title: Any ways to guesstimate IQ?

text:
# Question
Title: Any ways to guesstimate IQ?
Is there any way to roughly approximate someone’s IQ simply based off of observing their behavior, mannerisms, speech, social interactions, etc? In other words, are their certain patterns of behavior that people exhibit as a function of their intelligence, allowing for the approximation of their IQ by observing them display these patterns (and if so, what are some examples throughout the IQ spectrum)?

# Answer
> 2 votes
There's a body of research that shows that thin slices allow for reasonable discernment of intelligence and personality. Just two recent articles show the following:

> Negative affect, extraversion, conscientiousness, and intelligence were judged moderately well after 5-s exposures.

> Inferences of intelligence from thin slices of behavior strongly predicted intelligence test scores. A particularly strong single predictor was how persons read short sentences.

Note that this is alongside a large body of research done to show how thin slices of intelligence corresponds to real IQ. Both studies have further citations supporting this; they were just the first two I found off of Google.

## References

Dana R. Carney, C. Randall Colvin ¤, Judith A. Hall. (2007). A thin slice perspective on the accuracy of Wrst impressions. *Journal of research in personality*. http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/dana\_carney/slices.in.press.page.numbers.oct.2007.pdf

Borkenau, P., Mauer, N., Riemann, R., Spinath, F. M., & Angleitner, A. (2004). Thin slices of behavior as cues of personality and intelligence. *Journal of personality and social psychology, 86*(4), 599. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.86.4.599 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2004-12052-006

# Answer
> 2 votes
After seeing the answer that cites the Borkenau study, I wondered how the reading of short sentences factors in, so I pulled up the full article \[PDF\]

It didn't entirely have the concrete details I was hoping for (I imagined something about intonation, body language, or the size of "chunks" read at once). The following seems to mean that people are reported to be more intelligent when they appear to quickly read and understand text, perhaps without any sign of hesitation or struggling, and that this does correlate strongly with measured intelligence.

Pg. 11: "Inferences of intelligence from Task 13 (reading 14 newspaper headlines and subtitles aloud) were **more strongly related** to the LPS–PC in both participant subsamples, and to the APM score in one subsample, than were inferences of intelligence from **any of the 14 other tasks**."

Pg. 14: "Performance on intelligence tests is most strongly related to inferences from observing targets who read short phrases aloud, as in the headlines task. This suggests that the way people read standard text provides particularly diagnostic cues of their psychometric intelligence. This resembles findings by Borkenau and Liebler (1993), who found that inferences of intelligence based on observations of how strangers read a standard text allow for quite accurate judgments of their intelligence. This finding is interesting from a theoretical as well as from an applied perspective. Concerning theory, the finding is consistent with the assumption that intelligent persons perform simple tasks more efficiently (Deary, 2000). According to this view, measured intelligence should not only be related to how persons solve complex problems but also to how efficiently they perform on everyday tasks like understanding and reading a short text. In this context, the strength of the correlation of judgments of intelligence from the headlines task with the performance measures of intelligence becomes important. The finding that the LPS is related to the headline task nearly as strongly as it is related to another test of intelligence shows that the headline task is a quite precise measure of intelligence."

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, intelligence, behavior, iq
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# Question
Title: What is the best method for identifying single participants in EMA studies?
I am currently working on an ecological momentary assessment research project. I can't seem to find a clear answer in literature review to this question.

My problem is when observations reach to around 2,000 entries - we need to be clear which reading is from a specific participant perhaps belonging to a specific group as they make many entries at different time intervals each day.

What is the best way to fix the dependency issue of same participant data?

EDIT: I should mention that we are looking to make predictions of anxiety from various EMA entries multiple times a day for a few months now. This will utilize a machine learning approach. We really aren't sure if classification will work and perhaps will best be served with regression. But it is hard to tell since we aren't sure what the multiple readings from the same participants will do to the data. I am concerned with analyses specific to machine learning (how can we clean the data and do predictions with machine learning with repeated measures in a time series?)

# Answer
> 0 votes
LSTM or GRU neural networks can be used to model time-series data in machine learning. Likewise, moving average, autoregression, autoregressive-moving average, and the autoregressive integrated moving average models can be used to model time-series data.

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Tags: measurement, clinical-psychology, data
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# Question
Title: Correlation between sexual repression in adolescents and sexual deviancy later in life?
Is there a correlation between sexual repression and sexual deviancy?

Now we all have heard stories of people growing up in incredibly strict households that become some of the most exploratory and sexually deviant persons as soon as they get a 'taste of freedom' in college, or kids that went to Catholic schools that seem to stand for the antithesis of everything the Catholic church is as soon as they get out.

I was wondering, "what gives?" Before, having researched this topic, I just figured that repression of all kinds leads to deviant behavior, but after a search through some databases, I could not find anything that corroborates this belief.

I did a few Google searches using the keywords Sexual repression and sexual deviance, as well as using the PsycINFO database from Ebsco that my school provides and using the same keywords to no avail. I also did searches of just the single keywords or ideas that vaguely mean the same thing, and I couldn't find what I was looking for.

Am I just wrong in my assumption, or am I using these words or search terms wrong? I would really appreciate some insight into this topic, thanks everyone!

# Answer
> 2 votes
I think this question is not really about strict religious upbringings or sexuality at all, this is really about the broader issue of rebellious attitudes and anti-authoritarianism. No matter what controlled environment with particular sets of rules that groups of people find themselves in, there will always be a handful of those who rebel.

A good reference (among many that can be found) which suggests a neurological cause is below:

Rudorf, S., Baumgartner, T., Markett, S., Schmelz, K., Wiest, R., Fischbacher, U., & Knoch, D. (2018). Intrinsic connectivity networks underlying individual differences in control‐averse behavior. *Human brain mapping, 39*(12), 4857-4869. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.24328

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, personality, developmental-psychology, psychology, sexuality
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# Question
Title: The differences between sensory distortions and hallucinations
So, the way I've understood it, "sensory disturbances" can be categorized as follows:

Any sensory experience that isn't real goes under "sensory disturbances" in this diagram. If this unreal sensory experience is a distortion or misunderstanding of real, external stimuli, then it falls under "illusions". If the unreal sensory experience is generated in the absence of external stimuli, it is a hallucination. If the person having the hallucination believes in it, it is a true hallucination. If not, then it is just a hallucination.

So, if a person perceives an object to be a different color, whether it is due to an altered state of consciousness, or if it is due confusing circumstances, is this an illusion or a hallucination? The object is real, it does have a color (which in a sense isn't real and potentially experienced differently by different people), and the person sees the color differently than what they normally would. Is this external stimuli being distorted/misinterpreted, or is it a hallucination being superimposed upon or merged with an external piece of stimuli. What if the subject doesn't see a different color, but rather a different shade of the same color?

If a taste is changed from e.g. sweet to salty is it an illusion or a hallucination? If an object is perceived to move when it is not moving, is it an illusion or a hallucination.

At the heart of these questions really is the question: does in the absence of external stimuli necessitate that the hallucination not involve external stimuli, or not depend on it? If the object is falsely perceived to be moving, it involves it (and in a sense depends on it too), however, it isn't the nature of the object that causes the sensory disturbance, but rather an internally created disturbance (the perception of motion) instilled into the object. But since that percept of motion, although originating from within, modified an external stimuli in order to give the final experience, is that experience then an illusion due to it coming in the form of distorted, external stimuli?

Basically, I'm wondering about the nuanced border between illusions and hallucinations, if there even is one. If there isn't one, and there's a large grey area between them, then how does one differentiate between the two different categories proposed for the class of drugs that are hallucinogens? The broadest definition includes all drugs that sensory disturbances, and the most narrow definition is limited to those that produce hallucinations. How can that discussion be had in the event that there is a large gray area between illusions and hallucinations?

# Answer
The differences between illusion and hallucinations are quite clear and have been known for over 100 years.

For example, hallucinations are when you see things in total darkness or hear things when there is no sound. It is perception WITHOUT an external stimuli.

Regarding illusions, there IS something to be seen, heard, tasted or felt, an external stimulis, but the impression received is misinterpreted.

Therefore, when you ask about the distortion of taste, that is in response to an external stimuli (food, drink etc.) and it is being misinterpreted. A more intense flavor, or changed flavor (salty to sweet) are still misinterpretations of an external stimuli.

What matters here is not how the taste is changed, but the fact that it HAS changed.

Reference - https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.58.3.443
> 1 votes

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Tags: sensory-perception, hallucinations, optical-illusion, drugs, categorisation
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# Question
Title: What causes fear of vaccines and how can it be alleviated?
My city opened the COVID vaccination calendar for adults and my mother (50+ years old) is included, but she is afraid of the vaccine and we don't know which one will be applied.

* What causes fear of vaccines?
* What strategies can be applied to alleviate fear of a vaccine?

# Answer
> 3 votes
You ask a good question and I'm sure you're not the only one in a situation like this. Unfortunately, I don't think that anyone here could provide an exact answer for you, or anyone in a similar situation. The best way to figure it out would be to ask your mother/relative/friend to have an open communication about vaccines. Ask where they got their information, but don't rush to judgment. People's brains can be tricky and we're not always logical, so give it some time and try to establish trust. Not only could trust and communication with you allow you to figure out why mom's afraid, but trust and communication with a doctor might help alleviate the fear too.

