title: Do eyes accommodate to color?

text:
# Question
Title: Do eyes accommodate to color?
I've heard that our eyes accommodate between colors too far from each other in the visible spectrum. I imagine it's not a true focal point accommodation, but rather linked with how brain processes the information. Is this true?

What I'm trying to find out is, whether using color for emphasis, for example both blue and yellow (which are fairly far from each other in the spectrum), for text underlining, doesn't make the brain focus only at one color at once.

Like when you're looking for some object on your messy table, thinking it's of blue color and not noticing it's right in front of your eyes, because it was red.

Another example would be a document with some emphasized words in blue, some in yellow - and let's say the author wanted to make sure both colors are regarded as important (just in different context). Now question is, can the eye/brain focus on both colors at once? I don't mean if we can do it deliberately by trying hard, but rather if it's more likely for the brain to focus only at one color at a time, unconsciously.

By what I've heard, if I understand it correctly. If we want to use two different colors for emphasis, we should use colors that are close to each other in the EM spectrum (while still making sure, they are high contrast in regard to the background)

Refer to the two paragraphs taken from wikipedia I stylized.

I'd summarize the question like this. Is there **difference** in how we regard those two paragraphs? Are we more likely to skip some words when they are highlighted with colors too far away from each other in the EM spectrum, therefore, is it better to use colors closer to each other?

**EDIT:** I changed the luminance of the colors to be the same for all of them (70%, used HSL Color Picker). As pointed by John, the different luminance might have played a part in the perception.

View of the relative EM wavelength spread (images taken from Gimp)

# Answer
I don't think it is a matter of color/hue. Do you have a source for this hypothesis? If you were able to measure this effect then I would think it happens because of the importance rating a reader develops for a certain group of highlighted words, e.g. "all blue highlighted words are important to me."

The user Pete made a good comment in my opinion by pointing out the contrast issue. The attention of humans is foremost guided by luminance contrast. Then comes hue and then saturation. The colors you chose have a different luminance value and therefore attract attention differently.

Here's a link to compare the (relative) luminance values of your color sets.
> 3 votes

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Tags: perception, vision, color
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# Question
Title: Effect of words highlighting on reading comprehension
I'm interested if there are studies dealing with text understanding and POS (part of speech) coloring, or coloring syntactic/semantic information. The studies should solve the questions like:

* Which combination of colors improve/deteriorate understanding and reading of texts?
* How many colors should be in the scheme for positive/negative effects on reading and understanding of text? Which POSs should be preferably colored?
* Are there types of people who are more efficient with/without coloring?

I believe that a few colors with good combination could be beneficial. **Has somebody conducted research to test the effect of highlighting on reading comprehension**?

---

An example:

On this text you can see that many colors that don't go together can make the reading process even worse and distracting. Can this be changed to improve the reading process, instead?

A few events inspired me in the following order:

1. I started learning Chinese and their characters seem to have positive effect on my comprehension.
2. I've read a NL (natural language) article in English in a programming editor. I was used to colors for various programming languages.
3. I searched the Internet and found the article A case against syntax highlighting but don't agree with all the author's arguments or opinions. When you have only a few carefully chosen colors it's beneficial for programming so maybe could be for NL comprehension as well. A few colors could underline the basic thought and help to draw attention of the reader. When I read a scientific text for which I have not passion I'm often bored because don't know where it directs and colors and images help me a lot to concentrate and skimming over the basic thoughts could help with decision if it has sense to read it at all. This does not hold for fiction and poetry where we read for pleasure rather than getting information.

# Answer
I can speak to this question somewhat from a cognitive psychology standpoint. We memory researchers would think of text highlighting like this in terms of *distinctiveness*. (An article by McDaniel and Bugg (2008) may shed some light.) Simply put, highlighting a word in a different color than the rest of the text draws what we call *item-specific processing* towards that word. You'll have a better memory for it, for sure -- and maybe this ties into goals more relevant when writing code.

Increasing item-specific processing, however, comes with a cost: It detracts from *organizational processing*, which is involved with interrelating sentence (or code) elements, memory for order, and so forth.

Also note that the more items that are made distinctive, the less of a benefit making an additional item distinctive provides (e.g., if words are multicolored already, making a new word red or green doesn't really do anything to the distinctiveness of that word).

So when you use a lot of different highlighting colors, like in the example image, two things are happening: (1) too much distinctiveness is being used, washing out benefits from distinctiveness; and (2) increasing item-specific processing for individual items damages memory and processing for the structure. In essence, the example given is the worst of both worlds.

To answer your question, it might make sense to only use highlighting (or colors, fonts, etc.) to highlight key points, etc.; much like what we already do in writing for the web. Like anyone who highlights a textbook knows, it doesn't do any good to highlight an entire chapter.
> 17 votes

# Answer
According to this study, layout and color can be used to improve text readability. You can take a look online at text formatted in this manner here.
> 4 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, perception, reference-request, reading
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# Question
Title: Are older people more likely to be politically conservative and why?
J.Campbell suggest that the difference between age groups on being politically conservative is small. But F.Glamsers article concludes:

> there was a significant positive correlation between age and conservative opinions even when social class, education, father's SES, and the size of the respondent's childhood community were controlled.

While these articles are quite old (1981 & 1974) a more recent poll indicates that old people tend to be more conservative.

I'm wondering whether there is an neurological and psychological explanation of that phenomena.

# Answer
> 9 votes
As a neuroscientist, I would be highly doubtful of any neuroscientific 'evidence' about this phenomenon (if it exists). In fact, I think there is no reason to look further than the mere exposure effect:

> The mere-exposure effect is a psychological phenomenon by which people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them.

Conservative attitudes are by definition more traditional, i.e. those who have been around for a longer time... just like older people. Older people have, therefore, had more chance to become familiar to conservative attitudes through exposure.

# Answer
> 4 votes
I read in a recent news article that one of the main predictors of party allegiance was which party had a president in the White House during the respondents 'formative' years. However, I am unable to find neither the news article nor the study it was reporting on. If that were true, though, any current poll taken in isolation would simply reflect political systems over the last 50 years.

According to Franklin (1984), this is called the *traditional model* of party identification and seems to have been mostly superseded by the *revisionist model*:

> The traditional view that party identification develops at an early age, is remarkably stable throughout life, and is relatively unaffected by other political attitudes has been recently challenged by evidence that adult partisanship is in fact quite responsive to other political attitudes such as policy preferences, retrospective evaluations, and past votes.

From the conclusions of that paper:

> The results strongly support the revised view of partisanship. We have seen that party identification is not fixed in childhood, and further that it changes in response to policy preferences. We cannot say at what age young people begin to incorporate policy preferences into their partisanship. ... These findings clearly move us away from the traditional notion of party identification. ... \[T\]he revisionist view both accounts for the original movements away from parental identifications and provides an explanation for the later stability.

From skimming some abstracts, newer articles seem to agree with the revisionist model but try to account in more detail what makes people change allegiance and at what time in their life.

Searching Google Scholar for `party identification` should throw up a good few hits to get you started, especially if you restrict the publication date to more recent years.

# Answer
> 1 votes
“Show me a young Conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains.” - Winston Churchill

So in this sentence we could suspect there is something connected with intelligence and emotions (and part of brains related to thos phenomena) I will add to above that there should be something in relation with Terror management theory from social psychology and plasticity of adoption new knowledge and attitudes (see Piaget)

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Tags: social-psychology, political-psychology, cognitive-neuroscience
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# Question
Title: What are the benefits of transformational over transactional leadership?
Transformational leadership is sometimes recommended as a way of motivating and inspiring followers in contrast to more transactional styles of leadership.

There is a large pop-psych literature on leadership, but I'm specifically interested in scientifically rigorous empirical evidence supporting or not supporting the value of transformational leadership.

* What is the empirical support for transformational leadership?

# Answer
> 2 votes
Here is one meta analytic comparison:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15506858

Bernard M. Bass is one of the most cited researchers on this field: Here is one of his articles but there are plenty on the net:

http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/apl-882207.pdf

I think he is also author of MLQ - multifaceted survey of leadership.

There is also revised theory by Bass and Avolio: The implications of transactional and transformational leadership.

And also: Re-examining the components of transformational and transactional leadership using the Multi-factor Leadership; Journal of Occupational and organizational psychology. 2010.

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Tags: leadership, io-psychology
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# Question
Title: Psychometric scale with items in sets where responses imply a rank order of items
My question is related to psychometry. One survey is measured in this way:

```
Question 1
Claim 1     0 1 2 3 4 5 M
Claim 2     0 1 2 3 4 5 M
Claim 3     0 1 2 3 4 5 M
Claim 4     0 1 2 3 4 5 M

```

There are 25 questions of this kind. Participants should choose one '0' and one 'M' and one number for every of the claims, but numbers shouldn't be the same. Results are 2 independent factors, which combined produce 4 types in profile. The theory is that those factors are independent.

My questions are:

1. Is there any literature which will explain this type of measurement?
2. How to measure alphas for this questionnaire or conduct factor analysis
3. Is there a way to see/count Pearson coefficients (or any other type of correlation) for this survey and some other which are measured in traditional way with Likert scale?

Edit: ie.

```
Question1:
I am calm and organized      0 1 2 3 4 5 M (My options are all of them, i choose 0)
I like to go to Gardaland    X 1 2 3 4 5 M (My options are all except 0, i choose 5)
Everyone is paranoic         X 1 2 3 4 X M (My options are 1, 2 3 4 and M, i choose 3)
My mother was a good person  X 1 2 X 4 X M (My option is M because 0 and M are mandatory)

```

after that there is question 2 to question 25 which follow the same format.

