"Nested Neurons": Are they biologically plausible?

Disregarding the feasibility of neurons within neurons in silico, the answer to

  Is there any evidence for neurons existing within other neurons in humans or other organisms?

from a practical, biological point of view is no.

The literature point-of-view
The strongest argument against the neuron embedded (I'll deliberately not say "nested" as it has a computational and statistical taste to it) in another neuron is: I've never heard of it. I could cite every single neuro textbook I have not mentioning the phenomenon, but I'll wager that doesn't make too much sense, hence this unreferenced argument.

The physiological view
Neurons need a membrane potential to operate, e.g., to fire action potentials, or change their membrane in a graded manner. That membrane potential is, with perhaps an exception or two, always negative. That is, inside negative, outside neutral. A neuron within a neuron would provide inhospitable living conditions for the former. The latter wouldn't be too happy either. The former will not be able to build up the normal gradient of high Na+ outside the cell, and a high K+ inside, as the enveloping neuron would try to do exactly that same thing. The inner cell would thus build up a gradient (push Na+ out) and the enveloping cell would again transport the Na+ out. For K+ the reverse would happen (see Na+,K+-ATPase for background). In short, the inner cell would not be able to build up a membrane gradient, while the outer cell would have to deal with a pesky parasite messing up its ionic homeostasis. The inner cell would die, as many processes vital to the cell need a gradient (ion transport of nutrients along the membrane, disposal of garbage) and the outer cell would then finally be a happy neuron, barred the debris in its insides.

The teleological view
Physically embedded neurons don't make sense. Simply, because neurons exist, basically, to convey information from one neuron to the next. The textbook example of a neuron (Fig. 1) has an input part (the dendritic region), a space-traversing part to cover distance (the axon) and an output part (the axon terminal). Any processing occurring within the neuron is done primarily by logic operators such as summation, subtraction and integration (through the dendritic tree collecting information) and gain control (inhibitory or excitatory influences in dendritic region, cell body or axonal part). But in the end, a neuron is designed to get information from A to B. Therefore, a neuron within a neuron doesn't make sense from a neurophysiological vantage point.

Fig. 1. Textbook example of a motor neuron. The neuron receives information from higher motor areas in the dendritic region and stimulates the muscle using action potentials. Rate code is used to regulate the strength of muscle contraction. source: Obes DVR Lists.

Reference
- Purves et al. (eds.) Neuroscience, 2nd ed. Sunderland (MA): Sinauer Associates (2001). The Ionic Basis of Action Potentials


Why do people bite their nails even when they do not want to?

Nail-biting is considered a parafunctional habit. A parafunctional habit is the habitual exercise of a body part in a way that isn't the way that that part was intended to be used. Other common parafunctional habits include bruxism (grinding of teeth), hair-pulling, and picking at skin.

Nobody knows what causes these habits. Possible physical or psychological causes may include emotions (aggression, anxiety, stress, tension), hyperactivity, complications from other disorders (such as obsessive-compulsive disorder), or as a coping or focus mechanism, similar to how babies and young children find it soothing to suck on their thumbs.


Open source software for running Internet psychological experiments that collect reaction time data

For an open source JavaScript/HTML/CSS solution, check out jsPsych: http://www.jspsych.org. It  can be used for reaction time measurement and interactive designs. An article describing the library was recently published in Behavior Research Methods.

A subsequent article investigated the properties of reaction time distributions collected with JavaScript compared to those collected with MATLAB and Psychtoolbox. The main result is that JavaScript was 10-40ms slower, but had equivalent variance across different experimental conditions and equal sensitivity to the experimental manipulation of set size in a visual search task.

There are several good answers to this related question about the validity and accuracy of response time measurements online. Many of those answers discuss findings that are relevant to JavaScript libraries like jsPsych.

de Leeuw, J. R. (2015). jsPsych: A JavaScript library for creating behavioral experiments in a Web browser. Behavior Research Methods, 47(1), 1-12.

de Leeuw, J. R., & Motz, B. A. (2015). Psychophysics in a Web browser? Comparing response times collected with JavaScript and Psychophysics Toolbox in a visual search task. Behavior Research Methods, advance online publication.


How does glial cell activity influence fMRI, EEG signals?

I'm only going to attempt to answer a small part of your question: how does glial activation affect the blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) response measured by fMRI?

Schulz et al. (2012) were able to investigate the role of glial signaling on fMRI activity by simultaneously measuring neuronal responses with invasive optical imaging and fMRI. They found that glial activation prolonged the BOLD response, as shown in this figure:

Here's how they interpret this result:

  Although these glial responses did not initiate vessel dilations, they were associated with prolonged BOLD signals, suggesting a possible contribution to persistent vascular responses.

In other words: they hypothesize that the activity of the glial cells prolongs the dilation of the blood vessels, which is detected as a prolonged BOLD response.


If you look more into the history of the creators of the Myer's Briggs, you will notice that it is loosely based off Jungian archetypes. It was not created with 16 types initially. Actually, the Jungian theory is only in a few scales (I-E, S-N, T-F), and one of the criticisms of this test is that the theoretical basis really was not preserved.

The combinations you have discussed might not be available, because statistically, it would not have a lot of strength. I would worry about intercorrelated scales, because there is some evidence out there that they are currently, and that does not provide a lot of statistical strength for an actual assessment.

You could further investigate the manual and gain more insight through some of these readings:

Myers, I. Briggs. (2003). MBTI manual: a guide to the development and use of    the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. 3rd ed. Mountain View, Calif.: CPP.

Capraro, R. M, & Capraro, M. M. (2002). Myers-Briggs Type Indicator score   reliability across: Studies a meta-analytic reliability generalization  study. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 62, 590-602. doi:     10.1177/0013164402062004004

Pulver, C. A., & Kelly, K. R. (2008). Incremental validity of the Myers-Briggs type indicator in predicting academic major selection of undecided university students. Journal of Career Assessment, 16(4), 441-455. doi: 10.1177/1069072708318902


After a quick google search I (surprisingly) found that it already has an application: the No More Woof headset.

I believe the most important part is that you have a headset that fits and does not move when a dog walks or turns his head. Then it does not matter that much where and how the electrodes are oriented. The only thing you need to do is map the locations of the available electrodes to correct brain-regions of a dog. For human studies there are many different layouts of EEG caps (FieldTrip), which is fine, because they have such a clear mapping to brain areas.

How a dog's brain looks like and what frequencies can be expected I do not know, however. Perhaps you can follow up on the "No More Woof" to see what references they used to base their approach on.


Does risk of developing depression continue to increase after age 60?

In addition to the articles that @Seanny provided in the comments, I think this study addresses your question pretty well. A couple of idiosyncrasies about the sample: from rural Germany, primary care attenders, 75 and over (Weyerer et al., 2008).

Results are somewhat mixed: univariate analysis shows a positive relationship between age and depression (accounting for sex), while adjusting for all possible confounding variables make the effect not statistically significant (though still positive).

What does this mean? Yes, there is a positive relationship between age and depression. However, the relationship may not be distinct from other aspects of old age (mobility impairment, visual impairment, etc.) that increase in prevalence as age increases.

References

Weyerer, S., Eifflaender-Gorfer, S., Köhler, L., Jessen, F., Maier, W., Fuchs, A., … Bickel, H. (2008). Prevalence and risk factors for depression in non-demented primary care attenders aged 75 years and older. Journal of Affective Disorders, 111(2–3), 153–163. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2008.02.008


Why does human mind tend to understand everything in terms of duality or binary states rather than continuum of states?

There are many reasons why people tend to understand things in dualistic ways, but I'll mention two:

In the realm of inference (e.g., judging what is true, forming predictions), having mature schema for each end of a spectrum (e.g., one for introverts and one for extroverts) allows you to infer what positions between the two extremes might look like with adequate levels of accuracy. So, if you have developed schema for the ends of the extroversion spectrum, you can infer what a moderately extroverted person would be like without actually needing to store a third schema for a moderately extroverted person in memory. In other words, a dualistic understanding allows you to form schema for points between the extremes on the fly when you need it (sometimes called interpolation). It isn't a system that's free of the risk of error, but its easy to see how it is extremely efficient from a computational perspective in a world where agents don't need perfect mental models.

In the realm of decision-making, its important to consider the nature of what a decision actually is. While information and judgments might rest on spectra (e.g., the degree of attraction felt for a dating partner, strength of a preference for a political candidate) the actual decisions that are informed by these judgments are often discrete. For example, you can't "kinda" marry or "kinda" vote for someone. You either choose him/her or you don't. You can only express one behavior at a time. What this means is that information and judgments which fall on spectra often need to be converted into yes/no decisions. For example, when choosing which of five schools to attend for college, you're actually trying to convert a plethora of continuous information (e.g., benefits and costs of each school) into five yes/no values (specifically, one "yes" and four "nos").

