it as a deep and professional expression of taking interest in the conversation, often marked by the seriousness and context of the conversation. However on a contrasting ground, disinterest in the conversation is also a stimulus to crossing arms.

Crossing arms is also used as a sign to display prowess and as a challenge, in case the superiority of an individual is questioned.

Funnily enough, hiding the stain on the shirt seems a reasonable explanation too..:D
> 3 votes

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Tags: social-psychology, personality, communication
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# Question
Title: Is implicit and explicit memory a useful distinction?
In principle I understand the distinction. Implicit memory is not consciously recollected but has an automatic character i.e. while I'm solving a task in math, I'm automatically using the concept of numbers and maybe even counting which I have stored in my memory. Explicit memory on the other hand is the conscious recollection of particular bits of memory, like explicitly counting up to ten or maybe remembering my birthday.

What I'm wondering is this: Isn't this distinction somewhat arbitrary? Even if I consciously use a certain piece of memory to solve a task, isn't it the case that I still don't know how I manage to access this particular memory? And is this even only about memory? To me it seems that everything can be stored in some way (how I breathe, my birthday and the range of things I do when taking a shower) and isn't that the only type of memory we have? Shouldn't the distinction then be about how we use the things we have memorized? I mean is there evidence that implicit memory is stored in a structurally different way than explicit memory? Or am I focussing on the wrong question?

I'm asking this question out of pure interest as a cognitive linguist who doesn't have much to do with memory right now.

# Answer
> 3 votes
No, the distinction is real, not arbitrary. Implicit and explicit memory show different hallmark behavioral characteristics. A good overview of the difference between explicit and implicit memory is available in the MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. The wikipedia page on implicit memory also has some useful information.

Perhaps the most important piece of evidence we have for this distinction is not behavioral, but from a double dissociation in neuropsychology: some brain damaged patients have impaired implicit memory but intact explicit memory, whereas others have impaired explicit memory but intact implicit memory (e.g. Gabrieli et al, 1995). This is possible because implicit and explicit memory are thought to have separate neural substrates (e.g. Squire, 1992).

There are a lot of questions in your second paragraph and I'm not quite sure I follow. But to be clear, implicit/explicit memory is not the *only* distinction one can make on memory systems. It is one of many.

> Gabrieli, J. D., Fleischman, D. A., Keane, M. M., Reminger, S. L., & Morrell, F. (1995). Double dissociation between memory systems underlying explicit and implicit memory in the human brain. Psychological Science, 6(2), 76-82.
>
> Squire, L. R. (1992). Memory and the hippocampus: a synthesis from findings with rats, monkeys, and humans. Psychological review, 99(2), 195. Chicago

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Tags: memory, long-term-memory, working-memory
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# Question
Title: Why do people talk fast in presentations when nervous?
I was at a professional development seminar today, and the presenter, while being interesting and knowing his subject admitted to being nervous and was speaking very fast. I know I do this when I am giving presentations, despite knowing my audience and my subject.

Why is it that a lot of people will speak faster when nervous?

# Answer
> 8 votes
I am experienced presenter, my job is to show presentation, organize educations and trainings to different people, with different personality traits in different situation. Until now I collected more the 700 hours of presentation and more then 120 hours of presentation education. In the beginning I had also that problem, but I overcome it by exercise. Now I am completely relaxed when present.

In my opinion cause of this is social anxiety in self presentation: Here is one research, but I am sure you can find several more if you look to literature section.

Social anxiety, self-presentation, and the self-serving bias in causal attribution \[1980\].

Also people get aroused because if they think that other judge them, especially if they do not present a lot... here is model how people conclude others judge them

Mood and judgement: The affect infusion model (AIM) \[1995\]

EDIT: In this case 'fast talking' is indicator of public speaking fear, so you cant using 'public speaking fear' as cause of 'fast talking' because it will be circular definition. Here is a try to explain this in S-O-R paradigm:

State anxiety patterns for public speaking and the behavior inhibition system \[2009\]

I don't know exactly what is happening in brain but I assume that something is happening in giri of the hippocampus (working memory) which is overloaded with information of judging environment and accommodate presentation, but also have significant role in speech production.

# Answer
> 2 votes
When speaker lacks confidence about the full-scope of what they present, they stuff in as much as can be spoken to ensure they've covered any 'possible loose ends'.

Lack-of-Confidence ensures the speaker will never have enough, and will jam in more.

A confident speaker understands the ***core*** of their topic. They can speak it in *1* sentence (or 5). Thus, all other speech is *elaboration*, not *foundation*.

# Answer
> 1 votes
It has been disproven that an aroused brain "thinks faster", but an aroused brain perceives time as passing slower. Thus, an aroused speaker would be inclined to believe that they're speaking too slowly and thus speak faster to compensate.
Even outside of oral presentation, I find this tendency to act faster to be evident when I am playing a first-person shooter video-game and my view (and to a more unfortunate extent, my aim) whips about when I'm having an adrenaline rush, and how a scared animal will act similarly.