# Answer
> 1 votes
Okay. I think I finally get what you are saying. You have constructed a form of partially ipsative or forced choice scale.

In my words, I would say that you have 100 items in total. The 100 items are grouped into sets of 4 items, and you have 25 sets. Each item is rated on a 0 to 6 scale, and within each set participants need to give different responses for each item in the set. They must give a 0 and a 6.

This is a variant on the idea of rank ordering the items in a set. However, you would also get a little bit of additional individual difference information because participants are not just ranking items.

For further discussion, definitions, and a critique of ipsative tests see Johnson, Wood, and Blinkhorn (1988).

### References

* Johnson, C. E., Wood, R., & Blinkhorn, S. F. (1988). Spuriouser and spuriouser: The use of ipsative personality tests. Journal of Occupational Psychology, 61(2), 153-162.

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Tags: measurement, personality, test
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# Question
Title: How well can a human-generated "random number" be predicted?
For example, if i ask an individual to write a 20-number-long sequence of random numbers from 0 to 10. How well can I predict the 20th number from the initial 19?

More generally,

* **How well can subsequent numbers in a sequence be predicted from previous numbers?**
* **How well can humans generate random sequences of numbers?**

# Answer
It seems like there is a fairly big literature on this topic.

**Wagenaar (1972)** provides an early review of research. The author summarises around 15 studies. The studies involved generated random elements including letters and numbers of varying lengths. In all but one study, participants were deemed to be not good at randomising. As part of their review they talk about various forms of nonrandomness and factors that increased the nonrandomness (e.g., naivity of subjects regarding types of randomness, boredom, presence of a natural order to the objects, etc.). In general participants either engaged in too much alternation or too many runs of the same response. Wagenaar (1972) noted the need for more research. The general model seemed to be one whereby stable individual differences (e.g., memory, skill, and mental representations of randomness), states (e.g., boredom, fatigue), and inherent constraints on human randomness generation interacted to influence the degree of randomness produced.

**Towse and Neil (1998)** provide software call RgCalc for evaluating randomness in human generated sequences.

**Brugger (1997)** provides a more recent review, summarising:

> It is conjectured that Tune's explanation of sequential nonrandomness in terms of a limited capacity of short-term memory can no longer be maintained. Rather, interdependence among consecutive choices is considered a consequence of an organism's natural susceptibility to interference. Random generation is thus a complex action which demands complete suppression of any rule-governed behavior.

I also found a couple of articles by Persaud (2005) and Figurska et al (2008) that might be relevant.

**Summary:** Humans typically display some form of nonrandomness when generating sequences of digits. The degree of this nonrandomness varies across people. It is unclear to me at this point how well individuals could perform, for example, if they had an aptitude for random number generation or were trained to generate random numbers. For example, individuals might be able to draw on cues in the external world that are random and use that as their own personal input for generating responses (but perhaps this would be considered cheating).

However, the nonrandomness may only enable very small incremental prediction above chance in predicting any given response. Furthermore, presumably longer initial sequences of response would improve the ability to guess the subsequent response. Having longer sequences would allow you to extract the form of nonrandomness that the particular individual adopts (e.g., do they prefer alternating numbers or runs, do they prefer some digits over others, are there sequences of numbers preferred).

### References

* Brugger, P. (1997). Variables that influence the generation of random sequences: An update. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 84(2), 627-661.
* Figurska, M., Stańczyk, M., & Kulesza, K. (2008). Humans cannot consciously generate random numbers sequences: Polemic study. Medical hypotheses, 70(1), 182-185.
* Persaud, N. (2005). Humans can consciously generate random number sequences: A possible test for artificial intelligence. Medical hypotheses, 65(2), 211-214.
* Towse, J. N., & Neil, D. (1998). Analyzing human random generation behavior: A review of methods used and a computer program for describing performance. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 30(4), 583-591.
* Wagenaar, W. A. (1972). Generation of random sequences by human subjects: A critical survey of literature. Psychological Bulletin, 77(1), 65-72.
> 14 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, mathematical-psychology
---


# Question
Title: How are activities involving toy blocks linked the development of intelligence in children?
I'm looking for a peer reviewed article that links the development of intelligence to any form of block building activities.

For example a child playing with wooden blocks can improve their sensory-motor and communication skills while learning to solve problems.

Has anyone got any suggestions?

# Answer
Found what I consider to be the best reference here

Hirsch, E. S. (1996). The block book (Third ed.). Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children.

It's certainly going in the thesis after glancing through it. Thought posting it here might helps others too.
> 1 votes

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Tags: intelligence, developmental-psychology, problem-solving, motor, communication
---


# Question
Title: How are Raven's Matrices scores converted into age-adjusted IQ?
There are IQ tests based only on Raven's matrices. I wonder how a raw score on such a test is "scaled" to an IQ result. As we all know, IQ results depend on the age of individual tested. So I was looking for any data about IQ results and standard deviations in different age groups and I didn't find anything except truisms. But there must be a table with multipliers for every age group, by which a raw test score is multiplied to evaluate the IQ result.

* **How are raw Raven's scores converted into age-adjusted IQ?**
* **Where can one find age norms for Raven's?**

# Answer
> 8 votes
Raven (2000) provides norms for Raven matrices for different age groups.

Here is how you interpret it.

Burke (1985) provide different groups norms.

You can use different scales like IQ (which is very old term used in Piaget. DeVries (below) has more about it). Also there are other measures: percentiles, DQI, Z scores, etc... you have formulas to recalculate, but usually you have to have norms on different age groups.

Usually it is hard to interpret if you don't have some background in psychometry, but good luck.

### References

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Tags: intelligence, test, iq
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# Question
Title: Do we need a pre-test to compare the effectiveness of two treatments?
Assume, I want to evaluate how effective two teachers are in teaching English to German children. Both teachers have been teaching at the same high school for twenty years, and both use a distinctly different pedagogical methodology. In fact a small competition has arisen between them: they have published and discussed their ideas and practise in journals relevant to their profession, and they have now called in a data analyst (you) to conduct this evaluation which, so they hope, will decide their contest and reconcile the former friends.

The school, where they both work, is the only school for its small town. When pupils enter this school, they are randomly assigned classes: one half of the children are assigned to one class (and one maths teacher), the other half to the other class (and the other maths teacher).

The two teachers are tired of not knowing which method is best. In the interest of their pupils they want to finally decide on the better one and both use this from now on. They hope, that you don't need to test one cohort of children when they finish elementary school, have them taught for the 8 years from 5th grade until they graduate from high school, and then measure their mathematical ability again, to come to a conclusion. Therefore they ask you:

Is it enough to compare the levels of the dependent variable post-intervention? Or do you need to measure it pre-intervention as well? Why?

# Answer
### Answer based on your original depression example

Note that this answer was originally written based on your initial example, where you asked:

> Assume, I have developed a new intervention for people with light depression. I want to compare the effectiveness of this intervention (E) with an existing intervention (C). For this, I recruit test subjects from the local psychotherapeutic ambulance and randomly assign them to either the experimental (E) or control group (C). The interesting dependent variable is of course depressivity.

**In general, you don't need to measure pre-treatment for the dependent variable**. In the limit random assignment ensures that the groups are equal. Or to put it another way, random assignment ensures that the groups are not biased to be higher or lower on the dependent variable at baseline. A typical between-subjects t-test comparing post-treatement scores would typically provide an unbiased test of whether the intervention had an effect on dependent variable (i.e., depression) relative to control intervention.

That said, **there are many benefits to including a baseline measure**:

* Including a baseline measure of depression will almost always give you more statistical power because you are able to control for much of the stable individual differences in the dependent variable (i.e., depression).
* If you participants drop out during the intervention, it can be helpful to see whether this is related to baseline levels.
* You can begin to assess individual differences in the effect of the intervention.
* Where there are questions about whether random assignment was performed correctly, you can test for baseline differences.

Note there are several options for analysing pre-post treatment-control designs including ANCOVA, difference scores, and interaction effects. See this discussion for further ideas.

Note also that **there are good reasons to assess an intervention by measuring more than two time points**. For example, you might obtain (a) multiple baseline measures to get a sense of the stability pre-intervention (b) multiple you might measures during the intervention to assess depression during the intervention, and (c) multiple follow-up measures particularly to see both the immediate and the longer term effect of the intervention.

### Updated points based on the teaching example

* It is an empirical question whether first letter of last name is related to the effect of the teaching intervention or baseline differences. In general, it would be better to have a better form of randomisation of participants to groups.
* Where there are questions about the randomisation procedure, the presence of a pre-test measure can be beneficial to check this.
* There are several particular issues related to assessing the effectiveness of interventions relating to children in class rooms even when students have been randomly assigned to classrooms. (a) With just one classroom each, it is difficult to tease out what is the effect of the teacher and what is the effect of the curriculum; (b) there will typically be a lack of independent observations. Thus, for example, students within the classroom may influence each other. Thus, your effective sample size is not as great as it may seem.
> 9 votes

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Tags: measurement, methodology, statistics
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# Question
Title: Eye movement tendencies for shades, sizes, shapes, and colours
I was asked this question yesterday

Which of the following statements regarding research principles in visual attention is TRUE? The eyes tend to move from:

* a. Light to dark (shade)
* b. Large to small (size)
* c. Regular to irregular (shape)
* d. Unsaturated to saturated (colour)

I answered c) (can't remember where I Googled it but found that to be the most appropriate answer). I am worried that I am incorrect and would love to canvas the opinions of others. It shouldn't matter but the above question was in the context of web .