When mothers are thinking about vaccinating (or not vaccinating) their children, trust in a doctor is important (). Agreeing to vaccinate oneself is obviously not the same thing, and there are plenty of possible complications these days. But especially considering how important sources of information are, getting information from a trusted doctor could be one way to alleviate the fear. I'll link to some layers here that might help start a conversation about vaccination with someone. This is not comprehensive in scope or depth.

At a super basic level, some people have a fear of needles (2). This might be related to a tendency to protect the body, or a fear about introducing a foreign presence into the body. You can think about the body as a barrier that you generally don't want to have penetrated. Fears related to blood-injection-injury have been linked to aversion (that is, disgust) toward body envelope violations (3). \[Note. I have not found empirical data supporting or refuting a direct link between fear of needles and vaccine hesitancy.\]

On top of the complex psychology around an injection itself, vaccines commonly inject virus to prevent future virus, which is not the most intuitive idea (wikis: inject cowpox to prevent smallpox disease, inject inactivated flu to prevent flu illness). These emotional/cognitive components could contribute to fear or hesitancy of vaccination, and could be amplified by social factors.

Anti-vaccination attitudes (which could be related to fear of a vaccine) are more complicated because they also involve worldviews, such as conspiratorial thinking (4) and social norms (5). One possible (albeit nonspecific) way to think about this is through the idea of "groupthink", a phenomenon in which people are able to come to consensus under certain conditions, including limited search and appraisal of information, insulation from experts, and directed leadership (6). There was one RETRACTED paper which reported that vaccines might be related to autism in the late 1990s and while the evidence did not support the idea, it was/is a topic in the anti-vaccine movement (retraction, rebuttal (7), more commentary from that time (8)). Here's (9) a point of view which talks about some influential figures in the anti-vaccine movement before 2017.

Just to be explicit, this answer is not specific to the COVID-19 vaccine. In fact, I only referenced material prior to the beginning of the pandemic. There are probably many reports of COVID-19-specific vaccine hesitancy; I would be surprised if they came to substantively different conclusions than the past work (in that getting information from a trusted doctor is probably a big factor in alleviating fear and hesitancy of vaccine). The social/political climate could be a larger factor these days, especially as politics influences sources of information and trust. Social media could also be important (again, especially as a source of trusted information for many people).

If you're looking at the cited material, I might suggest starting with references one (Benin et al., 2006), five (Kestenbaum & Feemster, 2015), and four (Hornsey et al., 2018).

1. Benin, A. L., Wisler-Scher, D. J., Colson, E., Shapiro, E. D., & Holmboe, E. S. (2006). Qualitative analysis of mothers' decision-making about vaccines for infants: the importance of trust. Pediatrics, 117(5), 1532-1541.
2. McLenon, J., & Rogers, M. A. (2019). The fear of needles: A systematic review and meta‐analysis. Journal of advanced nursing, 75(1), 30-42.
3. de Jong, P. J., & Merckelbach, H. (1998). Blood-injection-injury phobia and fear of spiders: Domain specific individual differences in disgust sensitivity. Personality and Individual Differences, 24(2), 153-158.
4. Hornsey, M. J., Harris, E. A., & Fielding, K. S. (2018). The psychological roots of anti-vaccination attitudes: A 24-nation investigation. Health Psychology, 37(4), 307.
5. Kestenbaum, L. A., & Feemster, K. A. (2015). Identifying and addressing vaccine hesitancy. Pediatric annals, 44(4), e71-e75.
6. Turner, M. E., & Pratkanis, A. R. (1998). Twenty-five years of groupthink theory and research: Lessons from the evaluation of a theory. Organizational behavior and human decision processes, 73(2-3), 105-115.
7. Taylor, B., Miller, E., Farrington, C., Petropoulos, M. C., Favot-Mayaud, I., Li, J., & Waight, P. A. (1999). Autism and measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine: no epidemiological evidence for a causal association. The Lancet, 353(9169), 2026-2029.
8. DeStefano, F., & Chen, R. T. (1999). Negative association between MMR and autism. The Lancet, 353(9169), 1987-1988.
9. Smith, T. C. (2017, July). Vaccine rejection and hesitancy: a review and call to action. In Open forum infectious diseases (Vol. 4, No. 3). Oxford University Press.

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Tags: anxiety, fear, health-psychology
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# Question
Title: How move Working Memory (WM) span task into a VR?
How a classic Working Memory Capacity task that can be translated into a VR Task?

I want to study the effect of WM Load into resource allocation in a VR Environment. To do so I would like to move a WM span task into VR. I am working on the evaluation by ERP of the resources allocated to the VR environment when manipulating sensory immersion and the task should resemble a WM operation span task.

But I am struggling with finding in literature paradigms in VR to study working memory span. Wich might be an ecological translation of a WM span Task in a VR environment i.e. developing a task that resemble an ecological situation but that still involves attention and memory interference (according to Conway et al. (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/BF03196772.pdf))

Thanks to everyone will dedicate attention to this question!

# Answer
> 2 votes
I just searched for "working memory virtual reality" and the first result was a recently standardized virtual reality assessment of attention and working memory in adults (https://doi.org/10.1080/23279095.2019.1646745). Hope it helps!

Climent, G., Rodríguez, C., García, T., Areces, D., Mejías, M., Aierbe, A., ... & Feli González, M. (2019). New virtual reality tool (Nesplora Aquarium) for assessing attention and working memory in adults: A normative study. Applied Neuropsychology: Adult, 1-13.

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, cognitive-neuroscience, working-memory
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# Question
Title: What are the pros and cons of different programming languages for offline psychology experiments?
In terms of presenting and implementing experiments, which programming language is better?

Note: What we are talking about is **not data processing** but experiment presentation.

What I need:

* Experiments can be implemented on many computers at the same time, since the number of participants may be sometimes large.
* Sometimes I need accurate timing to get parameters such as the reaction time in the millisecond range. Both the magnitude of the reaction time, as well as timing differences between conditions are of interest.
* I prefer open-source programming environments, yet I have access to MATLAB for instance and finds are available.

What I've considered so far:

* **Python**. I've only tried `psychopy`.

+ pros: Accurate Timing. It is claimed that the timing function is nice.
    + cons: Robustness. The `psychopy` programs are not robust enough and sometimes I encounter annoying problems and the community is also, although good, but not good enough in my opinion.
* **Html/JS + Backend Server**. I've tried the scheme to write html/css/js to present my experiment and send data to the local server which I wrote with `flask` in Python since js cannot read and write files through the browser.

+ pros:
        - Flexible. With this scheme, I can do almost all I want to do and even more simply with the web app development technique.
        - Apparence. The front-end, i.e. the UI of the experiment can be as pretty as possible since there are many tools to enhance the performance of html/css/js.
        - Online Data Collection.
    + cons: Accurate Timing. I guess timing is a disadvantage for this scheme. I don't know how better is the optimization of `psychopy` or `E-prime` than simply using javascript, but I guess the measurement of parameters such as reaction time can be more inaccurate. If javascript is enough to do this, please tell me!
* **`C#`/`QT`(c++ or python)/`VB.NET`** etc. These are similar to the previous html scheme while the presentation and data collection can be done in a desktop app together, but I have no idea about the timing problem as well.
* **E-prime**. I'm not very familiar with E-prime so if there are any mistakes in the description please point them out, thanks!

+ pros:
        - Accurate Timing.
        - Robustness. As a well-known commercial experiment software, I believe e-prime is, to some extent, better than `psychopy`.
    + cons:
        - Closed Source. I do have money to pay for it and if it's indeed irreplaceable and I'll use it, but if I have other choices, I prefer open-source :)

So, any suggestion on this question? or is there some recommendation? Very much thanks!

# Answer
If the magnitude of reaction times in the millisecond range are necessary, the options to do decent experiments are very much limited. However, often reaction times are compared between situations and then *relative* reaction times are sufficient, which greatly reduces the requirement of *accurate* measurements, although the *precision* still needs to be good. The latter, however, is much easier to ascertain even with mediocre systems.

Focusing on the reaction time problem here; the problem is that many platforms based on Windows are not suitable for accurate measurements in the millisecond range, despite processors operating in the Gigahertz range. This is because Windows has its own, illogical, pesky and utterly inefficient internal queue of processes waiting in line to be executed, including executing utterly irrelevant updates while you are doing attempting to do your reaction time experiments. Button presses may be coming in delayed or execution of the next part of your script may be postponed because of some other background process irrelevant to your experiment. MacOS and especially Linux are much better platforms in that regard as they tend to have less of a mind of their own.

Then the programming environment. To be frank, I only have experience with MATLAB, which is not designed for reaction time experiments, although it can be fast. However, running on a Windows machine it will be massively sluggish. To circumvent these issues I have used the (open access) **Psychophysics3 toolbox for MATLAB**. This toolbox can prioritize the script to put it somewhat on top of the queue to enhance timing. However, it is still far from perfect and in my hands the delay was nonetheless about 40 ms between command execution and (sound) output as measured from the soundcard. So that's not great. It seems that other systems are able to reduce this latency to the single digit millisecond range. I can recommend sifting through the **introduction of the PTB3 toolbox** and take the time to look at the excellent **PTB3 forum** which has many excellent posts on reaction time experiments in using PTB3.

From what I understand, C / C++ are great environments for speedy and reliable timing. In addition, letting dedicated hardware take over the job of keyboard or mouse button presses accelerates system delays (USB polling times, especially sluggish with keyboards), such as dedicated **response boxes**.
> 3 votes

# Answer
All of these are pretty great options, to the point where the answer is probably just 'use the one you're most comfortable with'. (Although open source is a huge plus)

Javascript *can* do pretty decent timing, (for example here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-021-01573-x). There's still "losing control of the rest of the environment" if your study is online, but the js itself isn't a strongly limiting factor.