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Tags: social-psychology, communication, anxiety
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# Question
Title: Why are most popular humans pets carnivores?
Most popular pets are cats, and dogs. They are all carnivores. Few people have pigs as pets. More commonly, people eat pigs.

* **Why are some of the most common human housepets carnivores?**
* **Does this preference indicate anything more general about the human condition?** (for example, do humans love violent beings?)

Note: Cows, horses, and rabbits are cattles, not pets. You don't develop emotional bonding with them. People would scream when dogs are being eaten in China. People don't scream when pigs are being eaten everywhere.

I am talking about the **most popular pets that people form bonds with**.

I am just wondering that perhaps we use cats in mutually beneficial ways. That is why we love them. Also cats and dogs would retaliate if we hit them.

We uses cows in parasitic ways (as food). That's why we don't love cows. Perhaps a good strategy to be loved is to be reasonably violent? That's what I want to know.

Or perhaps humans love those who kill for them (like our soldiers?). Cats and dogs kill for us or help us kill. That's why we evolve loving them as our "allies". Is it possible?

NB: I am well aware that cats are very cute. I prefer rational explanation I can easily verified without referring to some vague emotions.

# Answer
> 7 votes
Iguanas are not carnivores.

Look at it historically: we have had useful animals around us for thousands of years: dogs to help hunting, cats to keep vermin away.

Other non-carnivorous pets was at some point - and still are - domesticated for food (rabbits, guinea pigs). Pigs are a gray area: they will pretty much eat anything, meat included. Then you have gerbils, rats, mice etc. All little rodents; some omnivores, but mainly herbivores.

Sheep, goats, buffalo, cows, horses are all a little too big for pets; though some people - on farms - might have a pet sheep. Miniature horses have been trained as "seeing-eye-horses". There are some obvious reasons for this: the training of the horse may take a little longer than with a dog, but they live a lot longer.

Birds have not been domesticated for very long; some birds of prey have and can be trained as hunters; falconry. This is a working bird, doing what it will do in the wild. Parrots and other "domesticated" birds will easily suffer as pets, not matter how big an aviary you might build. They need to be part of a flock, they get easily frustrated, alone and sick.

Reptiles are not so common as pets. This, I think, is partly because they are associated with slithering, slimy things. We prefer our pets to be mammals. They are closer to us in the evolutionary tree, they are easier to "understand", they have been domesticated for much, much longer. And their babies are cute beyond measure.

To me, this question is over-psychologising the historical evolution. Humans do not necessarily love "violent" creatures. We like creatures that can either be useful (hunting dogs) or entertaining and understandable (kittens - who can not love them?).

And. Animals are not "violent" per se.

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Tags: social-psychology, evolution
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# Question
Title: How long does it take to refocus after context switching?
Context switching has been highlighted for the toll it takes on productivity at great length, particularly by people who work in software and project management.

Are there any psychology/neuroscience studies documenting how long it usually takes a person to refocus on a task after someone is interrupted?

# Answer
As part of my PhD within the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), one of the things I am trying to support the user in is *multitasking*. This might be relevant for you since interruptions and multitasking are highly interlinked. I'll refer you to some of the key papers I encountered during my background research, including some on the effects of interruptions.

You are asking *"how long it usually takes a person to refocus"*. In order to answer that question fully you'd need to define 'refocus' better, but there are some papers on some effects of interruptions.

### Multitasking and activities

One of the main referenced papers on multitasking within HCI is “Constant, Constant, Multi-tasking Craziness”: Managing Multiple Working Spheres by Victor M. González and Gloria Mark, 2004. They introduced the concept of 'working spheres' representing higher-level contexts, which *"people spend about 12 minutes in \[...\] before they switch to another"*. I assume you are interested in the effects on these higher-level context switches, rather than low level tasks as part of these contexts. This is an important first difference to keep in mind when reading up on multitasking/interruptions. Following up on citations of this paper will lead you to a lot of papers which might interest you.

### Differences in interruptions

Not all interruptions are alike and not all interruptions are even disruptive. Monk et al. (2008) note *"the time to resume task goals after an interruption varied depending on the duration and cognitive demand of interruptions"*.

Some characteristics that have been observed to affect primary task performance:

**Interruption**

* Duration
* Cognitive demand
* Similarity to primary task
* Complexity
* Relatedness to primary task

**State when interrupted**

* Control over interruption onset
* Availability of primary task retrieval cues
* Cognitive load (Bailey, B. P., & Iqbal, S. T., 2008)

For references to the relevant papers and a lengthy discussion see Monk et al., 2008.

### Effects of interruptions

Studies concluded that people performed post-interruption tasks **more slowly** compared to pre-interruption performance. They also found that people made **more errors** in post-interruption performance. (Kreifeldt, J. G., & McCarthy, M. E., 1981) (Gillie, T., & Broadbent, D., 1989)

However, as Monk et al. also describe in their review there have been contradictory findings. For example, in a more recent paper by Gloria Mark et al., 2008 *"people completed interrupted tasks in less time with no difference in quality"*. They suggest people compensate for interruptions by working faster, at a price: experiencing **more stress**, higher frustration, time pressure and effort.

