Is there a biological equivalent to the bias term used in artificial neural networks?

Let's call "response function" the function that gives a neuron's firing rate (or probability of firing) given its input. Then, different kinds of neurons have different response functions. All of them, as far as I'm aware, are nonlinear, and can usually be experimentally measured.

There are neurons that will fire a little, even for small inputs (so they're basically rectified, nonlinear units) and neurons that need a specific, non-zero threshold of input to be crossed before they fire at all (somewhat analogous to having negative bias). These used to be called Type I and Type II neurons respectively, although I've rarely heard this definition recently. There are also neurons that always fire unless inhibited from doing so ("tonic activity"): you can see this as implementing a positive bias.

About the second part of your question, the "modification mechanisms": there are many factors that influence a neuron's probability of firing which are independent both of the input and of the input weight. You can see these as changes in the bias, either temporary or long-term. The main causes of this are the neuron's recent firing history (usually neurons are less likely to fire if they've just fired, unless they like to burst) and other phenomena usually called 'intrinsic plasticity'.

I hope this gives you a bit more of an idea.


If you have learned about the P300, Steven Luck's An introduction to the event-related potential technique (2014) will be of interest;
the SSVEP and motor-image-related changes are used in BCI, so this book "Brain-Computer Interfaces: Principles and Practice" by John and Elizabeth Wolpaw will be helpful.


In "The Great Hack", what are the data points used in psychological profiling?

The 'data points' were collected by Cambridge Analytica through an app developed by Dr Aleksandr Kogan. The app was a personality quiz called This is Your Digital Life and was run on Facebook. It collected all kinds of data, including 'likes', birthdays and locations. So it was those kind of data points where Cambridge Analytica was bragging about. It claimed that it had up to 5000 data points on every US voter.


I'm not sure how helpful my answer will be, but I get my "news" from scanning journals related to my interests.  I look through 1) broad review journals, 2) broad empirical journals and 3) more specific empirical journals.

In general, I find that popular media outlets do a poor job of reporting on research in psychology/neuroscience (but hopefully someone else has some idea of reliable/quality news outlets).

Broad review journals that I tend to look at include:

Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Current Directions in Psychological Science
Perspectives on Psychological Science
Emotion Review
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
Psychological Review
Psychological Bulletin
Psychological Inquiry
Personality and Social Psychology Review

Then there are the broad empirical journals:

Psychological Science   (studies from this journal appear very often in the news)
Clinical Psychological Science
Nature (usually hardcore neuroscience or behavioral economics)
Science (occasionally get a fun psych study here, which will be heavily advertised on the news)
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS has a good psychological and cognitive sciences section)
Neuroimage
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

And the more specific empirical journals (for me, mostly related to emotion):

Emotion
Cognition and Emotion
Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience

Looking at journals like these may not be too appealing if you want something quick and easy to read.  But I hope that this is useful to you in some way. :)


How did Hermann Ebbinghaus conduct memory experiments on himself?

Ebbinghouse indeed only tested on himself, limiting the generalization of his findings.

Your question is a really good one; given the time of his writing, the now so familiar structure of a standard journal paper (Abstract, Introduction, M&M, Results, Discussion) is not present in his monograph. However, tucked away in the text on p. 51 of 100 in this pdf version of his book he describes the following:

  The investigations in question fell in the year 1879-80 and comprised 163 double tests.
  Each double test consisted in learning eight series of 13 syllables each [...] and then in relearning them after a definite time. The learning was continued until
  two errorless recitations of the series in question were possible. The relearning was
  carried to the same point; it occurred at one of the following times, -- namely, after about
  one third of an hour, after 1 hour, after 9 hours, one day, two days, six days, or 31 days.

As far as I understand, hence, he learned a sequence of syllables and then he basically tried to re-learn those sequences after a series of fixed times and see how his scores were the second time.


How do psychologists measure malicious behaviour?

The Dark Triad maybe what you are seeking.
You have described the behaviours as "malicious", where as the Dark Triad uses the word "malevolent". The Oxford Dictionary advises that these two words are synonyms.
Reference
Jones, D. N., & Paulhus, D. L. (2014). Introducing the Short Dark Triad (SD3): A Brief Measure of Dark Personality Traits. Assessment, 21(1), 28–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/1073191113514105


Models of a working (short-term) memory task that combine performance and reaction time?

This is a tough question, one that I have had to face in my own research. Your question has already been answered/addressed in How to analyze reaction times and accuracy together?

In short, there is no universal method. If you don't find the references or methods listed in that question useful, then I suggest you will require a computational model such as the Linear Ballistic Accumulator. The LBA is a (structurally and computationally) framework that informs process underling both RT and error data (drift rate vs response criterion).


"Cognify". Does it describe awareness or confusion?

I did a quick google search for you and cognify only returned new, hip, modern, trendy websites and apps. So that was no use. Cognify just appears to sound cool in the industry.

When I looked at google scholar citation I again did not find many results, let alone studies that explicitly study cognify or cognification. As a matter of fact, only 14(!!) results were produced with just the word cognify. Within these results, I was able to find some papers that had used the word.

Bentrop (2014) appears to use cognify like your first translation: to become aware or to make explicit.

  “Teachers need to “cognify” their curriculum—examine their subject
  matter to identify and explicitly teach the thinking skills which are
  embedded within their subject

Vakalo (1978) uses cognify as "building a fitting (mental) picture" or, similarly to the former study, "becoming aware".

  When one visits an area for the first time he expects evidence of the presence
  of some phenomena and absence of others. The mechanism he uses to perceive and cognify spatial phenomena is comparison.

It seems thus that cognify means "becoming aware", more likely by yourself (through the act of deliberate thought) instead of "being made aware of". The fact that Vakalo used the word in 1978 already, but is not that well known still, shows that the word hasn't gained much traction in psychological sciences. It is thus likely that cognify is not an official term.

If you would like to read more on becoming aware, you should have a look at situation awareness (being aware) or situation assessment (becoming aware; e.g. Endsley, 1995; Wickens, 2008).

References

Bentrop, S. M. (2014). Creating an educational app rubric for teachers of students who are deaf and hard of hearing.

Endsley, M. R. (1995). Toward a theory of situation awareness in dynamic systems. Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 37(1), 32-64.

Vakalo, E. G. G., & Plessas, D. J. (1978). A conceptual framework for the estimation of opportunity loss at the regional-sectoral level with an application to Greece. Επιθεώρηση Κοινωνικών Ερευνών, 32(32), 117-126.

Wickens, C. D. (2008). Situation awareness: Review of Mica Endsley's 1995 articles on situation awareness theory and measurement. Human factors, 50(3), 397-403.


Dialectical Behavior Therapy's Biosocial Theory - Social Environment Validates Patients' Maladaptive Behavior - As Defined By Who/What?

Just as a point of note, you said you are quoting from Wikipedia, but it is actually WikiWand you are linking to.
The article cited Little, et al. (2018) which states that (emphasis mine):

DBT is based on a biosocial theory of BPD, which posits that the core difficulties seen in this diagnosis stem from the relationship between two factors. Firstly, those diagnosed have a biological dysfunction of the emotion regulation system; and secondly, their environment is invalidating, inhibiting the use of positive behavioural skills and reinforcing the use of less helpful ones (Feigenbaum, 2007; Linehan & Kehrer, 1993)

Feigenbaum (2007) states (again, emphasis mine):

The DBT model assumes that: (i) individuals with BPD lack key interpersonal and self-regulation skills, and (ii) personal and environmental factors may frequently block and/or inhibit the use of behavioural skills or reinforce maladaptive actions.

In psychology, when evaluating the client's environment, you need to look at things from the client's viewpoint, and reading those papers, it highlights that the term maladaptive actions or maladaptive behaviours refers to the consensus that they are as Anestis, et al. (2007) points out:

actions for which cost outweighs benefit [and] is a defining feature of a host of psychological disorders, including depression, eating disorders, and substance abuse disorders (Bornovalova, Lejuez, Daughters, Rosenthal, & Lynch, 2005; Claes, Vandereycken, & Vertommen, 2005; Fischer, Anderson, & Smith, 2004; Joiner, Metalsky, Katz, & Beach, 1999; Keel & Mitchell, 1997)

The client believes that their environment backs up their notion that their behaviours are justified and therefore blocks any move towards more helpful behaviours.
References
Anestis, M. D., Selby, E. A., & Joiner, T. E. (2007). The role of urgency in maladaptive behaviors. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 45(12), 3018–3029. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2007.08.012
Feigenbaum, J. (2007). Dialectical behaviour therapy: An increasing evidence base. Journal of Mental Health, 16(1), 51-68. https://doi.org/10.1080/09638230601182094
Linehan, M. M., & Kehrer, C. A. (1993). Borderline personality disorder. In D. H. Barlow (Ed.), Clinical handbook of psychological disorders (pp. 396–441). New York, NY: The Guilford Press.
Little, H., Tickle, A., & das Nair, R. (2018). Process and impact of dialectical behaviour therapy: A systematic review of perceptions of clients with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 91(3), 278-301. https://doi.org/10.1111/papt.12156


Is "doing everything in your head" a good proxy for intelligence?

Subject performance is not intelligence: Doing well in a single subject is a weak measure of intelligence. While the correlation between IQ and GPA is fairly high. The correlation for a given subject will typically be much lower. So another way of framing this subject is whether doing a subject in your head is a good proxy for subject understanding.

More broadly, your question implies a few other questions:

Does note taking improve learning?
Are students who are either more generally intelligent or more capable in the subject less likely to take notes?
Is there an interaction such that the benefits of note taking is less for more skilled students?

1. Is note taking effective?
I assume that note taking is generally effective and helping students to retain the information presented in a lecture. It encourages students to focus on the material. Deeper information processing increases depth of learning and retention. It also provides a means of revision, which in turn should increase retention.