# Answer
> 3 votes
If the question means in which of the option pairs is the second one more attention-grabbing, I would guess d.

a. Light to dark (shade) - I would say that visual attention is automatically drawn to bright areas in the visual field, so, exactly the opposite.

b. Large to small (size) - exactly the opposite again, bigger objects would be more attention-grabbing

c. Regular to irregular (shape) - This one is a tricky one because there is evidence for both. But from the options given in the other answers, I assume the question is about stimulus-driven attention, and there, attention would spontaneously go to the gestalts in the visual field (here's a recent example).

d. Unsaturated to saturated (colour) - And voila, I would say that the more saturated is the more attention-grabbing of the two. (see here for a randomly googled reference, it also supports not choosing answer a)

# Answer
> -1 votes
I'm not a professional psychologist, but my guess is b) large to small. I read the large headlines of news papers before reading the smaller sub headlines, and then body text.

You could probably eliminate unsaturated to saturated color. Saturated color stands out, so I'm not immediately going to look at unsaturated color first.

I can't think of my attention moving gradually across the other dimensions. I don't look at the lightest thing and then the second lightest thing. I'm attracted to contrasts. People notice differences. So I might see something white and black first, then something slightly gray and light black, then something dark gray, etc. My eyes wouldn't dart around from light to slightly gray, etc..

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Tags: vision, sensation, eye-movement
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# Question
Title: How many samples are there when test subjects come through different recruitment strategies?
Let's assume I want to conduct a survey. To find test subjects, I post an ad in a local newspaper, one on a locally relevant website, distribute flyers in front of the train station, and have managed to get one complete class from a local school to partake.

Due to the different recruitment methods, each will probably have drawn quite different samples from the population: the local newspaper is mostly read by older people with medium to high education; the institute website is mostly visited by students and researchers; the flyer is given to commuters; then there is that group of pupils, all of the same age and education level.

In my test, I ask my test subjects to specify how they knew of the test:

1. ad in newspaper
2. ad on website
3. flyer
4. they were tested in class

So I can group my data according to the recruitment method, if I want to.

Is this all one sample? Or have I drawn four samples?

And if this is one sample, how then *do* you draw two or more samples?

# Answer
> 4 votes
This depends on your research question, as well as the population you want to generalize your conclusions to.

If you care about whether complex sounds are easier to discriminate when they are longer, you can regard all the participants to be one sample because there is no theoretical reason to assume that people differ in this. In principle, the more universal the subject of your study is, the less you need to care about your sampling technique because any person should be as good as any other. In practice, the sample will likely be first year psychology students :)

But if you care about computer literacy or car ownership or attitudes towards standardized testing (i.e. if your question relates to individual differences or group differences), then clearly your samples are drawn from very different parts of the population. In that case you can say that you have drawn four samples. Or perhaps less - perhaps you drew two: people unlikely to have cars (school kids and train takers) and people likely to have cars (American newspaper readers and internet users). This is not the best example but you can see the logic.

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Tags: methodology, statistics
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# Question
Title: What correlation is there between breath control and personal self confidence?
In yoga, the instructor mentioned that controlled deep breathing can increase self-confidence. (Next time, I will ask him why he believes that but I doubt he has any references...)

Furthermore, there are certain times when I do notice increased levels of self confidence after controlled deep breathing.

Note: This is different than using deep breathing to prevent or calm down from a panic or anxiety attack.

The scope of the question is focused on a natural baseline level of confidence, increased via controlled deep breathing.

Some reference in general turned up as well:

> For example, controlled breathing can be used to increase self-confidence,...
> http://www.khyf.net/khyf/articleview.aspx?spage=A&DParticleid=44&icategorylist=

Are there any studies that prove this and if so, why? Any point in the right direction is greatly appreciated. Thank you.

# Answer
> 4 votes
I am not aware of any neuroscience papers that link breathing and self-confidence. One review that touched on breathing in yoga was Jerath et al. (2006). They discuss how deep breathing increases parasympathetic autonomic activity. This can change the physiological state of the body, leading to changes in affective state.

One area of the brain that may be relevant is a patch of cortex called the insula. The posterior insula receives afferent information from the body and creates the initial sensory representation of body state (Craig, 2000). From there, the mid insula begins to integrate body state with other sensory modalities, such as visual and auditory information. This progression continues, until you have a highly integrated, abstract representation of interoceptive and emotional state in the anterior insula (Craig, 2009).

Activity in the anterior insula has been related to a wide array of higher cognitive functions, including self-recognition, emotional awareness, risk prediction, conscious awareness of sensory stimuli, temporal perception, attention, perceptual decision making, performance monitoring, and more. We know that relaxation techniques can influence activity in this area of the insula (Critchley et al., 2002).

It is well supported that controlled breathing changes the state of your body and activity in the brain, including the insula. These changes can also directly influence our cognitive state and cognitive ability. Changes in self-confidence may be a part of that, depending on how you might define self-confidence.

* Craig AD, Chen K, Bandy D, Reiman EM. (2000) *Thermosensory activation of insular cortex*. Nature Neuroscience. 3, 184-190. PMID: 10649575.
* Craig AD. (2009). *How do you feel-now? The anterior insula and human awareness*. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. 10(1), 59-70.
* Critchley HD, Melmed RN, Featherstone E, Mathias CJ, and Dolan RJ. (2002). *Volitional control of autonomic arousal: a functional magnetic resonance study*. NeuroImage. 16(4), 909-919. PMID: 12202079.
* Jerath R, Edry JW, Barnes VA, and Jerath V. (2006). *Physiology of long pranayamic breathing: Neural respiratory elements may provide a mechanism that explains how slow deep breathing shifts the autonomic nervous system*. Medical Hypotheses. 67, 566-571. PMID: 16624497.

# Answer
> 2 votes
Deep breathing changes your posture. People with an upright, confident posture do feel higher levels of confidence.

Side note: It's okay to sulk after defeat. Research also shows that people who slump down after defeat recover from negative feelings quicker than people who try to remain upright.

But yes, adopting a more confident posture in general will make you a more confident person.

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Tags: reference-request, performance, consciousness
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# Question
Title: Does every human brain have the same shape?
Apart from the general structure (6 layer cortex, same areas, etc.) does every brain have the exact same number and arrangement of sulci, gyri, etc? Do these elements have the same shape?

# Answer
> 6 votes
No, not at all--or not necessarily; different sulci & gyri may be different shapes--this is one of the reasons why individual brains are transformed or normalized into standard space in group analysis of MRI data (see here for a good basic explanation of how & why this is done). In some cases canonical landmarks may be missing entirely--famously, an autopsy showed Albert Einstein to have quite anomalous anatomy in the area of the frontal operculum or Sylvian fissure.

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Tags: neuroscience, neuroanatomy
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# Question
Title: How much can users hold in their short term memory
I recently undertook a questionnaire and was asked a question about short term memory. One that I just can't find an answer to at all as it seems to be so contradictory.

This got me curious. How much can a user generally remember when viewing a website? There are various research papers on this including Heyer and Barrett (1974) and Shulman (1970).

The question was:

Research has shown that short-term memory is fragile. Which of the statements below is more accurate in describing how much information we can remember and for how long?

1. The amount you can remember is equal to about what you can say in 20 seconds, you will be able to hold this remembered amount in short-term memory for about 40 seconds.
2. The amount you can remember is equal to about what you can say in 30 seconds, you will be able to hold this remembered amount in short-term memory for about 20 seconds.
3. The amount you can remember is equal to about what you can say in 20 seconds, you will be able to hold this remembered amount in short-term memory for about 10 seconds.
4. The amount you can remember is equal to about what you can say in 20 seconds, you will be able to hold this remembered amount in short-term memory for about 20 seconds.

Does anybody know the definitive answer to this or, like me,

# Answer
> 12 votes
This is a very simple question with no single answer, I'm afraid. The other classic paper quoted in this context is Miller's "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two" (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Magical\_Number\_Seven,\_Plus\_or\_Minus\_Two). In the case of a user using a website, memory will also be affected by:

* Familiarity with the subject. Is the website about a topic the user is intimately familiar with, or something completely new (unlikely) or somewhere in between?
* Available contextual information. Can the user quickly get to supporting information? In which case, the load on memory may effectively be reduced
* The extent to which the information presented on the site is related. The key message of Miller's paper is that people group ('chunk') information in order to reduce memory load

Not sure if your question relates to a specific problem, or if it's a general query, but things like memory limits are hard to define absolutely, hence testing should always take place in as realistic a context as possible.

# Answer
> 1 votes
Sorry David :) I genuinely think the question isn't very meaningful: 20 seconds of speech could be information dense, or information poor. For instance, if we're talking about a website we could assume the listener knows context, or not. So with context "The header had primary and utility navigation, and a company logo in the top left.". Without context, we'd have to add that the header is at the top of the page, which would add to the time taken.

People have explored different ways of encoding memory: acoustically, semantically and visually. http://www.s-cool.co.uk/a-level/psychology/human-memory/revise-it/short-term-memory looks at the merits of each theory. At the end is quotes a study saying that in the absence of rehearsal, short term memory can only hold on to information for 15-30 seconds. So I'd go with 4, but:

* I don't think the question is reasonable, for the reasons already stated, plus the likely error bounds in any memory study
* Memory isn't just one thing - it's not just speech, or pictures. It's also affected by how we as humans choose to encode it. Simple encodings work well for random lists, but websites aren't seen or interpreted like that

Obviously I've not seen the questionnaire! I'd be interested to know what HFI come back with - would be great if you could let me know.