More relevant to your question, although described in a lot more detail by Monk et al. (2008) the graphs near the end of the paper show a **resumption time of about 1250-1700 ms** depending on the interruption duration (5-60s). These, however, seem to reflect much smaller (low-level) context switches.

### Discussion

My intuition (and some contradicting findings) tells me it's hard to generalize these results. I hope by providing this overview you have a broader picture of the scope of interruptions. I suggest you start by looking into Monk C. A. et al.'s paper (2008). It provides a nice overview and reports on the resumption time results mentioned earlier, relating them to memory models which might interest you. If you follow up on citations and find something interesting, please keep us up to date! :)

Again, it is still important to be concrete about what 'resumption times' are. I don't feel like there is one official definition, and rather think it's whatever researchers decide to measure in their methodology. I've done some experiments myself measuring resumption time as the time needed to re-establish the working context needed to execute the task being switched to, using the Windows 7 window manager (Jeuris & Bardram, 2016). Although this sometimes only took people around 2 s, others were totally overwhelmed with the many resources open due to multitasking and it took them over a minute.

<sub> González, V. M., & Mark, G. (2004, April). Constant, constant, multi-tasking craziness: managing multiple working spheres. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 113-120). ACM.
Monk, C. A., Trafton, J. G., & Boehm-Davis, D. A. (2008). The effect of interruption duration and demand on resuming suspended goals. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 14(4), 299.
Gillie, T., & Broadbent, D. (1989). What makes interruptions disruptive? A study of length, similarity, and complexity. Psychological Research, 50(4), 243-250.
Kreifeldt, J. G., & McCarthy, M. E. (1981). Interruption as a test of the user-computer interface.
Bailey, B. P., & Iqbal, S. T. (2008). Understanding changes in mental workload during execution of goal-directed tasks and its application for interruption management. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 14(4), 21.
Mark, G., Gudith, D., & Klocke, U. (2008, April). The cost of interrupted work: more speed and stress. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 107-110). ACM.
Jeuris, S., & Bardram, J. E. (2016). Dedicated workspaces: Faster resumption times and reduced cognitive load in sequential multitasking. Computers in Human Behavior, 62, 404-414. </sub>
> 16 votes

# Answer
From the Wall Street Journal:

> Office workers are interrupted—or self-interrupt—roughly every three minutes, academic studies have found, with numerous distractions coming in both digital and human forms. Once thrown off track, **it can take some 23 minutes for a worker to return to the original task**, says Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, who studies digital distraction.

Lots of wider reading around interruption science (the name for the aforementioned Gloria Mark's field of study) on Wikipedia. She has lots of papers on multitasking and interruption, but I can't find which one gives the 23 minute figure attributed to her by the WSJ. She also mentions this figure in a Fast Company interview.
> 6 votes

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Tags: measurement, performance, attention
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# Question
Title: What's the difference between repression and suppression?
These two terms are closely related, and thus easily confusable as synonymous. Is there a difference?

# Answer
Repression is the **unconscious** exclusion of impulses, desires, or fears from the conscious mind, while suppression is the **conscious** exclusion of similar thoughts.
> 4 votes

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Tags: terminology
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title: How to gamify a mentoring activity?

text:
# Question
Title: How to gamify a mentoring activity?
I am working on an app where we are aiming to develop peer to peer training. How could we gamify the learning process to make it more fun?

# Answer
> 2 votes
For starters, I think it's a good idea to provide rewards for both students and mentors. As an example: Mentors could receive rewards for answering questions by students, while students receive rewards for solving exercises. Furthermore, the mentor should be able to give rewards for good questions etc.

Actually, it's quite a bit like Stack Exchange, if you think about it. Only, without exercises and without the ability to directly ask one particular teacher who can be rewarded for answering and also reward you for a good question.

Another idea that pops up immediately, is to have team or group exercises with predefined roles. For example, if the exercises includes writing a calendar program (like Google calendar). One person could be responsible for graphical design, one for coordination etc. This is maybe not an ideal scenario since a task like that would be quite extensive but I think you get the picture.

In general, I think it's not that difficult to represent the traditional relation between student and mentor. This system is, in a sense, already includes rewards. However, the difference between the traditional system and an app like yours is really the possibility to engage in learning because you feel interest or curiosity about the subject. Having someone who can help and reward you only fuels the intrinsic motivation you already have. In that sense, I believe what really counts is that a system like the one you outline offers a sense of security for the student. The gamification is mostly based on extrinsic motivation and as such only an added bonus. The ability to connect based on interest and the desire to learn is what really makes the difference, I think.

I recommend the documentary 'Alphabet' which recently premiered. In this film, there is also a high emphasis on learning as a game, even though it may not exactly be what you're looking for, it might nevertheless provide some inspiration.