You might enjoy the timing mega-study by Bridges & friends, https://peerj.com/articles/9414/ which goes into this stuff in detail. It has a nice up-to-date collection of presentation platforms, and does the digging into all their timing properties so that you don't have to.
> 2 votes

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Tags: experimental-psychology
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title: Is cognition a zero-sum phenomenon?

text:
# Question
Title: Is cognition a zero-sum phenomenon?
In other words, are cognitive resources finite? Let's say, hypothetically, our mind is only processing 2 tasks: word retrieval and executive decision-making. If I have to dedicate cognitive resources to word retrieval, does that necessarily mean it is taking away resources from executive decision-making?

# Answer
Baddeley's (1992) theory of multiple component working memory may offer a way to think about this. Baddeley, Hitch, & Allen (2009) demonstrated that secondary tasks disrupted executive attention. They presented meaningful 8-word sentences and random word lists to participants and tested the effects of potential attentional disrupters. For example, participants repeatedly spoke a "1-2-3-4" pattern while hearing the sentences and word lists. Participants recalled fewer items correctly in this condition as compared with an earlier baseline measurement.

The results point to limitations on the working memory in terms of the load placed onto the executive control by various subcomponents. It suggests an answer to your question about the finiteness of cognitive resources.

**References**

Baddeley, A. (1992). Working memory. Science, 255(5044), 556-559.

Baddeley, A. D., Hitch, G. J., & Allen, R. J. (2009). Working memory and binding in sentence recall. Journal of Memory and Language, 61(3), 438-456.
> 1 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, cognitive-modeling, philosophy-of-mind, language-processing, cognitive
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# Question
Title: Does the Rubik's Cube increase mental ability?
Does becoming efficient in the cube help build your brain to be able to do other tasks better? What tasks and how?

# Answer
> 4 votes
Don't know of any research on the Rubik's Cube specifically. I did find this (https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.00750) but it looks like it was a presentation given by a mathematician at a mathematics conference, and it doesn't look like any actual experiment was performed to test the things that are being claimed. So I wouldn't take it seriously.

However, I would be surprised if practicing Rubick's Cubes actually did improve general cognitive function. Improving at specific tasks like brain-training apps usually doesn't improve general cognitive function (although evidence is still somewhat mixed), it makes you better at those tasks. Arguably, the mixed results can be explained by the fact that participants' performance will look *look* like an improvement in general cognitive function if you measure it in a task similar to the one that was practiced.

So in short, my expectation would be that it would generalize to very similar tasks, if anything at all. However, no one's actually done it, so if you try it and get results it'd be publishable, and if you want to form your own opinion the literature to look at would be cognitive training.

# Answer
> 2 votes
See this new work by Valerie et al found some benefits:

https://repository.isls.org/handle/1/6719

Quoting from the paper:

> Middle school students participated in four sessions of Rubik’s Cube training designed by the lead researcher and a partner middle school teacher. Results indicate that students improved in their ability to execute two and three- dimensional mental rotation tests.

Valerie, J., Aylward, G., & Varma, K. (2020). I Solved it! Using the Rubik’s Cube to Support Mental Rotation in a Middle School Science Classroom.

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, learning, gamification, cognitive-enhancement
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# Question
Title: Is fasting an effective method to overcome substance addictions?
I recently watched a testimony of a man who reports the results of a 40-day water/juice fast (no food). The individual claims to have been addicted to drugs for 22 years, including marijuana, cocaine, mushrooms, LSD, ecstasy, prescription pain pills and alcohol. He went cold turkey, abstaining from both food and addictive substances during the 40-day fast. After the fast, he reports complete freedom and no relapses.

This particular case raised my interest in the potential benefits of fasting in the addiction recovery arena. After a quick search I found this site which claims that:

> Fasting is by far the most sophisticated willpower workout available. If you get good at fasting, you can learn to control every other aspect of your life. If you get good at fasting, you can overcome any addiction, not matter how deeply imbedded. Medically, fasting has been found to rapidly dissipate the craving for nicotine, alcohol, caffeine and other drugs.

Is it true that any addiction can be overcome with the skills learnt by fasting? Are there studies on the effectiveness of fasting for overcoming substance addictions or any other addiction for that matter?

# Answer
> 2 votes
> Is it true that any addiction can be overcome with the skills learnt by fasting?

Perhaps for some people, but different people have different levels of craving for food and other pleasurable substances. And drugs may further influence this

> Substances like heroin may compete with food in the brain activating reward pathways and increasing dopamine receptor’ availability, thus suppressing the appetite and leading to lower body weight.

As a personal anecdote, I can easily water fast for many days, but I find going a full day without cannabis or other addictive substances to be extremely challenging, so this is definitely not true for all people. Drug addicts tend to be skinnier than the general populations, consume less food and have lower appetite.

> In the short term, opiates cause anorexia, decreased food consumption, and reduced gastrointestinal motility, all leading to malnutrition and increased risk of infections in the long term.

And stimulant users such as meth addicts can easily go days without eating due from simply being too focused on other things to even think about food.

# Answer
> -3 votes
Yes as it focuses the mind on a more primary need. So instead of seeking escapism and distraction of addictions, one becomes overwhelmingly obsessed with the idea of eating. This can overshadow the need to fulfill an addictive behavior and if maintained long enough (say a couple of weeks) can be enough to detach from the behavior as the self-reinforcing cycle is broken. Hunger is really powerful.

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Tags: addiction, drugs, feeding, alcohol, willpower
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# Question
Title: Does implied consent apply to user interface ergonomics?
In the application of psychological knowledge, the ethics for consideration include the consent of the subject for the application or practice of psychology. That is: whether or not the subject is explicitly, consciously consenting and taking part in an exercise or experiment, such as one which may cause extreme distress or discomfort. I would cite the Little Albert experiment as an example of an ethical conflict with regards to subject consent.

That said, in the consideration of the design and implementation of modern computer applications GUIs, electronic device interfaces, and web page layouts, or user interface ergonomics, is there any published or practiced ethical standard with regards to the sort of consent required to be offered or stated by a user when interacting with such an interface?

An example might be one where a marketing or impulse exploit is used to draw a person into using a mobile app or web page and then stuffing extraneous cookies into the users browser cache, perhaps for malicious purposes, with little to no content of substance or even intentionally misleading content being provided in return. Such as is the case of links or advertisements bringing users into a situation where they are quickly, and often unknowingly, forwarded through several pages which may quickly store cookies, but render nothing. Or instances where a user is redirected through a series of unnecessary networks only for the purpose of logging and tracking the user with no way for a typical user to know without a moderate to advanced technological background in computer networking. (Think dark patterns and click bait.)

While I am aware of the laws such as the computer fraud and abuse act which seek to prevent “security hacking” activities, I’m more specifically looking for something that might be used as an ethical standard to help guide the design and implementation of user device and application interfaces.

This may perhaps verge on the topic of intentionally confusing language and dependency requirements in licensing and EULAs, so I guess barring explicitly malicious language, how might the ethics of implied consent be applied to an end user?

# Answer
> -1 votes
As it relates to the application of psychology, the idea of complied consent seems to be less the arena of science and more the arena of philosophy or perhaps meta psychology.

While it may not be a topic that is in parallel with the conduct of research per say, there is a published set of ethical standards by the APA which states in the introduction:

> The fact that a given conduct is not specifically addressed by an Ethical Standard does not mean that it is necessarily either ethical or unethical.

Additionally, as far as the scope of applicability, the introduction continues with:

> This Ethics Code applies only to psychologists' activities that are part of their scientific, educational, or professional roles as psychologists.

This seems to imply that unless you are schooled and graduated as a psychologist, that you can likely get away with some of this as there is unlikely to be any response for someone who just “hacks” user interaction and ergonomics.

But, optimistically, perhaps these set of ethical guidelines can be shared and built upon by other associations and ethics committee more specific to the communities of UX and UI.

As far as a place to start with for ethical grounding in UX and how to treat users, the APA ethical standard specifically mentions *“development of assessment instruments; conducting assessments”* as areas covered. As such, it would seem to me that the collection of data in any software or hardware device would count as assessment instruments and the analysis of such data is in fact an assessment of a users psychological profile to be used in some way as determined by the goals of the system being used (as opposed to the goals of the user using the system).

Standard 3.04 may be another good starting point that, while again specifically mentioning psychologists as the intended audience and expected practitioners, might be incite full for guidance on what is appropriate for “phishing” or socially engineering a user through the interface, especially where it concerns the collection of personal data. Paragraph (a) states:

> Psychologists take reasonable steps to avoid harming their clients/patients, students, supervisees, **research participants, organizational clients, and others with whom they work**, and to minimize harm where it is foreseeable and unavoidable.

As far as I can tell, this seems to be the most appropriate reference for my question. I will continue to do some further searching and reading, but I thought this might help anyone who ends up here through similar curiosity if nothing else.

https://www.apa.org

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Tags: consumer-psychology
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# Question
Title: Do some people substitute pets for kids in their life?
So there are some old articles, like this one, which have discussed how pets (especially small pets) are on the rise with young adults, while birth rates are down. This talks about how delaying having kids is a short-term/ individual win for the family, as mothers' income increases every year she delays getting pregnant, but then the long-term effect is a society strained with many more old people than young (for one).