This is such a ubiquitous phenomenon in decision-making that I don't think its surprising that people naturally tend to use binary language to speak about things which exist on continua. That said, its important to point out that people don't always reduce topics they care about to binary categories. In many cases, people will share their ambiguity or ambivalence with trusted friends when they are having a hard time converting continuous information into discrete decisions. Pay attention the next time a friend opens up about something difficult and you'll notice that their language often demonstrates nuance and awareness of grey areas.

The paper cited below is an excellent discussion of the relationship between continuous information and discrete judgments and the reference section is packed full of papers that go into much more detail than I'm able to accomplish here.

Luan, S., Schooler, L. J., & Gigerenzer, G. (2014). From perception to preference and on to inference: An approach–avoidance analysis of thresholds. Psychological Review, 121(3), 501. (link to PDF)


What is the name of a cognitive bias by which existing facts are tailored to fit a personal hypothesis?

"I think you are referring to confirmation bias" (from wikipedia)

  Confirmation bias, also called myside bias, is the tendency to search
  for, interpret, or prioritize information in a way that confirms one's
  beliefs or hypotheses. It is a type of cognitive bias and a
  systematic error of inductive reasoning. People display this bias when
  they gather or remember information selectively, or when they
  interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally
  charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. People also tend to
  interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position.


What is meant by "serotonergic" in "serotonergic psychedelics"

Short answer
It's messy.
Background
The classical psychedelics (mescaline, DMT etc.) are derived from plants (peyote, ayahuasca) and have a long history of use by shamans and originally often mainly served religious purposes, before being exploited by the New World peoples for recreational (and occasionally scientific) purposes. LSD is also considered to be classic yet it is a synthetic derivative, but readily made from lysergic acid derivatives extracted from the mold Claviceps purpurea. These classic psychedelics are indeed all, primarily, 5HT2A agonists.
Having sad that, 'psychedelic' is a classical term meaning 'mind opening', and was first coined back in the 1950's. It's a broad, ill-defined term often associated with illicit drugs, hippies and alternative rock. The term serotinergic drug is more specific, while the term '5HT2A agonist' is yet even more specific. The former also includes MDMA, which is imo mind-opening, yet (generally) not hallucinogenic. The latter includes those drugs that produce profound hallucinations, i.e., the classic psychedelics.
This is the reason I tend to move away from 'psychedelic' as often soft drugs like THC are also termed 'psychedelic'. Hallucinogenics are a more specific class of drugs and is the one I think you are referring to, i.e., those compounds producing hallucinations, i.e., sensations that are not there (a hallucination being 'a perception in the absence of external stimulus that has qualities of real perceptions').
Now what about non-serotinergic hallucinogens? Well, there are particularly potent hallucinogens that are primarily not serotinergic, but glutaminergic, particularly the dissociative anesthetics. These include PCP and ketamine that are hallucinogenic as they

can produce visual and auditory distortions and a sense of floating and dissociation (feeling detached from reality)

However, here again it comes down to a matter of definition; a 'true' hallucination is a percept in the absence of a stimulus; a distortion is more akin to an illusion, namely

an instance of a wrong or misinterpreted perception of a sensory experience

In addition, most and perhaps all hallucinogens are 'dirty' drugs, in that they affect multiple neurotransmitter systems and therefore have broad effects. MDMA for instance is psychedelic because of its 5HT effects but definitely has stimulant, dopaminergic properties too (having the methamphetamine backbone this isn't surprising of course).
In all, not only is the scientific terminology messy, also the science behind it is messy, as 5HT2A agonists may still have effects on other neurotransmitter systems too. This can explain why every 5HT2A drug has slightly, or even grossly different actions than structurally related ones.


What is the evolutionary advantage of being embarrassed?

Marks and Nesse investigated evolutionary causes of anxiety disorders and reported about embarrassment in particular:

  Social threats evoke responses that promote group acceptance, for
  example, submission to dominants and to norms of dress, mien, odor,
  speech, customs, beliefs. This prevents dangerous extrusion from the
  group. Mild shyness and embarrassment can promote acceptance. If
  shyness and embarrassment are excessive, however, then fitness
  suffers, as in several anxiety disorders: pervasive shyness in
  avoidant personality disorder; gaze aversion and fear of scrutiny, of
  shaking, and of blushing in social  252 I. M. Marks and R. M. Nesse
  phobia; fear of excreting near others in sphincteric phobias (Marks
  1987, pp. 362-371); terror of looking or smelling abnormal in
  dysmorphopho- bia; fear of behaving antisocially in
  obsessive-compulsive disorder. Impulses to behave in ways that would
  cause social rejection may arouse general anxiety without the subject
  being aware of those punishable impulses, thus helping to conceal them
  from others (Nesse 1990). We do not emphasize a distinction between
  fear of specific dangers and anxiety aroused by nonspecific dangers or
  unconscious impulses, because in all cases the state, whether anxiety
  or fear, is aroused by a cue that indicates a threat to reproductive
  resources.

Nesse, Randolph M. "Fear and fitness: An evolutionary analysis of anxiety disorders." Ethology and sociobiology 15.5-6 (1994): 247-261. https://doi.org/10.1016/0162-3095(94)90002-7


Does consumption of amino acid supplements improve human executive function and self-regulation in ADHD cases?

There's a recent negative study: Bergwerff et al. (2016) "No Tryptophan, Tyrosine and Phenylalanine Abnormalities in Children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder":

  This study is the first to explore AAA metabolism in children with ADHD using a well-defined and relatively large sample. We found that AAA deficiencies are not related to ADHD. The results do not support treatment with AAA supplements in children with ADHD.

Also reviews prior work on defficiency:

  Thus far, five case-control studies have been published on AAA blood concentrations in individuals with ADHD [21–25]. Three studies, of which two describing the same sample [21, 22], reported lower plasma concentrations of tryptophan, tyrosine and phenylalanine in ADHD [21–23]. The other two studies, however, showed increased concentrations of free tryptophan in ADHD [24] and a trend towards increased serum concentrations of tryptophan in children with ADHD [25]. All five studies are limited by non-standardized assessments of ADHD and small sample sizes (ranging from N = 12 to N = 48), and therefore further research into the availability of AAAs in ADHD is warranted. [thus their own study.]

After their negative finding Bergwerff et al. do mention however that:

  We found a relatively high odds ratio of 2.2 for being diagnosed with ADHD when having low phenylalanine concentrations, but this result just escaped conventional levels of significance. Therefore, our study does not definitively rule out that low phenylalanine concentrations are present in (a subgroup of) children with ADHD. For instance, it might be that only children with severe deficiencies in executive functioning have decreased phenylalanine concentrations, as an altered dopamine functioning in the prefrontal cortex and the striatum is thought to impair executive functions, including sustained attention and interference control in ADHD [8, 67]

And they also reviewed treatments with supplementation:

  The hypothesis that AAA concentrations are related to ADHD symptoms is the basis for a number of depletion and supplementation studies. Depletion of dietary tryptophan was found to impair sustained attention in adults with ADHD [30], and to weaken behavioural inhibition in hostile children with ADHD [31]. Supplementation with tryptophan, on the other hand, resulted in a decrease of ADHD symptoms in children with ADHD [32]. Tyrosine supplementation decreased ADHD symptoms in adults with ADHD [33], but showed no effects on behavioural functioning in children with ADHD [32]. Phenylalanine supplementation in adults with ADHD caused a decrease of restlessness and an increase on the ability to concentrate at trend level [34], but in children no effects were reported for phenylalanine supplementation on ADHD symptoms [35]. However, also these depletion and supplementation studies are limited by non-standardized assessments of ADHD and small sample sizes (ranging from N = 10 to N = 20), as well as the lack of control groups, hampering conclusions regarding the relation between AAAs and ADHD. Therefore, there is a need of further research to support the hypothesis that AAA concentrations may contribute to the expression of ADHD symptoms.

So evidence for AAA supplementation effectiveness for treating ADHD is insofar of low quality; and there are contradictory findings (to put it mildly) on the actual AAA deficiencies in ADHD.

And regarding L-theanine, there's a study, Lyon et al. (2011) on sleep quality in ADHD. Which is probably the way they "salvaged" not observing much else in terms of improvements. The (2006) registration info for that trial had loftier goals to "examine the effects of L-theanine (an amino acid found in green tea) on the behavior, cognitive performance and sleep quality of boys with ADHD."

I tried to find a more systematic (or even meta-analytic) review of supplements in ADHD, but not much with that. It looks like most research on ADHD and diet is on restrictions (i.e. what not to eat), and even that area is full of controversy.


There is a lot of information on 'dream recall' related to research on lucid dreaming. For some quick information, I would take a look at Wikibook's page on Lucid Dreaming/Dream Recall.

I have tried some of these techniques, and I found that what has worked for me in the past was

trying to write down everything I can as soon as I wake up
lying in bed, not moving, and just letting my mind wander over what I could remember (this usually helps other memories about the dream pop up)
doing this consistently every day.

The last one is the most important, you really notice that if you are consistent you start remembering more and more when you wake up. I highly recommend the book "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming" by Howard Rheingold and Stephen LaBerge. It was the required reading for a Psychology of Dreams class I took and is based on a lot of cool research.