That said, there are a lot of different types of note taking. In particular, part of the skill of note taking is working out what is important and what is not important.

There are also many different pedagogical contexts. For example, in some settings note taking is required for keeping a record whereas in other settings slides or recordings of the lecture may be provided. Logic says that if note taking is the only record, then it would be more important. Similarly, lectures vary in the degree to which the specific material needs to be mastered as opposed to providing an overview and relying on textbooks or other activities to hone skills. I would assume that where a subject requires students to repeat or apply information presented in the lecture, then taking notes will be more effective.

2. Are students who are either more generally intelligent or more capable in the subject less likely to take notes? I don't know of specific research into this, but I think there would be two key factors operating. First, less capable students are more likely to use poor study skills. So this might involve either no note-taking or poor note taking (e.g., taking down too much information). Second, more capable students are likely to know more material and also be able to absorb the material better. So in some cases, they may have less need to take notes, which in turn may lead them not to take notes.

It might also be related to self-efficacy beliefs which are only partially grounded in reality. So for example, the student might think that they are understanding more of the subject than they are, and fail to see the benefit that they would derive from taking notes.

3. Is there an interaction such that the benefits of note taking is less for more skilled students? Certainly at a certain extreme level of prior understanding where the student already knows all the material, then there may be little benefit from note taking. Likewise, as mentioned previously many features of the context may influence the need for note taking.  However, in contexts where the material is somewhat new to all students, and the test is on the material presented in the lecture, and there are no slides or other material I imagine that note taking would be fairly valuable for all students.

Some research:

It seems there is quite a lot of research on note-taking. Check out "note taking" on google scholar.

Hartley and Davies (1978) review note taking looking at why students take notes and the research on note taking.

Kiewra (1989) provides another review of the learning benefits of note-taking:

  This review article investigates the encoding and storage functions of
  note-  taking. The encoding function suggests that the process of
  taking notes, which  are not reviewed, is facilitative. Research
  specifying optimal note-taking behaviors is discussed as are
  several means for facilitating note-taking, such  as viewing a lecture
  multiple times, note-taking on a provided framework,  or generative
  note-taking activities. The storage function suggests that the  review
  of notes also is facilitative. Research addressing particular review
  behaviors, such as organization and elaboration, is discussed as
  are the advan-  tages of reviewing provided notes, borrowed notes, or
  notes organized in  a matrix form. In addition, cognitive factors
  related to note-taking and review  are discussed. The article
  concludes with an alternative means for defining  and investigating
  the functions of note-taking, and with implications for edu-  cation
  and for research.

References

Hartley, J., & Davies, I. K. (1978). Note‐taking: A critical review. Programmed Learning and Educational Technology, 15(3), 207-224.
Kiewra, K. A. (1989). A review of note-taking: The encoding-storage paradigm and beyond. Educational Psychology Review, 1(2), 147-172.


What is the modern definition for problem solving?

The definition of problem solving can be different between researchers and regions of the world for various reasons. Frensch & Funke (2014) stated that:

  researchers adopt definitions that they perceive as useful, that is, that are consistent with their beliefs, knowledge and theoretical goals. A definition can therefore be neither static, nor commonly accepted. Rather, for any domain of research, a number of meaningful definitions co-exist.  In the area of problem-solving research, the current theoretical goals are different for North American and European researchers. The primary goal adopted by many North American researchers is to understand task performance and learning in natural knowledge domains.  The primary goal adopted by many European researchers, in contrast, is to understand how people deal with complex, novel task situations.  Because the theoretical goals differ for the two traditions, the definitions that have been adopted differ as well. Consequently, the two traditions are not  concerned with the same phenomenon, and any comparison of research findings runs the risk of being meaningless.

Reasons for their statement is given in the whole section of the book (pages 13-19), which is readable via the Google Books website

In order to try to come up with an integrated definition, they came up with the definition of:

  overcoming barriers between a given state and a desired goal state by means of behavioural and/or cognitive multistep activities (page 18).

Reference

Frensch, P. A., & Funke, J. (2014). Definitions of Problem Solving: The European Approach. In: Complex problem solving: The European perspective. New York: Psychology Press. pp. 13-19


Does data support Domhoff's neurocognitive theory of dreams?

The question body emphasizes the question whether Domhoff's neurocognitive theory of dreams is reliable.

Reliability is  the "consistency" or repeatability of research measures. So, a theory cannot be reliable.

I think OP (since offsite) meant to ask for the theory's validity, being the extent to which a concept, conclusion or measurement is well-founded and corresponds accurately to the real world. This interpretation also matches the question title better.

Domhoff (2001) bases his theory on findings in patients with brain injuries, showing that lesions in different areas have differential effects on dreaming. In addition, only 20–30% of REM period awakenings in children aged up to 9 years lead to dream reports and dreams of children under age 5 yrs are bland and static in content. Thirdly, Domhoff showed that dream content is repetitive and continuous with waking conceptions and emotional preoccupations. Based on these findings, Domhoff says that dreaming is best understood as a developmental cognitive achievement that depends upon the maturation and maintenance of a specific network of forebrain structures.

Domhoff's theory opposed the activation-synthesis theory theory, which was coined by Hobson & McCarley. They showed that the brain stem was activated during REM sleep. Their theory suggests that during REM sleep, random brain activation produces dreams. The theory has since been developed, as more and more is understood about REM sleep. Hobson has explicitly argued against Domhoff's theory, stating that Domhoff bases his theory on a 'misreading of the neurobiological literature and an individualistic view of dream psychology' (Hobson, 2005).

In the end, theories try to explain observations, and at this point, as far as I can see, both theories may have value. Personally, the activation-synthesis theory seems more plausible and less complicated, and hence the most parsimonious of the two. But admittedly, I'm not a dream expert.

Fig. 1. Activation-synthesis theory of dreaming. source: MacAlister College

References
- Domhoff. Dreaming (2001); 11(1), 13-33
- Hobson, Dreaming (2005); 15(1), 21-29


From "How Many People Are Aromantic?" from the blog The Thinking Aro:

Based on the 2014 Asexual Community Census data provided here:
25.9% of asexuals are aromantic.
If we run with the studies performed on self-reporting asexuals currently on the books, approximately one percent of the human population is asexual.
This means that in the United States alone, there are approximately 3,161,000 asexuals.
The number of aromantic asexuals in the U.S. should be about 818,699.
[...]
(The one dilemma we have in arriving at accurate numbers is that we can’t know if the 1% of people who are asexual includes demisexuals and gray-asexuals or not. The 2014 Asexual Census reports that 25.9% of asexuals are aromantic; 9.1% of gray-asexuals are aromantic and 3.5% of demisexuals are aromantic. When dividing the entire asexual spectrum by romantic orientation, aromantics make up 19% total, so if gray-asexuals and demisexuals would be part of the 1% of “asexuals” in the human population, then the number of aromantics would be lower than what I listed above. But if they aren’t part of that 1%, then the numbers would actually be higher.)
Now, the data collected through the 2014 census from sexual people (anyone who isn’t asexual, demisexual, or gray-asexual) is obviously tough to accept as accurately representative of the real sexual population because sexual people who completed the census would obviously be a specific type who has exposure to the asexual community online and therefore is aware of romantic and sexual orientations and information that most people in the world at large don’t have. But just for the hell of it, let’s consider the numbers that come of the data.
Of the sexual people who took the census, 4.3% identified as aromantic.
So if 4.3% of sexual people are aromantic (which might at first seem high but then again, maybe not), that means there should be around 13,456,377 aromantic sexual people in the United States.
Add that to the more reliable stat we have for aromantic asexuals, and there are roughly 14,275,076 aromantic people currently living in the U.S.

The author seems to place the population of the U.S. at 316,100,00, so these (highly uncertain) figures imply 4.5% of population is aromantic.

Again, this is assuming that 99% of human beings are sexual, excluding demisexuals and gray-asexuals. If we were to lump in demisexuals and gray-asexuals as part of that 99% of everyone who is not asexual, then the number of aromantics rises because we add the 9.1% of gray-aces who are aro and the 3.5% of demisexuals who are aro to the 4.3% of sexual people who are aro.
These numbers do not include anyone, asexual-spectrum or sexual, who are demiromantic, grayromantic, or WTFromantic. Those are just the aromantics.
[...]

As for whether the aromanticism rate is different among sexual orientations, it is according to Cross-orientations among non-aces from the Asexual Census Blog, which much of the above blog post was based on. The post states that 25.9% of asexuals, 3.5% of demisexuals, 9.1% of gray-asexuals, and 4.3% of non-aces are aromantic. It doesn't break down non-ace orientations though for their individual rates of aromanticism.


What is the difference between Avolition and Laziness?

Robin Kramer gave a good starting point in his comment.

As he said, the difference between laziness and avolition primarily come from the causes of each behavior. Laziness is common among psychologically "normal" individuals while avolition is commonly seen in patients with schizophrenia or depression. Now I will go in depth with each to better characterize them and hopefully show the differences between the two. I will talk about avolition first because it is better defined in the field of psychology.

Avolition

Definition of avolition mainly comes from research of schizophrenia symptoms. Schizophrenia symptoms can be divided as positive and negative symptoms. Negative symptoms can be divided into diminished expression and amotivation. Amotivation consists of anhedonia and avolition (Foussias & Remington, 2008). Anhedonia is diminished capacity to experience pleasant emotions. Avolition is the loss of drive and lack of curiosity. Avolition occurs in depression as well but is different for the two disorders. Avolition comes with saddening or depressed effect for people with depression, but this is not the case for people with schizophrenia.

