What's the relation between firing of dopaminergic neurons and dopamine dispersion in terms of neurophysiological processes?

I've mostly figured it out now, and I've a better idea of the words and phrases I need to search to get the information I was asking for.

The short answer comes from wikipedia: "The neurons' somata produce the enzymes that synthesize dopamine, and they are then transmitted via the projecting axons to their synaptic destinations, where most of the dopamine is produced." The transmission is a direct result of the firing of the neuron, so DA is dispersed, in the areas where dopaminergic axons end, proportional to the firing of the neurons.

A more complete answer would involve an understanding of the difference between tonic and phasic transmission, for which this has proved an informative and accessible source.

The above sources support the suspicion I mentioned in the hypothetical context provided in the question.


Correlation used as explanatory device in ''The neuroscience of Intelligence'

The author is simply not being explicit. The

  correlation

is neither r or r2, it is simply the relation between x and y.

Pearson's correlation coefficient, or r is a measure of the linear correlation between two variables. It's value is between +1 and −1, 1 being a total positive linear correlation, 0 means no linear correlation, and −1 is total negative linear correlation.

The coefficient of determination, or r2 has a value between 0 and 1. A value near 1 indeed indicates that most of the variation of the response data is explained by the different input values, whereas a value of r2 near 0 indicates that little of the variation is explained by the different input values.

Now to your book; 70% seems indeed like a lot. I thought it was approximately 40% and this is backed up by NIH and Scientific American that mention approximately 50%. However wikipedia mentions numbers up to 86% and back this statement up with influential articles. (Plomin & Deary, 2015) indeed postulate that

  The heritability of intelligence increases from about 20% in infancy to perhaps 80% in later adulthood.

Reference
- Plomin & Deary, Molecular Psychiatry (2015); 20: 98–108


What happens to a person's frontal lobes when they have a breakdown from stress?

Research would suggest that the type of "incessant" or "severe" stress required to precipitate a  "breakdown" would the higher cognitive functions performed within the frontal lobes.  As I am unsure what level of understanding you are requiring on this topic, I have included suitable quotes from a relevant study, which provides the answer to your question.

I quote Amy F. T. Arnsten's study of the effects of stress on the frontal lobe:

  The prefrontal cortex (PFC)—the most evolved brain region—subserves
  our highest-order cognitive abilities. However, it is also the brain
  region that is most sensitive to the detrimental effects of stress
  exposure. Even quite mild acute uncontrollable stress can cause a
  rapid and dramatic loss of prefrontal cognitive abilities, and more
  prolonged stress exposure causes architectural changes in prefrontal
  dendrites. Recent research has begun to reveal the intracellular
  signalling pathways that mediate the effects of stress on the PFC.
  This research has provided clues as to why genetic or environmental
  insults that disinhibit stress signalling pathways can lead to
  symptoms of profound prefrontal cortical dysfunction in mental
  illness.

Within the conclusion:

  The detrimental effects of stress on PFC networks are particularly
  problematic in the ‘information age’, when PFC-mediated cognitive
  abilities are increasingly needed for success. understanding the
  molecular mechanisms that alter PFC structure and impair PFC function
  during stress exposure will help to reveal how genetic and
  environmental insults can increase an individual’s susceptibility to
  PFC deficits. Identifying the molecular mechanisms that alter PFC
  function will provide the foundation for a new era in psychiatry, when
  we will understand how genetic changes affect intracellular
  signalling, neural development and neurophysiology in the circuits
  that underlie neuropsychiatric symptoms. It is hoped that this
  information will provide the framework for therapies aimed at
  rectifying molecular errors and ameliorating the symptoms of mental
  illness.

Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function
Amy F. T. Arnsten
Nat Rev Neurosci. 2009 June; 10(6): 410–422.
doi:  10.1038/nrn2648


What part of the brain locks up when a man is in the presence of an extremely attractive female?

I'm no expert, but I can take a stab at it.

  What part of the brain is involved in this phenomenon

The amygdala becomes active and locks up other parts of the brain (thank you @KeeganKeplinger for helping me clarify). This is based on the fact that the amygdala is responsible for more responses than fight or flight, as I had previously thought. Recently I read a book by Missy Vineyard on the Alexander Technique, and this review of How You Stand, How You Move, How You Live sums up the relevant part I was looking for.

    the four expressions of fear produced by the amygdala in the brain – attack, withdraw, freeze, and submit

  is it a stand alone issue or is it always accompanied by some other type of social anxiety

This would be coupled with more facets of anxiety than just social. This report might also corroborate this. I know if I'm withdrawn, determined on fleeing or any other variety of emotional responses - my ability to speak, reason or do much of anything is fairly impaired.

    Studies have also found that the amygdala modulates the fear
    response in humans. Fearful stimuli including fearful faces,
    fear-inducing images, and fear conditioned cues, have been
    found to activate amygdala in several brain imaging studies using
    positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic
    resonance imaging

  why do some men have it and others do not, is this some sort of protection or evolutionary byproduct and are there any studies specific to this issue?

Same reason as some people are easier to fright, others are easier to fright, I'd imagine. Life differences, not just past but present as well. Lack of experience approaching women (or men), and I don't believe this is male-specific. I dated a gal a few years ago who was the shyest person I ever knew. Over the phone it was easy to talk with her and get her to talk, in person she froze for the longest time. Was both amusing and frustrating simultaneously.

If one believes that the amygdala is the cause, then it'd be a matter of evolutionary byproduct. Freezing is a defense that's more passive than running or fighting, we try and protect ourselves by locking up and becoming like a wall. That book I linked covers the amygdala portion of the brain and it's role in our evolutionary history, as well as it's role in our current lives, as well as select other parts. The author seems well-versed in neuroscience, not just the Alexander Technique.


Why is my Gabor patch not resizing as a function of the bounding box?

The size parameter in your code simply means the size of the patch, i. e. the interval in x and y over which you sample your Gabor function.  What you are thinking of is the support of the function, i. e. the interval where it is noticeably different from 0. This is determined by the sigma parameter, which is the bandwidth of the Gaussian.

So if you just increase size, you will get a bigger image back, but the area where you can see the ripples will stay the same.  If you increase sigma, the area with the ripples will get larger, and then you may have to increase size as well to see all of it.

By the way, IMHO, the right place to ask this question is on dsp.stackexchange.com.


Are psychologists more immune to psychological problems?

Barriers to Psychologists Seeking Mental Health Care by Jennifer L. Bearse, Mark R. McMinn, Winston Seegobin, and Kurt Free of George Fox University asks a similar question.

  Professional psychologists provide help to people in need, but how freely do psychologists seek psychotherapy themselves when facing personal challenges and struggles? What obstacles make it difficult for professional psychologists to seek psychotherapy? A survey of 260 professional psychologists (52% response rate) was conducted to investigate the frequency of various stressors impacting professional psychologists and the barriers they experience in seeking mental health services. Though none of the stressors were rated with particularly high frequencies, burnout was identified as the most frequent problem. Difficulty finding a psychotherapist and a lack of time were identified as the greatest obstacles to seeking psychotherapy. Practice and training implications are discussed as well as future research directions.

As I have said in a previous answer - see for more info., there is Clinical Supervision, which is standard practice and required in codes of practice for registered counsellors, psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, etc. and those in training. However, what is concerning is that I came across an article by Els van Ooijen in Therapy Today, November 2015, Pg 32 that said

  The number of supervision training courses is ever increasing, yet it is not uncommon for practitioners to receive supervision from untrained supervisors. During my 15 years’ experience as a supervision trainer I have heard many stories about the kind of supervision people receive, ranging from excellent and supportive to unhelpful and traumatic, with many shades in
  between.

An article in Quora listed the following research but the references information provided is not all that great so where I could I found the referenced articles and linked them below.

  One study found the lifetime rate of depression in psychologists and social workers to be higher than that of the general population. (Deutsch, 1985)

  Research has shown that female therapists commit suicide at higher rates than the general population. (Roeske, 1986; Steppacher & Mausner, 1973)

  In one study, 61% of their sample of psychologists had experienced at least one episode of clinical depression. Of the 84% who had received therapy treatment, 29% had reported suicidal feelings and 4% had made at least one suicide attempt. (Pope & Tabachnick, 1994)

Non Linked References Above

Roeske, N. (1986), Risk factors: Predictable hazards in a health care career. In C. Scott & J. Hawk (Eds.), Heal Thyself: The Health of Health Care Professionals


Are there samples of false but beneficial beliefs?

I guess it depends on what you mean by "false beliefs". If you mean beliefs such as magical thinking, illusory patterns, superstitious beliefs, etc, then the following may help.

From an evolutionary perspective, Foster and Koko (2009) argue that false beliefs such as superstitious thoughts/rituals may arise due to the consequence of making a false-negative error (i.e. dismissing a real pattern) being potentially dire, while making a false-positive error (identifying a non-existant pattern) may have little consequence at all.

A psychological explanation that is popular is the formation of false-beliefs as a means of gaining control over ones environment. Keinan (2002) proposes three ways in which engaging in false-beliefs may improve one's sense of control:

these beliefs may provide an explanatory power over perhaps
inexplicable events, making the environment seem predictable and
controllable;
false-beliefs may appear to provide a means of controlling a situation, such as engaging in a superstitious ritual;
engaging in false-beliefs may create a self-fulfilling prophecy (the person's faith in their beliefs may make them more optimistic of the situation, reduce their stress, and subsequently improve their performance).


Do you know any good tutorial on designing EEG experiments with PsychoPy?