What coding scheme does NEF use? Rate or phase?

The NEF has no formal stance on whether rate information or phase information is of importance. All it cares about is spikes.

As proof, consider the derivation of the decoders, which is the core of the NEF.

The Decoders, $d$ are a vector of synaptic weights applied to the activities of neurons (one decoding weight per neuron) to approximate a given function $f(x(t))$. They can be thought of as the axons of a neuron.

Given the spiking neurons activities in the matrix $A$ (rows are neurons, columns are evaluation points), to an input $x$, this relation can be explained as:

$$A \cdot d = f(x(t))$$

Given an equation with one unknown, where a matrix $A$ is combined with a vector $d$ to get another vector $f(x(t))$, this can be solved using linear algebra to find $d$.

Note how there is no mention of rate or phase in this derivation. Admittedly, in the Nengo neural simulator, rate neurons can be used and functions that take phase into account can be calculated, but these design choices are up to the modeller and are not forced by the NEF itself.


How fast can stimuli be administered for evoked potentials?

For auditory brain stem responses (ABRs) the click rate can be really high, as the auditory system is exceptionally fast, in the order of tens of stimuli per second (e.g., Rodriguez et al (2010. This will still yield a good ABR. At around 40 ms, the transient ABR shifts toward a steady state response, in which peaks of the previous ABR start to overlap with the following (Korczak et al., 2010).

The visual system, however, is a lot more sluggisch and needs more time to recover from prior stimulation. For example, VEPs are generally recorded at a few stimuli per second. The transition from a transient response to a steady state response occurs at around 6 - 10 Hz (Fishman et al (2001).

References
- Fishman et al., Electrophysiologic Testing, 2nd ed. FAAO
- Korczak et al., J Am Acad Audiol (2012); 23: 146–70
- Rodriguez et al., Brazil J Otorhinol (2010); 76(1): 96-101


"Science" refers to a methodology for obtaining knowledge, and often to the knowledge itself as well.  Science is often confused with another term "technology", that refers to the application of such knowledge for practical uses.  Some people might incorrectly refer to "computers" and "cars" as examples of "science", when in fact they are examples of "technology".

Psychology is similarly divided.  The science part is called "research psychology", or just "psychology".  The technology part is called "applied psychology", that includes psychotherapy, and I think that's what this question is really about.

Clinical psychology is not technically a science, but an applied science, or in other words, a technology.  If you are wondering how science-based different schools of psychotherapy are, then check out this related question: Which schools of psychotherapy are most credible to a hard scientist?.  If you've seen a psychoanalyst recently for example, and you think it's kinda hoaky, well then, you're probably right - psychoanalysis is not generally considered to be science-based, and is comparable to astrology (pseudoscience) in that sense.

On the other hand, other schools of psychotherapy have a more scientific basis: Cognitive-behavioural therapy has been shown to be efficacious (above placebo) for a wide variety of common disorders, and behavioural therapy bases all its techniques directly on scientific findings.


How can we determine an appropriate rate of decay for our scoring algorithms?

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

The system calculated score based on this formula:

Ra_Old = Ra_New + K(Sa-Ea)

The sytem had various category of players such as:

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

and varying decay rates based on certain player properties:

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

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

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


What are the psychological mechanisms behind arrogance?

Clinically, arrogance is often associated with narcissistic personality disorder.

Narcissistic personality disorder is one of a group of conditions called dramatic personality disorders. People with these disorders have intense, unstable emotions, and a distorted self-image. Narcissistic personality disorder is further characterized by an abnormal love of self, an exaggerated sense of superiority and importance, and a preoccupation with success and power. However, these attitudes and behaviors do not reflect true self-confidence. Instead, the attitudes conceal a deep sense of insecurity and a fragile self-esteem. People with this personality disorder also tend to set unrealistic goals.

DSM-IV-TR diagnostic criteria include (reprinted here):

Criteria for narcissistic personality disorder to be diagnosed include:

Having an exaggerated sense of self-importance
Being preoccupied with fantasies about success, power or beauty
Believing that you are special and can associate only with equally special people
Requiring constant admiration
Having a sense of entitlement
Taking advantage of others
Having an inability to recognize needs and feelings of others
Being envious of others
Behaving in an arrogant or haughty manner

From a scientific standpoint, these characteristics can be difficult to pin down, and clinically, NPD is an "Axis II" diagnosis, which means that most insurance (in the United States) won't cover treatment of the disorder in and of itself.
Consequently, the push to discovering its underlying mechanisms may be less strong, but from theory, they are largely believed to be based on environment.
Proponents of the diagnosis are attempting to adjust the diagnostic criteria a bit to make it more objective for the upcoming DSM-V release.


What would make parents lose their instinct to protect their own children?

Sounds like you have had a distressing encounter with "learned helplessness" as madsun also described. Learned helplessness is a well-studied psychological phenomenon and reaction that explains the terrible situation that you have described. It is situational and explains the "fatalism" that is so difficult to understand. The simplest explanation I can find seems to be

  a phenomenon observed in both humans and other animals when they have been conditioned to expect pain, suffering, or discomfort without a way to escape it (Ackerman blog, 2019)

Chris describes the different types of learned helplessness in an another question

How does one escape learned helplessness?

References:

Learned Helplessness: Seligman’s Theory of Depression (+ Cure). PositivePsychology.com blog (2018, March 24).


Working on one problem opposed to working on mutliple problems when programming

Interesting queston I am a psychology student who is learning how to code as well. I am often thinking about what are the best strategies to learn. Below I am referencing a research paper that showed that a too rigid mindset impairs performance in general problem solving abilities.

ErEl, H., & Meiran, N. (2017). A drop in performance on a fluid intelligence test due to instructed-rule mindset. Psychological Research, 81(5), 901–909. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-016-0796-8

I am found something similar in my attempts to learn. Sometimes it is useful to take a break to relax your mindset, as it seems that the mind inhibits other solutions, when you are focused on something to exclusively.


Provable ROI for call center rest periods?

This is the paper you would want to read on this topic. The paper empirically compares four modes of managing interruptions. It is a great (and long) read so I'll try to summarize the bit for you:

There are thus four modes of managing interruptions:

Immediate interruptions. There is no management whatsoever. As soon there is a distracting stimulus/task, it has to be attended to. In your case, you could think of being in a conversation with one costumer and immediately being switched to another. You can already imagine this is not a very good one.
Negotiated interruptions. You can decide all by yourself whether and when to attend to the interruptions. You could choose to finish a difficult part of one task and only attend to the interrupting task when that is done.
Mediated interruptions. Some other metric decides when an interruption is deemed appropriate. A well known metric is workload, as measured by pupil dilation. To bigger you pupil is, the higher workload is. Interrupting would be best in low workload situations (Salvucci and Bogunovic,2010)). What you suggested, the cooldown time, is also a mediated system.
Planned interruptions. Interruptions only come at moments you have planned. Though this may seem nice, in many situations, such as yours, this is not possible. Even if you could plan the moments, in dynamic environments you cannot predict the best moments. You could have an incredible high workload on one day, and have nothing to do on another.

So which is best?

The results show that the best interruption management systems are a combination of negotiated and mediated management (believe me on this one, I do not want to discuss 20 pages of results here haha). Mediated management systems will determine the best moments of interruptions which is incredibly useful. However, if workload is very high for a longer period of time, the callers may be on hold for too long.

The negotiated management of interruptions allows people to work as hard as they can/want. Some people perform better under pressure than others and may choose to wait for a shorter period of time. The downside, however, is the fact that people are bad at this. Some people stress themselves out and never wait (Asking for reference here) and some people wait to long and may get distracted by other things (Katidioti et al.,2014).

A combination would thus be best. Mediate the interruptions, but allow the employees to continue working when they want to. In you case, you could have a short mandatory pause duration and a suggested longer pause duration (or conversely, an maximum pause duration). You could then determine the duration of the pause based on the length of the last call(s) for instance.

I hope this answers your question and if you have any questions just let me know.

EDIT: The literature I described above mainly focuses on multitasking, while your question is about sequential tasking. Nevertheless I do believe the above can be generalized to your problem. The interruptions are now in fact the breaks.

A final note, if people purposefully inflate there call time, this may be an indicator that workload is indeed too high. Talk with the people and ask what they think of the situation and what they think may be a good solution. When changing an interface/task/process, people accept the changes much more quickly if they are involved in the process (Asking for reference).

References:

Daniel C. McFarlane (2002): Comparison of Four Primary Methods for Coordinating the Interruption of People in Human–Computer Interaction

Salvucci and Bogunovic (2012): Multitasking and Monotasking: The Effects of
Mental Workload on Deferred Task Interruptions

Katidioti and Taatgen (2014): CHOICE IN MULTITASKING: How delays in the primary task turn a rational into an irrational multitasker


Correlation between anxiety/calmness and innovation development?