Since activation of prefrontal cortex is generally associated with initiation of spontaneous activity (which is less in frequency in people with avolition), hypoactivation of prefrontal cortex may be the cause of avolition in patients with schizophrenia (Sebanz & Prinz, 2006). Another study shows anti-correlation between dorsal caudate activity and negative symptoms of schizophrenia including avolition (Mucci et al., 2015). This indicates that avolition may be caused by abnormalities in the motivation-related circuit. There are two networks known to be involved in motivation-related brain network: first one includes the ventral striatum, orbito-frontal cortex (OFC), insula, and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and is involved in liking, reward anticipation, reward valuation, and representation of stimulus-reward associations. The other circuit includes the dorsal caudate and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), and is involved in representation of the expected reward and causal connection between action and reward (Liljeholm et al., 2011). Thus, there is a theory that patients with schizophrenia may exhibit avolition because they are not able to anticipate reward from their actions.

Laziness

Laziness itself is not studied extensively in psychology primarily because it has not been well-defined. At first glance, laziness seems to be a familiar concept to the usual people. However, laziness may involve many factors of human behavior that are at times but not always exhibited in people considered to be lazy. For example, one of the requirements of being lazy may be having no motivation. Without motivation, the person is less likely to show desire to take certain actions. But plenty show desire and motivation; these motivations are just not targetted to a long term goal. With these difficulties in mind, I personally believe that one of the economics definitions of laziness is most in line with what people commonly refer to as laziness: tendency for people to focus on the activities that give immediate pleasure rather than longer-term activities (Frédéric Bastiat, 1850). Bastiat called it idleness rather than laziness, but I believe they are synonymous in this context.

For the cause of laziness, I must confess this is not something I am familiar with. However, popular sources such as this one state that there can be multiple causes for laziness. One would be lack of interest in the field itself. Another would be lacking faith that the action will be worth the effort - which is similar concept to learned helplessness. One study states that anterior frontomedian cortex is involved in making these internal judgements leading to decision making (Zysset et al., 2002). However, studies such as this does not show what causes change in the activation of the anterior frontomedian cortex.

I also noticed that a popular YouTube video about laziness refers to a mouse study that selectively bred physically active mice which led to physically active mice descendents having the same characteristics. The video uses this study to state that there are genetic factors involved in laziness. Not only is it a stretch to make a connection between laziness of humans and tendency to wheel run by mice, the study itself is flawed in that the mice were bred with their parents for the first few weeks. This means that environmental factors cannot be ruled out. Here's the paper if you want to take a look.

References

Bastiat, Frédéric. Economic Harmonies. George B. de Huszar, trans. and W. Hayden Boyers, ed. 1996. Library of Economics and Liberty. Retrieved May 29, 2016 from the World Wide Web: http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basHar20.html

Foussias, G., & Remington, G. (2010). Negative Symptoms in Schizophrenia: Avolition and Occam’s Razor. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 36(2), 359–369. http://doi.org/10.1093/schbul/sbn094

Leon F Seltzer (2008). Laziness: Fact or Fiction?. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolution-the-self/200806/laziness-fact-or-fiction

Liljeholm, M., Tricomi, E., O’Doherty, J. P., & Balleine, B. W. (2011). Neural correlates of instrumental contingency learning: Differential effects of action-reward conjunction and disjunction. The Journal of Neuroscience, 31(7), 2474–2480. http://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3354-10.2011

Mucci, A., Dima, D., Soricelli, A., Volpe, U., Bucci, P., Frangou, S., … Maj, M. (2015). Is avolition in schizophrenia associated with a deficit of dorsal caudate activity? A functional magnetic resonance imaging study during reward anticipation and feedback. Psychological Medicine, 45(8), 1765–1778. http://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291714002943

Sebanz, Natalie (Ed); Prinz, Wolfgang (Ed)
Cambridge, MA, US: MIT Press Disorders of volition. (2006). vii 493 pp.

Stefan Zysset, Oswald Huber, Evelyn Ferstl, D.Yves von Cramon, The Anterior Frontomedian Cortex and Evaluative Judgment: An fMRI Study, NeuroImage, Volume 15, Issue 4, April 2002, Pages 983-991, ISSN 1053-8119, http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/nimg.2001.1008.
(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811901910080)


Can reduced cognitive load lead to some kind of mental or physical "atrophy"?

Assuming you're getting at a related idea to your other recent question (Does a more ergonomic and user friendly interface/device make the human brain work less?), I wouldn't worry about user friendliness causing mental atrophy by precluding the need for thought. Thought continues well beyond matters of control to matters of application and optimization. (E.g., can I use my washing machine on AstroTurf? How much high-efficiency detergent do I really need? Can I still use the old stuff?) When systems work particularly well together, entirely new areas of thought may emerge (e.g., the Industrial Revolution and the Italian Renaissance depended largely on the stability and prosperity of their host societies).

However, the "use-it-or-lose-it" principle may apply to specific skills and even general abilities and physical senses to some extent. Secondary language proficiency is one such popularly recognized example. I'd also recommend checking out the Scientific American Frontiers miniseries, Changing Your Mind (some episodes are available on YouTube). One particular episode with which I'm familiar features a research participant wearing a blindfold for a long period of time, during or after which a neuroimaging method (probably fMRI, but I can't quite remember) shows activity in her visual cortex when she's processing tactile stimuli. These sort of repurposing processes probably occur naturally throughout neurological development, especially in youth when neuroplasticity is greatest. AFAIK, neurological models of learning and development in general describe a lot of processes involving pruning of unused connections and reinforcement of frequently used connections. Others here probably know a lot more about these topics than I do, but it seems clear enough even to me that to some extent, atrophy is a natural and even adaptive part of the learning process. Even without referring to neurological substrates, one can argue that learning often involves the process of elimination, so the atrophy of ideas representing eliminated possibilities (e.g., the world is flat?) is desirable in some ways.

Of course, not all atrophy is desirable, and not all results in adaptive repurposing of the relevant brain structures. My former doctoral advisor once told me a particularly disturbing story about the punishment of one of the assassins of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose death played a role in sparking the first World War. I've looked into it a bit since, and suspect the story is apocryphal, but it's interesting nonetheless. Supposedly the assassin was locked away in a completely dark cell for so long that he went blind. If, as I suspect, this is mere apocrypha, I don't know whether this can happen in general, but the loss of vision in subterranean species of fish, lizards, and insects is well-documented in evolutionary theory.


Basis for "we make 35,000 decisions a day" statistic

Concurring with the comments on the Skeptics question, I am also not aware of a standardized operationalization of "number of decisions" that could be used to produce a meaningful measure for this, and to my knowledge no (serious) research has attempted to calculate a daily tally.

This clearly poses little challenge for the numerous references to this and other unsourced/uncited statistics.  While references on various blogs, social media, self-help books, and other questionable sources are not of much note, there are a few citations made on media outlets that readers might take more seriously, such as:

The Telegraph UK (2016):

  They say the average person makes 35,000 decisions a day.

Huffington Post UK (2014):

  According to newspaper ‘USA Today’ the average adult makes about
  35,000 decisions each day.

Phrasings such as "they say...", "it is thought that...", "according to various online sources...", etc are not very committal about validity, and the above quotes do only appear in the "Lifestyle" sections of these newspapers, so there is not much impetus for journalistic integrity.

Articles often mention other corroborating research to make the "35,000" statistic sound more plausible.  An example from a different Huffington Post UK (2011) article (found on Mirror magazine as well):

  The average Brit makes 773,618 decisions in a lifetime but lives to
  regret as many as 143,262 of them, a study has found. ... The study of
  2,000 indecisive Brits, by Nintendo Puzzler Mind Gym 3D, found that
  ...

That's right, Nintendo - the game system company - purportedly conducted this apparently unpublished poll, giving a much lower number of decisions statistic (around 27 per day).

Another example on a Psychology Today (2012) article:

  According to a survey by Columbia University decision researcher,
  Sheena Iyengar, the average American makes approximately 70 conscious
  decisions every day.

Sheena Iyengar, a professor of business at Columbia, also apparently did not publish her survey findings, but she does discuss it on TED (2012):

  I recently did a survey with over 2,000 Americans, and the average
  number of choices that the typical American reports making is about 70
  in a typical day.

Here is something from reference.com:

  Each individual is different, so it is impossible to pinpoint a
  specific number of daily decisions that applies to every individual,
  but Time magazine puts the number in the thousands.

The referenced Time Magazine article indeed says:

  Every day, we face thousands of decisions both major and minor ...

How silly.  Here is another interesting item from reference.com:

  The average person has about 48.6 thoughts per minute, according to
  the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging at the University of Southern
  California. That adds up to a total of 70,000 thoughts per day.

The source cited for this amazing claim does not corroborate this ... any more, but it did!

  How many thoughts does the average person have per day?
  *70,000

So let's see, 70k thoughts per day, 35k decisions per day ... that's about 1 out of every 2 thoughts is a decision?  The other 1 in 2 thoughts must be the ones about sex.  But wait, what's the asterisk (*) about?  Ah:

  *This is still an open question (how many thoughts does the average human brain processes in 1 day). LONI faculty have done some very
  preliminary studies using undergraduate student volunteers and have
  estimated that one may expect around 60-70K thoughts per day. These
  results are not peer-reviewed/published. There is no generally
  accepted definition of what "thought" is or how it is created. In our
  study, we had assumed that a "thought" is a sporadic single-idea
  cognitive concept resulting from the act of thinking, or produced by
  spontaneous systems-level cognitive brain activations.

The most credible corroborating research I've seen so far is the Wansink & Sobal (2007) paper: "Mindless Eating: The 200 Daily Food Decisions We Overlook", published in the journal Environment and Behavior.  Keeping in mind that neither author is a cognitive scientist, and that this article concerns nutritional health, not psychological measurements, this is nonetheless a very well cited paper.  In the paper, the authors explain:

  One hundred and fifty adults ... were initially asked to estimate how
  many total decisions about foods and beverages they make in one day.
  They were then asked six questions about snacks, six questions about
  meals, and six questions about beverages. ... While the typical person
  estimated they made around 15 food and beverage decisions in a day,
  the average that was calculated from subsequent questioning was 219,
  approximately 200 more.