While of course correlation isn't causation, I can easily see how the desire for establishing a solid career before starting a family & feminism & hustle culture & the eco-crisis, how all of these issues and more could make young adults more apprehensive about starting a family & decide to postpone it. Yet, there is still a biological urge to parent, and so in comes the fluffy ball of joy. The pet/ pet services industry is growing so so much.

Are there researchers that have investigated this trend/ cluster of behaviour, and what conclusions (or initial observations) have they come to? I know there are studies that tackle parenthood and pets as a whole, but that is not what I'm looking for. I don't think simply aggregating all families can lead you to any useful conclusions since it conflates different scenarios & motivations. It's like saying everyone earns an average of $100k/ year, when some make millions a year and others are dirt poor. I'd be specifically interested in research where they tried to isolate this pets-as-kids cluster.

# Answer
> 5 votes
Short answer: A full substitution isn't really the prevailing view among researchers, but a partial substitution is possible in some cases.

While it's tempting to think that an increase in pet ownership may contribute to the decline in fertility rates in many developed nations, the available data suggests that it's more likely that having fewer children simply leaves more resources (time, attention, money) available for parenting pets, as it does for many other leisure activities that are equally on the rise.

However, as suggested, there are many different reasons for pet ownership, and no doubt among some subset of adults, pets fulfill certain needs that might otherwise be fulfilled by children, such as emotional, social, and self-esteem support, and possibly the need to nurture, protect, train, or otherwise parent.

There are several good literature reviews that consider this question specifically, and are worth a read if you are interested in in-depth analyses. Note that evidence is relatively sparse at this time, so conclusions are by no means definitive.

Volsche (2019): Understanding Cross-Species Parenting: A Case for Pets as Children

> Though child-free pet parents are highly engaged, invested, and bonded with their pets, this should not suggest that they are confusing pets for children. Though Veevers (1980) found that there are those within the child-free community who engage in pet parenting as a substitution for human children, she warns that the “fur baby” stereotype is less common in practice; a vocal minority within the population.

Serpell & Paul (2011): Pets in the Family: An Evolutionary Perspective

> Among the Bororo people of central Brazil, ownership of pet macaws is almost entirely limited to women, and the standard Bororo explanation for why some households keep more of these pets than others is that these are the homes of women who have previously lost many children (Crocker, 1977).

These authors review several reasons for pet ownership, including parenting practice, and finding mates, both of which might contribute to (rather than reduce) fertility rates.

Aruah, Ezeh, & Tom (2019): Relationship between Pet Ownership, Pet Attachment and Decision to Have Children among Single People in the United States

> Although the want for children has reduced, the need to love and have a companionship has not. Human beings still crave for someone to care for and nurture, and so they acquire pets. ... animal companionship can provide a sense of nonjudgmental social support, a form of support that can be difficult for people (including supportive spouses or friends) to provide and for some, pets may become like surrogate friends, mates, or children.

There is also an interesting study by Hahn, Wang, & Yang (2013) that considers actual causation (rather than just correlation) by checking the effect of abortion legalization - a policy change that resulted in fertility decline - on pet ownership:

> ... abortion legalization raised the probability of owning pets by 15 percentage points for working women, but by only 8.8 percentage points for women not in the labor force.

These results suggest that pet ownership is more affected by wealth than child rearing, as non-working women - despite having more free time - did not increase their pet ownership as much as working women following the legalization of abortion in their state.

> We find that the demand for pets is affected by liberalization of birth control methods, suggesting a substitutable property of pets for children.

# Answer
> 4 votes
From what I've seen, in my view, the answer is a simple yes.

As for studies, there is an article in Psychology Today which cites a particular study called 'Interspecies Parenting: How Pet Parents Construct Their Roles'.

Links to both below:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/head-games/201903/why-some-people-think-pets-children-and-others-dont

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322261554\_Interspecies\_Parenting\_How\_Pet\_Parents\_Construct\_Their\_Roles which can also be viewed at https://doi.org/10.1177/0160597617748166

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Tags: parenting
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# Question
Title: How/why can dreams have higher resolution than visions/thoughts?
Today I had a lucid dream to an "alternative universe", where I was 100% aware of being in a lucid dream. One thought that came to my mind during it was that the universe I have been to was in crisp 8K HDR. As someone with no special mental (dis)abilities (including photographic memory), how is it possible that I cannot draw in my mind something more complex than a 4x4 chess board, but I could see a high-resolution dream?

My guess would be "My brain is lazy during normal times but eager to render at a high resolution in dreams"?

# Answer
I share similar concerns with you here in the Philosophy Stack Exchange:

https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/82488/where-is-it-that-i-go-when-i-dream?noredirect=1#comment231329\_82488

There is a great article on this in PsychologyToday where the author makes an attempt to draw some parallels between Dreams and Many Worlds Interpretation. Here it is: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/dream-catcher/201407/dreams-and-the-many-worlds-interpretation-quantum-physics

Another great source of information on this topic would be Eva T.H. Brann's work entitled: "The World of Imagination: Sum and Substance" which I highly recommend and would argue is the best source to begin your search for an answer.

Even the CIA has a take on it here: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001700210016-5

A part of the problem is whether or not dreams are an experience of a "place" (Topos) that one goes to. Since you have experienced what a lucid dream is like then for you this would seem to be obvious; insofar as you would refer to it as an "alternate universe" (Or a 'simulated universe'). That is what it has seemed like to me in moments of Lucid Dreaming that I have personally experienced.

As to what the factors are that determine the level of resolution between a dream and the visualization of the chessboard as you put it is indeed difficult to ascertain. I cannot provide an answer in all honesty but the resources shared above should provide some food for thought.
> 1 votes

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Tags: dreams, thought
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# Question
Title: Sources on P1/N1 modulation with checkerboard probe
I have been able to find a lot of papers that modulate the P1/N1 component with a visual probe, usually a checkerboard presented parafoveally. I understand the basics of what I am reading, but I would like to find more information about the basic effect of P1/N1 modulation with this type of stimuli. All papers I find present some new variation on the experimental paradigm, whereas I would like to read about the original effects, so I can use it on an experiment I am currently designing.

Does anyone know of a good review, book chapters, article, etc. describing this experimental paradigm?

# Answer
> 3 votes
For the fundamentals, I always go back to the more dated literature that is heavily cited (in this field of research, which is pretty big given it uses visual evoked potentials, say \>1k times). I found the following two papers that describe the basics of VEPs with checkerboard patterns.

In addition, a very nice visual electrophysiology book is *Electrophysiologic Testing*, by Fishman *et al* (eds.). That book has greatly helped me to understand the basics of these matters. For you, especially section 5.1 to 5.3 seem relevant as they deal with the basics and stimulus parameters of VEPs, including checkerboard patterns. Section 5.6 delivers practical guidelines that may also be of great use to you.

\- Fisman *et al*. (eds.), ch. 5. Electrophysiologic testing in disorders of the Retina, optic nerve, and visual pathway, 2nd ed. FAAO, San Fransisco, CA

\- Lehman & Skrendies. Reference-free identification of components of checkerboard-evoked multichannel potential fields. *Electroencephal Clin Neurophysiol* (1980); **48**: 609-21

\- Shigeto *et al*., Visual evoked cortical magnetic responses to checkerboard pattern reversal stimulation: A study on the neural generators of N75, P100 and N145. *J Neurol Sci* (1998); **156**(2): 186-94

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Tags: vision, eeg, attention, electrophysiology, event-related-potential
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# Question
Title: What is the neurobiological mechanism behind masochism?
I tried to search in textbooks and papers but barely found any concrete answer to which exact mechanism is behind non-intuitive transition from pain to pleasure. Does it have something to do with:

1. just the effect of dopamine (once the pain is administered, endorphins inhibit GABA and increase dopamine release)?
2. initially decreased levels of beta-endorphins in the brain, so that pain increases DA release as in (1) and even this small release is enough to feel the pleasure? And, as in people who are prone to self-harm, is it some kind of a "desperate attempt to artificially set the body to survival mode in order to mobilize the last reserves of the endogenous opioid system"?
3. lower sensitivity (to pain?) in such people?
4. some other explanations?

If someone have the answer or ran into papers addressing this question, I would be grateful!

# Answer
> 2 votes
The first paper I found was this one:

Kamping, S., Andoh, J., Bomba, I. C., Diers, M., Diesch, E., & Flor, H. (2016). Contextual modulation of pain in masochists: involvement of the parietal operculum and insula. Pain, 157(2), 445.

They note:

> Masochists reported substantially reduced pain intensity and unpleasantness in the masochistic context compared with controls but had unaltered pain perception in the other conditions

The context-dependence of this effect suggests to me to favor a "top-down" modulation explanation, rather than a "bottom-up" neurochemical one involving endorphins and dopamine.

The authors continue:

> The masochists compared with the controls displayed attenuated functional connectivity of the parietal operculum with the left and right insulae, the central operculum, and the supramarginal gyrus. Masochists additionally showed negative correlations between the duration of interest in masochistic activities and activation of areas involved in motor activity and affective processing. We propose that the parietal operculum serves as an important relay station that attenuates the affective-motivational aspects of pain in masochists.

So indeed, their results suggest that the higher-order perception of pain is different in masochists during masochistic activities. It's difficult to make causal conclusions from these data, however in general this isn't something that's going to be easy to study causally. I'm not aware of any model of masochism in model organisms, so approaches are going to be fairly limited to observational studies of humans.