# Answer
> 2 votes
The game mechanics playdeck from tech startup SCVNGR gives 50 great starting points.

Perhaps more directly relevant to the SE CogSci audience is the Mental Notes project, which aims to "bring a little psychology to Web design \[...\] each card describes one insight into human behavior and suggests ways to apply this to the design of Web sites, Web apps, and software applications.".

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Tags: learning, gamification, training
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title: Can our brain do trigonometry?

text:
# Question
Title: Can our brain do trigonometry?
I was sitting in college today today doodling around as I was bored, when I drew an arrow onto my paper, Looking at the arrow, I predicted that the arrow would move in the direction it was facing. Then, I thought "How did I know it would move in that direction?". Being a programmer/game developer I know that to make an object move in a direction, you need to do trigonometry math, and I highly doubt that I can find the cosine and sine of a number in my head.

How did I know in which direction the object was going to travel?

Here is a diagram:

# Answer
The brain doesn't do trig at all for this problem. It uses a lot of tricks to estimate the solution.

First we should be careful, though. Your example isn't an example of calculating the trig, it's an example of assuming or **completing** an image. This is in line with gestalt psychology, where the brain takes less information than necessary to truly know an answer and guesses the best solution based on several rules.

Now if our example is an actual moving object, such as a ball, we come to the aforementioned tricks.

One trick is constant re-estimation. Imagine you had a computer with a very naive way to calculate the movement of our ball - it looks at where the ball has come from and assumes a linear path. This path is probably wrong, but let's say we do this ~50 times a second. Each path is wrong, but they will be increasingly accurate, and each one may be sufficient to have a general idea of where the ball is headed, until it is accurate enough that we can catch the ball. Our brain probably does a lot better than a linear estimation, but it still takes some form of this shortcut, trading accuracy for a less difficult computation because we can redo and correct our calculations as we go.

Another trick is our short term knowledge of the path an object has taken and the fact that most objects take very simple paths. If I gave you a graph of the ball's movement from 0-10 seconds, chances are you can draw 10-20 seconds pretty accurately. This helps us with objects that are moving slowly or are far away, where we get to see them for long enough time to see an overall pattern.

These first two aren't so successful for predicting living organisms, which often move too fast and complexly for them. In this case, we largely rely on previous knowledge. We know few things leave the ground, and if they do they usually come down again very soon (often in an arc). We know most things accelerate downhill, decelerate uphill, and follow the curves of the surface they are on. For the things that are even less predictable, we learn to see the subtle preparatory movements involved: we see the slight turn of the leg before a runner changes direction, the crouch before a jump, the raising of wings before flying. Indeed when things don't follow these rules, or optical illusions make things appear to not follow these rules (rooms that look normal but are weirdly shaped), it amuses or confuses us.

Depending on the type of programming you do/your formal education, you may be very aware that when the optimal solution takes more resources to find than it is actually worth, programmers opt for estimations of near-optimal solutions. In a living creature, the priority is coming up with a solution that is near-optimal in enough time to react to potential danger (something flying towards you). In this way, the brain's sensory problem is an extreme version of the programming problem of coming 'close enough' in the time allotted. Specifically this is most similar to online problems where solutions must be optimal for an unknown amount of inputs as each input comes in.
> 4 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology
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# Question
Title: What is the name of a test presenting words in different colors?
What's the name of this psychological test where you.

1. Read and pronounce words in three colors (red, blue, green). - Words and colors match. - Say word and color (which are the same).
2. As above - Words and color now do not match. Say the color. - If the word is in a circle - Then say the written name.
3. As above - now words and colors do not match - alter (even and odd) between saying the color of the word and saying written word.

I have myself taken the test. Perhaps I remember some things wrong.

# Answer
This is an experiment testing the Stroop effect, named after John Ridley Stroop who studied it in 1935, and often called a Stroop experiment. It is a classic and well understood experiment and has now become a neuropsychological test for use in clinical settings, usually called the Stroop test.
> 10 votes

# Answer
The three levels of the Stroop test you describe are the following:

1. Congruent stimuli
2. Incongruent stimuli
3. Incongruent stimuli alternated with the Reverse Stroop effect
> 6 votes

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Tags: terminology, experimental-psychology, test, color
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# Question
Title: What is it called when a person seeks to compare themselves to others?
What is it called when a person consciously or unconsciously looks for similarities and differences in other people's reasoning, behavior, actions or past events and compares them with his/her own traits? I.e., Noticing them, with or without reacting, relating or comparing yourself with others.

# Answer
> 1 votes
**Cognitive Bias**

> A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situations. Implicit in the concept of a "pattern of deviation" is a standard of comparison; this may be the judgment of people outside those particular situations, or may be a set of independently verifiable facts.

One being:

> **Social comparison bias** can be defined as having feelings of dislike and competitiveness with someone that is seen physically, or mentally better than yourself.

There are other types of bias that would be appropriate to cover what you have asked in your question, I suggest having a look. For a list of cognitive biases.