I'm not sure if the authors truly believe that this methodology conclusively sets the total number of daily food-related decisions, or if they were just pointing out that we are often not aware of many of the decisions that we make, but it is not difficult to imagine that if the survey contained more or fewer detailed "subsequent" questioning, then the total number of decisions would increase or decrease accordingly.  Regardless, this paper is an important reference for the author's self-help book - Mindless Eating (2006):

  The phrase "mindless eating" refers to the empirical finding that
  people make nearly 20 times more daily decisions about food than they
  are aware of (an average of around 200 each day).

With a range of between 27 and 35,000 decisions per day, I think you can just pick any number you want for this statistic.  These types of claims are often associated with reference to research on decision fatigue and ego-depletion - a controversial idea about the limits of human capacity for decision making.

Anyways, I hope you had as much fun reading this answer as I had writing it.  Also, according to the Arnon Science Foundation, recent research proves that voting up this answer will make your day up to 32% better, so be sure to improve your average daily decision making by showing your support!


What is the difference between psychosis and neurosis?

Short answer
Psychosis can result in a loss of a sense of reality. Neurosis leaves the person suffering in contact with the here and now. Further, neurosis is an old term and was used as an umbrella term. Now its use has declined and rather more specific diagnoses are used.

Background
 - Psychosis is according to Medicine Net:

  [A] mental illness that markedly interferes with a person's capacity to meet life's everyday demands. [It is] a thought disorder in which reality testing is grossly impaired. Symptoms can include [hallucinations, such as] seeing, hearing, smelling, or tasting things that are not there; paranoia; and delusional thoughts. [...] Psychosis can occur as a result of brain injury or disease, and is seen particularly in schizophrenia and bipolar disorders.

Neurosis is according to Indiana University:

  [A] disturbing psychological disorders that still let the sufferer remain in contact with reality. This term plays a central role in Freudian psychoanalysis. In Freud's theory "neurosis" means "a personality or mental disturbance not due to any known neurological or organic dysfunction [brain or body problem]" (Reber, 1985). Freud used it as a label for a group of related symptoms of psychological problems that are distressing and painful. Unlike psychoses, which are psychological disorders that severely distort reality, neuroses leave physical, psychological and social reality intact. According to Freud, neuroses reflect poorly resolved unconscious emotional conflicts, which lead to psychological defense mechanisms that attempt to protect the person from consciously experiencing these conflicts but result in the observed behavioral and psychological symptoms.

  Neurosis takes many different forms, including

  anxiety disorders: excessive severe worrying.
  phobias: abnormally intense fears with no objective cause.
  obsessive-compulsive disorders: repetitive acts, such as repeatedly checking whether doors are locked, oven is turned off, etc.;
  repetitive handwashing and intense concern about "germs," etc.
  hysterical disorder (not the everyday meaning of intense over-excitement), such as: conversion disorder: psychological problem
  showing up as a "physical" disorder that cannot be result from
  physical pathology (e.g., "glove anesthesia" is apparent lack of pain
  perception from the hand, which cannot happen as a result of damage to
  the nervous system). dissociation disorders: multiple personalities
  (real cases are much rarer than the "celebrety cases" that reflect the
  intense interest people have in this peculiar condition);
  depersonalization in which a person no longer feels "real" and feels
  that his/her experiences are not real, to the point of feeling an arm
  or a leg is abnormally small or not even a part of one's own body.
  Factitious disorders: physical symptoms, such as dizziness, rash,
  vomiting, fever, etc., and psychological symptoms, such as
  hallucinations and memory loss, that turn out to be under the
  sufferer's control.

Note that the term neurosis has fallen out of favor, and that the subtypes mentioned above are taking hold. In general, Freudian analysis has lost its hold on in psychiatry. Now neurosis is divided into finer pieces, like panic disorder, social anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder (source: NY Times)


What effect can depression have on memory?

My initial thought when reading this question is that it would an extremely difficult thing to pin down whether or not depression would affect memory in the long term this is due to a variety of confounding factors but the one that strikes me as most prominent is that major depression rarely goes untreated for a long period of time, in a population of people suffering with depression most are likely to have sought treatment as some point. Meaning that a study into the effects of depression in the long term would be very difficult to facilitate as it would be hard to infer whether the changes in memory function would be due to depression or the effects of treatment for depression such as SSRIs, MAOIs, electroconvulsive therapy, and others. Although, SSRIs have actually been found to improve memory (Harmer et al, 2002), and effects of ECT have been found to be temporary with people recovering by 6 months (Calev et al, 1991).

A link between depression and memory impairment is supported
Burt, Zembar, & Niederehe conducted a meta analysis of 99 studies looking at depression and memory and found that:

  A significant, stable association between depression and memory
  impairment was revealed. Further analyses indicated, however, that it
  is likely that depression is linked to particular aspects of memory,
  the linkage is found in particular subsets of depressed individuals,
  and memory impairment is not unique to depression.

There is some evidence that people suffering from major depressive disorder have slightly different brain structure to neurotypical individuals. Brenner et al found that Patients with depression had a statistically significant 19% smaller left hippocampal volume than comparison subjects, without smaller volumes of comparison regions (amygdala, caudate, frontal lobe, and temporal lobe) or whole brain volume. It was not clear if this could change when the persons symptoms subdued, however to me it seemed like a permanent difference (obviously difficult to infer causality tho).

In terms of memory being enhanced in a manic state it appears that memory is much the same in a manic state as it is in a normal state (Glahn et al; Weingartner et al)

References

Bremner, J. D., Narayan, M., Anderson, E. R., Staib, L. H., Miller, H. L., & Charney, D. S. (2000). Hippocampal volume reduction in major depression. American Journal of Psychiatry, 157(1), 115-118.

Burt, D. B., Zembar, M. J., & Niederehe, G. (1995). Depression and memory impairment: a meta-analysis of the association, its pattern, and specificity. Psychological bulletin, 117(2), 285.

Calev, A., Nigal, D., Shapira, B., Tubi, N., Chazan, S., Ben-Yehuda, Y., ... & Lerer, B. (1991). Early and long-term effects of electroconvulsive therapy and depression on memory and other cognitive functions. The Journal of nervous and mental disease, 179(9), 526-533.

Glahn, D. C., Bearden, C. E., Cakir, S., Barrett, J. A., Najt, P., Serap Monkul, E., ... & Soares, J. C. (2006). Differential working memory impairment in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia: effects of lifetime history of psychosis. Bipolar disorders, 8(2), 117-123.

Harmer, C. J., Bhagwagar, Z., Cowen, P. J., & Goodwin, G. M. (2002). Acute administration of citalopram facilitates memory consolidation in healthy volunteers. Psychopharmacology, 163(1), 106-110.

Weingartner, H., Miller, H., & Murphy, D. L. (1977). Mood-state-dependent retrieval of verbal associations. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 86(3), 276.


Why fear is the opposite of desire and not disgust?

Just because two phenomena (partially!) share brain architecture does not mean they are experientially similar or opposite. There is little understanding of how neuronal activity creates conscious experiences. There is a lot of controversy in taxonomies of emotion because it is not clear what the emotions are or how many there are. Also, note that psychologists tend to define emotion in a narrow way, in particular referencing how transitory it is compared to moods or personality traits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion_classification

So, you feel disgust and fear are different: I anecdotally agree, some models of emotion agree, and they do not have the exact same neural correlates.

Major theories of emotion generally classify emotions on two dimensions: approach vs. avoidance motivation, and pleasant vs. unpleasant. Fear and disgust are both avoid/unpleasant. Desire is in this sense the opposite of fear: approach/pleasant. An example of this model is explained here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion_classification#Circumplex_model


Is the desire to impress others a major goal?

In their classic work, Crowne and Marlowe (1964) conceived of a new psychological construct, the "need for approval". Approval motivation (as it is also called), while present or absent in varying degree in different individuals, is based on the common fundamental human need "to form and maintain strong, stable interpersonal relationships", the "need to belong" (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). Individuals with a high need for approval behave in a way that they perceive to be socially desirable, with the intention to be accepted into a group or culture and not rejected.

Approval motivation is measured with the Marlowe-Crowne scale that consists of 18 items that, Crowne remembers (1991), seemed so extreme to the two researchers, "that few people could agree to them. But if they did, we thought, their endorsement would have to reflect a potent motive to respond in a socially desirable manner." One sample item is: "No matter who I'm talking to, I'm always a good listener." Note the modifier "always".

Sources:

Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117, 497-529. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497 Available online at http://www.communicationcache.com/uploads/1/0/8/8/10887248/the_need_to_belong-_desire_for_interpersonal_attachments_as_a_fundamental__human_motivation.pdf
Crowne, D. P. (1991). From response style to motive. Current Contents, 16, 18. Available online at http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/classics1991/A1991FW06500001.pdf
Crowne, D. P., & Marlowe, D. (1964). The approval motive: Studies in evaluative dependence. New York: Wiley.


How do I find Computer Science-Focused Cognitive Science Labs for Research?

The field you're talking about is probably computational neuroscience. In general, the advice I would give is that the department you are in doesn't much matter. There are people who study neuroscience that are in engineering, comp. sci, psychology, whatever. I know University of Chicago has an entire program in Computational Neuroscience. Probably the best thing to do is look up research in good journals (Neuron, Nature Neuroscience, Journal of Neuroscience, to name a few) and start popping off emails to professors. Most won't care that you have no background in biology or psychology, you can learn that on the way.