# Answer
> 1 votes
This is still an open research question, and there are a number of different hypotheses. The issue is further confused by mounting evidence that short-term memory and working memory are different processes, with working memory being suggested to be, basically, short-term memory plus attentional and executive processes that help maintain and control the contents of memory. (The following paper provides a very clear demonstration: http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=search.displayrecord&uid=1999-11137-004) The addition of these control processes can drastically affect memory capacity, and there's not always a clear line between a working memory task or a short-term memory task.

I agree with the above poster - the question is too vague to answer. Working and short-term memory capacity can vary based on a wide variety of parameters, including type of stimulus (it's easier to remember a series of numbers than it is to remember a series of abstract geometrical shapes), concurrent tasks (do you just have to remember the stimuli, or do you have to maintain the stimuli in memory while simultaneously doing something else?), experience with the task, memory training...it's a long list.

You may find a recent book to be of interest: Cowan, N. (2005). Working memory capacity. Psychology Press; ISBN 184169097X. (Keep in mind, though, that Cowan has his own model of memory capacity, so does not take an entirely neutral position.)

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# Question
Title: "Memory and the Computational Brain" by Gallistel & King
I am looking for opinions on this book particularly whether it is a suitable intro to the field of cognitive neuroscience. What I would not like is a book that is really a collage of introductory articles that bear little relation to one another. Several of the introductory books on Amazon are that way. That is no way to learn a subject, imo (but I digress).

Gallistel and King begin with Shannon's information theory, but do not imo go very far into the physiology of neurons nor do they discuss how the codes derived from brain activity are connected to human or animal behavior. What I am looking for is more comprehensive and thus a longer book. Is there such an introductory book?

# Answer
If you are interested in information theory and neuronal physiology, you shouldn't be looking for an intro to cognitive neuroscience, but rather cellular neuroscience. Most applications of information theory in modern neuroscience are related to neural coding. The classic (and recently updated) text is Kandel's "Principles of Neural Science". Byrne and Roberts' "From Molecules to Networks" has a more quantitative approach, but is not as comprehensive.
> 1 votes

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# Question
Title: How would synapses behave if resting potential was zero?
Assuming that the resting potential is zero and the other mechanisms were exactly the same, how would it affect the generation of spikes in terms of excitatory and inhibitory postsynaptic potentials(EPSP and IPSP). Trying to understand the reason behind negative resting potential, not how it is maintained, but why so. Does it mean EPSP is inherently suppressed by design?

# Answer
> 10 votes
There are two very different questions here. The first question is simple (although it could be interpreted a few different ways). The second question is very tricky and I am actually not certain we know the answer.

**1. What do PSPs look like if the resting membrane potential is 0 mV?**

If a cell is being held at 0 mV, its voltage-gated conductances are essentially broken and it is not actually able to fire an action potential. But let's put that aside and focus on synaptic events. Let's also assume that the reversal potentials for each ion are 'normal'.

The short story is that most excitatory receptors have a reversal potential near 0 mV, so EPSPs would have little direct effect on the membrane potential (remember this rule: current passing through an ion channel can only push the membrane potential *toward* the reversal potential of that channel). Inhibitory receptors tend to reverse around -75 mV, so they would have a large driving force and would strongly polarize the cell.

The slightly-longer story is that EPSPS would still have some effect--when ion channels open, ions flow in the direction of their electrochemical gradient. For excitatory receptors, this means that sodium flows into the cell, potassium flows out, and calcium flows in. The *net* electrical current would be roughly zero, but there would be an exchange of ions, and an opportunity for those ions to activate secondary signaling pathways.

Another effect of opening ion channels is a reduction in the resistance of the cell membrane. Thus at 0 mV, excitatory synapses can actually shunt IPSPs.

**2. What is the reason for having a negative resting potential at all?**

The first thing to recognize is that neurons store a large amount of energy in their chemical gradients. Potassium is pumped into the cell while sodium, chloride, and calcium are pumped out. Running these pumps is metabolically expensive (your brain takes up 20% of your metabolism at rest!), and the chemical energy burned in the process (ATP) becomes potential energy in the chemical gradient. Another way of saying this is that each of these ions *prefers* to be on the other side of the membrane, but the pumps keep them where they are.

Ions are generally pumped in such a way as to maintain charge balance--for every positive charge pumped in, one positive charge goes out. Now if you happen to have channels that admit only a single type of ion (we do), then opening that channel will result in an immediate flow of ions. But wait! Unlike the pumps, this ion flow is not charge-neutral, so after a very short time, the membrane becomes charged, and that charge imbalance (voltage) counteracts the chemical gradient (if ions dislike being on the wrong side of a chemical gradient, they absolutely *hate* being on the wrong side of an electrical gradient).

So what we have now is a huge energy store in the form of chemical gradients, and a means for the neuron to rapidly convert that energy into electrical potential. If the neuron wants to depolarize, it needs only open sodium or calcium channels. If it wants to repolarize, it opens potassium or chloride channels. You can think of it like a balloon connected by hose to two tanks: one high pressure, the other a vacuum. Open one valve and the balloon fills, open the other and it empties.

Ok, that was long but I am finally ready to talk about resting potential. The *how* is easy: neuronal membranes are more permeable to potassium than sodium. One of the valves is always open a little bit, and this drags the membrane potential negative, away from zero. Which is to say that the resting membrane potential is not at all the "driving force" for neuronal activity. Rather, it is almost just a side-effect of the real powerhouse--the chemical gradients.

I mentioned that neurons spend a lot of energy maintaining their chemical gradients. Why then, would the cell allow its potassium gradient to simply leak away? This is not an easy question! The lazy answer is "because all the voltage-sensitive channels operate in the range from -70 to 0 mV". I call this lazy because if there really was no benefit to having the cell rest at -70 mV, then evolution would find a way to conserve all that energy wasted by leaking potassium. So there must be a better reason. I've turned this into its own question here: Why do neurons have a negative resting potential?

# Answer
> 7 votes
Potential is relative, so having a negative resting potential simply means that the inside of the cell is negative with respect to the outside.

Since an EPSP is going to be an overall positive change, yes, the negative resting potential does keep the cell at far below the threshold, but recall that over a short time duration, these EPSPs sum up to eventually push the cell *above* threshold.

A cell with no membrane potential is the equivalent of a dead battery, there is no "electromotive force" (i.e., voltage), so there is no driving force for current changes (except in the case of leak currents due purely to concentration differences). Therefore, there is no calcium ion influx at the presynaptic terminal, no neurotransmitter containing vesicles can bind, and no transmitter is released into the cleft.

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# Question
Title: Why can a user seamlessly switch from one language input to another on the same keyboard?
The question regards the phenomenon where a user can switch context on the same tool seamlessly, and as it seems without thinking. The only practical use of the phenomenon that I know of is the switching of input languages on the same keyboard, but there are probably other real world examples.

Often these users don't type the way I do (looking at the keyboard), still they are very skilled in both Swedish, English and Icelandic keyboard setups. Is this a kind of automated process, such as the use of a piano from a professional concert pianist who does not need to think, only play with what is learned from hours and hours of exercise? I believe it is related. but not the same.

I'm asking of what this mechanism of switching context is and why it works seamlessly for users.

An image of the Icelandic keyboard setup:

Image from http://farm8.staticflickr.com

# Answer
> 2 votes
Focusing on the word "seamlessly", in the more general case (not just typing)--once you look at cognitive/linguistic activity with a fine enough resolution it becomes clear that language-switching is not usually seamless. There is typically a cost (lowered performance, either in speed or accuracy) to switching languages in any modality, which is typically greater from second language to first language than from first language to second language (Language Switching & Competition, Second Language Research April 2012 vol. 28 no. 2 131-149, among many others).

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# Question
Title: Can an individual having strong identity associations with groups be used to infer anything about them?
I've been reading a few articles and papers about individuals identifying with groups and their behaviors and attitudes, however I haven't yet found an answer to one of the questions that I was trying to learn about.

What does a strong identity association with a group (or multiple groups) indicate about the person as an individual (preferably from a social or IO psychology perspective), if anything?

I was looking to learn about were to see if a strong identity association with groups could possible be indicative of their ability to function well on other teams or if they are more suited to particular roles on a team (management, coordination activities as opposed to other team functions) as opposed to someone who tended to not have strong identity associations with groups. I'm also interested in their development as a person, especially with regards to relationships (friendship, romantic, at the workplace, out of the workplace).

# Answer
> 5 votes
**Social Categorization Theory**

From a social psychology perspective *Social Categorization Theory* (Haslam, Jetten, Postmes & Haslam, 2009) might be of interest to you. SCT states that self-categorization varies with different social contexts and leads to a depersonalisation in the sense that an individual is less likely to perceive himself as independent but rather as belonging to a group. This self-categorization then leads to group behaviour. SCT has been applied to many different areas. With regard to your question I think the relations of SCT and *Perceived Threat* (Steele, 1997) are relevant.

**SCT and Perceived Threat**

Perceived Threat occurs in situations where performance matters and refers to a process in which a member of a stereotyped group is threatened by the perception that other persons perceive him based on that (negative) stereotype. The Perceived Threat leads to stress, which in turn negatively affects performance. The theory has been used to account for the difference in cognitive ability tests between african americans and white people (Blascovich, Spencer, Quinn & Steele, 2001). The authors found that, under a high threat condition, african americans had greater blood pressure and lower test scores than white participants. There was no difference in blood pressure or test scores under a low threat condition.