A collection of classic EEG experiments implemented in Python and Jupyter notebooks.
Currently, all experiments are implemented for the Muse EEG device and using psychopy lib for stimulus presentation.
Classification is made offline though. But I'll post very soon an online tutorial:
https://github.com/NeuroTechX/eeg-notebooks/tree/master/notebooks


Is the oscillatory power inversely proportional to the frequency?

This is sort of sloppy writing about their results, and statistical significance.
In the paper, they're analyzing data in bands 1-4Hz, 4-8Hz, 8-13Hz, 13-30Hz, 30-50Hz, and 50-100Hz.

Psilocybin reduced spontaneous cortical oscillatory power from 1 to 50 Hz in posterior association cortices

means "we saw significant reductions in all of the bands except 50-100Hz".

and from 8 to 100 Hz in frontal association cortices

means "we saw significant reductions in all of the bands except 1-4Hz and 4-8Hz".
They're not saying anything in those sentences about the magnitude of the changes, only about the locations in space and in the frequency domain where they saw changes. And it doesn't really mean they don't see changes in the other bands, just that any changes there did not meet their criteria for significance. They're also sort of mixing a quantitative and qualitative assessment of the data. The sentence in the abstract refers to Figure 3 of the paper, where you can see that the magnitude and extent of the changes is far more frequency dependent than that short sentence conveys.


What is the term for the "knowing what you think but can't explain it" phenomenon?

Mental block

A mental block is an uncontrollable suppression, or repression of painful or unwanted thoughts/memories. Also can be an inability to continue or complete a train of thought, as in the case of writer's block. In the case of writer's block, many find it helpful to take a break and revisit their topic.

You can also check out a list of synonyms and related words for "forgetful and forgetfulness".


Environmental factors that predict theism

Your question specifically asks environmental factors which predict theism/atheism. Although your question is quite simple, it actually raises quite a few complexities.

Firstly, are we referring to religiosity, or specifically a belief in god? Many studies examining the psychology of the religion fail to make this distinction clear. Most probably because belief in a god is implied by active participation in religion - though I would say not an exclusive rule. It would be interesting to consider the multitude of pathways in which people get drawn into religion (a cultural institution) compared to a belief in god.

Secondly, your question specifies only the predictors of religious belief that are environmental. From my limited experience, this really closes off several of the most important predictors of religiosity (e.g. personality, attitudes). This makes it difficult to answer the question effectively. Most probably, religious belief can be predicted by a range of both individual level variables (e.g. personality) and environmental (e.g. parents religiosity) - and these variables likely interact with each other (i.e. some personality traits increase likelihood of being influenced by parents religious views).

Finally, the question is complicated as the predictors for belief in god may not be related to predictors of atheism. For instance, if low-socioeconomic status predicts theism, high-socioeconomic status may not be a good predictor of atheism.

I conducted a google scholar review using terms such as: "predictors of religiosity" "predictors of religious". From this, I focused on longitudinal studies and those which focused not simply on personality/cognitive traits. Examples of studies which I found were Predictors of Religiosity Among Youth Aged 17–22: A Longitudinal Study of the National Survey of Children which found

  The best predictors of youth religiosity were ethnicity and peers'
  church attendance during high school. Other predictors were, in order
  of decreasing magnitude: residence in the south, gender, religious
  schooling during childhood, maternal religiosity, church attendance
  during childhood, the importance mothers placed on childhood religious
  training, and an interaction variable identifying religious mothers
  who were very supportive.

and Explaining religiosity: towards a unified theoretical model.

  Individuals had a much
  higher probability of showing Christian religiosity if they had been strongly
  socialized by their parents, if they came from a mono-religious household and
  if they had Christian peer-socialization. Deprivation, social control, religious
  tradition of the canton as well as gender and age also played a certain role.
  Individuals with less education and income, living in smaller and rural communities
  and in traditionally Catholic (or mixed) cantons had a higher likelihood
  of showing Christian religiosity. The latter finding is very similar to that
  by Norris and Inglehart (2004) who were also able to show that religious
  culture was important on a collective (national) level. Furthermore, the study
  shows that especially older women had a much higher probability than
  younger women to be religious, while age was much less important for men.

A major criticism of the literature (as it currently stands) is that a large proportion of the quantitative work focuses on western, predominately Christian samples (see Vassilis and colleagues for more information). I would argue the book is open on this one. Clearly, thought has been placed into this field and there are some logical environmental predictors (i.e. parents religious views); however, few of these have been replicated in representative samples.


Is being a morning person vs a night person actually a real thing or just a preference?

(see also this Q&A over at Biology.SE: https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/93965/why-do-morning-people-have-shorter-biological-clocks/93966)
It's a real thing, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's set in stone or that preferences can't be changed/learned.
At least some portion of these preferences seem to be genetic and related to regulation of circadian rhythms. In brief: animals, including humans, have a system of molecular "clocks" that keep track of roughly the length of a day. These clocks most often run naturally slightly longer than 24 hours: if you keep someone (or, preferably, a lab animal) in constant darkness, they will still keep a daily sleep/wake cycle, but it will drift over time, corresponding to a >24 hour day.
To actually follow the real cycle of day and night, light is used to resynchronize the clock every day.
If someone's "natural" clock (without light synchronization) runs a bit shorter (faster) than average, you'd expect that person would tend to feel like waking up a bit earlier as well as feeling tired a bit earlier in the evening - a morning person. If someone's natural clock runs a bit slower than an actual day, then morning will come a bit sooner than they prefer, and in the evening they won't quite feel tired yet.
That said, like most traits of this nature, the biological underpinnings of these tendencies only explain part of it, and you would not expect to find people sorted neatly into "morning" and "night" but rather to follow something like a Gaussian distribution, with most people in the middle.
Here's a recent genome-wide association study and a review of some others on "chronotype" (the morning/night preference you ask about):
Jones, S. E., Lane, J. M., Wood, A. R., van Hees, V. T., Tyrrell, J., Beaumont, R. N., ... & Weedon, M. N. (2019). Genome-wide association analyses of chronotype in 697,828 individuals provides insights into circadian rhythms. Nature communications, 10(1), 1-11.
Kalmbach, D. A., Schneider, L. D., Cheung, J., Bertrand, S. J., Kariharan, T., Pack, A. I., & Gehrman, P. R. (2017). Genetic basis of chronotype in humans: insights from three landmark GWAS. Sleep, 40(2).


What exactly are the X and the Y axis of a brainwave?

In the general case of EEG, the x-axis is time, and the y-axis is the voltage potential measured by an electrode placed on the scalp.

When others talk about "brain waves" they typically refer to oscillations visible in EEG electrode signals that have more power in a certain frequency range. For example, "Alpha brain waves" usually refer to EEG signals with maximum power in the range of 7-13 Hz. "Gamma waves" have frequencies >30 Hz.

The dominant theory of the origin of the waves is that they are the result of large populations of individual neurons firing action potentials in a synchronized fashion.

So, if you had the ability to make, say, a 1,000 neurons near the surface of the scalp fire at the same time, a scalp electrode placed above those neurons should register a significant voltage potential deviation around the time of the trigger.


Is there any good alternative to the International Affective Picture System (IAPS)?

I would recommend the 730 pictures Geneva affective picture database (GAPED).

It has been validated worldwide, and the cultural bias is more limited than other image resources.

There are general positive/neutral/negative images, with valence and activations scores. Some other more specific images are also provided (snakes, spîders).

Download the datebase and ratings here Read the .txt provided.

Dan-Glauser, E. S., & Scherer, K. R. (2011). The Geneva affective picture database (GAPED): a new 730-picture database focusing on valence and normative significance. Behavior Research Methods, 43(2), 468-477. doi: 10.3758/s13428-011-0064-1

EDIT: The GAPED Pictures can be downloaded from the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences site (or directly from here)


In physiology, "tonic" refers to something roughly continuous or static.

In terms of receptor activation, tonic typically means there is some small quantity of agonist present such that the receptor is always activated a little bit. The receptors mediating tonic effects are typically "extrasynaptic": outside the synapse, and typically have higher affinity for their agonist. The opposite of tonic would be phasic - where a release of neurotransmitter causes an immediate and brief receptor activation.

In the passage you quote, they try puffing on some DA ("microiontophoretic application of DA") and they get the same response with and without pramipexole, so there is no effect on the phasic response.

However, the tonic activation, when they aren't puffing on DA, was increased. You normally measure this tonic activation by using a receptor antagonist (in this case they use haloperidol). The tonic activation is equal to (without antagonist) - (with haloperidol).

The drug they are using, pramipexole, is a D2 receptor agonist. How I would interpret their result is that, because pramipexole is around all the time during their experiments, there is constant low-level activity at the D2 receptor. They did not find evidence that this low-level activity decreased the response to phasic dopamine release, however; if it did, they would have seen a decreased response when they puffed on DA.

Chernoloz, O., El Mansari, M., & Blier, P. (2012). Long-term administration of the dopamine D3/2 receptor agonist pramipexole increases dopamine and serotonin neurotransmission in the male rat forebrain. Journal of psychiatry & neuroscience : JPN, 37(2), 113–121. doi:10.1503/jpn.110038

Grace, A. A. (2000). The tonic/phasic model of dopamine system regulation and its implications for understanding alcohol and psychostimulant craving. Addiction, 95(8s2), 119-128.


What are the meanings of the word 'gender'?

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics the following is stated:

Sex is a biological construct, what is real:
Attributes that characterize biological maleness and femaleness including:
Chromosomes
Hormones
Anatomy

Gender is a social construct, or 'man-made':
Attitudes and feelings that a given culture associates with a persons biological sex such as:
Gender expression
Gender roles and behavioirs
Gender identity
This Varies by time and culture

I am not able to identify to what degree the AAP's views are accepted or rejected by other organizations.