"Mr. Scott? We need more POWER!" is the common call made to engineering from the bridge of the fictional Starship Enterprise. It seems common in science fiction for engineers to flourish under high amounts of pressure and overcome all odds. However this does not reflect reality.

For this answer I think it best to turn to Individual Psychology as the creative process is more about a person's preference and comfort than a series of predefined conditions or mental states. Creativity flourishes in certain environments. High gain/high anxiety reward based systems do not encourage creativity. Creative people can be taught to cope with the existence of a reward and overcome the pressure. Extrinsic motivation fosters competition and dependence on rewards which leads to performance anxiety. Intrinsic motivation leads to performance for one's own betterment at ones own pace and while it produces less results.

Depression, Bipolar and Schizophrenia are thought to be caused by stress and anxiety acting on a biological vulnerability. So creativity may be a response and outlet to the anxiety the illness or life causes for these individuals.

By themselves, artistic and creative people tend to experience higher anxiety and depression. However there are no conclusive causal relationships between depression and creativity. There have been stronger relationships between more serious mental illness like schizo typical and bipolar.

  A study looking at 300,000 persons with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or unipolar depression, and their relatives, found overrepresentation in creative professions for those with bipolar disorder as well as for undiagnosed siblings of those with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

-Creativity and mental disorder: family study of 300,000 people with severe mental disorder


Is a Hopfield network with a continuous activation variable and a discrete time variable possible?

After doing some additional research, I think the answer is yes. It just means using a fixed timestep for the continuous-time activation equation (as described here). Since this is a differential equation, implementing it in software requires implementing a numerical integration method. I recommend the Exponential Euler Method as a starting point, because it's relatively simple and it's designed for differential equations of the sort that's used for the continuous Hopfield network.


Is there an innate human bias against admitting you are wrong or uncertain?

It's surely a combination of self-serving bias and avoiding cognitive dissonance. I'm not sure it there's a more specific name for it that has wide acceptance. It's been variously called "certainty bias", "feeling of certainty", "illusion of certainty" etc.


What is the name of the phenomenon whereby someone steps-up and others follow?

Your example of no student willing to object until one objects is analagous to Asch's conformity experiments. To quote the Wikipedia article:

  In a control group, with no pressure to conform to an erroneous view,
  only one participant out of 35 ever gave an incorrect answer. Solomon
  Asch hypothesized that the majority of participants would not conform
  to something obviously wrong; however, when surrounded by individuals
  all voicing an incorrect answer, participants provided incorrect
  responses on a high proportion of the questions (32%). Seventy-five
  percent of the participants gave an incorrect answer to at least one
  question.
  ...

  The unanimity of the confederates has also been varied. When the
  confederates are not unanimous in their judgment, even if only one
  confederate voices a different opinion, participants are much more
  likely to resist the urge to conform (only 5–10% conform) than when
  the confederates all agree.


How much power, in watts, does the brain use?

20 Watts.

Watson mentioned this in 2011: "The human brain only requires 20
watts of power to operate ... Watson? About 20,000 watts."  An interview with John Kelly (an IBM senior vice president and director of IBM Research) also puts the brain at "about 20 watts" (but puts the machine at 85 kW; the inconsistency doesn't matter for this question).
Popular Science also says 20 watts in an article explaining how simulating it in 2009 technology would take tens of megawatts.
Glenn Elert's high school students cite a collection of resources concluding 20W, as 20% of a 100W full-body power consumption.  That's the source cited on Wikipedia.
The 20W figure is cited like common knowledge from "several different sources" here, but those sources aren't named.


Refinements of Rescorla-Wagner model of classical conditioning

I don't think anyone has ever bothered (though Ralph Miller might disagree), since many of the 'failures' are outside of the model's purview. The model expresses as simply as possible the profound insight that we learn most when our expectations are not met. Many features of learning won't conform to this general principle (spontaneous recovery) but it doesn't make it wrong. Other features of learning emerge when the model is applied in layers or a hierarchy, rather than as a single unit (e.g., rapid reacquisition). Hence there is little pressure to adapt the model, although many adaptions have been proposed to account for one effect or another (e.g., Van Hamme &  Wasserman, 1994; Dickinson & Burke, 1996 etc). However these have usually limited it's generalisability due to overfitting.


I believe that there is a fundamental flaw in your scenario in that, pilots are not promoted to being a pilot from being something else. Pilots take intensive training courses that may include simulation training and do include many hours of practice in an actual aeroplane, under supervision of a trained instructor.

To more generally answer your question:

  Can one learn not to panic?

Yes, using behavioural training techniques we can train ourselves, or be trained by others, to respond to situations or stimuli in a different way than is our instinctive reaction.

With the situation you noted about pilots, a trained pilot will have all of the knowledge of how to deal with a situation that they may encounter and will have practiced this knowledge in an applied setting (an actual plane) many times, making the training become the pilots first response to a dangerous situation (Exposure Therapy, and  Repetitive Learning are some ways of doing this).

A novel situation can also be trained for. In your scenario, I would suspect that their training would include an emergency checklist type of activity that would then be repeated over and over so that it is ingrained in their memory and behaviours and will also become the pilots first response to a novel dangerous situation.

How to learn not to panic is really all about training your brain to behave in a different way then its instincts tell it to, this may or may not mean that you totally remove the instinctive fear response.


Does putting something on a scale of left-to-right bias people in one direction?

Yes.  In fact, it has been demonstrated in experiments that you can get people to assert they believe the opposite of what they previously said if you can successfully frame the idea with its political polarity inverted.

I can't remember the experiments off the top of my head, but I think this podcast episode touches on it.  https://youarenotsosmart.com/2019/03/01/yanss-146-tribal-psychology-rebroadcast/

It has been established that people who hold ideologies, or just very strong political beliefs, are motivated by the perception of whether something is left or right.  Objective facts, even reproducibility, are less important.


Short answer
Over-thinking

Background
Unconscious recall of information can be more effective than conscious recall of that same information. Disruption of the activity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (by TMS) improved image-recall in healthy subjects (source: UC Santa Barbara). The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is associated with executive functions including working memory and selective attention (Lehner et al., 2016). The effect over paying too much attention in an attempt to remember something has been referred to as over-thinking.

Reference
- Lehner et al., Genomics, Circuits, and Pathways in Clinical Neuropsychiatry, 1st ed. Elsevier (2016)


There are some subtleties to this question which you may or may not realize. There are (at least) two similarly sounding questions, but they are actually quite different questions:

Does an individual's general cognitive abilities change throughout life?
Does the rank-order of a population's cognitive abilities change throughout life? In other words, if we test a population at one time and then again at another time, will those who scored highly on the first test also be the ones who score highly on the second test and vice versa?

The answer to the first is trivially yes. An individual's brain is more powerful and has learned more when they are 22, then when they are 4, say. There is also reduction in cognitive abilities when people become elderly.

The second question is more interesting. For this I would refer first to the paper:

Deary et al (2000). The stability of individual differences in mental ability from childhood to old age: Follow-up of the 1932 Scottish Mental Survey. See pdf here.

They conclude that

  The correlation between Moray House Test scores at age 11 and age 77 was 0.63, which adjusted to 0.73 when corrected for attenuation of ability range within the re-tested sample. This, the longest follow-up study of psychometric intelligence reported to date, shows that mental ability differences show substantial stability from childhood to late life.

So the rank-order of abilities within a population probably correlates >0.7 with its rank-order six and a half decades later (age 11 to age 77).

Another interesting study, which is new and I don't believe is published yet, is the following:

Grønkjær et al. Associations between education and age-related cognitive changes in a 41-year follow-up study

In this Danish longitudinal study, they have them first tested at mean age 20, then again 41 years later at mean age 61. They report finding:

  The mean change in BPP test scores was -2.94 (SD 5.60) and a retest correlation of 0.81 between the baseline and follow-up BPP scores was observed.

These correlations are not quite in the 0.9-1.0 range, and hence we're certainly not seeing perfect stability. On the other hand, I don't think I know any quantitatively measured psychological trait which shows a greater longitudinal stability (in terms of rank-ordering) than general cognitive ability.


I think there are many determinants of jealousy. The very basic one is evolutionary explanation. For example, jealousy was necessary for male to extend his genes. If he wasn't, the another male could "take over" his female partner.
Another (more interesting for me) explanation is psychoanalytic one. You can read more for example in Bowlby's books, but also more classic ones. As "more classic" I mean these works which talk about Oedipus complex or other phenomenon which influence our approach (e.g.projection) to other people in future.

1) Buss,Larsen,Westen,Semmelroth - Sex Differences in Jealousy: Evolution, Physiology, and Psychology

2) White, Gregory L.; Mullen, Paul E. (1989) Jealousy: Theory, research, and clinical strategies.

3) Pines, Aronson (2006), Antecedents, correlates, and consequences of sexual jealousy

4) Bowlby (1953) Some pathological processes set in train by early mother-child separation


Can reading a non-fiction book with great curiosity account to taking a break?