The theory has also been used to demonstrate negative effects of stereotype against women (Von Hippel, Issa, Ma & Stokes, 2010) and older men (Von Hippel, Kalokerinos & Henry, 2012).

**References**

Blascovich, Jim, Steven J. Spencer, Diane Quinn, und Claude Steele (2001). African Americans and high blood pressure: The role of stereotype threat. *Psychological Science, 12*, 225–229.

Haslam, S. Alexander, Jolanda Jetten, Tom Postmes, und Catherine Haslam (2009). Social identity, health and well-being: An emerging agenda for applied psychology. *Applied Psychology 58*, 1–23.

Steele, Claude M. (1997). A threat in the air: How stereotypes shape intellectual identity and performance. *American Psychologist, 52*, 613–629.

Von Hippel, Courtney, Mona Issa, Roslyn Ma, und Abby Stokes (2011). Stereotype threat: Antecedents and consequences for working women. *European Journal of Social Psychology, 41*, 151–161.

Von Hippel, Courtney, Elise K. Kalokerinos, und Julie D. Henry (2012). Stereotype Threat Among Older Employees: Relationship With Job Attitudes and Turnover Intentions.

# Answer
> 2 votes
This kind of answer is also in focal point of my research. Unfortunately none of my attempts in social psychology didn't result in accepted predictions of group behavior. In some occasions they are reliable in other not. But work of Wilfred Bion is of great help in my work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfred\_Bion

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# Question
Title: Does a person's brain still contain a record of daily events?
Does a person's brain have a record of every event that happened during a person's lifetime? Is it possible to recall any of those events and is it possible to recall those events in detail?

For example, I almost drowned when I was a child. I know this happened and can remember bits of the event but I don't remember all the details. Is that complete memory still stored?

# Answer
> 10 votes
No. I don't think so. There are many arguments for why this is not the case.

* A common understanding of human memory is that it is part of an information processing system: attention, sensation, perception, interpretation, memory consolidation, forgetting, and memory recall. In some sense all these represent possible points of failure. Thus, we can fail to attend to an event in the first place, we can misunderstand the nature of an event, or memories can be temporarily inaccessible.
* Building on the idea of the information processing system, it is important to recognise the huge subjective component to the experience of an "event". This links closely with philosophical questions about the nature of reality. However, regardless of the nature of the truth of external reality, it is clear that human experience is imbued with meaning and is experienced through various cognitive schemas. Thus, the "objective event", whatever that might be, is often never represented in the first place.
* Another perspective is that memory has been shaped by the adaptive needs of humans. In such a context, memory consumes resources. Memory also needs to efficiently serve our needs. From such a perspective forgetting of irrelevant memories and consolidation of life saving and life improving memories is important to our adaptation. For example, this is an argument for the benefits of a forgetting curve whereby recent memories are recalled better than distal memories; recent memories are more likely to be relevant to current behaviour.
* There is so much research to show the failures of human memory in even short term contexts. For example, check out some of the eye witness testimony research of Elizabeth Loftus to see how poor people are at recalling details even short term. The entire field of memory research extensively documents failure of recall and biases in recall.

Despite all this, there are also many times where people can not currently recall something that is stored in long term memory. See for example discussions of tip of the tongue phenomena, spreading activation, fan out effect and so on.

# Answer
> 10 votes
(1) There are different kinds of memory:

* a "sensory" (e.g. visual) memory of events as they happened
* a verbal memory, i.e. the knowledge that something has happened (verbalization being the result of higher cognitive processing or "reflection")
* a behavioral memory, i.e. a specific reaction to certain stimuli that does not appear in individuals that did not experience the relevant trauma

The purposes of memory are correct and efficient future behavior. A detailed sensoric memory is not helpful in achieving these purposes, so it is usually not retained.

Verbal encoding becomes more likely in older children (older than 28 to 36 months) and is better in girls. Children of all ages preserve a behavioral memory. (Terr, 1988)

(2) Traumatic and negative life events are less well remembered than positive life events (Byrne, Hyman & Scott, 2001), and it seems that memory is correlated to the type of trauma. In one study (Williams, 1994), 38% of abused women had no memory of that (documented) abuse. Forgetting the abuse was more likely, if the perpretrator was part of the girls family. I would interpret this as the trauma being more severe, if the child's trust was broken. Forgetting this may be a coping strategy (see 3, below).

(3) Forgetting of traumatic events seems, in part, to be due to these traumatic events to "fall out of" and "not fit into" the individuals world view (Janoff-Bulman, 1989). Whenever we experience something new, we have to either adapt our idea of the world to include this new experience, or we can, among other strategies, deny, ignore, or simply forget, that it happened. In the case of childhood abuse by close relatives, accepting the event as a fact, would result in the child loosing its family and all trust in the world. It would be unable to survive. Forgetting the trauma maintains a world that can be lived in. Deliberate forgetting can be found in victims of genocide (Buckley-Zistel, 2006). Forgetting can be willfully induced (Joslyn & Oakes, 2005).

There's a wealth of research into forgetting of traumatic life events.

# Answer
> 5 votes
There are individuals who possess extraordinary memory ability, sometimes called eidetic memory. With specific reference to your question, a woman in Los Angeles has an extraordinary ability to recall autobiographical events from her past. You can read the Wired article of her story here.

> At the scientists' behest, for example, she recalled—without warning and in just 10 minutes—what she'd done on every Easter since 1980. "April 6, 1980: 9th grade, Easter vacation ends. April 19, 1981: 10th grade, new boyfriend, H. April 11, 1982: 11th grade, grandparents visiting for Passover ..."

Her ability extends to certain momentous cultural events, such as disasters.

> She instantly retrieves from memory the exact dates of the explosions of space shuttle Challenger and Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. She remembers not just that September 25, 1978, was when a PSA flight crashed in San Diego but also that the jet collided with a Cessna. She can go in either direction, disaster to date or date to disaster. When I say "January 13, 1982," Price has no trouble recalling the Air Florida flight that plummeted into the Potomac.

One theory of her astounding memory is that she obsessively thinks about events after they happen, which leads to more effective encoding and strengthening of the memory for that event. This seems to be a key distinction between her and a person of average memory - if you didn't encode an event completely when it happened you are unlikely to be able to recall it completely later. Trauma, such as nearly drowning, can either enhance or degrade this process.

If you are curious, a great book that goes over our many memory failings is "The Seven Sins of Memory" by Daniel Schacter. Highly recommended.

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# Question
Title: Problem solving capability as a "function" of room temperature
I'm wondering, whether there is a correlation between environmental factors like temperature and the ability to solve problems (say math exercises). Although I am sure this has been studied, maybe someone could point me to a reference.

# Answer
As @what mentions Pilcher et al (2002) provide a meta-analysis of the effect of hot and cold temperature on performance. They found that cold temperatures of 10 degrees celsius resulted in an average reduction in performance of 14.88% and that hot temperatures of 32 degrees celsius resulted in a decrement of 13.91% relative to more neutral temperature conditions.

The study does discuss how type of task and duration of task moderate the effect of temperature on performance. However, as is often the case with meta-analysis, I found the results to be somewhat confusing and not readily explainable by a coherent theoretical model.

### References

* Pilcher, J. J., Nadler, E., & Busch, C. (2002). Effects of hot and cold temperature exposure on performance: a meta-analytic review. Ergonomics, 45(10), 682-698.
> 3 votes

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# Question
Title: Does personality imply an inclination to be an expert in one field or average in "all" fields?
The question of whether it is better to be an expert in one domain or average in many is too vague.

However, instead, I'd like to focus on the following:

* Are individuals born to prefer being an expert in one domain or average in many domains?
* Is there any serious research on this?

For example I'd very like to be an expert in swimming but after some time of hard training this activity becomes boring for me. I need to run, I need to play ball team games etc. Conversely, Michael Phelps, world swimmer, incline to be an expert in one branch.

We can talk about branch of study, hobbies, sport, social interactions, languages, etc.

# Answer
> 4 votes
I imagine there are many ways of looking at this question. Here are just a few ideas:

**Society and specialisation**: One lens for viewing this question is to focus on the reward structure of our society. There are many forces in society which encourage specialisation and the development of specific expertise. Careers are typically built around developing expertise in a particular domain (e.g., doctors, lawyers, computer programmers, etc.). The nature of the reward structure that is facilitated by large economic markets means that the most popular actors, musicians, and politicians, and the most successful athletes get more of the financial and social rewards than those that just dabble in such activities. The flipside of a specialised society is that you don't need to know how to do many things, because you just pay someone else to do it. Thus, from this perspective, in historical terms society appears to be encouraging expertise more than in the past.

**General individual differences**: The concept of need for achievement refers to an "individual's desire for significant accomplishment, mastering of skills, control, or high standards."

**Self-actualising**: You could look at research on how people find meaning in their life and how mastery and expertise fits into that experience. In particular, the journey of acquiring mastery in a domain has often been linked to feelings of meaning and purpose. For example, have a look at something like Self Determination Theory and the role of competence in achieving a sense of personal growth.

**Expertise and deliberate practice research:** There's a substantial body of research that has studied people acquiring expertise in particular domains. Ericsson et al (1993) provides a good introduction to this research. A central claim in Ericsson's model is that deliberate practice is key to acquiring expertise. And given that deliberate practice is optimised for improving performance it may not necessarily be intrinsically enjoyable. Thus, this suggests that the motivation to engage in deliberate practice over an extended period of time may be a key differentiator between those who do and do not acquire expertise.