Experiments demonstrating irreligious people spontaneously developing superstitious rituals?

Short answer
In accordance with @ArnonWeinberg's comment, I think superstition is the term you are after.

Background
Superstition (e.g., Skinner (1948)) is:

  [A]ny belief or practice that is considered irrational[.] [F]or example [ a belief that] arises from ignorance, a misunderstanding of science or causality, a positive belief in fate or magic, or fear of that which is unknown. "Superstition" also refers to religious beliefs or actions arising from irrationality.

I may, in fact, have found a video fragment of the one you are looking for, using @ArnonWeinberg 's clue in the comments. I searched for

Skinner+Superstition+experiment+In+Humans+Video

And found this this awesome video. I had a good laugh, thanks! Pigeons, a bowl of fish, and a group of funny people trying to find meaning in chaos.

Reference
- Skinner, J Exp Psychol (1948), 38(2): 168-72


What is the relationship between anger management difficulties and ADHD?

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a type of Neuro-developmental condition whose signs can be seen during early childhood.

ADHD is related to hyperactive behavior, attention difficulties or difficulty in controlling behavior. ADHD can affect an individual’s ability, whether at school or work depending on the symptoms.

Usually, the majority of individuals with ADHD tend to have problems with aggression and emotional control.

Anger outbursts individuals with ADHD are often excessive and explosive. Some individuals may hyperfocus on their anger and frightened when they lose control and have difficulty understanding their outbursts.

ADHD is strongly associated with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) and can interfere with the successful treatment of ADHD.

I am a teacher at Accel Centre, and there are a few students suffering from hyperactive behavior while in the class.

This happens because many children and teenagers are unaware of being overly angry or otherwise they are unable to identify the origin of their anger.

On the flip side, many people with ADHD seem to only be able to focus their attention on something they enjoy doing.

References:

http://www.childhealing.com/articles/adhd.php

https://www.myvmc.com/diseases/attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder-in-adults-adult-adhd/


What does the visual feed from the retina look like before it is processed by the visual cortex?

There is a LOT more to "your eye doesn't 'see' images, your brain reconstructs them" then what is shown in that picture.  After the image is flipped and distorted, contrast information at various scales is extracted and pretty much everything else is thrown away.  Here is a simulation of that:

This information is then used to build up progressively more complex and abstract representations of the visual scene.

I found a video showing a simulation of how this edge detection works, but it doesn't appear to include the distortion and receptive field sizes.  I haven't been able to find a video that combined everything.


Why do some individuals enjoy watching scary videos?

Below are some reasons why some people enjoy and what happens when watching a scary movie:

Horror entertainment can trigger the fight-or-flight response, which comes with a boost in adrenaline, endorphins, and dopamine. The brain can then process surroundings and conclude that the experience is not a genuine threat.

Below are some causes and effects of watching a scary movie:

Excitation transfer: This theory states that people who experience an emotional response to horror also experience more enjoyment when threats are resolved.

Individual empathy: People who are less empathetic enjoy horror films more, according to Professor Ron Tamborini. He suggests that “viewers with high levels of empathy should dislike horror films because they react negatively to the suffering of others.”

Sensation-seeking: People who watch horror movies may want to stimulate sensory reactions. Studies indicate these viewers may be more aggressive than other people.

Source of Reference - Concordia University


What factors influence a person's perceived expertise?

Expertise – defined by Hovland, Janis and Kelley (1953) as "the extent to which a communicator is percieved to be the source of valid assertions" – is the second dimension of source credibility besides trustworthiness and attractiveness in their source-credibility model. The perceived expertise is, of course, not independent of these other dimensions: attractive people are considered more knowledgeable, and trustworthiness has a similar effect.

Leaving aside obvious objective cues for expertise (e.g. proven success with identical problems, the university degree of a medical doctor, or years of practical experience in a relevant field) I want to focus on irrelevant and subjective cues.

What constitutes expertise would most certainly depend on the field and the expertise of the person judging the expertise of another. For example, Golbeck and Fleischmann (2010) found that in online Q&A sites such as cogsci.stackexchange.com, photo cues such as smiles or showing the person egaged in a relevant activity only improve trust in a poster's knowledgeability among non-experts. And while the expertise of a person producing tangible goods can be easily discerned even by a layman user ("Do these shoes fit?"), intangible services such as child care or a physician's diagnosis and the relevant expertise are very difficult to measure, sometimes even for experts. (Zeithaml, 1981)

In a study on the social communication of political expertise, Huckfeldt (2001) found the most important factors to influence perceived political knowledge to be interest (influencing perceived expertise with a probability of .74), objectively defined knowledge (.36), agreement of discussion partner (.31), agreement between discussion partners (.29), partisan extremity (.14) and education (.11).

As you can see, apart from objective knowledge, perceived expertise is in part influenced by wether other people agree with a speaker, how strongly he favors one standpoint (neutrality and scepticism, both signs of healthy scientific reasoning, seem to substract from apparent expertise), and how educated he appears in general (i.e. a well-groomed person with a PhD will appear more of an expert, no matter if he indeed has any knowledge of the field he expands about or not).

Following a dual processing model such as the elaboration likelihood model, source factors such as expertise, likability, attractiveness and consensus serve as heuristic cues when recipients lack the ability or motivation to scrutinize a message effortfully. But not all recipients use the same cues. Low self-monitors (whose attitudes are based on values) elaborate an expert source's message more effortfully than the same message delivered by an attractive source, while high self-monitors (whose attitudes are based on sochial adjustment concerns) process messages from an attractive source more effortfully. (Ziegler, von Schwichow & Diehl, 2005)

In other words: When a message is unambiguous, strong arguments lead to more agreement than weak arguments (not source characteristics such as expertise). But when the message is ambiguous, it leads to more favorable reactions (aggreement, attitude change) when it is delivered by a source whose characteristics match the personality of the message's recipient.

I am sure there is more, but this is what I can come up with at the moment. If you want to find more, look at research on persuasion.

References:

Goldbeck, J., & Fleischmann, K. R. (2010). Trust in social Q&A: The impact of text and photo cues of expertise. In Proceedings of the 73rd ASIS&T Annual Meeting on Navigating Stream in an Information Ecosystem (vol. 47). Silver Springs, MD: American Society for Information Science. http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1930000/1920442/a77-golbeck.pdf
Hovland, C. I., Irving, K. J., & Kelley, H. H. (1953). Communication and Persuasion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. http://xa.yimg.com/kq/groups/24018828/1542385145/name/4188769.pdf
Huckfeldt, R. (2001). The social communication of political experts. Amercian Journal of Political Science, 45, 425-438. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2669350
Zeithaml, V. A. (1981). How consumer evaluation processes differ between goods and services. In J. Donnelly & W. George (eds.), Marketing of Services (pp. 186-190). Chicago: American Marketing.
Ziegler, R., von Schwichow, A., & Diehl, M. (2005). Matching the message source to attitude functions: Implications for biased processing. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 41, 645–653. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2004.12.002

A note on lie detectors:

In a study on "Police officers' ability to detect suspects' lies" (Mann, Vrij & Bull, 2004), the ability to detect lies strongly correlated with (self-)percieved experience in interviewing suspects. Participants where UK police officers of differing ages (22 to 52), length of service (1 to 30 years) and work areas (e.g. criminal investigation, trainers, traffic officers etc.) Average self-reported experience in interviewing suspects was 3.75 (on a scale from 1 = totally inexperienced to 5 = highly experienced).

For the whole sample accuracy in detecting lies was 66%, which is significantly higher than the level of chance. Experience was somewhat correlated (around .20), while length of service was uncorrelated (-.07) to accuracy.

Mann, S., Vrij, A., & Bull, R. (2004). Detecting true lies: Police officers' ability to detect suspects' lies. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89, 137-149.


Are there shapes defined by 3 (or more) generative parameters whose mapping to psychological similarity space is known?

Consider the colour visual system. Take 3 monochromatic (in the physics sense) light sources of wavelength $420 \; nm$, $534 \; nm$, and $564 \; nm$; i.e. the peaks of spectral sensitivity for cones. Your 3 physical parameters are then 3 knobs $b$, $g$, $r$ that control the intensity of each light source as they shine on the same white surface. If you want more physical parameters, you can just add more knobs for other monochromatic lightsources, however 3 is sufficient. Colour perception is extremely well studied, so this comes as close as I can think of to a known mapping between between objective and psychological space. Unfortunately, you will run into some culture and language specific issues for judging the similarity of perceived colours.


Is it possible to induce the processes that occur during sleep such as memory "garbage collection" without actually sleeping?

The so-called glymphatic system, pump washing the brain with cerebrospinal fluid during sleep, has already been mentioned in answer to the SE question "Do you need to sleep every night?" It seems more than just a memory cleanup process as if on a computer, but "has significant implications for treating 'dirty brain diseases like Alzheimer's" and understanding it "is a critical first step in efforts to modulate this system and make it work more efficiently" (Maiken Nedergaard). That should go towards answering Q2, at least if such interventions take place in the waking state at the experimental stage.

Another recent report concerns brain cells known as microglia, which also play a role in mopping up neurotoxic brain waste such as beta-amyloids.  In addition they monitor the growth of synapses and prune connections between neurons so that the brain can refine its circuits and conserve resources, particularly during adolescence. Relevant maybe, as this is a period in life known for prolonged sleep. Some research on mice suggests a preference on the part of microglia for carrying out their work when the organism is in darkness. Hyperactive microglia however are conjectured to be implicated in Alzheimer's by stripping too many synapses when these are inadvertently tagged by the brain for destruction.

References:

"To Sleep, Perchance to Clean. Study* reveals brain takes out the trash while we sleep" University of Rochester News Room 17 Oct 2013

*Nedergaard M (corresponding author) et al "Sleep drives metabolite clearance from the adult brain" Science 18 Oct 2013

"The Mind Minders - a fertile, flexible brain couldn't live without its roving band of caretakers". New Scientist, 12 Oct 2013.