Source:
PDF, slide 7, from the AAP

Reference (Best attempt available for now)

Garofalo, R. (2013). Understanding Gender Nonconformity in Childhood and Adolescence
Webinar Video: https://www.aamc.org/initiatives/diversity/449804/aap2.html
Free Original Source PDF: https://www.aap.org/en-us/Documents/solgbt_webinar_transition_garofalo.pdf
Source PDF Bibliography [Free PDF]: http://www.pedsuniversity.org/Portals/2/biblios/Garofalo_Gender_biblio.pdf


Is the book "The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance" worth reading?

The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (CHEEP) was the state of the art in expertise research at the time of publication, and it remains a resource that I recommend and refer to frequently. Editor K. A. Ericsson, in my view, authored some of or simply the most important expertise acquisition research in the last century, overturning age-old beliefs about talent and innate ability, and he did a very admirable job of it, all things considered. Other contributors, such as B. J. Zimmerman, are authorities in their own right within their fields.

What the book is

Importantly, CHEEP is an academic resource on expertise acquisition for domains that have been researched, not a guide to becoming an expert. If your questions revolve around appropriate theoretical frameworks for expertise, how to measure expertise, domains of expertise and the mechanisms which underpin expertise, then this book is an invaluable introduction and reference. If you are looking for a resource on becoming an expert yourself, then your mileage may vary much more, depending on your level of education in academic psychology.

Limitations

With that said, cognitive science moves quickly, and I would say that while the book's contents remain relevant, some/many of its topics are already understood in greater detail than they were in 2006. There are a number of developments I would like to see included in a hypothetical update, such as retrieval-induced forgetting/facilitation, the growing embodied cognition literature and, perhaps more regrettably, a lot of recent skills acquisition research.

Concluding remarks

Despite the increasingly worn pages of my copy, occasional missing recent development, and other signs of aging, the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance nevertheless earns itself a 9/10 and a prominent spot on my shelf. It is an unrivaled introductory text to the field of expertise research.


Does language and/or culture affect an individual's cognitive capacity?

This is a hot topic of debate, so my answer will be an incomplete one.
There are actually two separate questions here. One is on language and the other one is on environment.
Language:
My answer is no; different languages do not limit the conceptual repository of human mind. The current ongoing debate is partially on the Pirahã language. Everett studied this language and after seeing that it does not have syntactic recursion, he claimed that it demonstrates that Pirahã community somehow could not think recursively. Of course this is a very simplified view and may be a little misinterpreted and/or a provocative understanding of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. But I believe that the main problem is on the theoretical grounds of grammar. Steedman's CCG shows a very powerful alternative way of looking to grammars. It is computational and combinatorial. I don't know any particular studies on Pirahã with combinatorial grammars, but that would be an interesting issue to investigate. My personal opinion is that this thinking of "language effects the way of thinking" is also a bit dangerous and open to manipulations too much.
Environment:
Environment definitely affects the cognitive abilities. There are several studies on this. You can search the internet for papers such as Gathercole (1999) or Gleitman, Elissa, Newport (1995). These are the ones that came to my mind immediately. One of the facts is that late exposure to language entirely limits the grammatical abilities. Environmental feedback is also essential. It may be hard to observe physically impaired children but there are also studies that focus on deaf children in hearing families in the absence of sign language. These are interesting studies, but the bottom line is: yes, environment affects cognitive abilities.


What is the role of Chloride (Cl- ions) in membrane potential?

In normal neurons, Chloride's reversal potential is near the resting potential for the neuron and also happens to be near the leak conductance reversal potential for the neuron. While not exactly the same these three are sometimes confused.

The difference between these three reversal potentials is subtle.

Chloride Reversal Potential: is the potential carried only by the chloride ion. Therefore it given by the Nernst Equilibrium Potential.
Leak Reversal Potential: The conductance that remains (relatively) constant. As useful metaphor the leak conductance is the passive conductance of ions through the membrane. This current can be carried by any Ion.
Resting Potential: The voltage where the neuron is at rest, usually when it is at a steady state. It is defined by all ion's that permeate the membrane at rest. (see GHK)

Because these three reversal potentials are approximately the same that means many computational neuroscience papers will consider only consider the leak current like the two paper's you linked. However, if there is reason to consider Chloride conducting channels specifically (like GABA receptors) then there will be a specific term for the Chloride Ion's Reversal potential.

From a computational perspective, the fact that the Chloride reversal potential is close to the rest potential is actually important. It is capable of shunting inhibition. In short this means that the neurons membrane potential is moved closer to rest, rather than more negative as is the case with regular hyperpolarizing current carried by Potassium Ions. Thus if the membrane potential is below the driving potential for chlorine the shunting inhibition will actually slightly depolarize the cell. Note that this small depolarization  will not pass the chlorine reversal potential, thus keeping the cell at rest and preventing firing, despite "depolarizing the cell"

While it is generally true that hyperpolarizing current suppresses firing, there are exceptions to this rule. For example, if a neuron is a resonator (fires in response to certain frequency of input) then hyperpolarizing inputs at the right frequency will cause the neuron to fire. Note, However this is only true for the current carried by Potassium Ions, and shunting inhibition will prevent this type of hyperpolarize-induced firing. The reasoning for this is quite complex, but a good (albeit math-heavy) explanation see Dr. Izhikevich's book Chp 7.


Does sleep deprivation cause mood swings?
Few studies have focused on mood changes in healthy subjects following sleep deprivation. It seems that there is evidence for sleep deprivation causing mood changes on the subsequent day, but there is no evidence for or against it causing mood swings.
Hart et al. (1987) found significantly higher self-reported hostility for sleep-deprived medical residents compared with controls, but did not report an effect size. A later study compared college students' self-reported moods between "morning/evening person" and total/partial sleep deprivation, and reported general support for mood changes in morning persons, but not in evening persons (Selvi, Gulec, Agargun and Besiroglu, 2007).
Does sleep deprivation impair grasping?
A reasonable search of Google Scholar, Web of Science and Scopus did not reveal any research on the association between sleep deprivation and grasping behaviors as such. One study of surgical residents reported that sleep-deprived residents made more errors and took more time to complete a surgical simulation, the "Minimally Invasive Surgery Trainer VR", mostly involving grasping behavior (Eastridge et al., 2003).
Does sleep deprivation affect reasoning?
Reasoning is by far the most well-studied domain with respect to sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation seems to have a substantial negative effect on many aspects of reasoning. Pilcher and Walters (1997) reported that sleep-deprived college students not only performed worse on Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal, but also rated their concentration and effort as higher than controls following total sleep deprivation. Herscovitch, Stuss and Broughton (1980) found that partial sleep deprivation was associated with decreased strategic flexibility on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task. Hart et al. (1997) reported that partially sleep-deprived medical residents retained less information and exhibited slower responses on a set of cognitive tasks.
References

Eastridge, B. J., Hamilton, E. C., O’Keefe, G. E., Rege, R. V., Valentine, R. J., Jones, D. J., ... & Thal, E. R. (2003). Effect of sleep deprivation on the performance of simulated laparoscopic surgical skill. The American Journal of Surgery, 186(2), 169-174.
Hart, R. P., Buchsbaum, D. G., Wade, J. B., Hamer, R. M., & Kwentus, J. A. (1987). Effect of sleep deprivation on first-year residents' response times, memory, and mood. Academic Medicine, 62(11), 940-2.
Herscovitch, J., Stuss, D., & Broughton, R. (1980). Changes in cognitive processing following short-term cumulative partial sleep deprivation and recovery oversleeping. Journal of clinical and experimental neuropsychology, 2(4), 301-319.
Pilcher, J. J., & Walters, A. S. (1997). How sleep deprivation affects psychological variables related to college students' cognitive performance. Journal of American College Health, 46(3), 121-126.
Selvi, Y., Gulec, M., Agargun, M. Y., & Besiroglu, L. (2007). Mood changes after sleep deprivation in morningness–eveningness chronotypes in healthy individuals. Journal of sleep research, 16(3), 241-244.


Can you learn a skill by observing someone else?

Watching others perform a skill serves as both instruction and visualization practice. The instruction can provide the beginner with a wealth of information that they lack, when starting a skill. It provides the experienced practitioner with details of technique that informs their growth.

How productive watching can be sometimes depends upon previous experience. For example, in the medical profession there is a phrase, "Watch one. Do one. Teach one." Which indicates that the practitioner should observe a technique once, do the technique once, and then teach it to someone else, once. This seems frightening, at first glance, since I certainly do not want to be someone's "do one" when I am lying on a surgery table.

However, the actual context of this learning method matters. Generally, what the practitioner is learning is some small variant of a skill they have already mastered. For example, if they already know a wide array of stitches for closing wounds, they may be learning a variant of one of these stitches. In this case, seeing the technique performed slowly once is sufficient. Then they practice the stitch by "doing one", often while being observed. Finally, they teach the technique to someone. This serves to reinforce their new knowledge, because to teach someone else something requires that you think about the subject carefully, which in turn aids in mastery.

Such a system of learning by watching breaks down, if the context of previous knowledge is omitted.


How to design an experiment to measure coffee preferences?

The study design sounds pretty good. Some of the good things you are proposing:

Using a repeated measures design will give you more statistical power than a between subjects design, which is particularly useful when your sample size is small.
Randomising or counterbalancing for order should mostly control for order effects.
Double blind will focus the test on taste rather than branding and as you say limit experimenter effects

A few further suggestions:

You could provide a little bread and water between the two tastings or separate the tastings by some longer period of time to limit any residual taste effects from the first taste.
And yes, as you say, increasing sample size will increase your statistical power. That said, if your sample is your population (e.g., you have an office of 10 people), then the smaller sample size doesn't matter.
You should consider how the response scale you will use for rating taste. You could simple get a binary preference. But I think it might be better to use some form of scale that rates preference in addition to an explicit question at the end about preference.