### References

Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological review, 100(3), 363. PDF

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# Question
Title: Relationship between cognitive load and self-indulgent behavior in simple task completion
**Background**

A subject in an office-building setting is asked to memorize a list of numbers and to write them down on a whiteboard in another room on the opposite side of the building.

The subject must navigate a series of hallways in order to get from the first room to the other room.

At a certain point midway through the hallways, the subject is approached by a confederate who asks the subject if she would like a treat. The subject is given two choices:

* 1) a high-nutrition, moderately-tempting snack with a low level of self-indulgence
* 2) a low-nutrition-value, highly-tempting snack with a high level of self-indulgence

**Hypothesis**

There exists a relationship between complexity of the memorization task and the choice to accept the high self-indulgence snack, such that:

* The subjects are more likely to accept the high self-indulgence snack if the memorization task is more complex and imposes a higher cognitive load.
* The greater the cognitive load of an in-process mental task means the greater deficiency the subject will have in being able to resist or "self-censor" behaviors.

**Question**

Can anyone provide links or references that relate to the above hypothesis and test?

# Answer
> 3 votes
Gailliot et al (2007), didn't do it with a memorization task, but with a variety of other tasks requiring self-control:

> The present work suggests that self-control relies on glucose as a limited energy source. Laboratory tests of self-control (i.e., the Stroop task, thought suppression, emotion regulation, attention control) and of social behaviors (i.e., helping behavior, coping with thoughts of death, stifling prejudice during an interracial interaction) showed that (a) acts of self-control reduced blood glucose levels, (b) low levels of blood glucose after an initial self-control task predicted poor performance on a subsequent self-control task, and (c) initial acts of self-control impaired performance on subsequent self-control tasks, but consuming a glucose drink eliminated these impairments. Self-control requires a certain amount of glucose to operate unimpaired. A single act of self-control causes glucose to drop below optimal levels, thereby impairing subsequent attempts at self-control.

* Gailliot, Matthew T., et al. "Self-control relies on glucose as a limited energy source: Willpower is more than a metaphor." Journal of personality and social psychology 92.2 (2007): 325. PDF

# Answer
> 2 votes
Another paper that might be relevant is Vohs and Heatherton (2000). They examined self-regulation failure in a group of dieters and non-dieters. The idea behind their study was that dieters would have an increased incidence of self-regulation failure because they must consistently maintain self control around food.

In one of the studies they had a low temptation condition where candy was placed far away and a high temptation condition where candy was within reach. The experimenters also manipulated the availability of the candy by telling participants to either "do not touch" or to "help yourself. The participants then had to watch a 10 minute movie with the candy nearby.

After the movie the participants were taken to a separate room and asked to complete an ice cream tasting task. Following a brief tasting, the participants were told "By the way, help yourself to any ice cream you want; we have tons in the freezer." The dependent variable was how much ice cream was eaten in each condition.

The results showed that dieters ate approximately the same amount of ice cream in the "do not touch" conditions, but ate significantly more in the "help yourself" condition with high temptation. The authors conclude that the dieters exercised so much self control when snacks were in reach and available that they had far less self-control available following the ice cream tasting.

* Vohs KD and Heatherton TF. (2000). Self-regulatory failure: A resource-depletion approach. Psychological Science, 11(3), 249-254.

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# Question
Title: Where can I find a longitudinal study with a binary response?
I've spent the last couple of months trying to find real data (not simulated) of a longitudinal study, but I can't seem to find one. Any topic and time frame is fine, but the dependent variable must be binary, and a few covariables are also desirable. I appreciate any help immensely!

# Answer
(1) The statistic software R comes with a number of datasets. You can see which datasets are available with the command `data()`. Here is an overview.

Among the datasets that came with my distribution of R is the dataset `Titanic`, which includes the binary variable "Survived", which gives information about which passengers survived the Titanic's maiden voyage.

Another dataset, `UCBAdmissions`, gives information about which applicants were admitted or rejected to UC Berkeley.

The data in both datasets is grouped (by sex etc.). Both are not longitudinal, though.

You can get information on each dataset with `?datasetname`, e.g. `?Titanic`. Maybe more datasets include binary variables.

(2) As Jeromy Anglim noted, many statistics text books offer an online data repository. Here is the one for Applied Regression Analysis and Generalized Linear Models (2nd ed.) by John Fox. Here is the one for Statistik (7th ed.) by Fahrmeir et al. (in German).

(3) Here is a linklist to free datasets, here is another. I guess there are more.
> 3 votes

# Answer
Perhaps have a look at chapter 14 of Gelman and Hill http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/arm/

Chapter 14 is on multilevel logistic regression and the website provides access to all data files used.

I just don't have access to the book right now to tell you which of the many datafiles used in the book correspond to the examples in chapter 14.

More generally, textbooks are a good way of directing your search. Many provide practice datasets. So you just need to find textbooks on longitudinal analysis of binary response data.
> 1 votes

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# Question
Title: Where to find historical dream activity data?
Is it just me, or are we dreaming less? Maybe it's the computer screens in our face all day. Maybe that's just what happens when we get older.

I'm wondering if there's a resource of some kind to determine historical dream activity. Might it be possible to use Google Trends to determine dream activity (similar to how Google Flu tracks illness via search queries).

Or is Google too novel a tool, and are dreamers searching too randomly to track any meaningful delta in dream activity? If so, is there another resource that might provide meaningful dream data?

# Answer
I think you need to distinguish dream activity and dream recall. I thought that everyone dreams every night. However, many factors influence whether we recall the dreams.

Thus, I think a more productive search would be to focus on the factors that influence dream recall, and perhaps the prominence of dreams in peoples lives.

I found one older article by Cohen (1973) which summarises research on the frequency of dream recall. He states that

> Frequency of dream recall is affected by physiological, methodological, and psychological factors.

Beaulieu-Prevost and Zadra (2005) writes

> Schonbar (1965) suggested that people who remember many dreams are generally interested in dreams, in trying to understand them, in increasing their dream recall frequency, and tend to have an overall positive attitude towards dreams.

Beaulieu-Prevost and Zadra (2005) then go on to cite numerous such studies.

Thus, the next question would be whether the factors that influence dream recall have changed over recent history. Palagini et al (2011) might provide a useful starting point as they review historical perspectives of dreaming.

### References

* Beaulieu-Prévost, D., & Zadra, A. (2005). Dream recall frequency and attitude towards dreams: a reinterpretation of the relation. Personality and individual differences, 38(4), 919-927.
* Cohen, D. B. (1969). Frequency of dream recall estimated by three methods and related to defense preference and anxiety. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 33(6), 661.
* Palagini, L., & Rosenlicht, N. (2011). Sleep, dreaming, and mental health: A review of historical and neurobiological perspectives. Sleep medicine reviews, 15(3), 179-186.
> 2 votes

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# Question
Title: What is the scientific term for unexpected, spontaneous dream recall?
**I'm interested if there's a term for spontaneous dream recall**. I will try to define the phenomenon I'm talking about.

Over 10 years ago, I started to notice that I can spontaneously recall dreams, and clearly label them as dreams. I may **recall 3 dreams from the past night, then more dreams from weeks or months ago**. Some of these dreams I have written down, others were "forgotten" upon awakening, only to be recalled much later. That's a lot of dreams. When in this state of spontaneous recall, I can consciously guide the recall process once the original dream is recalled and recall a number of additional dreams that may or may not be loosely connected to that one.

Just to clarify, these are not fantasies and neither waking memories. I can clearly distinguish a waking memory from a dream memory. The entire dream memory is recalled in a flash with all the details: place, action, characters present. All of this over a second or so, similar in duration to the Deja-vu.

I've looked up and found Cryptomnesia, which is defined as:

> Cryptomnesia occurs when a forgotten memory returns without it being recognised as such by the subject, who believes it is something new and original.

What I'm describing is similar to Cryptomnesia, except that the memory is immediately recognized as a previously seen dream.

This phenomenon makes me believe that I do not really "forget" dreams. Normally, such memories are "blocked" from ordinary awareness, but can be recalled at random times of the day, or when laying in bed and preparing for sleep. Just to clarify: I calculated that I potentially see up to 1600 dreams in a year, and can recall many of them this way.

**Is there a search term I can use to look at scientific literature that deals with the phenomenon of unbidden, spontaneous (dream)memory recall?** Maybe there's something that deals with real memory recall that sounds similar?

# Answer
This could be an example of what is termed "involuntary memory" or "involuntary autobiographical memory". Mainly it is due to subtle and obvious prompts.
> 10 votes

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Tags: terminology, memory, sleep, dreams, long-term-memory
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# Question
Title: Classic cognitive neuroscience studies that highlight conclusions that could not be drawn from behavioral experiments
Background: I studied psychology prior to going into cognitive neuroscience for my PhD. While I know my own area in depth, I lack the kind of broad overview that people who have done their Masters in cognitive neuroscience tend to have. I was recently asked to give a general talk on cognitive neuroscience, in a country where it pretty much doesn't exist yet as a field. The talk is for highly talented high school kids who are at a summer school for scientific research in psychology. We have all afternoon for this.

My idea was to first talk about neuroimaging techniques: what do the machines look like, what do they measure, what kind of conclusions can we draw using them. I then wanted to go on to some **examples where neuroscience was used to draw conclusions about cognitive functions, such that the conclusions couldn't have been drawn using just behavioural experiments**.