This question What are the possible causes of pettiness? and answer *touches upon* some of the reasons people compare themselves to others.

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Tags: social-psychology, bias, similarirty
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# Question
Title: Why does extrinsic motivation sometimes reduce intrinsic motivation?
Why is it that if a person likes subject X but then when he gets paid for it he doesnt like it anymore. What causes this?

# Answer
This effect has been termed Overjustification effect and was originally reported by Lepper, Greene & Nisbett (1973) who studied the influence of rewards on intrinsic motivated behavior.

Some theories hypothesize that the reward reduces the feeling of self-determination, which in turn reduces intrinsic motivation, because the reward induces the feeling of being controlled by the person that offered the reward.

**References**

Lepper MR, Greene D, Nisbett RE (1973). Undermining children's intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward: A test of the 'overjustification' hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 28 (1): 129–137. doi:10.1037/h0035519.
> 10 votes

# Answer
To understand Extrinsic motivation to do something think of the carrot and the stick theory. So one only does something because they have to, ie, for some reward for due to some fear of penalty. Think of when our parents "made" us do the dishes. Thats an example of an extrinsically motivated act. Whereas Intrinsic motivation is when we do something because we want to. So sometimes what starts out as an extrinsic motivation becomes internalised within our belief system and it actually becomes somewhat intrinsic. for example, our parents instil in us to brush our teeth every night and then when we become parents that becomes our own own intrinsic value. however without going into too much detail, it is still an extrinsic motivation while being classified as a subset of extrinsic motivation because it has almost the most of the elements of intrinsic motivation the only difference being is that it is an internalised extrinsic motivation. So to address the question, the extrinsic motivation has not interfered with the intrinsic motivation. A study showed that once a reward was offered to people who were intrinsically motivated, they actually lost interest. however when praise was offered instead of reward, the intrinsic motivation was maintained or increased.

References Deci, E., & Ryan, R. (Eds.), (2002). Handbook of self-determination research. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press
> 1 votes

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Tags: motivation
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# Question
Title: What is the effect of motherese on development?
Most cultures (Falk, 2009) have a special type of language that is used to talk to children: **infant-directed-speech** (IDL; or informally, motherese, baby talk). For instance, Fernald (1992) argues that motherese is an evolved phenomena that was selected for. This suggests that it has a benefit to child development, hence my questions:

1. **What benefit does IDL provide children?**
2. **How do the features of IDL benefit the cognitive development of children?**
3. **Are there benefits beyound effects on language-acquisition?**

### Notes

* The only benefit I am familiar with (shameless self plug) is in helping avoid reversal-errors in pronoun acquisition but Kaznatcheev (2010) is only a theoretical prediction based on a particular computational model of questionable (, ) empirical validity.
* I am interested in the developmental benefit of the very specific language used in IDL, not about the benefit of maternal care in general.

### References

Fernald, A. (1992). "Human maternal vocalizations to infants as biologically relevant signals: An evolutionary perspective." In J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby (Eds.) *The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture* (pp. 391-428).

Falk, D. (2009). Finding our tongues: Mothers, infants and the origins of language. *New York: Basic Books.*

Kaznatcheev, A. (2010). "A Connectionist Study on the Interplay of Nouns and Pronouns in Personal Pronoun Acquisition." *Cognitive Computation* 2(4): 280-284.

# Answer
> 7 votes
Motherese may play a role in emotional development.

Soken and Pick write:

> Concurrent with the exaggerated speech of motherese, there are probably exaggerated facial displays, allowing infants to explore the particular aspects of the face... Child-centered displays may serve as opportunities for learning about affective events.

Walker-Andrews (1997) also suggests that

> the presence of the face acts as a setting for attending to the affective quality of the voice.

Yet, according to a recent, extensive review on motherese (Saint-Georges et al., 2013), its role in emotion and cognition is still an open area of research.

# References

* N. H. Soken and A. D. Pick, “Intermodal Perception of Happy and Angry Expressive Behaviors by Seven‐Month‐Old Infants,” Child development, vol. 63, no. 4, pp. 787–795, 1992.
* A. S. Walker-Andrews, “Infants' perception of expressive behaviors: differentiation of multimodal information.,” Psychological Bulletin, vol. 121, no. 3, p. 437, 1997.
* C. Saint-Georges, M. Chetouani, R. Cassel, F. Apicella, A. Mahdhaoui, F. Muratori, M. C. Laznik, and D. Cohen, “Motherese in Interaction: At the Cross-Road of Emotion and Cognition? (A Systematic Review),” PLoS ONE, vol. 8, no. 10, p. e78103, Oct. 2013.

# Answer
> 6 votes
I believe motherese exists to teach the infant to discriminate phonemes in the native language. Kuhl et al. (2005) show that during the first year language critical period, infants gain an increased ability to discriminate between phonemes of the native language, while their ability to discriminate between phonemes of non-native languages declines. Additionally, their ability to discriminate phonemes is initially language-neutral. Kuhl (2003) further shows a strong correlation between mother speech clarity and infant phonetic discrimination ability.