A lot depends on your definition of what constitutes 'a break'. Many are likely to argue a break involves relaxing, a 'fun' pastime, which in another question on this site has been discussed to be beneficial for the work environment in the case of social activities:

  ..., having fun at work was perceived to positively
  influence workplace relationships to a moderate-high degree,
  contribute to managing stress to a moderate degree, improved job
  satisfaction to moderate degree and was reported to have a little more
  than neutral, direct impact on workplace effectiveness. These outcomes
  must however be examined in the context of results, suggesting not
  only are different types of fun activities enjoyed more, but different
  types of activities are highly salient in relation to the particular
  organisational variable measured.

However, these results do not seem to generalize to your scenario, as you seem to be more interested in taking a break from ongoing work and potentially switching to other mentally demanding individual work.

Therefore I believe the following study on multitasking—the interleaving of several primary tasks—which are
executed one at a time) by Adler and Benbunan-Fich (2012) measures results more in line with what you are after.

  Our results show an inverted-U pattern for performance efficiency
  (productivity) and a decreasing line for performance effectiveness
  (accuracy).

There is thus an optimal amount of task switching which leads to the highest productivity. However, increased levels of multitasking lead to a significant loss in accuracy, indicating a trade-off between productivity and accuracy.

These results thus seem to confirm that in at least the context of the study switching to a different task can improve productivity, in line with increased effectiveness when taking 'a break'. To which degree (and if at all), however, will depend highly on the specific tasks and work environment. For example, a follow-up study by the same authors (Adler and Benbunan-Fich, 2015) shows that subjective task difficulty is a determining factor: easy tasks
benefit from multitasking by increasing stimulation, whereas hard
tasks decrease performance as the result of an overload in mental
workload.

Adler, R. F., & Benbunan-Fich, R. (2012). Juggling on a high wire: Multitasking effects on performance. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 70(2), 156-168.
Adler, R. F., & Benbunan-Fich, R. (2015). The effects of task difficulty and multitasking on performance. Interacting with Computers, 27(4), 430-439.


Is there a place where I can find inconsistent images?

The University of Adelaide has a lot of information concerning inconsistent images:

http://www.hss.adelaide.edu.au/philosophy/inconsistent-images/

There are also a few of those on this page:

http://www.hss.adelaide.edu.au/philosophy/inconsistent-images/galleries/#sl


Have humans always had problems with motivation and laziness?

The change that is relevant to your question is not that from a rural farming life to an urban office-working one, but the neolithic revolution.

In early prehistory and during the palaeolithic period, our ancestors lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers. They did nothing but hunt and gather food. When they were sated, they relaxed. Because they had no fridges, food could not be stored, so there was no purpose in "working" more than was necessary for the momentary satisfaction of hunger or repairing of tents and hunting gear.

"Laziness" can be seen as a result of the necessity of sustaining the ecosystem that the hunters were dependent upon:

  Hunting results in rapidly diminishing returns – it is a risky, arduous
  and time-consuming business. This is reflected in the fact that
  predatory animals tend to be spectacularly lazy. Lions, for example,
  sleep or doze for at least twenty hours a day, and spend another two
  hours growling and grooming. They hunt for only about two hours a day.
  Kalahari bushmen have similar been shown to hunt for only about six
  hours a week [sic!]. 'Laziness' is a way of life for the big predator. (Tudge, 1998, p. 33)

Then, about 10.000 years ago, the first humans settled down and began agriculture. From this moment onwards, each day was filled with hard labor.

  ... farming changes the rules of the game. Farming manipulates the
  environment with the express purpose of overcoming its natural
  restraints. The more you manipulate, the more food you can produce.
  The harder farmers work the more food they can produce. Laziness is
  emphatically not favoured. A hunter who works twice as hard as average
  may get twice as much food in the short term, but will soon come
  unstuck as his prey disappears. But the farmer who works ten times as
  hard as his neighbor will indeed produce ten times as much food – and
  in favourable circumstances can sustain this tenfold increase
  indefinitely. (Tudge, 1998, p. 33)

Motivation for paleolithic hunter-gatherers was simply the need to not go hungry. It was not something that you did not have. You either hunted or died. The very concept of motivation does not fit such a life, because action sprang directly from your basic needs. While those needs were satisfied, there was no need for action: "laziness, nomadism and sharing were all integral parts of the Aboriginal life-style" (Ward, 1988).

Hunter-gatherer life is the garden Eden that Adam was sent forth from: "thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread". Rowley-Conwy, in his aptly titled article "The laziness of the short-distance hunter" (1984), argues that for one Mesolithic community in western Denmark at least, "farming was not adopted until problems arose with the hunter-gatherer economy".

If you want to study how problems with motivation came about, you'll need to go look at the difference between nomadic hunter-gatherer and settled farmer life.

Evolutionary psychology assumes "that our minds and bodies are adapted for an ancestral environment", and "that we suffer the consequences of poor fit between our inherited natures and many of the constructed environments in organizational society" (Nicholson, 1997).

Geary and Bjorklund (2000) think that motivation depends on the type of ability that is necessary for performance:

  ... much of formal education is "unnatural" in that much of what
  children are taught involves tasks never encountered by our ancestors
  (Brown & Bjorklund, 1998; Geary, 1995). Although humans apparently
  have been using language for thousands of years, it is only in this
  century that the majority of people on the planet are literate. Geary
  (1995) referred to language and other evolved forms of cognition, such
  as those represented in Figure 1 [nonverbal behavior, language, facial
  processing, theory of mind, kin, in-group, out-group, social
  ideologies, flora, fauna, movement, representation, engineering], as
  biologically primary abilities, and skills that build upon these primary abilities but are principally cultural inventions, such as
  reading, as biologically secondary abilities. Biologically primary
  abilities are acquired universally and children typically have high
  motivation to perform tasks involving them. In contrast,
  biologically secondary abilities are culturally determined, and often
  tedious repetition and external motivation are necessary for their
  mastery. From this perspective, it is understandable that many
  children have difficulty with reading and higher mathematics.
  (emphasis added)

And from this perspective it is also understandable that most of us aren't very motivated to perform those of our daily chores that require biologically secondary abilities, and I would surmise that the motivation declines as we move towards abilities that build upon abilities that ... are more and more removed from our biologically primary concerns.

Sources:

Geary, D. C., & Bjorklund, D. F. (2000). Evolutionary developmental psychology. Child Development, 71, 57-65. doi:10.1111/1467-8624.00118
Nicholson, N. (1997). Evolutionary psychology: Toward a new view of human nature and organizational society. Human Relations, 50, 1053-1078. doi:10.1177/001872679705000901
Rowley-Conwy, P. (1984). The laziness of the short-distance hunter: The origins of agriculture in western Denmark. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 3, 300-324. doi:10.1016/0278-4165(84)90005-9
Tudge, C. (1998). Neanderthals, Bandits, and Farmers: How Agriculture Really Began. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Ward, R. (1988). Aboriginal communists. Labour History, 55, 1-8. http://www.jstor.org/stable/i27508887


Closure, an actual psychology term relating to filling in information?

The more common psychological and probably everyday use of the term closure refers to a desire  for information that may resolve an issue or situation (e.g., see closure psychology).

I think that the form of closure you describe comes from the Gestalt school of psychology. To quote the wikipedia article on Gestalt Psychology regarding Law of closure:

  The law of closure states that individuals perceive
  objects such as shapes, letters, pictures, etc., as being whole when
  they are not complete. Specifically, when parts of a whole picture are
  missing, our perception fills in the visual gap. Research has shown
  that the purpose of completing a regular figure that is not perceived
  through sensation is in order to increase the regularity of
  surrounding stimuli. For example, the figure depicting the law of
  closure portrays what we perceive to be a circle on the left side of
  the image and a square on the right side of the image. However, there
  are gaps missing from the shapes. If the law of closure did not exist,
  the image would depict an assortment of different lines with different
  lengths, rotations and curvatures, but with the law of closure, we
  perceptually combine the lines into whole shapes.

More generally, what you describe on is touched on by a number of psychological theories covering different phenomena. For example, there is filling-in describing the process by which visual perception is filled-in over the physiological blind spot and scomata.

Furthermore, most models of cognition would construe perception as the interaction of external stimuli, our cognitive architecture, and existing representations. For example, if you look at job satisfaction data, responses are often as much a function of the individual as they are of the work environment. Or to take another example, models of learning suggest that whether a stimuli is perceived as a threat depends on our prior experience with the stimuli.

It seems that the book that you are reading is extending the perceptual idea of closure to incorporate a broader cognitive component.


How else can we eliminate wrong underlying beliefs, when even science fails?

Our memory act as a very powerful database, being able to store a huge load of data. Thing is, that "instinctive data" you learned someday is still there. It might get erased eventually, but as it is "fetched" and used, it gets stronger.

Memory retrieval act akin to a computational weighted-graph navigation, where once you need to remember something, you start navigating in your memories. Memories with greater "weight" or "importance" may be fetched earlier and given a stronger "stamp", i.e., they are more relevant in a given context.