For example, for **memory**, I thought I could talk about HM and how we learned about the distinction between short-term and long-term memory when his hippocampi were removed. For **language**, I could talk about the effect of cloze probability on the N400 evoked potential. For **consciousness**, I could talk about the role of feedback connections and how selectively knocking out early areas with TMS before the feedback signal comes back can abolish conscious perception. I'm still not sure what examples to use for:

* Attention
* Motor control
* Executive functions
* Emotions
* Clinical applications
* Sleep
* Perception of space or time
* Social behaviour
* Other

I would love to hear your thoughts on the most classical Cognitive Neuroscience findings you can think of. What would your list look like? It can be anything really, as long as it's not just behavioural. Rats, monkeys and zebrafish are also welcome to the list :)

# Answer
> 7 votes
For introductory cognitive neuroscience, I think it is often best to start with interesting neuropsychological cases -- I think such cases provide an intriguing and intuitive way to get into the relationship between mind and brain. You already plan to talk about HM (and you can mention the movie Memento if you think students might be familiar or interested in it), I would suggest following that approach in the other domains. A few suggestions:

* Executive functions/social behavior: Phineas Gage (frontal lobe damage produced impulsivity, rudeness, etc.)
* Language: pure anomia (patients can report lots of information about an object but can't name it), jargon aphasia (patients produce nonsense words without realizing they are nonsense)
* Conceptual knowledge: semantic dementia (progressive degeneration of semantic knowledge)
* Spatial attention: hemispatial neglect (patients don't notice things on one side of visual field, usually the left side following right parietal lesions)
* Motor control: ideational apraxia (impairment of action planning), ideomotor apraxia (impairment of object use), optic ataxia (impairment of visually-guided reaching)
* Face perception / visual expertise: prosopagnosia (typically described as impairment of face perception, though it affects other versions of visual expertise)

More generally, there is a good two-volume set called Classic Cases in Neuropsychology (Vol. 1, Vol. 2) edited by Chris Code et al. that describes lots of interesting and influential cases.

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Tags: neuroscience, cognitive-neuroscience, teaching-of-psychology
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# Question
Title: Can general intelligence be understood as pattern analysis?
I have been thinking for a while about general intelligence (i.e.,not specific abilities used for particular tasks such as chess). I think that the essence of general intelligence is pattern analysis. I.e., the brain of any animal is a pattern analysis machine. The brain analyses patterns of sounds, lights, pressure, chemicals (in the nose and the tongue). More than that, it also analyse patterns of actions (body language, pattern in doing daily activities, etc etc).

* To what extent can intelligence be understood as pattern analysis?
* Do any existing researchers conceptualise intelligence as pattern analysis?
* What evidence is there to support conceptualising intelligence as pattern analysis?

# Answer
You are certainly not the first to conceive of intelligence as pattern analysis. In fact, there is a book by Jeff Hawkins called "On Intelligence" which investigates this idea in depth. His idea is that the best candidate mechanism for intelligent brain function is predictive coding.

In the predictive coding framework, the job of the brain is not to continuously process all incoming information, but instead to continuously predict upcoming information: the brain is an inference machine. Predictive coding is a hierarchical process whereby a any stage in cognitive processing sends its prediction to a previous stage in processing via feedback connections. For example, if area V2 'expects' to see a square, it will send this information to area V1, which codes for line orientation. If the received input matches the expectation, the information is suppressed. The information now doesn't need to go any further than V1, because it has already been fully predicted, i.e. the brain already contains a representation of it. If, however, the input doesn't match the prediction, the mismatch, called prediction error, is transmitted further through the processing hierarchy.

Prediction error is considered the reason why surprising (invalidly predicted) stimuli lead to more neural activity than unsurprising (validly predicted) ones, for example in mismatch negativity paradigms.

The notion of expectation here is automatic, it is a function of each brain area and does not need to be conscious in the sense of us being aware that it's happening.

It is however important to note that this notion of intelligence is nothing like the notion of intelligence in psychology. In psychology, intelligence is a measure of individual differences between people. The predictive coding framework is, in contrast, posited as a general feature of the neocortex.
> 8 votes

# Answer
The nature of intelligence is a highly controversial open question.

However your phrasing and use of the term "general intelligence" seems to indicate a g-factorist context to the question, so then, I would say the answer is "no".

Pattern recognition tests such as Raven's Progressive Matrices do load highly on the g-factor but things unrelated to pattern recognition load as well, such as reaction time.
> 1 votes

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Tags: intelligence, artificial-intelligence
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# Question
Title: Is there evidence of suppression of the frontal cortex during herding behavior?
Phenomena such as large-scale stock market sell-offs and financial panic in general are often explained in terms of herding behaviors.

At how primitive of a level does one actually "follow the herd"? In other words, does this behavior elicit a strong response at the brainstem level (particularly in the tectum, i.e., the colliculi) at some cost to frontal cortical processing?

Obviously, it's a difficult task to run an EEG or have a subject in for an MRI during a real panic, so results based on simulations are certainly acceptable.

# Answer
This is probably not a complete answer to your question.

There have been a few studies on this relationship.

This article from the Journal of Neuroscience "Downregulation of the Posterior Medial Frontal Cortex Prevents Social Conformity" (Klucharev et al. 2011) approach the research (from their abstract):

> Here we demonstrate that the transient downregulation of the posterior medial frontal cortex by theta-burst transcranial magnetic stimulation reduces conformity, as indicated by reduced conformal adjustments in line with group opinion.

This article may also be of interest
> 3 votes

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Tags: cognitive-neuroscience
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# Question
Title: Is there a function between loss of memory and time?
I have 2 related questions with regards to memory capabilities and time:

1. "Is there a function (e.g. $e^{-\Delta Time}$) with regards to memory loss?" Everyone is bound to forget over time. Is there a function that describes this decay?
2. "Is there a function between time spent looking at something and remembering it?" The more the time I spend trying to remember something, the better I will be at it. Is there any correlation between the two?

# Answer
> 6 votes
There is substantial research on both the functional relationship relationship between practice and retention and between time away from task and forgetting (e.g., see forgetting curve). In general, retention is a monotonically increasing and monotonically decelerating function of practice. And retention is a monotonically decreasing function of time where the rate of deceleration is decreasing. This general finding is tremendously robust, but there is substantial debate about the best fitting functional form for these two relationships.

Averell and Heathcote (2011) provide a good review of forgetting curve functions. See equations 2, 3, and 4 in the article for instances of pareto, power, exponential functions. They concluded:

> Our analysis revealed that, although for individual participant data the exponential function with an above chance asymptote had the best fit among the models we considered, this advantage was due to its extra flexibility (complexity). When we adjusted for complexity using a range of model selection techniques that varied in the degree to which they adjusted for complexity, in every case a power function with an above chance asymptote provided the best description of forgetting. Interestingly, previous analyses of retention functions without an asymptote (Lee, 2004) found that the power model was more complex than the exponential. Our findings suggest that the addition of asymptote parameters adds more complexity to the exponential function than the power function.

### References

* Averell, L., & Heathcote, A. (2011). The form of the forgetting curve and the fate of memories. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 55(1), 25-35. PDF

# Answer
> 3 votes
As for question two, a simple thought experiment helps shed some initial light. Imagine you are asked to learn a set of stimuli that are presented on a screen for 1 s each. Surely you'll get a big mnemonic boost for those items if you instead study them for 2 s each.

But then imagine you have studied an item for 60 seconds -- can you imagine one extra second will make a big difference? The relationship between study time and eventual performance surely begins to plateau.

In cognitive psychology is an interesting finding called the *labor in vain effect*, which suggests that when people are given an unlimited time to study, occasionally they will expend a great deal of effort on items which they'll never learn.

**Reference:**

Nelson, T. O., & Leonesio, R. J. (1988). Allocation of self-paced study time and the "labor-in-vain-effect." *Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition*, *14*, 676-686. \[PDF\]

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Tags: memory, theoretical-neuroscience
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# Question
Title: Possibility of using the effects of sleep to induce a virtual environment?
I'm not sure what this guy is trying to say, or why his question got closed, but I think I can build upon it and form a solid question. When the brain enters REM Sleep, all sensory input to reality is eliminated or dulled. The person will begin dreaming as the brain creates random impulses and sends them through the brain. Through the techniques of Lucid Dreaming, the subject can learn to control the false dream reality completely. These conditions provide everything necessary for a virtual environment except they are isolated to the individual's brain.

If we were able to induce the physiological conditions of sleep (which should be a simple injection of hormones), and generate these impulses artificially(connecting the brain to a high-end computer program), then we should be able to immerse the person in a virtual environment. Lucidity could be achieved easily by programming the system to leave clues for the subject. The ramifications of this are enormous. For example, a man in China and a man in Russia could go bowling together, without leaving their own homes.

(I'm not sure if this theory already exists, but I definitely reached these conclusions myself.)

My main questions are:

1. What are the hormones necessary to induce sleep in this way?
2. Is this a safe and reliable way to immerse a subject in a virtual environment?

# Answer
As a matter of fact, this can be possible in the future. There have been "predictions" that within this century we will be able to upload our consciousness into computers, creating an environment where it will actually be like reality.

Now, off of theoretical, as of now it's impossible to do virtual reality. All I can provide you with is a theoretical answer, which is above.