So if clarity is so important, why talk to children in semi-gibberish and not normal speech? One possibility is that motherese emphasizes certain sounds to enhance the perceptual discrimination. Karzon (1983) investigates this idea, with positive results. To us motherese sounds odd, but in reality it is providing a clearer phonetic structure for the infant to learn.

It's likely that the mother's desire to talk to her baby in motherese, and the babies appreciation of it are traits that co-evolved. Perhaps, like Falk suggests, motherese is an exapted remnant of some early hominid proto-language.

This type of interaction might also have a role in the larger structure of mother/child bonding. But I feel it's unlikely that it evolved for that particular reason. What's more likely is that it was simply co-opted into that mechanism.

### References

Karzon, R.G. (1985) Discrimination of polysyllabic sequences by one- to four-month-old infants *Journal of Experimental Child Psychology* 39(2): 326-342.

Kuhl, P.K., Conboy, B.T., Padden, D., Nelson, T., & Pruitt, J. (2005) Early Speech Perception and Later Language Development: Implications for the "Critical Period" *Language Learning and Development* 1(3-4): 237-264.

Liu, H-M., Kuhl, P.K., Tsao, F-M. (2003) An association between mothers’ speech clarity and infants’ speech discrimination skills *Developmental Science* 6(3): F1-F10.

# Answer
> 4 votes
Fonagy and Target, although they do not specifically cite the term 'Motherese', believe that what they call 'Marking'- signalling an unreality or playfulness in mirrored displays of affect can play a crucial role in the development of a faculty they call 'Mentalization'.

According to their model, newborns experience affect as all-pervading, and do not see it as limited to a self. By internalising mirrored affect displays by the primary caregiver they are able to conceptualise their own affect on a second order (symbolic) level, are able to 'play' with their own feelings as the mother brings affect into the realm of the pretend. Thus they implicate improper marking in later development of borderline personality disorders.

Here's a paper of theirs on the subject, although I recommend their book, which is considerably more expansive.

**Edit:** Sorry, off the internets for a month. Here are some useful quotes:

> Take the case of pretend play: here *markedness* is conveyed by a series of salient perceptual features that distinguish a pretend action or pretend emotion expression from a real one. Knowing looks, slightly tilted head, high pitch and slowed down down, exaggerated intonation and contour, schematic, abbreviated or only partial execution of action schemes... ...all mark for the child that the pretend expression is categorically different from its realistic equivalent- that it is "not for real". We have argued... ...that in the case of adaptive parental affect-mirroring interactions, the affect-reflective emotion display is also modified by the same kinds of transformations... **(Fonagy, Gergley, Jurist and Target, "Affect regulation, Mentalization and Development of the Self" p296 , Other Press 2002- linked above)**

Frustratingly, this was the most explicit exposition of marking behaviours I could find in the book, which is mainly theoretical. You will immediately observe that what is described is not all motherese, nor only motherese- but you will agree, I hope, that there is a not-inconsiderable overlap between the two- and that the wedding of IDL to such concepts is not, so to speak, of shotgun ilk. To say that the function of motherese was precisely the above would certainly be wrong- but I would hope you would concurr that as an adaptation it would confer advantage in part for this reason, were Fonagy et al's hypothesis

> ...\[T\]hat the perception of markedness activates the yound child's metarepresentational system (Leslie 1987) which allows for "decoupling" of the expression from its referents in actual reality. **(Ibid, p296)**

true.

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Tags: developmental-psychology, language, linguistics, parenting
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title: Enhance recollection abilites

text:
# Question
Title: Enhance recollection abilites
I hope this is a good way of asking this question.

I am not generally the guy with the best memory out there, so I looked a bit into it and I am concluding my recollection phase is the weakest. It's seems like I can store a lot but recalling it, I would come under average.

It's not like it has stopped me from doing fine in life, but I am curious about how one can enhance that part, any good reads should you recommend from the scientific literature ?

Thanks.

***Augmented :***

Well I do recall a lot because I can gather a lot from my memory, but then I stumble often in just getting the first starting point from which I would be able to gather all those memories, i.e : I can remember profusely given someone or something helps me with recalling just a part or the beginning of it. So my recalling issue is really in having a sort of catalogue or dictionary like system : once you get the word you get its definition, my trouble is in getting the word (I hope the analogy is clear). Working memory is short-term memory? Can be, what are symptoms for that ?

# Answer
> 0 votes
Practice or forget, that is the rule. If you want to recall more words for your vocabulary then read more and write more texts with less common words. If you want to recall memories look at old photographs of your life and try to recall everything associated with those events.
Memory improves when health improves, so work on that too.

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Tags: memory, long-term-memory, working-memory, short-term-memory
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title: Significant baseline, Oddball paradigm

text:
# Question
Title: Significant baseline, Oddball paradigm
I recently conducted an EEG experiment using a passive Oddball paradigm with two experimental conditions : standard stimuli (occurring with a 85% probability) and deviant stimuli (occurring with a 15% probability). This experiment was conducted on 10 participants.