As Ben Brocka mentioned, what you're describing is Habituation, which Wikipedia defines as:

  Habituation is a decrease in an elicited behavior resulting from the repeated presentation of an eliciting stimulus (a simple form of learning.

More specifically, it's technically called Neural adaptation. To quote Wikipedia again:

  Neural adaptation or sensory adaptation is a change over time in the responsiveness of the sensory system to a constant stimulus. It is usually experienced as a change in the stimulus. For example, if one rests one's hand on a table, one immediately feels the table's surface on one's skin. Within a few seconds, however, one ceases to feel the table's surface. The sensory neurons stimulated by the table's surface respond immediately, but then respond less and less until they may not respond at all; this is neural adaptation

As this was explained to me in Psychology 101, this is the same phenomenon which allows us to not feel our shoes shortly after putting them on. It's also what enables people to perform really dirty, smelly jobs like sewer maintenance and garbage collection.

The process works exactly as you described, and many people can instantly relate to it: The longer you are exposed to a given stimulus (like a smell) the less you continue to react to the stimulus. The stimulus becomes more "normal" to you, and you start to think of it less. As soon as the stimulus is removed, the effect begins to reverse. The Characteristics of Habituation section of the Wikipedia article covers this.


Why is deltaE not used as a measure of error?

Delta E is used extensively in vision research, however the study you sited only tested hue recall (all samples and test responses were designed to vary in hue and minimally in luminance and saturation).

This is one possible criticism of the studies. One of the major improvements in Delta E 2000 is a hue dependent rotation. We are more or less sensitive to certain hue regions. While this is one source of criticism, they are generally relying on large color differences to differentiate successful trials vs. unsuccessful trials and Delta E does not have any meaning for large color differences.

A more accurate reinterpretation might be to say that they aren't calculating color differences at all but rather the variation of the response distribution and the underlying probability density functions. The variation analysis is not dependent on individual color difference calculations.


Can you Counteract the Negative Effects of Sleep Deprivation?

Nutrients have little to do with it*, it's the rest cycles that are important.

Cells  are messy, stumbling, statistically functional things.  Periodically, a cell needs to take a break so it can perform basic maintenance tasks and undo the disorder its incurred handling numerous signaling and protein construction mechanisms [1].  For neurons, this is particularly difficult. If they take a break, they begin to lose information as they undergo long term changes in response to their activity level. So instead, animals with sufficiently complex nervous systems enter a state of reduced activity (called sleep) to help perform maintenance [2] - there's also some question to how it might contribute to memory, but that subject is more contentious [3].

There may be volitional mental states that are achievable that can do the same things as sleep can (give all the different parts of the nervous system rest cycles and slow down metabolism) but nobody has been able to prove it yet, that I know of.  Harvard researcher, Dr. Herbert Benson, claimed it was possible in The Relaxation Response, but I don't know of any one actually demonstrating it in trials.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25325492
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3972489/
[3] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627304005653

*Granted, if you don't sleep, your metabolism doesn't slow down and you burn through nutrients faster.


How are research participants normally divided into equal groups to allow scientific comparison?

Adding to Jeromy's answer, the answer to your question would depend on what you want to study.

If you study normal behavior, common to all people, you assign your participants randomly to the experimental and control group. The experimental group receives the factor you want to study (e.g. watches some advertising), while the control group does not, and then you calculate the avarage difference in their behavior (do those that watched the advertising buy more of that product?).

If you study abnormal behavior, found only in certain people, these certain people (e.g. people suffering from some mental disorder) go into one group, people without this abnormality (e.g. people without that mental disorder) go into another group. Both receive the factor your want to study or are given the same task, and then you calculate the average difference in their behavior.

This, obviously, is not a random assignment. There are different techniques to counter biases (such as more old people with dementia in one group, because dementia usually happens in old age, so that performance differences might be attributable to age, not dementia). For example, you may "match" participants in relevant aspects, so that when you find a participant with, say, dementia, you search for a participant without dementia who has the same age, same sex, same educational background etc., so that their differences are unlikely to result from these secondary factors.

There are also experiments without control groups, or any kind of group assignments. For example, if you study something in which all (healthy) people are the same, you do not need a control group. For example, if you want to research human three dimensional vision, you could work with only one participant, because you could rightfully assume that all human beings have two eyes in approximately the same position, so that individual differences would not influence understanding the basic process. Many classic experiments in fundational fields of psycholoy such as perception were done with only one or a mere handful of participants.


How successful is hypnosis or hypnotherapy over a distance, for example, over Skype?

A literature review was conducted Barak et al. (2008) that compared the effectiveness of internet-based psychotherapy in general (not specifically hypnosis). From their abstract, the results indicate that:

  The overall mean weighted effect size was found to be 0.53 (medium effect),
  which is quite similar to the average effect size of traditional, face-to-face
  therapy.

Following, they

  [...] examined interacting effects of various possible relevant moderators of the effects of online therapy, including type of therapy [...], type of outcome measure, time of measurement of outcome (post-therapy or follow-up), type of problem treated, therapeutic approach, and communication modality,
  among others. A comparison between face-to-face and Internet intervention
  as reported on in 14 of the studies revealed no differences in
  effectiveness.

In short, the studies reviewed,

  provide strong support for the adoption of online psychological
  interventions as a legitimate therapeutic activity [...].


What are effective methods to overcome the initial psychological resistance towards an unpleasant task?

I don't know of evaluations of those types of techniques. To broaden your query slightly, there is strong evidence from social psychology that increasing helpful behaviors and decreasing unhelpful behaviors is more about context than willpower (e.g., see how Nisbett & Ross talk about the power of the situation for behavior: http://faculty.babson.edu/krollag/org_site/soc_psych/ross_pers_sit.html). So if a person were seeking to initiate difficult behaviors, I would first modify the context rather than use the tools mentioned. For example, if a person had trouble doing a work task and was using stackexchange as a distraction, they could disable their internet for a period.


Why do people avoid taking the last "donut"?

What is interesting about this phenomenon is that it runs counter to the scarcity principle. Countless research has shown that the more scarce a commodity is, the more desirable it becomes. This is often capitalized on in marketing ("limited edition" and so on). Thus, the last donut should actually be even more attractive than one of many donuts. So something additional must be happening here.

Daniel Effron and Dale Miller did a series of experiments on this question. Their data is very nice because it shows that both things happen at the same time. The less supply or the more demand for a commodity (they used stuff like chocolate or the opportunity to watch a funny video), the more people wanted to have it. At the same time, they were slower or less likely to take it. The latter tendency increased with the number of group members. Effron and Miller show that this is related to a reduced feeling of entitlement--they call it "diffusion of entitlement". So we want the last piece of chocolate more, but don't think we are entitled to it.

So what's the difference to the effects of scarcity in consumer situations ("black friday")? Effron and Miller discuss that it might be equality norms that are more important when we are in small groups. In contrast, in consumer contexts it might be more a norm of first come first served. It might be a matter of anonymity as well I guess. Whatever it may be, this data adds to research showing that often we are less selfish and care more for the outcome of others than a standard economics approach (homo oeconomicus) would suggest.

Source:

Effron, Daniel and Dale T. Miller. 2011. Diffusion of entitlement: An inhibitory effect of scarcity on consumption. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 47: 378-383.


What is the state of the art research of the consciousness level for high-level cognitive activity?

One approach to this is to search for "habituation", "learned task", "concomitant task", "dual task" and "multiple task" studies, which may include cognitive and physical aspects (memory, reaction time and such). "Background tasks" are usually related to computers.


Research on Distribution of Enneagram Types in a Given Profession

I myself have a long-standing fascination with the Enneagram system and believe it to be the most incisive and encyclopedic theories of human patterns I know.  So, yes, I would say there are correlations with career-choice (as with essentially all behavior).  I have one more specific comment about job-choice.  But first, I'd like to enumerate two important caveats that apply here:

Career choices (like many other important human choices - marriage, politics, etc.) are highly conditioned on background, education, opportunities perceived to be available, etc. - therefore, it is naive to expect overwhelming simplistic correlations.  Type Five scientists?  Type Eight policemen?  Maybe - if one really investigated I suspect there would be evidence that the relative frequencies of these Type-job pairings exceed those expected based on frequencies of the Types in the population under study.  But they might not be that much higher - there's just too much variability in our various life paths....

Formal research on the Enneagram is hamstrung in general terms by the lack of a simple, easy objective measure of Enneagram type.  Yes, there are various (relatively) cheap-and-easy tests, available on-line and in book-form - but I don't think they are particularly accurate.  There's too much at stake psychologically when people are being asked self-report questions, and many of use "game the system" in favor of how we'd like to be seen (even if tend we claim otherwise).  This is based on 10+ years experience with hundreds of people coming through a public discussion-group I've run on the Enneagram.

Maybe someday there'll be an Enneagram test based on brainawaves (or whatever).  Until then, I'd say, in our time, the better way to get into this system is to read a good book (any of the Risa and Hudson books are good places to start), and look and soberly deeply into yourself if you are so inclined.  Then, if you take an abiding interest in the topic, and want to get more involved, try and find an Enneagarm-educted community with sincere people who can help validate (or challenge) your self-assessment.  Once securely typed, you can really know how deeply and uncannily this system works in our lives - and curiosities like how the system relates to career-choices may not actually seem as important.