CONSTANTINI, WIKIPEDIA *sigh*:

  Learning and memory are direct consequences of attentional processing: the more attention is directed or devoted toward something, the more likely it is that it will be later learned and remembered.

SURESH, PAVAN KUMAR, AISHWARYA:

  [page 2, §2] Another example which everyone can associate or relate to is remembering an almost forgotten event after a very long time. It so happens that, when we come across a bite of a cookie after decades or smell of a perfume after a long time, we take time to recall what it is about and our association with it.

  ...

  [page 3, §3] [In a face querying context] In the Memory Repeat, the brain repeats the same querying activity until it deduces a relationship between the second image and the fifth image. Once a relationship is establishes, corresponding activities that are chained/outlined to form a bountiful array of events.

  Based upon the data present at the back of the brain, relevant output can be expected. The output might be an association of that image with certain events. It can either be the first time they met or the assignment that any
  had done together or a project/ paper that they had worked upon or classes they had attended, etc.
  It should, however be noted that not all images can yield a positive result. Some associativity (read: data) may have gotten erased as the passage of time.

  A positive result is named as Hit Rate and False Alarm Rate. Hit rate is the positive outcome of a query while False Alarm Rate is the irrelevant or negative outcome of the querying. False alarm rate is the output when an image (or a face) is identical to another image.

If the data is fetched, but never used, it will eventually wear off from the results, but it will only disappear from your brain upon physical memory removal, which takes time.


What explains the characteristics of the receptive fields of simple cells in V1?

The retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) and the neurons in the upstream lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) both have relatively simple receptive fields that are organized in in a center-surround fashion (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Center-surround receptive field in a retinal ganglion cell. source: Pinterest

In the primary visual cortex, the simple cells receive inputs from multiple LGN neurons (Fig. 2). By combining these inputs and aligning them with multiple ON-centers and OFF-surrounds in series (or vice versa) orientation-selectivity is accomplished in V1. The video you linked corresponds to Fig. 2C:

Multiple ON-centers are linearly aligned and
The ON-centers are sandwiched between linear arrays of OFF-surrounds.

This means that

The simple cell will respond maximally when the ON-centers are illuminated and the OFF-surrounds are not (first minute video clip);
The cell will not respond when the OFF surrounds are illuminated (1:20 point in clip), regardless whether the ON-centers are illuminated or not; the stimulation of the entire ON-center and OFF-center area results in zero activity (2:30 in clip).
A stimulus oriented obliquely to the RF also results in zero-activity, because the ON and OFF parts are both stimulated (1:50).

Fig. 2. Diagrams of simple cell receptive fields in primary visual cortex. source: Stanford


Do children learn to play musical instrument more easily than adults?

Roughly speaking, most forms of learning become harder as one ages. Probably the most relevant aspect for your question is learning fine motor skills:

  most studies revealed that performance gains in fine motor tasks are diminished in older adults


Which statistical test should I use when there are multiple latent predictors and multiple latent outcomes?

I'm guessing you are relating the Big 5 factors of personality to Meyer and Allen's three factor model of commitment (normative, continuance, affective).

You certainly could adopt the simple approach of creating observed composite scores for each variable and reporting the correlation matrix and a set of multiple regressions.

However, the language of your question also suggests that you are interested in modelling latent variables rather than observed variables. This may suggest a structural equation modelling approach may be suitable.

Benefits of structural equation modelling approach

You can model your measurement model (i.e., do the observed variables load appropriately on your 8 latent factors; is there an overall higher order commitment factor that represents the three commitment factors)
You could model relationships between latent factors rather than observed variables (i.e., you can adjust for reliability of measurement); this often aligns analyses more with theoretical interests in psychology.
You could explore more sophisticated model comparison approaches. One approach I really like involves comparing models with various constraints in either the correlations or regression coefficients between the predictor set (i.e., personality) and the outcome set (i.e., commitment). E.g., one model could constrain all 15 regression coefficients between personality and commitment variables to be the same; another model could say that the relationships are constrained to be equal across commitment variables but different across personality variables.


What is the difference between 'stereoscopic depth' and 'crossed/uncrossed disparity'?

Short answer
Stereoscopic vision is the perception of depth via disparity. Disparity is the mechanism that the visual system uses to create binocular depth perception.

Background
A dictionary definition of Stereoscopic is the following:

  [N]oting or pertaining to three-dimensional vision or any of various processes and devices for giving the illusion of depth from two-dimensional images or reproductions, as of a photograph or motion picture.

So stereoscopic depth perception refers to the ability of perceiving depth in a 2D image.

A more visual-scientific description of stereopsis is the following (Kalloniatis & Luu, 2016):

  Stereopsis refers to our ability to appreciate depth, that is the ability to distinguish the relative distance of objects with an apparent physical displacement between the objects. [...] Stereopsis is an important binocular cue to depth perception. Stereopsis cannot occur monocularly and is due to binocular retinal disparity [where] two objects stimulate [...] disparate (non-corresponding) retinal points [...].

Monocular cues include occlusion, lights & shade, among others. Binocular cues, i.e., stereoscopic cues are caused by the slightly offset retinal images on our two eyes due to the distance between them. This is called disparity. Disparity depends on the focal distance, and in a nutshell, uncrossed disparity refers to points in space closer than the focus distance and crossed disparity to points more distant than the focal distance (source: Heeger, New York University).

Hence, long story short, stereoscopic depth is a perception, disparity is the mechanism that the visual system uses to create that perception.

Reference
- Kalloniatis & Luu, Perception of Depth. In: The Organization of the Retina and Visual System, Utah University (2016)


What is the most robust method for peer grading?

In order to incentivize the desired behavior for your first point, you can do the following.

If the group that comes out second, gave the lowest (possible) grade to the group that came out first, the punishment is at follows <specify punishment here>. An alternative condition would be: If the first group received the lowest grading from the second group. This is more stricter, but also fairer. Maybe add some tolerance (e.g. 1 grade divergence is okay).

You could try the same strategy for the second point, but that won't work. If the groups can't vote for themselves (as a group) and if we assume that the end result is a somewhat objective representation of the performance, the last group would give the second to last group the lowest grade. You could try the alternative of the first approach, though:

If the last group received, the worst grade from the second to last group and if that grade diverges by more than 1, then <specify punishment here>.

In fact, you could introduce this rule for all the ranks. First and second place, second and third, etc. But the groups would need more time then, also this assumes the performances of the groups vary to such extent that it is indeed possible to subjectively rank them.

In order to have the groups assess them themselves, you could introduce a finite number of grades or classifications (e.g. top performer, medium performer). If the grades/classification can only be awarded a fixed amount of times, each participant will have a unique rank (relative to that group). The grade will probably not compare to group members of other groups (maybe if you weigh it with the group grade). It is possible to limit the number of possible grades to number of group members, or limit it to 2 or 3 (top, medium, bottom) and have multiple grading rounds.


Why does a higher post-synaptic cell resistance lead to a higher voltage change when current is applied?

If you consider the electrical synapse a simple series RC circuit, with the resistance in the synapse and the capacitor as the postsynaptic cell, then you are correct that the value of R only changes the charge time for the capacitor (from a DC source, but not it's final voltage (at t = infinity).

($\tau = RC$)

On the other hand, this model is too simplistic for the electrical synapse because you also have losses (discharge) to the outside of the cells. Image from the book:

And a more realistic circuit is created with extra (parallel) resistors below for the extracellular discharge. Note what happens when the 2nd resistor (discharge of postsynaptic cell to inter-cellular space) is introduced in the circuit (switch closed): the voltage charge on capacitor drops significantly.

You basically have to "beat" or minimize this voltage drop, and one way to do this is to have a lower series resistor (another is of course a higher isolation [i.e. resistor] from the intercellular space). When the synapse resistance is 10 times lower than in the previous circuit, the voltage drop on the synapse is much lower, and so the voltage on the capacitor is higher, even with the switch closed:

You can play with the circuit here; it's set for the first set of resistor values; you need to right-click on a resistor and pick "edit" to change it's value; I could have added another switch and resistor to achieve that change for the synapse... but I didn't want to complicate the circuit conceptually.


What is the bias/thought process that results in distrust of "formal" knowledge in favor of "folk" knowledge?

This might be a matter of social proof; people generally absorb folk knowledge in a less-impersonal way than formal knowledge (your grandmother says it works, instead of hearing/reading that it might work from a reporter who read the abstract of the paper that says so).  I don't know if there has been formal work examining the role of social proof in the acceptance of folk knowledge, though.


Name of the psychological effect that make us see correlation that may not exist

The feeling that the solution is obvious after it is provided is called hindsight bias (aka the "knew-it-all-along phenomenon").
This feeling is informed by the metacognitive sense of surprise, which itself is a form of processing fluency.  Basically, when the solution to a problem is first given, it is surprising (lacks fluency), and hence judged as difficult.  However, when the solution is known or provided again, it is no longer surprising (has fluency), and hence judged as easy.  People often underestimate the difficulty (or predictability) of solutions (or events) after knowing the outcome, due to this bias.
In the example provided in the question however, it is not clear that you actually know the solution, only that you feel that you know the solution after it was solved by someone else.  In this case, you really do have a case of wishful thinking.