ERP were recorded with 64 electrodes.

An ANOVA test on the prestimulus baseline period yielded a significant effect of the condition. I have observed a difference between standard stimuli's wave and deviant stimuli's wave. There shouldn't be such a difference between these two but I understood that this difference is caused by a smaller number of trials in the deviant condition than in the standard one.

However, I'm still wondering whether this significant difference can be caused by the small number of participants (n=10) or by too small inter-stimulus interval (ISI=1500ms) ? How do you suggest I should deal with this significant baseline regarding the understanding of MMN/P3 effects ?

I looked on cogsci.SE and I didn't find anything relevant to my question.

# Answer
> 5 votes
How many trials do you have per condition? With a small number of trials in the deviant condition, and a small number of participants, these things can happen.

The ISI would not cause this per se, however, have you considered looking at effects of the previous trial? You can analyze the baseline intervals as a function of what type the previous trial was, and see if there is a difference in the period following deviants or standards.

You could also try to randomly sample as many standard trials as you have deviants per participant, and then re-do your analysis and see what happens. You can make a loop and do this many times, and then look at the median p-value.

It could also be that some small number of subjects is introducing some skew to your results. You could try to re-do your analysis on a single subject level, comparing standard and deviant trials within subjects. Then you could see whether all your subjects have this effect or only some of them. If it's only some, you could look at their data more carefully for potential outliers. If it's a general thing, I'd look into the effects of the previous trial.

And if it's the previous trial effect, you can just remove all standard trials preceded by a deviant and try again.

All that being said, even if you have a baseline difference, it might not really matter: *this is what baseline correction is for*. But I agree that it's disconcerting.

I'm also a bit confused why you would use an ANOVA to compare two conditions, and not a t-test. Maybe I'm not understanding you design completely.

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Tags: methodology, statistics, eeg
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# Question
Title: Everybody thinks everyone's doing it, so they do it, and everyone ends up doing it
I'm on mobile, can't say much. But is there a term to describe such reasoning.

# Answer
> 4 votes
The possible concept you may be looking at is a fad. Which can be explained under the umbrella of several social-psychological theories. Dynamics including conformity, changes to individual behavior and personality within a group, perception bias with regard to opinions held by a group as opposed to an individual.

> A **Fad** is any form of behaviour that develops amongst a large population and is collectively followed enthusiastically for a period of time, generally as a result of the behaviour being perceived as popular by one's peers or being deemed "cool" by social media. A fad is said to "catch on" when the number of people adopting it begins to increase rapidly. ...
>
> ... Apart from general novelty, fads may be driven by mass media programming, emotional excitement, peer pressure, or the desire of "being hip" ...
>
> In economics, the term is used in a similar way. Fads are mean-reverting deviations from intrinsic value caused by social or psychological forces like those that cause fashions in political beliefs or consumption goods

**Bandwagon effect**

> The bandwagon effect is a well documented form of groupthink in behavioral science and has many applications.\[which?\] The general rule is that conduct or beliefs spread among people, as fads and trends clearly do, with "the probability of any individual adopting it increasing with the proportion who have already done so". As more people come to believe in something, others also "hop on the bandwagon" regardless of the underlying evidence.
>
> The tendency to follow the actions or beliefs of others can occur because individuals directly prefer to conform, or because individuals derive information from others. Both explanations have been used for evidence of conformity in psychological experiments.

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Tags: social-psychology, terminology
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# Question
Title: Why might a stutterer not stutter when talking to themselves, whispering, or singing?
**Background:** I'm a stutterer myself and have always wondered what caused my stuttering. There have been reports of the effects of certain genes and environmental factors that causes stuttering. But there is nothing really concrete as far as I know. The main cause could be a multitude of factors that are up to debate.

From my own experience, I observe that I don't stutter/get a block when I talk to myself, whisper, and sing. Otherwise I stutter, and even more frustratingly I sometime get a speech block and can't begin to say what I want until I change my wording.

The fact that I can speak normally in certain conditions means that I have the physical ability to speak normally.

### Question

**Based on the neural mechanisms of stuttering, why might a stutterer not stutter when talking to themselves, whispering, singing, etc.?**

# Answer
> 13 votes
I'm not an expert in this field, but this seemed interesting enough I did some reading up on the topic. The two review papers I found quickly were Prasse & Kikano (2008) and Lawrence & Barclay (1998), both from the Journal of the American Academy of Family Physicians. I have no idea whether this is a reputable journal or not.

There appear to be three types of stuttering; developmental (acquired during youth, often leaves after age 4), neurogenic (acquired due to neurological trauma), and psychogenic (secondary symptom of latent psychiatric disorder) \[\]. Interestingly, the articles disagree on whether psychogenic still exists (see Etiology discussion in \[\]). While both articles suggested that the etiology of stuttering is largely unknown (see here, Etiology section), theories suggest that there's a neurologic dysfunction at play and/or physical causes relating to airflow. Specifically, the neurologic dysfunction suggests increased brain activity during speech in stutterers relative to non-stutterers. There's a lot of discussion about genetics and stuttering as well; read the articles for more.