Name for a condition where one with their limited knowledge thinks of a problem as bigger than it really is?

I can't provide you with a direct term that you are looking for. However, I think the level of confidence comes close.

My reasoning is as follows: Experience/knowledge increases task proficiency (Kuhlthau, 1999). Proficiency affects the level of confidence. Confidence, in turn, affects the perceived task complexity (Chang, 2005).

References
- Kuhlthau, JASIST (1999); 50(5): 399-412
- Chang, Computers Human Behav (2005); 21(5): 713-28


Why does your recorded or objective voice sound different to what you hear in your own head?

Jens' answer is pretty much spot on, but misses the fact, remembered from my undergraduate lectures, that your ears actually partially 'turn off' when you speak (or chew), in what's called the stapedius reflex (wikipedia).
The most common reference I've seen for this is Møller (2000), which unfortunately is a book, but I'm sure more information could be found with a little digging.
Reference
Møller, Aage (2000). Hearing: It's Physiology and Pathophysiology (illustrated ed.). Academic Press. pp. 181–90.


What is the relationship between visual attention network and visual stream (Two-streams hypothesis)?

My short answer would be that there is no clear relationship between these two models about how visual information processing works in the brain. However, the terminology and evidence overlaps considerably which makes this confusing.

One way to think about this is that the two models are explaining different stages of processing. The two visual streams is somewhat more general and it is very much founded on brain anatomy (lesion studies in animals and neuropsychology). It is to do with what happens to the visual information that comes into the brain, and the theory is that while some of it is processed to consciously recognise stuff (ventral), a separate pathway is involved with supplying visual information for action.

None of this is explicitly about "Attention". Corbetta and others are trying to relate brain structures to experiments in typical observers where processing changes even though stimuli are perceptually available. Although their two networks are sometimes called "dorsal and ventral", because of the involvement of superior/inferior brain regions, this does not imply that they map on to Milner and Goodale's visual streams. There are several other differences in anatomy.

It seems likely that both top-down and bottom-up attention can modulate perceptual processing in both visual streams (and they interact too!). It might help to think of some examples...

If you are more likely to act on something when it is more salient
(e.g., avoiding a colourful obstacle without thinking about it) then
this suggests the "bottom-up" system has detected the obstacle and
prioritised it's processing for action (dorsal stream).
If you are voluntarily told to pay attention to something, and you
are quicker to act on this, it suggests that "top down" attention has
enhanced the dorsal stream.
If you are voluntarily told to pay attention to something and you are
quicker to recognise it, then this would be an effect on conscious
recognition, thought to be part of the ventral stream.
If your attention is captured "bottom-up" by something, this is also
going to make you better at consciously recognising it with your
ventral stream.

Here, and here are a couple of recent neuroscience papers on the attentional systems involved, and here is a classic paper showing attention is coupled in both perception and action streams.


Why do we see shadows in the following black-and-white optical illusion?

Looks like these are variations on the Hermann grid illusion, wiki page here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_illusion

As the wiki page notes, the first-pass explanation of this was lateral inhibition, but this is not really 100% satisfactory.
There's a nice quick walk-through of the old explanation and the problems with it here: http://web.mit.edu/bcs/schillerlab/research/A-Vision/A15-2.htm
A journal paper version of this stuff from the same lab is:
Schiller, P. H., & Carvey, C. E. (2005). The Hermann grid illusion revisited. Perception, 34(11), 1375-1397.


What are the different theories about how the brain processes speech?

This question is quite broad and since it seems to be basically a reference request, I will suffice by giving some prominent theories of speech perception with sources and references.

Speech perception theories are grouped into two:

Passive (or non-mediated) theories. These theories mostly focus on finding the identity of certain constant perceptual cues and on the ways the auditory system might extract them from the acoustic signal. These theories are basically filtering theories, and do not involve the mediation of higher cognitive processes in the extraction of these cues. It is assumed that acoustic cues are extracted in the periphery of the auditory system (source: Mannell).
Active (or mediated) theories. These theories suggest that there is no direct relationship between the acoustic signal and the perceived phoneme, but that higher level processes are involved instead that compare input patterns with internal patterns (source: Mannell).

Passive theories

The distinctive feature theory defines a set of acoustic and articulatory features that is used to generate a binary code system of yes/no decisions to allow the identification of speech sounds at a phonemic level (source: Mannell).
The acoustic theory is also based on a set of distinctive features that are largely production based. The distinctive features are assumed to be encoded directly, and passively in the periphery of the auditory system (source: Mannell).

Active theories

The motor theory (or analysis-by-synthesis) assumes that perception and production are closely linked and that motor commands in the brain that control movements of the muscles used to speak, also help us to perceive speech. It claims that humans are equipped with an innately present speech processing 'module' (sources: UC Calgary, Mannell, Libermann & Mattingly (1985)).
The trace theory assumes that there are 3 connected speech perception levels - features, phonemes and words. Facilitation of these levels is assumed to occur through connections between the levels (source: UC Calgary).

Reference
- Libermann & Mattingly Cognition (1985); 21: l-36


This is the 2,000th question posted. Why do people care about big round number events more than the surrounding events?

I might be wrong but it might have something associated with the numerical goals we acheive as children, young adults and grown up. For example, becoming 10 years of age is a sign of maturity, mainly due to the double digits it contains. This leads us (as children) to believe that we are that much closer to becoming adults. When people turn 40 or 50 they put a lot more pressure on them selves than they would have if that number was decreased a year or two. Maybe it's the obvious facts such as 50 is closer to 60 than 49 is?

Also, when we learn how to count, we don't necessarily stop at 3, or 7, 10 is usually the number that kids are first introduced to, and once they learn it get appraise from external figures.

Basically, our preffered simplicity for numbers may or may not reflect our own personal achievements during our childhood and other significant life experiences. I know for a fact that I wouldn't be as proud of running a 39.7K as I would have been for running a 40K, even though the difference is a tiny 0.3.

When we announce our achievements to others we say "I'm in the top 10 for my age in cross-country!", assuming we come 7th, top ten sounds like a greater acheivement, this is just me, others may have different opinions.

Growing up and being congratulated for our achievements by older family members and other adult figures for unspecified winnings might have an impact on our greater admiration of "rounded numbers". I'm not quite sure whether or not I explained my self very well but I hope you understand what I'm saying.


Where should I place a reference electrode?

Short answer
In general, a reference electrode should be placed in a well-conducting medium close, or some distance away from the recording electrode.

Background
The idea of a reference electrode is that it picks up any unwanted signals, such as artifacts, that are also present on the recording electrode. Background noise and artifacts can ruin the electrophysiological signal.

As your linked web page explains nicely, a well-placed reference electrode can mitigate noise and artifacts. In the linked page they take the example of recording motoneurons in muscle. If you would place the active electrode in the nerve close to the muscle, and the reference electrode away from the nerve but still close to the muscle, any artifacts arising from, e.g., muscle activity are picked up by the active and reference electrodes simultaneously. The closer the reference electrode is to the recording electrode, the larger the similarity of the artifact will be and the lesser the contamination. This effect can be achieved using a differential amplifier. The subtraction of the reference signal is referred to as common-mode rejection (Kappenman & Luck, 2011).

The terminology encountered is often referred to as monopolar recording and bipolar recording setups (e.g. Beck et al., 2007). Monopolar recordings use a distant reference electrode. This setup comes in handy when the potentials of interest are small and the preparation is devoid of artifacts. Because the distant reference electrode will almost pick up none of the signal, the signal is nicely preserved. However, any local artifacts will not be cancelled out. In case of artifacts and background noise, a bipolar setup is preferred by placing the reference close to the recording electrode. The signal amplitude may drop, but the added benefit of noise cancellation may outweigh that loss. Basically it is a trade-off to optimize the signal-to-noise ratio.

An electrophysiology amplifier records potentials (or currents). This requires a closed system that allows the passage of current through the system (Fig. 1). Large impedances will result in current flow to be minimal and hence the potentials cannot be picked up anymore. As a rule of thumb, in case of EEG recordings and other compound-action potential recordings as in your linked page, low-impedance measurements are best. Therefore, placing the reference on a high-impedance surface as suggested in the question (suspended in air or fastened to an insulator like wood) is the worst thing you can do.

Fig. 1. Diagram of an electrophysiological recording setup. source: InTech. Note that the reference electrode here is called a reference electrode. The terminology on your linked web page is likewise confusing as they call the reference electrode the ground electrode. A ground electrode is,
 however, different from the reference electrode, as the ground electrode is used to reduce outside influences on your signal, like the 50-Hz mains power or other electrical field emanating from equipment and so forth.

In addition, for the most optimal recordings, impedances should be matched between active and reference electrode (Kappenman & Luck, 2011). When there is a large mismatch between them, common-mode rejection works less effectively and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) will decrease. Therefore, placing the active electrode in tissue (low impedance) and the other one in a high-impedance medium will result in the common-mode rejection to fail.

References
- Beck et al., J Neurosci Methods (2007); 166(2): 159-67
- Kappenman & Luck, Psychophysiology (2010); 47(5): 888–904


Can you retain a large number in your head for an extended period of time without distortion?

Yes, you can train your memory to be better at certain tasks, such as remembering numbers.

For example Ericcson et. al. (1980) describe a university student who practiced memorizing numbers several times per week for twenty months and could then memorize and recall more than 70 digits reliably.

I would not recommend such however if you are looking for general purpose memory function. The benefits gained from cognitive training are shallow and do not transfer from one skill to another. For example, while the student was a genius at memorizing numbers, when asked to memorize letters he was not better than a normal person

References

Ericcson KA, Chase WG, Faloon S (June 1980). "Acquisition of a memory skill". Science 208 (4448): 1181–2.


is it possible to think without language?