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Tags: neuroscience, neurophysiology
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# Question
Title: Is most of Kahneman's 'Thinking fast and slow' not supported by evidence/non replicable?
> 'So, replicability \[of all studies in this book\] is somewhere between 12% and 46%. Even if half of the results are replicable, we do not know which results are replicable and which one’s are not.'

> 'Readers of “Thinking: Fast and Slow” should read the book as a subjective account by an eminent psychologists, rather than an objective summary of scientific evidence.'

A Meta-Scientific Perspective on “Thinking: Fast and Slow

I have no background in social sciences or statistics so I don't know if claims and math in this article are correct. Could somebody with more knowledge comment on this? This is HUGE if true.

# Answer
This is complicated. There's no easy answer, but the outlook for replicability/reproducibility of a lot of the empirical evidence is not great.

The R-index (that the blog authors use to rank the chapters) is itself a heuristic, which shouldn't be taken as statistical evidence that a study will **necessarily** fail to replicate. That being said, it could potentially be considered a useful heuristic, as is the idea that people process information over time (i.e., some mental processes happen more quickly than others).

An issue of *Psychological Inquiry* might be helpful to people who want to learn about the most recent conversation among **a select group** of psychological scientists. This journal publishes a "target article" and allows other people in the field to comment, to which the original authors reply. The whole conversation is published as an issue - this one is from April 2021. Without going into detail, many priming effects do not replicate, and social priming might be a terrible term to use, in part because it is associated with questionable scientific literature (target article here, one cherry-picked commentary here, the authors of the target article reply to the commentaries here).

Kahneman himself warned of problems with the literature in 2012 (see a scientific news report here (4) and his email here).

1. Sherman, J. W., & Rivers, A. M. (2021). There’s nothing social about social priming: derailing the “train wreck”. Psychological Inquiry, 32(1), 1-11.
2. Harris, C., Rohrer, D., & Pashler, H. (2021). A train wreck by any other name. Psychological Inquiry, 32(1), 17-23.
3. Sherman, J. W., & Rivers, A. M. (2021). A final word on train wrecks. Psychological Inquiry, 32(1), 49-52.
4. Yong, E. (2012). Nobel laureate challenges psychologists to clean up their act. Nature News.

Hope this helps.
> 8 votes

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Tags: bias, statistics, behavioral-economics, replication
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# Question
Title: Is there a national/international coming out day for people with mental health issues?
I know there's a general mental health day on October 10th and a Coming out as LGBTQ+ day on October 11th (odd that they're right next to each other), but I've never heard about a day dedicated to needing to "come out" or simply tell people you love that you've been diagnosed with a mental health disorder. Due to mental health issues being so stigmatized, telling people you have a mental health disorder can be nerve wracking and can even bar you from working certain jobs. So is there a nationally and/or internationally recognized day where we "come out" of the "closet" as people with mental health disorders?

P.S. as a bisexual woman, I know the LGBTQ+ comparison to mental health issues is problematic but I only brought it up because I want to know if there is a mental health version of LGBTQ coming out day.

This is the only article I could find that mentioned both in this way: https://pacificaidsnetwork.org/2017/10/08/mental-health-day-coming-day-linked-stigma/

# Answer
Stigma is indeed a major barrier for seeking treatment. As such, several mental health awareness events focus on reducing stigma in order to encourage patients to come out and seek help and support from health professionals, their family, and community. While these observances do not exclusively focus on coming out, sharing experiences, or seeking help, they do often include this goal in their agenda:

* Mental Health Awareness Month (May): "Mental Health Awareness Month strives to reduce the stigma (negative attitudes and misconceptions) that surrounds mental illnesses." For example, the theme in 2016 was: "Life with a Mental Illness - and called on individuals to share what life with a mental illness feels like for them ... encourage people to speak up about their own experiences ..."
* Children's Mental Health Awareness Day (May 7): "Teens learned about how to take care of their mental health, ... and how to reach out to their parents/guardians to start a conversation around mental health."
* National Day Without Stigma (Oct 9): "The objective of National Day Without Stigma is to eliminate the shame and discrimination surrounding mental health disorders by creating communities of understanding, support, and help-seeking."
* Mental Health Week (Australia) (Oct 10-17): "Raising awareness of mental health issues and reducing stigma associated with seeking support."
* World Mental Health Day (Oct 10): "... an international day for global mental health education, awareness and advocacy against social stigma."
* Mental Illness Awareness Week (Oct 5–11): "Programs during Mental Illness Awareness Week are designed to create community awareness and discussion in an effort to put an end to stigma and advocate for treatment and recovery."
* World Teen Mental Wellness Day (March 2): “raise greater awareness of mental health issues among teens, as well as provide education about removing stigmas surrounding preventative mental health.”
* Mental Health Awareness Week (May 8–14): "... an annual event when there is an opportunity for the whole of the UK to focus on achieving good mental health."
* Asian American Pacific Islander Mental Health Awareness Day (May 10): ".... Asian Pacific American Mental Health Awareness Day will address the mental challenges faced by these communities and provide adequate tools to deal with them."

There are also events for specific disorders listed here, including autism, suicide, down syndrome, and others. Another list of mental health awareness events here.
> 5 votes

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Tags: mental-illness
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# Question
Title: is it possible that "the first given food determines the behavior of a child/person"?
In Pakistan, there is a custom that when a child is born we give him a tiny amount of food (something sweet e.g Honey, Dates, Brown Sugar). It is considered that whoever gives the first food to the child, the child will hold his properties or behaviors ( This seems baseless).

But in some cases, the kid actually holds the properties, which is strange. My question is, what is the logical reason to hold such common properites.

**For Example:**

I have two Aunts (Sisters of my mother), and each of the aunt's children (My cousins) are married together (Yeah Cousin marriage is allowed in Muslims). They have a kid, when he was born, I gave him first food (Honey). Now the kid has some properties like me, e.g he doesn't often play with other kids, he does not talk much, etc... His parents are happy with this as they assume that kid is like me and since I am educated so the kid is going to be educated too.

My concern is, maybe the kid has some problem and we are just trying to justify it in the wrong way.

Is there any possibility that kid got properties from me? As the only common thing between his parents and me is "We have the same maternal grandparents"

Also, I did not spend any time with the kid that we may assume that kid learned that behavior from me. Both of his parents are extroverts than introverts.

# Answer
> 1 votes
This doesn't make any biological or medical sense, but it probably does fit an example of confirmation bias. That is, if people believe a certain food conferred personality traits, they will look for those traits in a person. When they find any of them, it will reinforce the first food idea. When some are absent, they will ignore or explain them away rather than reject the first food idea.

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Tags: behavior, feeding, introversion
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# Question
Title: What is the actual interpretation of the "correlation of a connection between neurons"?
I am student of Mathematics who is currently studying the utility of Algebraic Topology in the field of Neuroscience. In the paper I am reading (Reimann et al 2017) the authors explain that for several pairs of neurons they calculated the correlation of their spiking activity. Sometimes they also use the expression "correlation of connection", which I think refers to the correlation of spiking activity between two neurons (as the prior references). I am interested in understanding the following:

1. How does one measure the correlation of a connection?
2. I know the mathematical definition of correlation and have an intuitive understanding of it as a measurement of dependence. But in the case of neurons what is the actual interpretation for the correlation of a connection? Is it in the sense of synchronicity? Or something else?

Any insight will be appreciated. This is not my area of studies, so the most elementary observation might help. Thank you in advance.

Reimann, M. W., Nolte, M., Scolamiero, M., Turner, K., Perin, R., Chindemi, G., ... & Markram, H. (2017). Cliques of neurons bound into cavities provide a missing link between structure and function. Frontiers in computational neuroscience, 11, 48.

# Answer
They write in the paper:

> Correlations were calculated from histograms of the average spiking response (peri-stimulus time histogram, PSTH; bin size, 25 ms) to five seconds of thalamo-cortical input over 30 repetitions of a given input pattern

So, they count spikes in 25 ms bins for two neurons, resulting in two time vectors (one for each cell), and calculate the Pearson correlation between those vectors. A "connection" in this context is the same as an "edge" in graph theory; they're referring to a correlation between a pair of nodes (neurons). It's not really strictly correct to call it a "correlation of connection" but the meaning is still clear. More strictly you might call it "the spike count correlation of two connected neurons".

Generally, one would say that neurons that fire more spikes at the same time are *functionally connected*. That does not necessarily mean they are *structurally* connected, for example you could have a lot of functional connectivity between two (physically) unconnected neurons that share inputs. However, in this paper they are talking specifically about relationships between functional and structural connectivity. "Synchronicity" doesn't have any clear meaning without an operational definition, but firing rates on a time scale of 25 milliseconds aren't really all that synchronous from a neuron's perspective.
> 1 votes

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Tags: neuroscience, computational-modeling, neural-network, synchronization
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# Question
Title: Does our conscious experience of world match the world as it IS or as it presents itself?
Steven Pinker in his book 'How the mind works' says:

> our conscious sensation of color and lightness matches the world as it is rather than the world as it presents itself to the eye. The snowball is soft and wet and prone to melt whether it is indoors or out, and we see it as white whether it is indoors or out. The coal is always hard and dirty and prone to burn, and we always see it as black.

and then on the samepage he gives an example that, to me, seems to prove the exact opposite:

> When a television set is off, the screen is a pale greenish gray. When it is on, some of the phosphor dots give off light, painting in the bright areas of the picture. But the other dots do not suck light and paint in the dark areas; they just stay gray. The areas that you see as black are in fact just the pale shade of the picture tube when the set was off. The blackness is a figment, a product of the brain circuitry

We see black when it IS pale greenish grey. what am i missing here?