Your situation as described seems to be in the "developmental" case, with a neurologic underpinning. Assuming no car crash or other blunt force trauma in your past, your stuttering comes and goes depending on the situation (i.e., if you're in public or private). As such, the symptoms you describe are likely related to stress, discussed in both articles above. It seems to be understood that stuttering as a disorder can be overcome with time and practice, and it seems that you have managed to do that to a small amount. However, stress is a large factor in stuttering, and can in fact exacerbate the problem tremendously. For what it's worth, I can also state anecdotally that stress is a large factor in stuttering, and for some people the severity of the stutter will increase as a factor of how stressful the situation may be.

I'm not sure that this addresses the singing aspect of your question. Hopefully someone else can address that.

# Answer
> 3 votes
Stuttering is a neuromuscular disorder. It consists of problems in sequencing and timing the movements required for the speech.

The whisper is speech without vibration of the vocal cords. Since there is no vocal fold vibration, the muscles that control pitch are not active and the larynx does not need to move. This means when the PWS ( person who stutters) whispers, he is bypassing any problem that larynx might have caused.

The rhythm effect : The people who stutters usually become fluent when speaking to an external pace. The external pace can be a metronome, can be singing, or can be choral reading. This is explained like the following: The external timing cues compensate for deficient internal cues for the timing.

Stuttering is intermittent which makes it more unpleasant. PWS labels fluent moments as success, and the stuttering moments as failure. And does everything to avoid stuttering, and all these avoidance behaviors feed the stuttering. At the end, PWS reaches to the point: "Stuttering is everything you do trying not to stutter."

The blocks are exactly "what one does when he is trying not to stutter."

I recommend to all stutterers to read the book "self-therapy for the stutterer" by Malcolm Fraser.

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Tags: language, communication, motor
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# Question
Title: Are we actually seeing black colored objects?
We know that black objects absorb light with almost all the frequencies of the visible spectrum. This means there will not be any frequency of light reflected and falling on our retina, in order for us to see that object.

**Does this mean that I am actually not seeing the black object but differentiating it from the surrounding?**

# Answer
Actually, black objects absorb light across visible frequencies indiscriminately, but not completely. So some light still reflects off them. This is described on this Q&A of the Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

But even if there was a perfectly black objects which absorbs 100% of the light that falls on it, you could still perceive it as it via the contrast to other objects around it.
> 7 votes

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Tags: vision
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# Question
Title: Why does splitting attention between a primary task and another task appear to improve performance on the primary task?
I've been thinking about my performance at various tasks and where my focus is at during them and something's really got me confused.

It makes sense that devoting all my focus to a task while I'm doing it would yield the best results that I'm capable of. In my case, however, the opposite seems true.

If I'm trying my best to accomplish something and it's not working to my satisfaction (bugs in my program code that don't appear to have a reasonable cause for example) - and this only happens when I'm really focusing on the task - I get irritated with my apparent inability to come to the desired result and my performance declines, which irritates me more.

On the other hand, if I have my focus split (i.e. playing a movie or tv series while I'm busy with the task), I stay a lot calmer and generally my performance at said task stays pretty high.

It's very clear to me that I don't perform well under pressure, but in a lot of cases, there's no pressure aside from what I put on myself.

So my question is this: how is it that when I'm just absent-mindedly doing something, it generally turns out better than it would if I focused on it and tried my hardest?

# Answer
> 2 votes
### Dual Task research

In general, I think a lot depends on what is the secondary task and how it relates to the primary task (see human multitasking). In general, secondary tasks tend to lower performance on the primary task.

A classic combinations where there may be facilitation is music with gross motor tasks, where the music is often experienced as motivating. In other cases, music can serve to block out other external distractions, such as in a noisy office.

However, in general, it would be unusual for task performance to be improved by simultaneously watching television while doing the task. It might make the task more enjoyable, but it would be rare for it to improve productivity. The intrusive way that TV impinges on your attention would generally interfere with flow and focus on the primary task, especially where the primary task involves cognitive control.

### Incubation

That said, there is a literature on the benefits of breaks and incubation on problem solving. So, in general, taking a break after working on a task intensely and getting stuck, can be a useful way of breaking the impasse. In particular, a good night sleep can be particularly helpful.

### Motivation

Another way of framing your question is in terms of the effect of a secondary task on motivation and persistence. Making the task more enjoyable might have an effect on your persistence.

However, drawing on the expertise literature, I'd say it's often better to work in a focussed and concentrated way for a shorter period of time, than to do a task in a half hearted way for a longer period of time. If you've truly lost the ability to concentrate, then it may be time to rest and recuperate, both in terms of good sleep and time off task.

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, performance, problem-solving, attention, working-memory
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