I think the answer is a qualified yes, humans can think without language. Ultimately though it depends on what you mean by "think."

There is a remarkably large number of deaf people who are not exposed either to a signed or spoken language even in developed countries. These people often invent their own gesture systems, referred to as home sign systems. These people  In these cases, the deaf children's systems are more complex than the gestures their parents use (Carrigan & Coppola, 2012). My dad was a home signer until after high school, and he learned how to work on his car, drove a motorcycle, and figured out how the furnace worked. Based on these examples, it is clearly possible to engage in fairly complex reasoning without language. In the article cited below, Spaepen et al. (2011) describe how home signers have some concept of number, albeit imprecise.

This is all to say that thinking is possible without language. Home signers are not catatonic, and can actually engage in complex reasoning. One the other hand, language is a huge cognitive advantage, and in this respect it certainly has an impact on thinking. Language facilitates transmission of information (learning), and it provides a way of organizing thought.

Carrigan, E. M., & Coppola, M. (2012). Mothers Do Not Drive Structure in Adult Homesign Systems: Evidence from Comprehension. In N. Miyake, D. Peebles, & RP Cooper,(Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1398-1403).

Spaepen, E., Coppola, M., Spelke, E. S., Carey, S. E., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2011). Number without a language model. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(8), 3163-3168.


Sleep and dreaming is somewhat of a specialty of mind, so I can comment on the wake-sleep-wake transition.

People typically love the feeling of relaxation and warmth associated with sleep.  Waking up naturally can feel just as good - imagine lounging in bed on a Sunday morning without having to get out of bed. Waking due to alarm is an abrupt event which is indeed unpleasant.

In terms of conscious - unconscious transition at wake/sleep. There are a number of techniques, sharing the acronym WILD - Wake Induced Lucid Dreaming, where a person, through practice, enters dreaming state directly from waking state, while remaining conscious. There are different variant of this technique, some accompanied by vivid hallucinations and sleep paralysis, while other are more subtle.

I believe the existence of wake induced lucid dreaming demonstrates that the wake-sleep transition is not a binary event, but instead is a sequence of predictable events. Typically the ability to record short term memories is gone first, followed by intensification of mental imagery, followed by seamless transition into a dream featuring that imagery. You can think of dreaming as "dimming" of consciousness, rather than turning it off.

There are a number of drugs/supplements that are known to boost vividness of dreaming or increase subjective experience of consciousness (such as use of logic, decision making and control). After a certain threshold the person becomes self aware of the fact that he is dreaming.

In this way, consciousness can be described as a hologram. Adding pixels to hologram makes it more vivid, removing pixels makes it more fuzzy. At a certain number of pixels, the ability to recognize the image is gone. Add these pixels back and the image returns.


Disappointment When Goal Fulfilment is Delayed

I can think of a term, but it's not psychology-specific: unmet expectations (that and lack of attention).  Your two case studies are basically the same in these aspects.

Unmet expectations are just that: we expect a certain emotional state when a situation is achieved (like buying a new car) - if that state isn't fully reached (which it rarely is - life is so rarely as clean cut as our minds would have it), our expectations are unmet and we are left 'to make up the difference', so to speak - disappointment, anger, frustration, all of these are possible, and more.

How important we rate the outcome is also important - and unmet expectation isn't a big deal emotionally if the outcome isn't very important to us.  This is similar to reading a book and then going to the movie adaptation of it: if you have a mental picture of how the movie 'should' look, then you may be disappointed with how the actual movie turns out.

The other half, not enough attention, is also quite straightforward: if we are paying attention (the right attention, of course) we can see that material possessions rarely bring lasting happiness (this is actually a function of a remarkably adaptive human physiology, but I don't understand it well enough to explain it over the internet, sorry).  And with attention, we know that while we may enable more experiences, fun or lasting experiences, with material possessions, pursuing the thing itself as the end, rather than the means to the end, will inevitably result in dissatisfaction.

Lastly, there are a lot of popularized articles about expectations.  Here are a few:
Psychology Today article
NCBI Paper: The effect of unmet expectations among adults presenting with physical symptoms.
Tiny Buddha: Unmet expectations

Most of these were found by Google Search for phrase unmet expectations, so there's a lot more where those came from.


Would administering oxytocin in games of deception improve performance?

One of the very recently published studies linked to in the question, on the relationship between exogenous oxytocin administration and ability to accurately detect deception, instructed participants to self-administer oxytocin by nasal injection before evaluating contestants' decisions in videos of the Friend or Foe game show (Israel, Hart and Winter 2014). They reported that:

  Rather than improving subjects’ inferences about others’ mental states, oxytocin impeded accurate assessments of trustworthiness in risky social exchanges. Oxytocin decreased prediction accuracy but did not increase predictions of cooperative behavior in general.

The evidence reported in Israel, Hart and Winter (2014) clearly implies that exogenous oxytocin would have deleterious effects in games of deception such as poker. However, it may not be as simple as that.

Another study proposed that oxytocin may exert its apparent effects by increasing the attentional salience of social information, and that the effect may thus be mediated by interpersonal factors like perceived group membership (Ten Velden et al., 2014). They reported a complex set of results broadly consistent with this hypothesis based on a simplified poker game task:

  Results permit three conclusions. First, intranasal oxytocin does not increase indiscriminate benevolence in humans. This conclusion follows from the observation that in competitive interactions, humans given oxytocin reduce competitive approach only when their protagonist is an in-group member, and do not show an increased preference for settlement when protagonists are from a rivaling out-group. Second, and relatedly, intranasal oxytocin promotes cooperative conflict resolution in within but not between group competitions. This conclusion follows from the observation that, compared to placebo, oxytocin increased a preference for settlement with in-group protagonists, but not with out-group protagonists. Third, and finally, in competitive interactions, intranasal oxytocin does not influence preferences for withdrawal. This conclusion follows from the observation that regardless of competitive strength, and regardless of the protagonist's group membership, oxytocin exerted no influence whatsoever on the tendency to “fold” in the competitive poker-game studied here.

Note that while the Ten Velden (2014) study used a poker-like task, it did not report on differences in ability to detect deception.

References

Israel, S., Hart, E., & Winter, E. (2014). Oxytocin Decreases Accuracy in the Perception of Social Deception. Psychological science, 25(1), 293-295.
Ten Velden, F. S., Baas, M., Shalvi, S., Kret, M. E., & De Dreu, C. K. (2014). Oxytocin differentially modulates compromise and competitive approach but not withdrawal to antagonists from own vs. rivaling other groups. Brain research, 1580, 172-179.


How are personality traits "encoded" in the brain?

Cool question...really huge though. I'll have to revisit this as I find time to add more. For starters, I just saw an interesting link in @ForbiddenOverseer's question, "Are there any personality theories that use the scientific method?" For some info on cerebral blood flow and extraversion, check out Johnson and colleagues (1999). Here's an excerpt of the abstract:

  RESULTS: Overall, introversion was associated with increased blood flow in the frontal lobes and in the anterior thalamus. Regions in the anterior cingulate gyrus, the temporal lobes, and the posterior thalamus were found to be correlated with extraversion. CONCLUSIONS: The findings of the study lend support to the notion that introversion is associated with increased activity in frontal lobe regions. Moreover, the study suggests that individual differences in introversion and extraversion are related to differences in a fronto-striato-thalamic circuit.

In an earlier answer today (to What makes a sight or an image mesmerizing and irresistible?), I implied that sensation-seeking relates to the behavioral activation system, the nucleus accumbens and VTA, and dopamine. Support for those relationships ought to be available through Wikipedia.

Here's a summary of other info from my lecture on biopsych for my class on personality a few years ago:

Frontal lobe

Activity has been correlated to negative emotionality via fMRI.
Cooperative people show more activity during social interaction, implicating reward sensitivity.
Aversive attention and motivation is right lateralized; approach motivation and aversion inhibition is left lateralized.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) knocks out self-enhancement bias temporarily.
Damage reduces emotional experience, regulation, and inhibition – cf. Phineas Gage, Capgras syndrome, and the history of frontal lobotomies.

Amygdala

Implicated in identification of rewards & threats

Activates in extraverts receiving pleasant stimuli (e.g., happy faces, scenes, & emotion words; pleasant tastes)
Activates during social attraction; generates sexual responsiveness
Activates in shy people viewing unfamiliar faces
Also in pessimists when shown a picture of a snake
Overactive in people with anxiety disorders such as PTSD

Activated by unexpected emotional conflict – stronger in neurotics viewing conflicting cues.
Inhibited by anterior cingulate – cf. brain tumor in Charles Whitman, UT tower sniper ’66

“I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts.  These thoughts constantly recur, and it requires a tremendous mental effort to concentrate on useful and productive tasks.”

Ascending reticular activating system – acts like a valve on incoming stimulation

More “wide open” (active) in introverts

Stronger reaction to lemon juice stimulus
Faster responses to noises in brainstem via EEG

Reaction to erotica, violence, mutilation, insects, etc.:

High sensation-seeking: arousal and reward area activation
Low sensation-seeking: emotional self-control area activation

Electrode stimulation of substantia nigra $\rightarrow$ depression!
Governs reactivity, not baseline arousal

Optimal arousal threshold is the same distance from rest regardless of extraversion
ARAS affects acceleration from stimulation toward the threshold. See simplistic figure:

I've got a few answers here on neurotransmitters and hormones already:

Testosterone affects aggression, competitiveness, sexual motivation, sensation-seeking, risk aversion, empathy, and abstract reasoning. See "Are there recent theories on physiognomy?" and "What are the cognitive effects of increasing testosterone levels in men?"
Monoamine oxidase A affects maladaptive vulnerability to stress resulting in antisocial behavior. Mu-opioid receptors relate to collectivism and pain sensitivity. Serotonin also relates to collectivism and anxiety. See "Innate personality tests: do they exist? If not, why?"