# Answer
> 1 votes
The two paragraphs are saying the same thing; I think Pinker is making a bit of a grandiose philosophical statement in the meaning of "the world as it is", but it makes sense if we give that the narrow meaning he's actually using: the "world as it is", the color of an object, refers to how that object reflects light. Not the spectrum of light emitted, which changes by the ambient light available, but how the object *changes* the ambient light spectrum to reflect just part of it.

The distinction he's making is in the difference between perception and the actual signal entering the eye; alternatively, think of that signal as what one pixel from a digital camera would register. Perception will be constant ("match the world as it is"), while the camera pixels would register something very different for the same object in different contexts.

A white snowball reflects light the same whether it's inside a candlelit room or out in the bright sun, but because the light source is different you will receive a completely different spectrum and intensity of light at the eye (or camera) in those two settings. However, the perception of the snowball being *white* stays the same. It stays the same because you aren't directly reading the count of photons of different wavelengths coming off the snowball to decide it's white, you're making comparisons with all the other light coming off all the other objects in the room to determine how much ambient light there is, and based on that, which wavelengths each object in the room must be reflecting ("the world as it is").

The TV example is the same, just from a different perspective. You're perceptually making the same "ambient light" corrections as the candlelight/sunlight distinction, except in this case for the emitted light of the TV. If, say, the TV is showing a picture of a car driving down an asphalt road, the asphalt is black and you perceive it as black even if there is actually the pale greenish gray light entering the eye.

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Tags: perception, color
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# Question
Title: Method and sample size to test validity and reliability of a scale/ survey
I am working on a project where I need to use a scale to measure certain psychological and political positions. I have a questionnaire that is used in the US, and whose validity was tested there quite well, but I need to use the scale in India.

I want to test the validity of the instrument in the Indian context, before using it for my study. I wanted to know the steps for testing different kinds of validity and reliability, the sample size required etc. Links to any good material to study these things (books/ video lectures/ notes/ other materials) would be of help, along with any comments or recommendations on what to do from your side.

# Answer
> 1 votes
The first step is translation. Some projects have used a three-step process including 1) forward translation, 2) back translation, and 3) cultural adjustment. Two translators would complete step one, two more would complete step two, and then the materials are sent to external people (preferably non-academics) for review. Here's (1) a preprint that describes that process.

Beyond that, the process is very much dependent on the measure being validated. There are procedures to assess factor structure, measurement invariance, reliability, convergent validity, discriminant validity, predictive validity, etc. This is a huge field of study and there's no way to provide an answer that would apply to any scale. I would not assume that the measure was rigorously validated in the source in which you found it, unless you have the expertise to evaluate their methods and procedures.

I might try searching (or posting) on cross-validated to get information specific to the statistical approach.

I would think about whether you really want to conduct validation studies, or simply translate the measure as best you can. Validation studies will take a long time and they're quite complex. Here's (2) one example of a scale that very much needed to be validated in another language, because of the substantive differences in the translation.

Here is a video with someone talking about the EFA/CFA procedures. I have not watched it and because it's such a complicated topic, I doubt they cover everything you need to know in the 25 minutes.

Here are some powerpoint slides that have more information from Classical Test Theory. This is only one possible way to approach psychological measurement. Another approach is Item Response Theory.

1. Forscher, P. S., Paris, B., Primbs, M., & Coles, N. A. (2020). PSACR: The Psychological Science Accelerator's COVID-19 Rapid-Response Project.
2. Seema, R., Quaglia, J. T., Brown, K. W., Sircova, A., Konstabel, K., & Baltin, A. (2015). The Estonian Mindful Attention Awareness Scale: Assessing mindfulness without a distinct linguistic present tense. Mindfulness, 6(4), 759-766.

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Tags: measurement, statistics, survey, validation, reliability
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# Question
Title: How close are fluorescent dyes to individual neurons in two photon microscopy?
Considering the minute electrical excitation produced by neural cells needed to excite fluorescent dyes, how close are they to these cells, considering that being too close will disrupt cell processes. Is there any ratio of how many fluorescent proteins are excited by each cell?

# Answer
When using a genetically encoded fluorescent dye like GCaMPs, the calcium-sensitive proteins are **produced in and located inside the cell**. That's where they have to be because they are measuring the calcium concentration inside the cell.

When using an injected dye like Oregon Green BAPTA, it's common to use an AM ester form of the dye (for example see this product from ThermoFisher: https://www.thermofisher.com/order/catalog/product/O6807#/O6807 \- also not meaning to promote any particular merchant, you can search "oregon green BAPTA AM" and get other results). The esterified version of these dyes are cell-permeant and then are cleaved by an intrinsic esterase to become non-cell-permeant. This means that again, the **fluorescent calcium sensor molecules are within the cells where you want them to be so that they measure internal calcium concentrations**. Any AM dye that remains in the extracellular space will not fluoresce without the esterase, which is good because that would otherwise contribute to unwanted background signal.
> 1 votes

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Tags: neuroscience, neurophysiology, neuroimaging
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# Question
Title: Are there equivalent calcium imaging molecules that fluoresce in the presence of neurotransmitters between axons?
Molecules like GCaMP fluoresce when calcium ions attach to them. I was wondering if this can work with the other neurotransmitters in the brain or compounds that transmit signals outside of neurons.

# Answer
> 1 votes
Yes, for example there is the, uhh, creatively named "glue sniffer": GluSnFRs that responds to glutamate by fluorescing, and a couple other varieties as well (also mentioned on that Wikipedia page).

The concept is similar to the calcium-sensitive dyes: couple a motif that binds to the target of interest and causes a conformational change with a motif related to fluorescent proteins like GFP/YFP, such that the binding of the target molecule/ion allows the fluorescent motif to be active.

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Tags: neuroscience, neurophysiology, neuroimaging, neuroanatomy
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# Question
Title: Can a person be persuaded to become gay?
Can a person become gay? Can a person be persuaded to become one? I heard that gayness is correlated with some genetic characteristics so, I figured, laws against "gay propaganda" (e.g. in Russia) are anti-science, aren't they (in addition to being discriminatory)?

## References

Hamer, D. H., Hu, S., Magnuson, V. L., Hu, N., & Pattatucci, A. M. (1993). A linkage between DNA markers on the X chromosome and male sexual orientation. *Science, 261*(5119), 321-327. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.8332896

# Answer
The article you linked (Hamer, et al. 1993 \[Open Access PDF\]) was cited in Mills (2019) \[Open Access PDF\] which states,

> Work in the 1990s isolated a relationship with the Xq28 region on the X chromosome (5 \[Hu, et al. (1995)\], 6 \[Hamer, et al. 1993\]). Subsequent studies found similarity in the sexual orientation of identical twins, with genetics explaining 18% (for women) and 37% (for men), with the remainder accounted for by directly shared environments (such as family or school) and nonshared environments (such as legalization or norms regarding same-sex behavior) (7 \[Långström, et al. (2010) Open Access PDF\]). Many of these studies could not be replicated, and although twin and family studies found a genetic basis, they could not isolate variants associated with same-sex orientation at specific genetic loci.

Mills (2019) also reports that,

> On page 882 of this issue, Ganna et al. (3 \[Ganna, et al. (2019) Open Access PDF\]) report the largest study to date, comprising almost half a million individuals in the United Kingdom and United States, identifying genetic variants associated with same-sex sexual behavior. They provide evidence that genetic variation accounts for a small fraction of same-sex sexual behavior and uncover a relationship to the regulation of the sex hormones testosterone and estrogen as well as sex-specific differences. They also reveal complexity of human sexuality.

There is also a comment on this study (Hamer, et al. 2021 Open Access PDF) and response (Ganna, et al. 2021 Open Access) is also available for your review.

With all this in mind, in review of Hamer et al. (1993) you linked to, the answer to the question Can hocd change sexual orientation? still stands that,

> \[N\]othing and nobody can make you homosexual, bisexual or heterosexual

The thing is, genetics has nothing to do with persuading someone to be gay other than the fact that if genetics were involved, persuasion cannot be effective.

So with that in mind, reviewing the rest of the answer to the question Can hocd change sexual orientation?, it still stands that,

> \[N\]othing and nobody can make you homosexual, bisexual or heterosexual

## References

Ganna, A., Verweij, K. J., Nivard, M. G., Maier, R., Wedow, R., Busch, A. S., ... & Zietsch, B. P. (2019). Large-scale GWAS reveals insights into the genetic architecture of same-sex sexual behavior. *Science, 365*(6456). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aat7693

Ganna, A., Verweij, K. J., Nivard, M. G., Maier, R., Wedow, R., Busch, A. S., ... & Zietsch, B. P. (2021). Response to Comment on “Large-scale GWAS reveals insights into the genetic architecture of same-sex sexual behavior”. *Science, 371*(6536). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aba5693

Hamer, D. H., Hu, S., Magnuson, V. L., Hu, N., & Pattatucci, A. M. (1993). A linkage between DNA markers on the X chromosome and male sexual orientation. *Science, 261*(5119), 321-327. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.8332896

Hamer, D., Mustanski, B., Sell, R., Sanders, S. A., & Garcia, J. R. (2021). Comment on “Large-scale GWAS reveals insights into the genetic architecture of same-sex sexual behavior”. *Science, 371*(6536). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aba2941

Hu, S., Pattatucci, A. M., Patterson, C., Li, L., Fulker, D. W., Cherny, S. S., ... & Hamer, D. H. (1995). Linkage between sexual orientation and chromosome Xq28 in males but not in females. *Nature genetics, 11*(3), 248-256. https://doi.org/10.1038/ng1195-248

Långström, N., Rahman, Q., Carlström, E., & Lichtenstein, P. (2010). Genetic and environmental effects on same-sex sexual behavior: A population study of twins in Sweden. *Archives of sexual behavior, 39*(1), 75-80 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-008-9386-1

Mills, M. C. (2019). How do genes affect same-sex behavior?. *Science, 365*(6456), 869-870. http://doi.org/10.1126/science.aay2726
> 5 votes

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Tags: social-psychology, sexuality
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# Question
Title: What do current-clamp pipettes inject in neuronal recordings?
I am news to the field of computational neuroscience, and I constantly see equations involving an "input current", which can be tested experimentally by injecting "currents" into neurons and simultaneously recording the membrane potential.