As for hormones and safety:

* Use sleep hormones, melatonin, serotonin

As for safety, it hasn't been done, I can't answer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT1vxEpE1aI

That video is an interesting video by Michio Kaku on this topic.
> 2 votes

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Tags: perception, dreams
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# Question
Title: What is the effect of studying logic or mathematics on general thinking skills?
I frequently hear comments from people to the effect that "Studies have shown that students who take (intro) logic courses don't show any signs of improvement in logical/rational/critical thinking." Yet, as an undergrad, I got the opposite impression: I felt that studying logic (and mathematics) in more depth sharpened those skills. My initial Google search on the issue didn't really turn up much.

So, I have some questions regarding the *psychology* of logic and mathematics.

> **Question**: What studies have been done regarding the effects/benefits to cognitive thinking skills from taking intro logic courses? What about studying probability theory, or even mathematics more generally? How conclusive are they?

Any references would be extremely helpful. I now teach intro logic as a grad student, and if there's something that students consistently miss out on, I would like to know about it so that I can (hopefully) make improvements. Also, any resources in the relation between mathematics and psychology more generally would be beneficial.

(I posted this on the MathSE, but was told this would be a better place for this question. If this needs retagging, let me know. I see that this question is similarly related, but I'm particularly interested in intro formal logic courses).

# Answer
Here are some references that may be of use to you:

Contrasting the cognitive effects of graphical and sentential logic teaching: Reasoning, representation and individual differences (Stenning et al, 2007).

The shaping of deduction in Greek mathematics: A study in cognitive history (Netz, 1999). - a bit of a historical context, but I'd imagine that there are similar ideas

A cognitive theory of graphical and linguistic reasoning: Logic and implementation (Stenning and Oberlander, 1995).

A Cognitive Analysis of Problems of Comprehension in a Learning of Mathematics(Duval, 2006)

Perhaps related to your request - The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Popper, 2005).
> 7 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, reference-request, intelligence, educational-psychology
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title: Current diagnostic interviews for DSM-V

text:
# Question
Title: Current diagnostic interviews for DSM-V
I was wondering if there are currently any diagnostic interview schedules that have been made/adapted to fit DSM-V criteria? Have you heard of anything?

Specifically, I am looking for interviews for children.

# Answer
The SCID is a Structured Clinical Interview for DSM Disorders.

The SCID website talks about a version designed for children called the KID-SCID.

You mention a specific interest in DSM-V. Under "what's new", the SCID website states:

> January 2013: Development efforts are underway for the SCID for DSM-5 and updated training materials, which are expected to be released in the fall/winter 2013.
> 3 votes

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Tags: measurement, clinical-psychology
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# Question
Title: In which situation should structural dissociation theory be applied?
In which specific situation you think is most appropriate to apply Van der Hart's SDT?

# Answer
> 4 votes
According to a presentation given by Van Der Hart "Structural Dissociation of the Personality: The Key to Understanding Chronic Traumatization and Its Treatment", this theory relates to the response to trauma, described further in the paper "Trauma-related dissociation: conceptual clarity lost and found" (Hart et al. 2004). From the abstract:

> It postulates a common psychobiological pathway for all trauma-related disorders. Trauma-related dissociation is maintained by integrative deficits and phobic avoidance. This conceptualization advances diagnosis, classification, treatment and research of trauma-related disorders.

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Tags: abnormal-psychology, stress, ptsd
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# Question
Title: Is it possible to think in a second language?
Those who have learned a second language are *guaranteed* to consciously think of words and their corresponding meaning in your native language or vice versa.

This is common with more "complex" sentences, like "My favorite color is green.", rather than "Hi" or "Hello, how are you?" (The latter being a common phrase, so it needs no thinking in most languages.).

* Is it possible to stop the conscious act of translating your native language to your second language or vice versa?
* Is it possible to fully "think" in your second language?

Clarification: When you speak your native language you rarely think about the grammar and structure and it comes right out, I'm asking if that's possible with people who learned multiple languages.. can you think as if that language was native to you?

Further clarification: You know how a beginner of a foreign language usually cannot speak rapid-fire and has to think through every word and it's syntax, instead of making a flow of words automatically, you have to 'think' and fill in each word accordingly.

Example: When a person who natively speaks English talks, they can talk without having to think of word meanings as it is already implicitly processed by your sub-conscious.. but this flow usually stops when you..

Another example: Person A doesn't use the word "condescending" a lot, and has to return to the definition in her memory. She usually doesn't meet condescending people. She has met a person who has this attribute. In an argument she says "You're so --pause--, umm, hmm..", and in her mind she goes through a list of words (Mean, (I had to pause here to find a word for the example..) Defiant, Rude, etc.) until she reaches condescending.

That is the feeling of "thinking" I'm describing. A new learner of a second language has to "think" through everything, and my question is: Can you "think" in a second language without having to find and link words in your native language? Excluding young people exposed to both, but people who took classes and moved to a country to learn.

# Answer
> 24 votes
It is possible for some people to think in a second language. And given that you are asking about possibility, to some extent anecdotes are evidence.

* Many children who change linguistic communities at a young age lose the ability to talk in their first language. This is particularly the case where the first language is different to the language in which parents speak to their children.
* In less extreme cases I have friends who came to an English speaking country at a young age, but still retained the ability to speak in their native language. Nonetheless, the vast majority of the time, they speak English. I assume that at a certain point, they switched from primarily thinking in their native language to primarily thinking in English. One friend mentioned the experience of when at around age 14, his dreams began to switch from being in Polish to being in English.

I guess the interesting question is whether there are limits to this, such as when the second language is not learnt until teenage years or adulthood.

In terms of a few hypotheses, I would think that ability to think in a second language would be linked to (a) greater fluency with the second language which in turn would be linked to experience and training and (b) specific primary training in the content of the thoughts in the second language (e.g., if you study a subject at university in the second language and thus you may know the terms better in the second language). Also from my limited experience of learning French, it felt like there was a degree of choice whereby I could actively try to think in French. That said, the cognitive associations between underlying concept, English word, and French word were pretty strong. Thus, the subjective experience of thinking in French and translating from English to French was often subtle.

*Note also that I'd still be interested in any research that has specifically studied this phenomena.*

# Answer
> 19 votes
> Is it possible to stop the conscious act of translating your native language to your second language or vice versa?

Many people have already commented that they certainly experience thinking in several languages. While this sort of phenomenal insight is interesting in itself, one key idea from cognitive science research is that introspection is not generally to be trusted when it comes to understanding cognitive processes (see for example the famous studies by Nisbett and Wilson). So both your conscious experience of thinking in your first language and my (or anyone else's) feeling of thinking in another language are not necessarily telling us much on how we think.

> Is it possible to fully "think" in your second language?

I don't know but it's even possible to dispute the fact that you are thinking in a spoken language at all (see for example Jerry Fodor's “language of thought” hypothesis). Another view that is currently quite popular tries to account for abstract concepts in sensorial terms (cf. symbol grounding, some interpretations of “embodied cognition”, etc.) The idea is that when you are thinking about something, you are unconsciously manipulating sensory (visual, auditory…) representations, not linguistic ones (be it in a spoken language or some universal language of thought).

An example of an empirical result supporting this view is the “concept modality switch effect”: When asked to verify a property (e.g. “Can light flicker?”), participants are a little quicker if the previous question involved the same modality (in this case vision) rather than another one (say audition). This modality switch effect also exist when directly perceiving through two different modalities leading to the interpretation that to answer the question “Can light flicker?”, you are not merely retrieving some sort of symbolic knowledge (expressed in a language-dependent or language-independent manner) but actually visualizing/hearing/experiencing the relevant concept on a sensory level.

At the same time, you can also find theories purporting an influence in the other direction, in which the language one speaks changes the way one views the world all the way to pretty elementary perception (see Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). One area where this has been discussed and researched extensively is color perception, culminating in a big research project called the “World Color Survey” collecting data on color names in many cultures.

One line of research in this field uses differences between languages to track language influence on basic perceptual processes. For example some languages like Greek and Russian apparently have no word for “blue” but two words distinguishing different types of blue. The distinction between “dark blue” and “light blue” is obligatory when using these languages, you cannot say “blue” without specifying dark or light.

One intriguing result suggests that native Russian speakers are slightly quicker to distinguish two shades of blue that do not belong to the same linguistic categories whereas the effect does not exist for English speakers (Winawer, Witthoft, Frank, Wu, Wade & Boroditsky, 2007). Note that the task does not involve naming or remembering the color, only making a decision about two colors before you so it is pretty strong evidence that one does in fact “think” in a language (this is a complex question however, if you dig into this literature you will find that there is a lot of disagreement on various assumptions and methodological points regarding what is a basic color term, etc.).

Following the same line of inquiry, there is an empirical result that seem directly relevant to your question: Athanasopoulos (2009) used a color discrimination task with bilingual Greek/English participants (specifically Greek students in the UK). I don't remember all the details but he found that the effect varied depending on the level of acculturation (e.g. how long the participants spent in an English-speaking environment, how well they spoke English and at what age they learned it) and semantic availability of the relevant color terms (this was measured by asking people to list color names and counting how far down the list the different terms appeared). This suggests that, to the extent that language plays a role in perception, it is possible for a second language to have an influence but also that this is not an all or nothing proposition (i.e. the influence of the second language grows with increased exposure).

References:

* Athanasopoulos, P. (2009). Cognitive representation of colour in bilinguals: The case of Greek blues. *Bilingualism,* 12 (1), 83-95.
* Winawer, J., Witthoft, N., Frank, M.C., Wu, L., Wade, A.R., & Boroditsky, L. (2007). Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination. *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America,* 104 (19), 7780-7785.

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, learning, language
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