Theory of mind refers to an ability to recognize that others have a mind, and that others may have knowledge/beliefs/motivations that are different from their own.

Children (and adults) with autism as a group have deficits in tests meant to assay theory of mind, though of course the degree of impairment depends on the individual and different tests may give different results.

Tests that assay theory of mind are often dependent on other skills, however, including language and visual social skills (such as eye contact) that are also often impaired with autism, making it more difficult to separate out those related skills from theory of mind itself. However, even after controlling for language skills, people with autism still have deficits in theory of mind.

I don't think it is correct to think of theory of mind as a binary yes/no, although some approaches to the concept do treat it as such. Neurotypically developing children show different elements of the theory of mind at different stages of development. Sometimes theory of mind is separated into "orders", where higher functioning people with autism tend to have more issues with second-order theory of mind, where one recognizes not only that someone else has a mind of their own but also that a third person is able to think about that person's thoughts.

Some individuals with autism who have theory of mind deficits are still able to develop skills to cope and can understand cognitively that others have minds different from their own. Importantly, however, "theory of mind" itself refers to an innate cognitive ability, sort of a natural or automatic accounting for the thoughts of others.

Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A. M., & Frith, U. (1985). Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind”?. Cognition, 21(1), 37-46.

Baron‐Cohen, S., Jolliffe, T., Mortimore, C., & Robertson, M. (1997). Another advanced test of theory of mind: Evidence from very high functioning adults with autism or Asperger syndrome. Journal of Child psychology and Psychiatry, 38(7), 813-822.

Baron-Cohen, S. (2000). Theory of mind and autism: A fifteen year review. Understanding other minds: Perspectives from developmental cognitive neuroscience, 2, 3-20.

Frith, U., & Happé, F. (1994). Autism: Beyond “theory of mind”. Cognition, 50(1-3), 115-132.

Ozonoff, S., Pennington, B. F., & Rogers, S. J. (1991). Executive function deficits in high‐functioning autistic individuals: relationship to theory of mind. Journal of child Psychology and Psychiatry, 32(7), 1081-1105.


At least among a sample of high-school students the dark tetrad correlations look like:

So there's only a moderate correlation between narcissism and sadism (0.37), but it turned out to be strongest of the six (as commonly measured). However it was only the 2nd strongest after an oblique rotation, the psyhopathic-sadistic one "winning" by small margin (0.02) in that approach:

  To evaluate if the different measures of these four
  traits loaded on a more general second-order factor, we conducted
  a hierarchical analysis of oblique factors which showed
  there was not a general deviant personality factor that was likely
  to reflect all types of traits. There appeared to be four primary
  unique factors corresponding to psychopathic, narcissistic,
  Machiavellian and sadistic traits. The four constructs thus obtained,
  appeared to display a greater degree of independence
  than the original four, with Pearson’s r ranging from .01 to .26
  (Fig. 1).

So despite their moderate correlation (all four) dark tetrad bits are seen as reasonably independent factors.

What I find strange in that figure is that after the oblique rotation there was practically no correlation between Machiavellianism and psychopathy. I'm not sure what to make of that.


Is learning to do a task automatically an example of intuition?

No, these are not examples of intuition, but examples of procedural memory (or automaticity). Procedural memory is the ability to perform certain tasks without conscious awareness.


How is an action potential conducted across axonal branches in a neuron?

Often action potentials arise not until the initial segment of the axon, sometimes referred to as the   axon hillock. This has to do with a critical density of voltage-gated sodium channels needed for action potential generation (Kole et al., 2008). The way it is conducted though the dendrites is hence often by means of graded dendritic potentials.

Axon terminals are not "gated". The axon potential simply is conducted through all of them (see e.g., Anesthesia Key), barred any refractory effects or inhibitory or excitatory inputs from axoaxonal connections.

Reference
- Kole et al., Nature Neurosci (2008); 11: 178-86


How can the aversion response be explained neurologically?

I remembered that Disgust is one of the 6 major emotions and there is quite a lot written about it:

  The neural basis of disgust

  The scientific attempts to map specific emotions onto underlying
  neural substrates dates back to the first half of the 20th century.
  However, it was not until the mid-1990s when it was recognized that
  six basic emotions, including disgust, were each related to a specific
  neural structure and therefore considered to be a part of the clinical
  neurosciences.[23] Functional MRI experiments have revealed that the
  anterior insula in the brain is particularly active when experiencing
  disgust, when being exposed to offensive tastes, and when viewing
  facial expressions of disgust.[24] The research has supported that
  there are independent neural systems in the brain, each handling a
  specific basic emotion.[4] Specifically, f-MRI studies have provided
  evidence for the activation of the insula in disgust recognition, as
  well as visceral changes in disgust reactions such as the feeling of
  nausea.[4] The importance of disgust recognition and the visceral
  reaction of "feeling disgusted" is evident when considering the
  survival of organisms, and the evolutionary benefit of avoiding
  contamination.[4] [edit]


what is the difference between mindfulness meditations and focusing on other things?

It is question I've been asking myself as well in my experience with mindfulness meditation.

Meditation is not manipulating experience, it is simple noticing it. Furthermore it focuses on sensory experience which seems to be inversely correlated with our narrative experience(Farb et al., 2007).

Being focused on studying involves planning and invariably it adds a narrative feature to our experience. Mindfulness increase grey matter in areas associated with executive control(Hölzel et al., 2011), hence we can hypothesize mindfulness is good for more effective studying.

There might some type of false placebo effect in studies reporting increased focus due to meditation.

Farb, N. A. S., Segal, Z. V., Mayberg, H., Bean, J., McKeon, D., Fatima, Z., & Anderson, A. K. (2007). Attending to the present: Mindfulness meditation reveals distinct neural modes of self-reference. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2(4), 313–322. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsm030

Hölzel, B. K., Carmody, J., Vangel, M., Congleton, C., Yerramsetti, S. M., Gard, T., & Lazar, S. W. (2011). Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density. Psychiatry Research, 191(1), 36–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pscychresns.2010.08.006


What are examples of stimuli that we know cause a grief or sadness reaction in humans?

I m not sure how much of sadness images are covered under it but perhaps you could have a look at IAPS ( International Affective Picture Series) . They seek to make media for specifically inducing desired affective states in research work including images , audios and videos.

http://csea.phhp.ufl.edu/media.html

Perhaps you could have a look into Mood Inducing Procedures ( MIP) used to induce both positive and negative affects in a laboratory setting .


Why does a person's mind keep imagining situations with problems that do not exist and continue solving those problems in the imagination?

It sounds like you're talking about what psychologists and neuroscientists commonly call episodic future thinking or mental simulation. In this cognitive state, we simulate possible future scenarios, often pertaining to social interactions we might have, or survival situations. This allows us to pseudo-test hypotheses regarding the possible outcomes for an imagined scenario based on inference and the memories of our past experiences in similar situations. This may be adaptive if it allows us to prepare contingency plans for those scenarios, should one arise. We do this habitually, perhaps because there are so many possible scenarios to simulate, and the more we explore options and form tentative contingency plans, the better prepared we are for the world. It might also just be a rewarding activity in and of itself.
Absent-mindedness, mind wandering, or distractibility by one's own thoughts may be problematic if we are chronically distracted away from the present moment and the tasks that need to be accomplished at the moment. Mindfulness therapies may be helpful in training the ability not to let the mind wander and instead focus on desired tasks. Activities that require concentration may also train this ability, such as music performance. In severe cases, stimulant medication may be helpful, such as amphetamines or methylphenidate.
Regarding neural mechanisms for these states, there has been quite a lot of research and speculation in recent years on the interplay between two major brain networks, typically called the default mode network and the salience network. In functional connectivity MRI studies, the default mode network seems to be active during the state you described, whereas the salience network is active during focused attention on the external world and while completing a task. It may be that differences in how these networks have developed in an individual dictate the strength of their tendency to internally simulate rather than focus on the external world.
Here's a study regarding these networks and PTSD: Neural Dysregulation in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Evidence for Disrupted Equilibrium between Salience and Default Mode Brain Networks


What is the difference between Megalomania and Narcissism?

The DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) doesn't distinguish between megalomania and narcissism. The most recent edition of the DSM (DSM-5) classifies both as a form of narcissistic personality disorder.


Hebbian theory and synaptogenesis - how to identify the subsequently actioned neuron?

Hebb's actual statement is:

  Let us assume that the persistence or repetition of a reverberatory activity (or "trace") tends to induce lasting cellular changes that add to its stability. ... When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite a cell B and repeatedly or persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A's efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased.

So, in Hebb's case we are talking about neurons that are already connected that then increase their strength of connection when firing of Cell B follows after excitation by Cell A.