Now, this "current" is not an actual flow of electrons (I'm assuming ?) from a metal electrode so my question is the following: what is actually injected inside the cell in such measurements? How does it works?

# Answer
In a current-clamp (or voltage-clamp, for that matter) experiment, you have a pair of electrodes; one is in the bath somewhere acting as a ground, the other is suspended in a glass pipette full of some salt solution, usually one that roughly mimics the intracellular ion composition, with some adjustments for convenience or experimental reasons. In a whole-cell configuration that is typical of a current-clamp experiment, the experimenter presses this glass pipette against the cell and sucks the membrane in, such that the inside of the cell and the inside of the pipette are all one electrically-connected space.

When you "clamp" current to some level, that means that the amplifier is making sure a certain current runs between those two wires; you then measure the voltage required to maintain this current as a read out of the cell's function in some way.

"Injecting electrons" is really not too far off from the truth. It pretty much acts like a battery in that circuit, except that the voltage of the battery is adjusted dynamically to fix the current (rather than the voltage being constant as in a typical household battery). The rest is really a matter of electrochemistry rather than any neuroscience: the ground wires used are typically silver chloride-coated, so the actual electrochemistry that occurs is the redox reaction between solid atomic silver and silver chloride.

None of the silver interacts with the tissue, though; spatially the electrodes are far from the cell itself. Electricity is conducted through the liquid ionic medium like it always does: other positive charges are attracted to negativity/repulsed by positivity, and vice-versa.
> 2 votes

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Tags: electrophysiology
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# Question
Title: Lunar cycles linked with mental health issues?
From what I can find...

1. Anecdotally, my mother used to work in nursing homes for the elderly and found that around the full moon, patients slept less and were more agitated.

> Anecdotal evidence concerning a relationship between human illnesses and a full moon is frequently claimed by as many as 81% of mental health workers (Francis, et al. 2017).

2. Police have linked full moons to a rise in aggressive behaviour among drinkers on the streets of Brighton.

> Research carried out by us has shown a correlation between violent incidents and full moons.

3. The same newspaper report cited a 1998 study without reference information, stating that

> In 1998, a three-month psychological study of 1,200 inmates at Armley jail in Leeds discovered a rise in violent incidents during the days on either side of a full moon.
> During the first and last quarter of each lunar month there was a marked increase in violent incidents.During the remaining part of the month there were far fewer incidents and none at all on some days.

I have yet to find the 1998 study through Google Scholar etc. but I have found some research (e.g. the open access Foster & Roenneberg (2008)) finding no link. I was wondering if there has been **any possible** link found in clinical research?

My theory was initially that maybe the full moon might affect CSF (cerebral spinal fluid) levels around the various areas of the brain, much like it affects sea water levels with their tides. But, then I would have thought the same would occur at local sea tidal times. However, maybe tidal effects are stronger at full moon?

## References

Attewill, F. (2007). Police link full moon to aggression. *The Guardian*. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/jun/05/ukcrime

Foster, R. G., & Roenneberg, T. (2008). Human responses to the geophysical daily, annual and lunar cycles. *Current biology, 18*(17), R784-R794. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2008.07.003

Francis, O. J., Kopke, B. J., Affatato, A. J., & Jarski, R. W. (2017). Psychiatric Presentations During All 4 Phases of the Lunar Cycle. *Advances in mind-body medicine, 31*(3), 4–7. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28841578/

# Answer
> 1 votes
I have found a piece of research (Thakur & Sharma 1984 **PDF**) which states there **is a possible link**.

> **Abstract**
>
> The incidence of crimes reported to three police stations in different towns (one rural, one urban, one industrial) was studied to see if it varied with the day of the lunar cycle. The period of the study covered 1978-82. The incidence of crimes committed on full moon days was much higher than on all other days, new moon days, and seventh days after the full moon and new moon. A small peak in the incidence of crimes was observed on new moon days, but this was not significant when compared with crimes committed on other days. The incidence of crimes on equinox and solstice days did not differ significantly from those on other days, suggesting that the sun probably does not influence the incidence of crime. The increased incidence of crimes on full moon days may be due to "human tidal waves" caused by the gravitational pull of the moon.

## References

Thakur, C. P., & Sharma, D. (1984). Full moon and crime. *British Medical Journal (Clinical Research Edition), 289*(6460), 1789-1791. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.289.6460.1789

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Tags: neuroscience, social-psychology, cognitive-neuroscience, clinical-psychology, criminology
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# Question
Title: What is the size limit of molecules entering the intracellular sections of a neuron?
As voltage sensitive organic dyes enter the inside of neurons and quantum dots are seeking to replace these due to their higher quantum yield, I was wondering what the seize limit is, as quantum dot are typically dozen of nanometers across in every direction.

# Answer
> 1 votes
I've used latex microspheres in the past. These not only enter cells but also move retrograde (backward) through axons, and are sized up 0.02 to 0.2 microns; it seems like the smaller beads in the range of 0.05 microns are taken up better (or at least transported better) than the larger ones. You can see the individual spheres clearly on a microscope in labeled cells.

I think it's wrong to think about just *size*. Not everything will get through membranes. Small hydrophobic materials can just slip through the membrane, but larger ones rely on endocytosis. I don't know if further work has been done on the mechanisms of these tracers, but early papers suggested that they are taken up by endocytosis particularly at presynaptic terminals and then transported as vesicles along microtubules.

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Tags: neurophysiology, neuroimaging, neuroanatomy, psychopharmacology
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# Question
Title: What statistical tests should be performed to test effect of trials on response times where each subject has different number of data points?
I am running a behavioral experiment where a number of subjects (=20 in my case) perform a simple cognitive task. The experiment consists of a fixed number of trials (say, 40 in my case). During each trial, the participant executes a single key-press and the response time (RT) is recorded.

So my recorded data looks like this:

```
subject-1   -> [Trial-1 RT, Trial-2 RT ... Trial-40 RT]              # (40 trials)
subject-2   -> [Trial-1 RT, Trial-2 RT ... Trial-40 RT]              # (40 trials)
...        ...       ...
subject-20  -> [Trial-1 RT, Trial-2 RT ... Trial-40 RT]              # (40 trials)

```

Now based on some RT criterion, a few trials are removed for each subject. This resulting data looks like this:

```
subject-1   -> [Trial-1 RT, Trial-3 RT ... Trial-40 RT]              # (32 trials)
subject-2   -> [Trial-1 RT, Trial-2 RT ... Trial-38 RT]              # (36 trials)
...        ...       ...
subject-20  -> [Trial-3 RT, Trial-8 RT ... Trial-40 RT]              # (28 trials)

```

The removal of a few trials result in a non-uniform number of data-points for each subject. Eg. subject-1, subject-2 and subject-20 have 32, 36 and 28 trials respectively.

Now I want to test the effect of trials on response times, what statistical methods should I use?

I know that when I am **not** removing the data, I have a nice 20\*40 (subjects * trials) data matrix on which I can perform repeated measures ANOVA (within-subject) to see the effect of trials on response times. But how should I go about it if I am removing a couple of trials?

# Answer
This type of data (repeated measures on a group of subjects) lends itself perfectly for a **linear mixed model (LMM)** analysis. I'm into psychophysics myself and I have mostly abandoned simple ANOVAs and switched to LMMs almost completely, especially because it can handle missing data, and because LMMs allow for inclusion of trial and session number to correct for them in an elegant manner. In effect, you can potentially take learning effects and/or mental fatigue into account. Between-subject (baseline) differences and learning effects are two of the most pesky problems in psychophysics and repeated measure designs, respectively. This makes the use of LMMs so rewarding in this field.

An LMM has several huge advantages over standard ANOVA analysis and it is expected to replace standard ANOVA analysis in time.

Advantages of LMM include:

* Subjects (and other variables) can be included as random effect, such that the model corrects for within-subject differences (akin to repeated measures);
* Missing data are allowed and corrected for;
* Fixed and covariate factors can be included and tested for significance. In your case trial # can be included as a covariate. The LMM will calculate the effect of trial # on your outcome measure and will calculate whether that effect is significant or not (check 'model estimates' under statistics when you use SPSS);
* LMMs can be statistically powerful, despite low subject numbers.

If you wish to stick to standard RM-ANOVA, you can also opt to **impute your data** to correct for missing values. Especially multiple imputation is a robust way of estimating missing data (Van Netten *et al*., 2016), also available in SPSS.

<sub>**Reference**
**-** Van Netten *et al*. *Ear Hear* (2017); **38**: 1–6</sub>
> 3 votes

# Answer
Mixed effects regression is somewhat related to repeated measures ANOVA and can handle missing data. However, they assume the missing data are missing at random.