As mentioned above, I do have one more comment specifically on job-choice, however.  Based on my own typing skills I once did a survey of a group of 100+ individuals many of whom I know well (my high school class) and attempted to correlate career-choice with Enneagram type.  Interestingly, I found that the TYPE-WING actually seemed as strongly typed with career-fields chosen as the MAIN TYPE.  Possibly, as individuals who express their main type in so many aspects of our lives, we unconsciously choose career-fields that help express our less-fully-expressed aspects as described by our type-wing.  (Just a speculation.)  More caveats: (1) TYPE-WINGS may be harder to diagnose properly than the main type itself; (2) I have somewhat different beliefs about what these TYPE-WINGS are than the ones described in the literature.

Sorry for the long-winded answer, that's just the territory as I see it.  Please post any replies, and I will attempt to monitor this thread.


What test could I use to measure the short-term memory capacity of a group of people?

There are several commonly used measures of Short Term Memory (STM).

Memory span: lists of items are presented sequentially and the participant has to repeat each list after it ends. The lists become progressively longer. The most common variant is called Digit span, in which the items in the lists are spoken digits. Another common variant is called Backwards Digit Span, in which the participant has to repeat the list in backwards order. The WAIS test battery has an implementation of both, along with a standardized scoring method.
Free Recall: a list of stimuli (usually nouns) are presented. After the presentation ends, the participant has to recall, in any order, as many items as possible from the list. The list is typically, 10-15 items long. This task has been used for a long time (e.g. [1]) and is still used in current research (e.g. [2]). Note that there is another variant of the task that is called Serial Recall, in which participants have to recall the items in the order in which they were presented. This variant is essentially identical to the Memory span described above, except the lists used are usually of constant length, and not successively longer as in the memory span task.
N-Back: a stream of stimuli is presented, and the participant has to respond whenever the stimulus presented is identical to the stimulus presented N steps ago. N usually starts at 2, and increases as the participant performs better. This task has been used for a long time (e.g. [3]) and is still used in current research (e.g. [4]).

You should also be aware of the close term Working Memory (WM). The distinction between STM and WM is not really clear. If there is such a distinction, STM deals with simply holding information in memory "As-Is", and WM deals with the ability to perform mental operations on it (such as comparison to other stimuli, mental rotation, re-ordering, etc.).
Backwards memory span and N-back are usually considered tests of WM, while forwards memory span and free recall are considered tests of STM.

As a side note: if you are interested in improving learning/teaching methodologies such as the schedule of classes, I'm not sure why you are interested in measuring STM. I would guess a more relevant property to measure would be the long term retention of what was learned.

[1] Murdock Jr, B. B. (1960). The immediate retention of unrelated words. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 60(4), 222.

[2] Farrell, S. (2012). Temporal clustering and sequencing in short-term memory and episodic memory. Psychological review, 119(2), 223.

[3] Kirchner, W. K. (1958). Age differences in short-term retention of rapidly changing information. Journal of experimental psychology, 55(4), 352.

[4] Jaeggi, S. M., Studer-Luethi, B., Buschkuehl, M., Su, Y. F., Jonides, J., & Perrig, W. J. (2010). The relationship between n-back performance and matrix reasoning—Implications for training and transfer. Intelligence, 38(6), 625-635.


What benefit is there to playing highly repetitive games?

Lumosity has a research section that explains how their repetitive games help in day-to-day activities. They claim it's peer reviewed, although all of the papers are published to their site.

However, Science based medicine had this to say about a study with games similar to Lumosity...

  This one study, of course, is not definitive. It is possible that more training is needed before significant benefits are seen. Perhaps
  video games are more effective because they are more engaging and
  players will spend more time playing.What this study shows, however,
  is that products sold as brain training games had no documented
  benefits after six weeks of use.

  Putting this study into the context of the overall research, it does
  make us more cautious about concluding that there are general
  cognitive benefits to brain training games or entertainment video
  games. Benefits are likely to be closely related to the specific tasks
  involved in training, and not transfer to unrelated tasks.

  But there is already enough published evidence showing visual
  tracking, multitasking, and executive function benefits from action
  and strategic video games respectively that this study will not be the
  final word. When there is conflicting research, more study is needed.

  This study is most applicable to brain training products, and shows
  that the marketing claims for these products are not justified. There
  is very unlikely to be any benefit, or any specific advantage, to
  “scientifically designed” brain training applications. For now, you
  are better off just playing a video game.

So, more or less, there isn't any information suggesting that these repetitive "brain games" actually help develop skills outside of learning to play the game better.


What is the relationship between Working Memory and Attention, and how can one assess his WM?

Engle has published extensive papers about this topic and if you are interested I suggest looking him up.

In 2001 Kane, Bleckley, Conway, & Engle (In Engle, 2002) attempted to directly measure the relationship between WM and executive attention, and conclude that that the underlying factor responsible for the relationship between measures of
WM capacity and performance on higher-order cognitive tasks is a
domain-free executive-attention system.

  Although individuals possessing different WM capacities will
  show differences in number of items stored in a variety of memory
  tasks, this is a result of differing ability to maintain and inhibit
  information, particularly in the face of distraction and interference.
  Only when the context makes it difficult to maintain the appropriate task
  goal do people with high WM spans perform better than people with low
  WM spans.

In 2003  he found that:

  Individual differences in working-memory (WM) capacity predicted performance on the Stroop task in 5 experiments, indicating the importance of executive control and goal maintenance to selective attention

In my opinion the two are obviously linked however it would be difficult to infer causality or direction in the relationship. It would make sense that if your attention improves your working memory would also improve, however it's hard to say if one causes the other  or if they are intrinsically linked and would just both increase at the same time.

In terms of measuring WM at home here is a link to an n-back test which I think will be fairly easy to do at home:

http://cognitivefun.net/test/4

The n-back task requires participants to decide whether each stimulus in a sequence matches the one that appeared n items ago. N-back has become a standard measure for WMC, however treat results with a pinch of salt as Kane et al (2007) have called it's validity into question.

References:

Engle, R. W. (2002). Working memory capacity as executive attention. Current directions in psychological science, 11(1), 19-23.

Kane, M. J., & Engle, R. W. (2003). Working-memory capacity and the control of attention: the contributions of goal neglect, response competition, and task set to Stroop interference. Journal of experimental psychology: General, 132(1), 47.

Kane, M. J., Conway, A. R., Miura, T. K., & Colflesh, G. J. (2007). Working memory, attention control, and the N-back task: a question of construct validity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33(3), 615.


What is the history of self-experimentation in cognitive science?

Short answer
Based on the general developments in drug and medical device development research, 1970 was a major milestone, as randomized controlled trials were marked as compulsory for new drugs to be marketed through the FDA regulations.

Background
The question is quite broad, but in terms of clinical trials I can say that since 1970 the FDA required that drug producers submit randomized controlled trials (RCTs) results with new drug applications, heralding a new era of the RCT in drug approval regulations (Meldrum (2000); Bothwell & Podolsky (2016)). An RCT is defined as

  [A] type of scientific (often medical) experiment which aims to reduce bias when testing a new treatment. The people participating in the trial are randomly allocated to either the group receiving the treatment under investigation or to a group receiving standard treatment (or placebo treatment) as the control. Randomization minimizes selection bias [...]. The RCT is often considered the gold standard for a clinical trial.

Now you are referring to questions on Cognitive Sciences or Psychology in general. Drug research and medical device investigations include the widely used psychoneuropharmaceuticals such as the antidepressants and antipsychotics, as well as medical devices such as deep brain stimulators and sensorineural implants to treat e.g.., epilepsy and deafness/blindness, respectively. All of these can be included in the disciplines of Cognitive Sciences and Psychology.

References
- Bothwell & Podolsky, N Engl J Med (2016); 375: 501-04
- Meldrum, Hematology/Oncology Clinics of North America (2000);
14(4): 745-60


How do people with DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) experience dreams?

Unfortunately, I was not able to find empirical literature on this question, as it does not appear to have been studied much - for example:

  References to dreams in the multiple personality literature are rare
  and tend to be brief.

So we are limited to clinical reports.  In 1994, Deirdre Barrett collected 3rd-hand accounts of dreams from 23 DID (MPD) patients.  The study method that she used is not very good quality however, so any conclusions would be premature, but it does provide some possible hypotheses as to the nature of these patients' dreams, as summarized in this table:

In particular, alters appear as characters in dreams (4) of more than half of the patients in this survey.  Item (5) lists a few patients reporting dreams experienced from multiple perspectives (ie, multiple alters) simultaneously:

  ... for these 26% of patients with dreams in category 5, two or more
  personalities reported dreaming at the same time and experiencing each
  other as characters.

Another interesting item (9) lists patients who reported experiencing multiple different dreams by different alters.  Note that some of the dream reports (2) were not actually dreams, but were perceived as such by the alter recounting them.

More case reports are reviewed in another paper, and Barrett has written extensively on this subject.  She summarizes:

  These included memories of childhood traumas and content of recent
  fugue episodes.  A few of the dreams were undisguised recreations of
  actual episodes, especially for recent repressed events.

and:

  No characteristic of the dreams of dissociative disordered patients in
  this survey is so distinctive as to never be found in those of other
  dreamers.

Empirical data (based on mentation) would be more reliable for drawing conclusions.  Barrett and others have hypothesized that rather than alters appearing in dreams, characters in dreams may be used as inspiration (prototypes) for dissociated identities.


Taking into account reliability of Raven's Matrices and Self Monitoring tests

Regarding Cronbach's $\alpha$, Wikipedia writes:

  It has been proposed that $\alpha$ can be viewed as the expected correlation of two tests that measure the same construct.