Judging from effects of TMS (and tDCS), intelligence may relate to cortical excitability and myelination – see "Can learning be facilitated by transcranial magnetic stimulation?" As for changing personality in general, neuroplasticity may be important to consider, but biofeedback may be able to take advantage of it to alter neuroticism – see "Neuroplasticity and Treatment of Depression". Chronic malnutrition might even affect neuroticism by deeper mechanisms than subjective stress resulting directly from deprivation – see "The effect of proper food intake on emotions and brain function". Other links seem to exist between physical and mental well-being – see "Does mental satisfaction lead to physical satisfaction?" – but I'm probably getting further afield here than you intended answers to go.

Reference
- Johnson, D. L., Wiebe, J. S., Gold, S. M., Andreasen, N. C., Hichwa, R. D., Watkins, G. L., & Ponto, L. L. B. (1999). Cerebral blood flow and personality: A positron emission tomography study. American Journal of Psychiatry, 156(2), 252–257. Retrieved from http://journals.psychiatryonline.org/article.aspx?articleid=173270.


How does Classical Conditioning and Operant Conditioning really differ?

The first thing to note is that both classical and operant conditioning are theories that attempt to explain how specific observable learning behavior works. They are not natural laws that psychology has uncovered, but models. In certain cases, scholars disagree and debate wether what they observed was caused by classical or operant conditioning. An example is apparative treatment of nighttime bedwetting (enuresis nocturna).

A common treatment for nighttime bedwetting includes bedwetting alarms: the child wears special underwear with a sensor that registers moisture and triggers an alarm that wakes the child when the first drops of urine are released. Now the goal of the treatment is that the child notices the stimulus "full bladder", wakes up and goes to the toilet. A treatment that helps the child to wake up after the bed has been wet does not help, because you want to avoid the bedwetting, and the children usually wake up by themselves when they are wet anyway. So how does the alarm treatment for bedwetting work? How does waking a child up *upon* urine release teach a child to wake up *before* urine release?

It could be classical conditioning, but then we would have backward conditioning, because the alarm goes off some time after the stimulus "full bladder". But backward conditioning has been shown to either not work at all or not work well. But the alarm treatment is highly effective. So likely what goes on is operant conditioning, where the wakeup alarm, getting out of bed and changing the bedclothes are aversive elements, and the success (getting up with only a few drops into the bed), the happiness and praise of the parents, and the feeling of competence are rewards.

The debate about how alarm treatment of enuresis works tends towards operant conditioning, but it is by no means decided. Alarm treatment of enuresis could be one rare case of effective backward conditioning.

That said, we can look at what the theoretical difference between classical and operant conditioning are, keeping in mind that these may not be factual, "real" differences in the mechanisms of learning, only in the model:

in operant conditioning a behavior is strengthened because of its consequences: what you do (e.g. smoke as a teen) leads to a reward (e.g. peer approval) or punishment (e.g. angry parents), so you repeat or avoid it, to repeatedly receive the reward or avoid the punishment

in classical conditioning the trigger (e.g. food) of a naturally occuring reaction (e.g. salivation) is paired with some random, unrelated stimulus (e.g. a bell sound), this co-occurence is learned, and as a consequence the orginally unrelated stimulus is perceived as a signal that the trigger will appear; the consequences of the reaction (e.g. drooling or digestion) are completely irrelevant for the learning

You can see that in operant conditioning the original cause (trigger) of the behavior plays no role, while the reinforcement is causally related to the behavior. In classical conditioning the outcome of the behavior plays no role and the learned stimulus has no natural relation to the behavior.


How long does it take to read a sentence with X number of characters?

I've studied this a little bit within the context of timing responses to personality test items. General models of reading speed look at both the time to read the words as well as to comprehend. From memory, eye tracking studies have shown how the eyes will often back track to confusing parts of a sentence (apologies for lack of reference).

Some general findings that I've found in my own data on time to answer personality test items of different lengths:

Expect an initiation period. I.e., the time between displaying a message and the commencement of reading. In mathematical terms, this will translate to a non-zero constant in your model of reading time as a function of properties of the text.
The more familiar the content and the words are to the reader, the quicker they will be. This translates both in absolute terms that simple words are quicker to read, and also to interactions between individuals and the content.
In general, character count, word count, and syllable count tend to be highly correlated in normal prose. From my own data, these indices tend to have a relatively linear effect on reading speed.
More complex sentences (e.g., ones with negation, multiple clauses, etc.) take longer to read. For example, I found that sentences with "not" took systematically longer to process.
Individuals differ substantially in reading speed. Expect to see a distribution of individual differences that is a little bit positive skewed from normal. Thus, if you are designing a system where you determine the length of time text is displayed, you may need to pitch the speed of your system to capture a certain percentage of that distribution (e.g., 95, 99% etc.). Various factors explain variation in reading speed including whether English is a second language and education.
There are also outliers. People get distracted. Thus, there is reading time when people are focussed and there is reading times that incorporate distraction and other processes.

More generally, if you have the resources, you can do some pilot testing on a sample of individuals where you time how long people take to read the text, ideally within the context of the application. This could allow you to develop a domain specific model of reading speed.

Although a little tangential, some articles that discuss speed of item responding in a personality testing context include Casey and Tyron (2001) and Wagner-Menghim (2002).

References

Casey, M.M. & Tryon, W.W. (2001). Validating a double-press method for computer administration of personality inventory items.. Psychological assessment, 13, 521.
Wagner-Menghin, M. (2002). Towards the identification of non-scalable personality
questionnaire respondents: Taking response time into account.
Psychologische Beiträge, 44(1), 62-77.


Why does regular repetition become a habit?

Here are some excerpts from Wikipedia you might find helpful for the (somewhat too-) general question:

A habit...tends to occur subconsciously.[(Butler & Hope, 1995)]...[Andrews (1903)]...defined [habits as]: "...acquired through previous repetition of a mental experience." Habitual behavior often goes unnoticed in persons exhibiting it, because a person does not need to engage in self-analysis when undertaking routine tasks. Habits are sometimes compulsory...Old habits are hard to break and new habits are hard to form because the behavioural patterns we repeat are imprinted in our neural pathways...but it is possible to form new habits through repetition [(Rosenthal / Psychology Today)].
As behaviors are repeated in a consistent context, there is an incremental increase in the link between the context and the action. This increases the automaticity of the behavior in that context [(Wood & Neal, 2007)]...
Habit formation can be slow. Lally[, Van Jaarsveld, Potts, and Wardle] (2010) found the average time for participants to reach the asymptote of automaticity was 66 days with a range of 18–254 days...

References
Andrews, B. R. (1908). Habit. American Journal of Psychology, 14(2), 121–149. Available online, URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1412711.
Butler, G., & Hope, T. (1995). Managing your mind: The mental fitness guide. Oxford Paperbacks.
Lally, P., Van Jaarsveld, C. H., Potts, H. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998–1009.
Wood, W., & Neal, D. T. (2007). A new look at habits and the habit-goal interface. Psychological Review, 114(4), 843–863. Available online, URL: http://dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/545/docs/Wendy_Wood_Research_Articles/Habits/wood.neal.2007psychrev_a_new_look_at_habits_and_the_interface_between_habits_and_goals.pdf.


Apparently your question is on backward masking, which means that the masker follows the stimulus (probe) in time. Backward masking generally occurs at higher levels, typically the cortex. In case of visual stimuli this can be the primary visual cortex, or V1 (Mace et al. 2005). Ongoing processing of the probe is then thought to be interfered with by the subsequent presentation of the masker, as long as the masker-probe interval is not too long. The PNAS article by Covaks et al., 1995 shows this nicely at the cortical level: neurons working on the stimulus change their response patterns when a masker is presented afterwards. So although there may be connections folding back and forth onto themselves, a serial 'one-way' route where the processing of a stimulus changes upon arrival of the masker is the most parsimonious, and experimentally supported explanation. Cortical processes are often affected by consciousness (alertness/vigilance) so the presence of backward masking effects can be interpreted as a marker of cortical higher-level processing.

Forward masking, and simultaneous masking, on the other hand, work at the neural level through adaptation processes. Although the effects of forward masking can be observed at the cortical level as shown by Brosch & Screiner 1997, forward masking is caused by processes occurring in the periphery (e.g., the cochlea or auditory nerve in hearing) and are unaffected by mental state. Hence, the presence of forward masking indicates that the neural process under investigation reflects a peripheral process that can also occur subconsciously, whereas the presence of backward masking generally point towards a higher-level neural process that is typically affected by mental state. Hope this helps.


Medium-term effects of polyphasic sleep on performance

Disclaimer: As you have noted yourself, there aren't very many scientific researches on the topic. The only main points that I can derive are generally of blogs or sketchy speculations. As such, you are supposed to take this answer with a grain of salt.

Interesting Thing of the Day notes that polyphasic sleep may make the person awake and alert but have adverse effects on the creativity and mental agility.

  ...it may be that although one can indeed be awake and alert for 22 hours per day, creativity and mental agility suffer as a result.

Supermemo has the following to say about Polyphasic sleep:

  Yet you will definitely not want to sleep polyphasically if:

  you want to maximize your creative output
  you want to maximize your peak alertness, your average alertness, or minimize the impact of your worst alertness levels
  you want to maximize the health effects of sleep, etc.

While both the sources are not scientific findings, it does send a signal that polyphasic sleep cycles would have a negative impact on IQ tests and general activities like reading because your overall alertness is down because of sleep deprivation. Poor mental agility would have result in a lower working memory as well.