Depending on what type of rejection criteria you are using, that assumption may be broken, in which case I think you're pretty much out of luck without a method to account for that. It may be that it is a sufficiently reasonable assumption, however, even if not strictly warranted.
> 1 votes

# Answer
LMM is a good suggestion, second that.

Consider also fitting a log-normal to the RT's as recommended by Haines & friends https://psyarxiv.com/xr7y3/download/?format=pdf

You will have more or less uncertainty depending on how many trials you got, but it won't matter that people did different numbers of trials. I find the arguments in this paper for 'one stage' inference (as opposed to two-stage summary) very compelling, see what you think, your mileage may vary. One reason to like it is that it goes very naturally with hierarchical approaches, so it's a natural ally of that LMM suggestion.

It seems likely that the dropped data points are super-fast or super-long RT's that are from some data generating process other than the one you're studying, right? The participant sneezed or snoozed briefly and then went back to doing the task? You can wrap that understanding into the model! If your actual understanding of the data generating process suggests that RT's are usually log normal with a mean that depends on condition, but there are some uniformly distributed contaminants, you can write down a model that says exactly that and do inference with it. There's a nice rundown of the theory/motivation here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022249610000593 but it's gotten much easier to do since this article was written. There's a blow-by-blow walkthrough with code in this incredibly awesome blog post https://www.martinmodrak.cz/2021/04/01/using-brms-to-model-reaction-times-contaminated-with-errors/
> 1 votes

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Tags: methodology, experimental-psychology, statistics, psychophysics
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# Question
Title: Does the brain contain chaotic systems, akin to the weather or planetary orbits?
I was wondering whether the brain contains processes that are chaotic in nature i.e. subject to great variance in the long run given minutely different initial conditions down to quantum fluctuations, such as is found in planetary orbits or the weather.

# Answer
> 2 votes
Yes, it seems so, as long as you're willing to take a bit of control along with your chaos.

One can certainly build chaotic systems from biologically inspired neurons, and there is a whole branch of systems neuroscience dedicated to the critical brain hypothesis, the idea that optimal brain function arises from a whole system at a critical point on the "edge of chaos". Even a system on the "edge of chaos" has a lot of chaotic elements, and you'll find many papers on this written in journals interested primarily in mathematical chaos and its implications rather than only in experimental neuroscience.

A particular scientist in the area to follow is John Beggs; I'd highly recommend reading reviews authored/coauthored by him as a starting point to reading about this area.

# Answer
> -1 votes
It is obvious from the start that the brain has to include chaotic, massive, parallel neuron activity. There is a correspondence between the outside world and the world of neuron activity. All physical processes must be able to get mapped to neurological activity, that is, neurons working in concert must be able to exhibit chaotic patterns if we deal with chaotic processes in the real world (say a storm). We would be helpless and frozen if this were not the case. Just as neuronal patterns (by which I mean the patterns of them firing) can show you a static chessboard when thinking about one or when you see one, by the same token, there is a chaotic pattern in the brain to be seen resembling a raging storm. So when you dream about a storm, a neurological storm can be seen by an observer watching youif (in theory). The pattern has a correspondence with a rea-life storm and therefore its pattern is chaotic.

And chaos has actually been observed. In relation to smell experiments have been performed that showed patterns typically associated with chaos (attractors). Different experiences of a smel revealed different patterns and different smells interaffected. After smelling a banana (for example) your experience of smelling cheese will be different from the one without bananas (pretty trivial but the underlying processes were shown to be chaotic). See also here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1631069103002002

Looking at the brain from the outside shows no weather or planetary systems. But there are patterns in the fairly static neurons to be seen that *are* chaotic. Precisely fit to their erratic forms (they look like frozen chaotic lightning flashes). Experiencing it from the inside you can dream of walking through chaotic storms. Complete with a thunder that rolls and lightning flashing. There are numerous experiments showing chaos in the brain. But they are unnesserary. I can reason this without them experiments.

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Tags: brain
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# Question
Title: How long does an area clean-up help it stay clean?
Sometime in middle or high school I remember coming across this popular thinking of, when an area or neighbourhood has some trash, it makes people think it's ok to litter there themselves, and the more trash there is, the more of an unspoken 'norm' littering becomes. However, the hope was that the reverse is also true, and if a neighbourhood's cleaned up, then it signals to people that littering is the anti-norm here.

But I have gone on trash cleaning walks around my neighbourhood in the past few months, and I can't say that that hope is totally founded. The street by my apartment building has trash reemerge with a vengeance within a week. It makes me think there's some discrepancy in how this is thought about. Like, it's harder to see during night-time, so it absolves you from confronting the results of trash on the grass, and the like.

Are there long-term studies around (various) neighbourhoods that study this behaviour, and detangle and clarify the different factors at play here? Other studies are good too.

# Answer
Research indeed demonstrates that littering is significantly more frequent when there is existing litter - for reviews, see Huffman et al (1995), and Geller et al (1982. pp 84-97).

A more recent review by Vos et al (2018) summarizes:

> Among researchers, there is a general consensus that littering is significantly more likely to occur in a littered setting than in a litter-free setting.

The authors discuss a number of other factors known to reduce littering behaviour, including the presence of others, existing litter being in piles, seeing other people picking up trash, and the scent of cleanser. Factors that increase littering include lack of trash cans, and the broken windows effect.

As for long-term observational studies, your best bet is probably Schultz et al (2013):

> Findings are reported from coded observations of the littering behavior among 9,757 individuals at 130 outdoor public locations

Some interesting findings from this study:

> ... of all 8,990 individuals that were observed moving through a diverse range of sites, 4% littered.
>
> ... the large majority (85%) of littering behavior results from individual-level variables (e.g., age, gender, attitudes, and motivation) ... 15% of the variance in observed littering behavior was due to some aspect of the context (e.g., existing litter, lack of convenient receptacles, etc.).
>
> ... for every unit increase in the amount of existing litter (from 0-10), the observed littering rate increased by 2%.

Lots more detail in the paper.
> 2 votes

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Tags: norms
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# Question
Title: Why does Neuralink place sensors in the neocortex instead of the old brain?
Imagine a perfect archer whose arrow always hit the target in precisely the area where he wanted it to hit.

Now imagine that each location on the target was an instruction to a human body to make a particular type of movement.

If you wanted to know what instruction was being sent in the signal, what might your strategy be?

One strategy might be to place sensors at every location on the target to determine exactly which area was hit and thus which instruction was being invoked.

Another strategy might be to try to blanket the space between the arrow and the target with sensors and try to predict the trajectory of the arrow.

Intuitively, the former strategy seems more rational, so I don’t understand why Neuralink, whose goal is to build a Brain Machine Interface (BMI) to enable signals to be sent directly from the brain to a computer, seems to be pursuing the latter?

From reading the Jeff Hawkins' book, “A thousand brains: A new theory of Intelligence”, my understanding is that the neocortex cannot generate movement. It has to send signals to the old brain whenever it wants to make any kind of a movement.

So rather than blanketing the neocortex with sensors trying to predict what signal is being sent, why are they not precisely targeting their sensors to the connection points on the old brain which are receiving signals from the neocortex?

My guess is that we just do not have the technology to precisely place the sensors at exactly the locations where they would receive the optimal signal. Is this correct?

Additional context:

> For a long time, it was believed that information entered the neocortex via the "sensory regions," went up and down the hierarchy of regions, and finally went down to the "motor region." Cells in the motor region project to neurons in the spinal cord that move the muscles and limbs. We now know this description is misleading. In every region they have examined, scientists have found cells that project to some part of the old brain related to movement.
>
> For example, 1: the visual regions that get input from the eyes send a signal down to the part of the old brain responsible for moving the eyes.
>
> 2: Similarly, the auditory regions that get input from the ears project to the part of the old brain that moves the head.
>
> Moving your head changes what you hear, similar to how moving your eyes changes what you see.
>
> The evidence we have indicates that the complex circuitry seen everywhere in the neocortex performs a sensory-motor task. There are no pure motor regions and no pure sensory regions.

“A thousand brains: A new theory of Intelligence”, Chapter 1, Jeff Hawkins

# Answer
> -1 votes
I think I see what you mean now. Why putting sensors in the human region and not in the motor region? The motor generates movements in the body so why don't use this this region to put sensors in and use the gathered information for steering external motors. We can read:

> The upper motor neurons in the cerebral cortex reside in several adjacent and highly interconnected areas in the frontal lobe, which together mediate the planning and initiation of complex temporal sequences of voluntary movements. These cortical areas all receive regulatory input from the basal ganglia and cerebellum via relays in the ventrolateral thalamus , as well as inputs from the somatic sensory regions of the parietal lobe. Although the phrase “motor cortex” is sometimes used to refer to these frontal areas collectively, more commonly it is restricted to the primary motor cortex, which is located in the precentral gyrus.

We see how this region is interconnected with sensory input (like the somatic sensory regions). The motor region corresponds with the thought procees also, obviously, therby changing the thought. If a person is disabled the motor processes are disrupted. This can have influence on thought processes obviously but the motor initiating first thoughts are not influenced. So if you connect these thought processes in the neocortex (the motor areas are situated in the old cortex) you get the purest initiator of the external motors.

The big problem is of course how to integrate your sensors outputs with the external motors. To address this takes a lot. Experimentts with non-paralysed people as well as theoretical work.

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Tags: brain-computer-interface
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