Note that correlation is a nonparametric concept. Its definition is independent on the functional form and functional relationship of the two variables. There are numerous ways to measure correlation that take the functional form into account. Pearson correlation and point-biserial correlation are probably the most well known.

In the case of two binary variables some notable measures are: Matthews correlation coefficient, Cohen's $\kappa$ or Pearson's $\phi$. One may also consider measures from Signal detection theory. Cronbach's $\alpha$ is also applicable to binary variables. In fact, the Wikipedia page lists a simplified formula (due to Cronbach, 1970) for the case where both variables are binary.

To conclude, there is nothing wrong with application of Cronbach's $\alpha$ to binary items. Still, other measures of relationship between two binary variables exist and may be worth considering.

Reference: Cronbach LJ (1970). Essentials of Psychological Testing. Harper & Row. p. 161.


What's the explanation of this optical illusion where many coloured arcs radiate from a central point?

This is a type of illusory motion (or motion illusion) called the Enigma Illusion.

The cause of motion illusion in general is not well understood, but research suggests that there may be slightly different reasons for the different types of motion illusions.

A common theory is that particularly high-contrast colours are perceived separately in the retina (perhaps turning photoreceptor cells on takes a slightly different amount of time than turning them off), and as a result, the signals from the retina arrive at the visual cortex at slightly different times, causing the illusion of motion.  Comparison of brain activity using fMRI between actually moving and apparently moving images shows similar activity in the visual cortex, supporting the assertion that the illusion is caused at the retina rather than at the visual cortex.

In the particular case of the Enigma Illusion:

  When the eye movements, called microsaccades, were suppressed, test
  subjects reported that the Enigma illusion — an illustration that
  seems to flicker and turn — remained stationary.

That is, small, rapid, unconscious eye movements are also involved in creating the illusion.

Here is a nice collection of different illusory motion images: http://brainden.com/eye-illusions.htm

The reason for optical illusions such as this one is a side-effect of the way the brain processes typical visual information efficiently, at the expense of handling unusual situations incorrectly.


What happens if you lie to a child during language acquisition?

You would need a conspiracy of many people to prank a child with this kind of thing, because kids are really good at tracking the information value of sources. If you give a different random word every time they'll discount you as an information source, if you give the same random word every time they'll learn it... and use it only with you (more or less, but increasingly so with age/experience.) See Birch et al. (2008) for more details.

You might also have fun with the literature on early bilingualism, which is basically this situation, right? Kids are phenomenal at this. See for example Liberman et al. (2017).

Birch, S. A., Vauthier, S. A., & Bloom, P. (2008). [Three-and four-year-olds spontaneously use others’ past performance to guide their learning.][] Cognition, 107(3), 1018-1034.
Liberman, Z., Woodward, A. L., Keysar, B., & Kinzler, K. D. (2017). Exposure to multiple languages enhances communication skills in infancy. Developmental science, 20(1), e12420.


When I have used (or seen) this term, it usually means that recurrent excitatory connections in a network have become stronger than the inhibitory feedback. This means that excitatory activity will grow stronger and stronger, without inhibitory influences to keep it in check. Eventually, the activity within the network will be limited only by spike-rate saturation. This type of network configuration is sometimes used as a model for an epileptic seizure.


Why do solutions to problems feel simple (or obvious) once we are given them?

The closest one that comes to mind is called the Hindsight Bias. Basically this means that things seem to be "more obvious" than it actually is--usually after the event had just happened.

Definition:

Hindsight bias is a term used in psychology to explain the tendency of people to overestimate their ability to have predicted an outcome that could not possibly have been predicted. In essence, the hindsight bias is sort of like saying "I knew it!" when an outcome (either expected or unexpected) occurs - and the belief that one actually predicted it correctly.

Usually coming up with the idea is difficult, for instance solving a math problem. The challenge is finding the right mental model to approach the problem, but once the solution or approach is presented to you, it may be easy to accomplish and you'd feel it was obvious.

Or it could be really just that predictable or that you're natural/good at the subject (e.g. Math) to begin with and it is easy for you.


Can intense multitasking improve fluid intelligence/working memory?

In general, I'd hypothesise that "memory-training" programs will not lead to domain-general increases in fluid intelligence nor working memory.

As general background, you might want to check out the literature on expert memory.

Practice is very effective at improving performance on the practised task. Transfer is real and does exist, but it is often small in effect.

Let's take the study by Ericsson, Chase, and Faloon (1980). After 230 hours of practice a participant, SF, was trained to increase their digit span (i.e., the sequence of random numbers they could recall) from 7 to 79 numbers. One might think that SF had increased his working memory. However, talk aloud protocols suggest that SF was using sophisticated domain specific mnemonic strategies (e.g., linking running times to random numbers). The skill did not generalise to other memory stimuli.
The expertise literature is filled with examples of experts seemingly defying the limits of human ability. Yet, such achievements tend to be domain specific and achieved through substantial practice. For an excellent review of the expertise literature, see Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Romer (1993).

It is very difficult to modify very large domain general abilities.

Thus, my general advice is for people wanting to improve their working memory or fluid intelligence is to instead focus on what domain specific ability they want to improve and focus on practicing that.

References

Ericsson, K. A., Chase, W. G., and Faloon, S. (1980). Acquisition of a
memory skill. Science, 208(4448):1181-1182. FREE PDF
Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, T., and Tesch-Romer, C. (1993). The role of
deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance.
Psychological Review, 100:363-406.


Firstly, the matter of lifestyle is probably a significant factor.  Someone who is an alcoholic their whole life and never tries or learns new things is going to have a different outcome that somebody who is still learning new things and exercising and eating healthy.

That being said, lifestyles equal, there's at least two factors in age-associated reduction in memory and learning.  Firstly, just like hips and shoulders start falling apart, so does the brain (characterized by morphological abnormalities and synapse loss).  Organisms are very complex machines and lots of the equipment is gradually failing throughout our life.  Dementia is a typical result of age-induced wear and tear on the brain.

The other is reduced plasticity.  We start off with a very plastic brain, which allows us to learn our environment.  However, part of the process of learning is to stabilize our learning circuits so that they can't be changed again (i.e. you want memories to stay as robust as possible).  Our whole brain goes through series of this stabilization.  At 4-5 years, pruning removes "unused circuitry", greatly reducing plasticity.  In the early 20's, our frontal lobes finalize and myelinate (and this is thought by some to pertain to why people start practicing better judgment at this point).


Platforms to make online experiments with counterbalancing

You could try www.gorilla.sc  It's cloud based software specifically designed for running cognitive psychology experiments online without needing to code.  It's not free, but it is affordable - £0.75 per participant.

Counterbalancing of various sorts is built in; randomisers, stimuli set counterbalancers, order counterbalancers.  It sounds like the simple randomiser set to balanced will do what you want.  As long as you stay on top of rejecting Ns that drop out, you'll get a balance in each condition.

There is a GUI questionnaire builder, task builder and experiment tree builder.  So you don't need to do any coding.  The vast majority of cognitive science task can be created in it very easily.

Full disclosure, I created Gorilla.


Why is "breaking a car" considered a sort of therapy?

I believe you're referring to Catharsis. According to Freud, expressing anger serves to relieve it. However, a few more recent researchers have argued that expressing anger serves to reinforce aggressive behavior.

@Chuck Take a look at this study and this book excerpt.


Why is it easier to learn something when you have a teacher explain it?

A bad teacher would explain things in a manner that's harder to digest, when compared to a good teacher. However, in general, for any teacher, even a tutor, it is easier to concentrate because the prefrontal cortex is reminded continuously of the goal (of learning). This is called goal-directed behavior. Learning alone, however, makes it harder to concentrate at the same level. I may have misunderstood what you you were looking for in the answer.


What are the main theories that account for why some people like X and others not?

In psychology, we call people's attitudes towards things "preferences", and the emotional experience associated with preference is referred to as "affect", or more specifically, "valence", which is positive or negative.

As alluded to in the question, there is a genetic predisposition for certain preferences, such as sugar (sweetness), and some aversions, such as quinine (bitterness).  Biology sets probabilities, but since people can come to like bitterness and dislike sweetness, we know that as with any statistical probability, there can be some exceptions.

Learning also plays an important role.  This was clearly demonstrated by the seminal Pavlov's Dog experiment.  Dogs are genetically predispositioned to salivate when they smell food, but have no particular predisposition to the sound of a bell.  However, by pairing the sound of a bell with the smell of food, dogs learned to salivate from the sound of a bell alone.  This process of pairing something that does not elicit a response to something that does is called "classical conditioning".

A well known example of classical conditioning in humans is the sound of a pop-can opening followed by the sound of fizz, which is used by companies such as Coca-Cola in their advertising to elicit a conditioned (positive) response to television ads that only have sound and no smell or taste to them.  Through classical conditioning, people can learn to enjoy something that they have no predisposition to enjoy or even something that they have a predisposition to avoid, or come to dislike something by a similar process.  Restaurants often use ambiance, presentation, and other classically conditioned methods to improve the dining experience independently of the taste of the food.

The role of learning is also evident in cultural differences in common preferences.  For example, different cultures show a general preference for spicy food, sour food, or subtle flavours.  And as alluded to above, media (such as advertising) can have a profound influence at the cultural level as well - eg, robusta coffee is low grade and bitter, but Americans have been exposed to much advertising suggesting that it is of high quality, and it is very popular there.  This can also happen through the mere-exposure effect.

Many other factors come into play, including cognitive biases and memory, and these combine together to influence individual preferences.  For example, members of the same family may have similar genetic predispositions and similar cultural influences, but differences in the expression of specific genes, degrees of cultural assimilation, and personal experiences can account for their different preferences.


It seems like somebody's done a lot of literature pooling already:

Is Rationality Teachable?

Among influences mentioned are statistics, logic training, and debiasing.

There's also a book that summarized findings:

Teaching Critical Thinking: Some Lessons From Cognitive Science
Tim van Gelder
College Teaching
Vol. 53, Iss. 1, 2005

  ABSTRACT: This article draws six key lessons from cognitive science
  for teachers of critical thinking. The lessons are: acquiring
  expertise in critical thinking is hard; practice in critical-thinking
  skills themselves enhances skills; the transfer of skills must be
  practiced; some theoretical knowledge is required; diagramming
  arguments (“argument mapping”) promotes skill; and students are prone
  to belief preservation. The article provides some guidelines for
  teaching practice in light of these lessons.

Anecdotally, I recognize a tendency for science professors to let students use their intuition at first and then crush it in an attempt to make debiasing habitual.


Does individual work performance follow a Paretian distribution?

An alert of a follow up paper ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF JOB PERFORMANCE: THE ROLE OF MEASUREMENT CHARACTERISTICS IN OBSERVED DEPARTURES FROM NORMALITY and subsequent search brought me to this discussion. I don't have full access to these articles unfortunately.

Of the two questions that posed, no, I wouldn't expect to find a normal distribution and no, I wouldn't expect to find a pareto distribution. As was mentioned in the G+ discussion that Artem linked to, what we tend to see is some skewed distribution such as a log-normal.

A good tool for exploring these types of situations, especially in a dynamic / systems-based situation is to use simulation.  This is what I did in a 2010 blog post on 'forced ranking' which at it's heart frequently assumes normally distributed performance.

The post shows selection of any sort quickly produces a skewed population. This selection can be either on entry level selection or during a performance review cycle.  What I didn't explore in that simple model, but again supports the outcome, is self-selection - i.e. the likelihood of an employee leaving is to some degree based on their assessment of fit.

I also explore what happens if we use a probability distribution not only for the individual, but also a distribution for the likely measurement error (because only in rare situations can be objectively measure performance.) For me this is the sort of instance where a Bayesian Hierarchical model makes sense.

In my day job working with senior HR people to help them understand their workforces I find simulation a powerful tool. We can make a few simple assumptions and show that over time unexpected results will occur.  Many times it will show that normal distributions don't logically hold over time.


Where can i find old archived patient records from 19th century psychiatric hospitals?

A Google search for patient records from 19th century psychiatric hospitals (no quotes) turns up relevant results, though not for free access.
For example, here's a service from The National Archives (UK) that looks like exactly what you're talking about. And another one from New Zealand. I'm sure there are more.


What are “Stimulus locked” and “Response locked” in Philiastides & Sajda (2006)

Does the locking refer to the initiation of the measurement with
  starting cue being being the presentation of stimulus or the response
  of the subject?

More or less, yes.

When measuring brain activity, you usually make a long, continuous recording during which you expose your study participants to a task over and over again. There's a lot of noise in the recordings, so you need to average over many instances of a stimulus/task event to get an idea of what it does to the brain. To average, you need to cut the recording into trials (also called epochs).

You need to decide what to base these epochs on, i.e. what to cut around. Stimulus-locked measurements happen when you cut an epoch relative to the stimulus onset. The average over all trials will then give you a good impression of the sensory response to the stimulus.

However, there are some higher order cognitive processes going on as well, and they will happen at different speeds over trials and over different subjects, so they will smear out in the average. If you want to look at these, it's wiser to do response-locked measurements, i.e. to cut the epochs around the moment that the study participant responded to the task.  This way, just prior to the button press (in the plot), you might get to see some evidence-accumulation or similar cognitive process going on. You can also see the motor response very well.


What is the location of the center-surround receptive fields of retinal ganglion cells?

A nice illustrative image of how the photoreceptors connect to the retinal ganglion cell (RGC), and thereby facilitate the center-surround structure is provided in figure 1 below. It shows a cross section through the retina.

Fig. 1. Photoreceptor organization and connections to the retinal ganglion cell. source: McGill University

The receptive fields (RFs) are determined by the number of photoreceptors connected to the RFs. RFs are smaller in the central high acuity area of the retina (the fovea) and increase in size more eccentrically. As a result, visual acuity is highest in the center visual field, and degrades more eccentrically in the field of view.


Quiet simply: loss aversion

People are adverse to loss, the majority of people who are wealthy pay into a system they get little direct benefit from, in comparison to poorer people who tend to get back what they put in or more depending on circumstance. However the rich, and everyone else, benefit from being in wealthy westernised societies with higher levels of tax, because people have more money in these countries. It is the tax system which allows these countries to develop their citizens, poor countries have lower levels of education and poor infrastructure as a result of low taxation and poor distribution of expenditure. However people do not calculate costs and indirect benefits together..."individuals bracket indirect benefits and costs separately. This is the case when the primitive utility function"..."satisfies the decomposability property (Tversky and Kahnemann, 1991)" Alesinay and Passarelliz (2015). Basically as indirect benefits are not calculated directly from costs individuals will look to avoid loss, its quiet natural to avoid loss. If you think about inheritance tax, money and property that have already been taxed are taxed again, surely an individual should be able to decide what to do with their property? Of course the state would agree for redistributing wealth for the benefit of society. Although this would seem unfair to the individual who saved in comparison to those that spent all they had. The point is that its just as easy to justify tax avoidance as it is to promote taxation, we could easily get into the principles of collectivism and individualism here but that is for the politics and philosophy areas of stackexchange.


Ethics of observing someone doing something with substantial risk

Institutional Review Boards (IRBS) are both legal and practical gatekeepers for researchers, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_review_board. Practically, a social scientist may not be able to publish or receive funding support if their research is not approved. Legally, they also provide some cover. However, they are not guarantors of being ethical, because there is not universal agreement about what is ethical. So perhaps we could ask WHO would consider it more ethical if such a study were approved by an IRB compared to not?

From my experience both inside and outside of hospitals managing IRB submissions, such a study is unlikely to be approved. However, some might still consider it ethical, and there's no practical barrier to observing it. One important feature here is whether the researcher designed, encouraged, or administers the treatment. Researchers are not prohibited from observing harmful behaviors in others, in general.


The fundamental question here is: Can we "read" emotions in a perceiver-independent, objective way?

The answer, I'd venture, is: We don't really know (although, currently, we cannot do this with great reliability or specificity).

It would be painstaking to go through the history of emotion research and to go over every emotion theory that supposedly has a definitive answer to this question.  Fortunately, a great overview of this history can be found here.

It would also be a pain to go through every emotion perception study, in cultures near and far, every psychophysiology study, every behavioral or neuroimaging study, and the many (sometimes quite giant) limitations of this literature.  Fortunately, you can find meta-analyses on these topics, which mostly suggest we cannot "recognize" contempt, or any other emotion, with notable reliability or specificity (although we can "perceive" it; e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4.)

So, it's hard to answer this question.  We might be able to one day, but we are very, very, very, very far away from sampling the dynamic and highly variable range of potential expressions of "contempt," let alone any other emotion (no study has actually tried to do this ever).  Moreover, quite a few emotion theories do not recognize contempt as universal (see here for a recent overview).

If the above doesn't confuse you enough, I'll pull in the picture I pointed to in the comments.  Same "disgust" face, different emotion.  Well, what about contempt?

I realize my answer is pretty unsatisfying, but if you read a great deal of the emotion literature, you might just arrive to the same conclusion.


Binary classification as a cognitive strategy?

I think there is a misperception at work in your question. There is a wide variety of objects that we never perceive in such a binary manner: colors, fruit (apples, oranges, plums, ...), weather, and basically every other concrete objects. The only things we perceive in a binary fashion are abstract ideas! Good versus evil. Liberal versus conservative. And here we can ask about the reality (which is more complex) and the function of this simplification. The answer is: speed of decision making.

The basic binary classification is negation: x versus not x. The usefulness of this distinction becomes apparent when you put it in context: Is this berry edible or not? Do I want to trust this person or not? All binary opposites have a negation at their basis and divide the world into things you want to avoid and things you want to interact with.

And since human beings have to decide about one million things every day, they make life easier by using heuristics to make most of these decisions: simple rules based on experience, so you don't have to think before you vote for your next president.

The few binaries that are more or less objective, are categories of measurement: long/short, hot/cold, bright/dark, etc. That the physical reality underlying these measurements is maybe more complex (e.g. coldness depends not only on temperature, but also on the humidity of the air and the speed of the wind), is not relevant to the one-dimensionality of our sensation.

Night and day is not binary, since we have dawn and dusk and late afternoon and early morning and the dead of night as well to differentiate subjective time, relative visibility, quality of light, restedness/tiredness etc., that all make up the meaning of "night", "day" and other daytime names. The phrase "day and night" is binary only in certain phrases where they have symbolic meaning (e.g. "day" = good, "night" = evil, or "working night and day" = working all the time, without resting).

Studying the development of thinking styles in college students, Perry (1970) found that as they grow their thinking advances from a dualistic black-and-white perspective to a multiplicity of truths that allows for uncertainty. They also grow from a purely intellectual to an ethical perspective. In the course of this development, dualistic thinking can serve as an alternative to forward progression, and persons that already have developed to a higher level of thinking can use dualistic thinking as a "retreat" (Zang, 2002): "a student returns to a dualistic orientation to find security and the strength to cope with an overchallenging environment".

Binary thinking is related to personality disorders such as borderline personality and narcissism (Oshio, 2012): "The results indicated that thinking dichotomously may lead to
wide-ranging personality disorders."

Sources:

Oshio, A. (2012). An all‐or‐nothing thinking turns into darkness: Relations between dichotomous thinking and personality disorders. Japanese Psychological Research, 54(4), 424-429. doi:10.1111/j.1468-5884.2012.00515.x
Perry, W. G. (1970). Forms of intellectual and ethical development in the college years: A scheme. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Zhang, L. F. (2002). Thinking styles and cognitive development. The Journal of Genetic Psychology, 163(2), 179-195.


Personality traits associated with finishing other people's sentences?

Several factors may influence a person to finish off other peopla's sentences.
- The person may be stressed (and some people stress more often than others, thus stress may cause some people to do this more often)
- ADHD is said to cause an impatience, making the clients finish off other people's sentences:
http://www.healthline.com/health/adult-adhd
- A person may have a lot of energy, spending a bit of this energy on finishing off other's sentences.
- The speaker and the listener might ble close to eachother, and know eachother very well, maybe the listener was "just thinking of just the same thing"..

Whether or not I can find sources on "emotionally intense" people doing this, depends on how one defines being "emotionally intense". You could probably call any of the above examples emotionally intense people...


Scientific articles linking personal-professional growth

There is a difference between personal development and professional development, although they can cross over each other.

Personal development

This can be achieved through

clinical supervision which is separate and completely different to line-management but necessary for effective line-management,
self-awareness through self-reflection and self-evaluation,
counselling where required

Professional Development

This is achieved through continuing training and learning, which is recognised by your governing body as training and learning which forms part of CPD (Continuous Personal Development).

Training and learning opportunities may range from formal classes and distance learning, perhaps working towards a qualification, to informal learning experiences, such as conferences, workshops, peer discussion groups, volunteering, and so on.

Some governing bodies award "CPD Points", for example, 1 hour of CPD may count as 1 point of CPD for the year.

The following are examples of CPD (not exhaustive):

Keeping up-to-date with current research and new books in your area of work
Expanding your knowledge outside your area of work (only if you intend on expanding the area of your work)
Organising further training, where relevant or to update existing skills.
Some of this can cross over into personal development where the knowledge and learning gained helps towards this.

Minimum CPD Required

The minimum required depends on your governing body so if you do not know, get in contact with them or you could lose your license to practice if you fail to meet the requirements.

The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), for example, expects all members to gain 30 hours of CPD per year as a minimum (BACP, n.d.) and the requirement forms part of their ethical framework everyone has to follow as a member of BACP.

References

BACP (n.d.). CPD Guidance for registered members [Online]Retreived from: https://www.bacp.co.uk/membership/registered-membership/guide-to-cpd


Clarification on the definition of sublimation?

Sublimation is a term from psychoanalytic theory. In short, the internatlized norms - the so-called Super-Ego - directs the drives to outlets that are free of guilt or shame. The whole process takes place inside the individual, and in fact the norms that individual has internalized (in his childhood) need not be identical to the norms that the adult person is surrounded by.


Two possibilites to increase the effect of binaural beats

Both of your proposed methods to increase the measureable affect of binaural beats on the brain would introduce a monaural beat. For example, sweeping the volume from left to right means the volume in at least one ear is changing over time. You would hear a beating if you listened to just this ear. Similarly, to sweep the frequency range, you would need to change the frequency in at least one ear. If you listened to just this ear, you would hear a "beat" (or more precisely frequency modulation).

I am not aware of any research on how sounds that have both monaural and binaural beats affect the brain. My guess is that people who are interested in using binaural beats to influence the brain would stay away from stimuli that have monaural beats since you can hear the monaural beat with a single ear. From my understanding of the literature on using binaural beats to influence the brain, there is something special about binaural beats since the beat is created by the brain (which is sort of true and sort of wrong).


What branch of psychology deals with the Framing Effect?

Gestalt psychology (Interpretrations of problems) and cognitive psychology (Problem solving). If you are fairly new to these topics, Robert Stenberg's "Cognitive Psychology" is pretty simple and explains a lot of the basics of this complicated issue.
It should be noted that Tversky and Kahneman are specialist in cognitive psychology itself, and have more works on this subject; but I still recommend Stenberg's work to appreciate a lot more of these books if you are starting to learn in psychology and the likes.
Hope it helps.


$EF$ is the "easiness factor". This means that the greater easiness you have, the longer will be the interval to next review ($I_\text{new}$).

So if you will use the old $EF$, the new interval value will not take into account your last review quality, which makes less sense IMO.

For the other hand, as I can see in the original implementation of algorithm, they calculate the interval first and then they calculate the easiness:

procedure Repetition(ElementNo,Grade:longint;var NextInterval:longint;commit:WordBool);
  var DataRecord:TDataRecord;
  begin
    DataRecord:=GetDataRecord(ElementNo);

    with DataRecord do
    begin
      if Grade>=3 then
      begin
        if Repetition=0 then
        begin
          Interval:=1;
          Repetition:=1;
        end
        else if Repetition=1 then
        begin
          Interval:=6;
          Repetition:=2;
        end
        else begin
          Interval:=round(Interval*EF);
          Repetition:=Repetition+1;
        end;
      end
      else begin
        Repetition:=0;
        Interval:=1;
      end;

      EF:=EF+(0.1-(5-Grade)*(0.08+(5-Grade)*0.02));

      if EF<1.3 then
        EF:=1.3;
        NextInterval:=Interval;
      end;

      if commit then
        SetDataRecord(ElementNo,DataRecord);
      end;

The same is in the specification: they calculate next interval at step 3 and $EF$ is calculated at step 5.

I'd like to understand what all these magic coefficients mean and how they were found, but unfortunately didn't find this information.


Teasing generally seems to have two components. First, as mentioned in the title of your question, it is a matter of becoming annoyed; specifically at behavior that is (often repetitively) enacted towards oneself. Furthermore, to know that someone is teasing you it is necessary to be able to conceptualize their intentions (otherwise known as having a "theory of mind"), which is necessary in order to potentially feel disrespected. It is uncontroversial that dogs can feel annoyed, just try relieving one of its food (or tapping on the glass it is behind ;). However, the extent to which dogs are able to conceive of the mental states of others is debated in animal psychology. It has been shown, for instance, that certain populations of dogs are unable to spontaneously adapt to human social cues. However, naturally, many pet domestic dogs are great at adapting to their owners behaviors. Dogs are not "man's best friend" for no reason - they do possess the ability to learn social cues. However, it seems that this has to be taught, whereas it seems that humans have a much greater innate predisposition to TOM/mentalizing. In conclusion, dogs' TOM seems to be a significantly more superficial ability than it is in humans. This leads me to suggest that tapping on the glass causes your Cocker Spaniel to either a) want to play oh-so-badly, or b) get (really) annoyed. They surely don't understand teasing with the full social capacity of a human.


What intelligence theory is being taught?

My impression is that the Cattell-Horn-Carroll model is the most established and well respected framework. I.e., the closest thing that we have to something like the "Big Five" in personality.
It incorporates the importance of g, which is arguably one of the most fundamental ideas in intelligence research.
But it also focuses quite a bit on the distinction between fluid and crystalised intelligence. It is a very developed taxonomy based on a lot of theoretical and empirical work.
Sternberg's model of practical intelligence and Gardner's model of multiple intelligences often seem to get mentioned in entry-level textbooks but I don't think they enjoy mainstream support in the intelligence community.


By learning to read and write upside down, what did I do to myself?

Negative Transfer

A common scientific term to describe what you are talking about is called negative transfer. I.e., where learning one skill actually results in lower performance on another skill. This is contrasted with positive transfer, when learning one skill facilitates performance on another skill. In general (although I don't have refs on hands) positive transfer is generally a greater effect than negative transfer. Negative transfer tends to be localised to particular aspects of the task (e.g., b's and d's).

For a extended encyclopedia entry see Perkins and Salomon's (1992) article on transfer of learning.

Research on Mirror Reading and Writing

There's even research specifically on reading and writing upside down and back to front (e.g., see google scholarfor 'mirror writing' and 'mirror reading'). I haven't read much of this literature.

To take but one article, Gottfried, Sancar, and Chatterjee (2003) discuss acquired mirror writing.

They note, perhaps relevant to your question, that:

  Young children, developmental dyslexics, and some healthy left-handed
  adults may produce mirror text.

I assume that in the above cases (as opposed to your case where it is acquired with deliberate practice), writing in reverse is involuntary, in which case I suppose you could describe writing a few letters back to front involuntarily as representing a symptom shared with some developmental dyslexics.

As an interesting historical aside, they note that

  Perhaps the most celebrated mirror writer, Leonardo da Vinci,
  generated over 5000 notebook pages in reverse.

So, you're in good company.

References

Gottfried, J., Sancar, F., and Chatterjee, A. (2003). Acquired mirror
writing and reading: evidence for reflected graphemic representations.
Neuropsychologia, 41(1):96-107. FREE PDF
Perkins, D. and Salomon, G. (1992). Transfer of learning. International
encyclopedia of education. FREE LINK


Does the Dunning-Kruger effect still work the same if the incompetent person is aware of this effect?

One critique of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that it is just regression to the mean. I.e., there is an imperfect correlation between perceived an actual ability. A consequence of this is that people low in ability will overestimate and people high in ability will underestimate. Of course, in some domains, we also see a leniency bias whereby people in general have an inflated sense of their ability. For a discussion of these interpretations see this post by Tal Yarkoni.

But in general, there are ways of increasing the correlation between perceived an actual ability. The basic principle is to provide people with feedback on their performance that is accurate. And presumably, it would help to persuade people that it is trustworthy.