Biologically, the plasticity mechanism best associated with Hebbian plasticity is called spike timing dependent plasticity (STDP). STDP utilizes a calcium signal mediated by NMDA receptors.

NMDA receptors are glutamate receptors but depend on simultaneous depolarization of the membrane to displace a magnesium block that is ordinarily present. NMDA receptors are best activated when they are already bound to glutamate (released from Cell A) when Cell B fires an action potential; the action potential propagates back into the dendritic tree as well as down the axon, and this displaces the magnesium block, allowing calcium to enter the cell.

The subsequent signaling cascade results in increases in post-synaptic AMPA receptors, which causes long term potentiation.

If cell B fires but cell A did not fire before it, then the action potential still propagates back into the dendrites but there is no glutamate present at synapses between cell A and cell B so those synapses are not potentiated.

Hebb, D.O. (1949). The Organization of Behavior. New York: Wiley & Sons.


Venus effect explained in greater detail?

The Venus Effect is just as you understand it.  The painting the effect is referring to is depicting the woman admiring herself in the mirror, when in fact, if you study it properly you will see that she would not be able to see herself in the mirror, but she wuld be able to see the artist (or you) as the viewer.

If you look at the diagrams I put together below, you will see from the first diagram how the venus effect works.

Image 1:  The Venus Effect in play.  The viewer can see Venus, but there is no way Venus can see herself, when in fact she can see the viewer in the mirror.

Image 2:  The Venus Effect is not in play.  The viewer cannot see Venus, Venus can see herself, and she cannot see the viewer


How are hallucinations generated, is it related to dreaming?

Psychosis results in hallucinations. States of psychosis are thought to be like seizures caused by imbalanced levels of at least dopamine and serotonin. Psychosis like depression creates new pathways in the brain which allow for the senses to be flooded with internal information. The person who is experiencing hallucinations may be forced by the psychosis to think that it is real. Some are able to realize that the hallucination is not real. For instance, it is a common condition of humanity to have isolated instances of hallucinations. People hear music when there is none or think someone calls their name but no one did. Normal people are able to recognize that there was no music and no one called their name.

Psychosis can be caused by extreme excitement. Excitement alone impairs judgment but if it goes to an extreme a person can become psychotic and begin to hallucinate or have other odd behaviour.

Often times people schizo type and bipolar disorder are accompanied with insomnia. If the illness progresses far enough the sick person can become caught in a state between awake and asleep. The hallucinations are combined with greater degrees of dissociation (day dream).


Where can I find a longitudinal study with a binary response?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Can placebo effect be increased by modifying the perception about prescription/intake setting?

I think the field of persuasive communication is relevant for your answer, as well as research into the efficacy of psychotherapy.

Customers trust advertising if it is communicated by:

attractive persons
credible experts

Psychotherapy is more effective if:

the therapist believes that his methods are effective (!)
patient and therapist share the same world view and values
patient and therapist like each other

What constitutes attractiveness, expertise, common values, and sympathy, will differ among individuals. For some, expensive architecture makes a bank more trustworthy; for others it is a sign of waste and mismanagement. So you will have to identify the exact parameter value for each target group or, for perfect fit, even each individual person. But basically what you have here are moderators that affect the efficacy of a placebo.

What is noteworthy is that the belief of the person administering the placebo has an effect. So it's better they don't know it is a placebo, but have been given it by a person they in turn trust.

There is a lot of research into both areas; I give only one introductory source each (both of which respectively include what I quoted above):

Goldstein, N. J., Martin, S. J., & Cialdini, R. B. (2008). Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Wampold, Bruce E. (2001). The Great Psychotherapy Debate: Models, Methods and Findings. New York: Routledge.

Don't be fooled by the popular nature of the first book; Robert Cialdini is an eminent expert on persuasion. If you want, there are more scientific publications by this author.


Research correlating stress/boredom with eating/comfort-seeking?

Droid here are a couple of relevant studies:

Experiments with rodents done by Kent Berridge found that:

Stressed rats will expend more energy on obtaining pleasurable relief (in the form of food) than non-stressed rats. But only to familiar foods

Peciña, S., Schulkin, J., & Berridge, K.C. (2006). Nucleus accumbens corticotropin-releasing factor increases cue-triggered motivation for sucrose reward: Paradoxical positive incentive effects in stress

Experiments with stressed exam students done by Wendy Wood et al found that stress amplified the hedonic habitual approaches already used by students (so basically it made them seek out more of the HABIT though not the reward, to relieve stress and regain comfort.

Neal, D.T., Wood, W., & Drolet, A. (2013). How do people adhere to goals when willpower is low? The profits (and pitfalls) of strong habits. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

In short it seems that our default response to stress (and subsequent comfort seeking) is to seek out a FAMILIAR rewarding habit (E.g. having a coffee at Starbucks, if that’s a habit) than a non-habitual reward. (So comfort seeking is Pavlovian not strictly hedonic)


Any review articles on behavior change psychology?

Elder et al (1999) provides a review of behavioural change theories in the context of health behavior change in primary care. They mention several, for example:

  Models and theories such as the Health Belief Model,
  Cognitive/Information Processing, the Theory of Reasoned
  Action, Social Cognitive (Learning) Theory,Social Support
  Theories, Behavior Modiﬁcation, and Kanfer’s Parallel
  Self-Management Model guide much of current health-promotion reFsearch and practice. The
  Transtheoretical or “Stages of Change” Model presents a cognitive-behavioral
  change process not grounded in a speciic health behavior theory.

Green (1984) provides a very general review of health behavior modification.

Stokols (1992) presents a theory around healthy environments.

References

Elder, J. P., Ayala, G. X., & Harris, S. (1999). Theories and intervention approaches to health-behavior change in primary care. American journal of preventive medicine, 17(4), 275-284. PDF
Green, L. W. (1984). Modifying and developing health behavior. Annual review of public health, 5(1), 215-236. PDF
Stokols, D. (1992). Establishing and maintaining healthy environments: toward a social ecology of health promotion. American Psychologist, 47(1), 6. PDF


Subliminal Persuasion: best chances of success

For the sake of "Hail Mary" answers: there's a recent (2016) paper by Ruch et al. claiming unprecedented results:

  Subliminal influence did not significantly decay if probed after 25 versus 15 min. This is unprecedented evidence of the longevity and impact of subliminal messages on conscious, rational decision-making.

You could try to replicate their experiment(s).


"Contingent" means "dependent upon".

See the first definition of
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/contingent?s=t

The reason the second definition there (which is the one you are thinking of) has the same word is because if B is contingent on A, then B is not for sure going to happen.  B will only happen if A does.


What is the result of an excess of dopamine?

Too much dopamine release in the striatum may lead to psychosis, and especially to the positive symptoms associated with this disease (e.g., delusions and hallucinations, as opposed to the negative symptoms such as a flattened affect) (Laruelle et al., 1999).

The etiology of psychosis is complex. Many direct and indirect environmental factors are implicated, as well as genetic factors. Environmental factors include obstetric complications and frequent cannabis or amphetamine use. The environmental factors are all implicated stronger in psychosis than genetic causes. Genetic predisposition and environmental factors may also interact in complex ways in the development of psychosis (Howes & Kapur, 2009).

References
- Howes & Kapur, Schizophrenia Bulletin (2009); 35(3): 549–62
- Laruelle et al., Biol Psychiatry (1999); 46:56–72


Counterfactual thinking and the origin of language

This is controversial, to say the least, and possibly false according to one interpretation on such experiments with monkeys. But note that there is a subtlety here: the way counterfactuals are usually tested with monkeys involves them having seen what a reward could have been, but had not received.

Recent studies on reinforcement learning in primates indicate that humans are not alone in
our ability to think about hypothetical outcomes. For example, Lee and colleagues (Abe & Lee
2011, Lee et al. 2005) presented rhesus monkeys with a computer-based version of the game rock-
paper-scissors. When they examined the strategies that the monkeys used over time, they found
that monkeys did not simply adjust their choices based on what they received on the previous trial.
Surprisingly, monkeys also adjusted their strategy to account for rewards they would have received
had they chosen a different option. Using a similar computer-based setup, Hayden and colleagues
(2009) presented rhesus monkeys with a risky decision-making task with eight possible choices.
Whereas seven of the options consistently provided small juice rewards, the final option was
variable: Sometimes it provided a much larger reward, and sometimes it provided a much smaller
reward. Critically, monkeys were given feedback about what the risky option would have provided
on every trial. In this way, monkeys could see how much juice they would have gotten from the
risky option, regardless of whether they had chosen it. As in the rock-paper-scissors task, modeling
of the monkeys’ behaviors showed that the monkeys adjusted their future strategies on the basis of
what they would have received. In cases where the risky option would have provided the high-value
outcome on one trial, monkeys were especially likely to seek this option out in future trials. In this
way, monkeys—like humans—change their future choices according to counterfactual situations
that could have (but did not) happen.

(There's subsequent para that discusses that monkeys, like us, seem to be driven by regret-like emotional responses in such matters.)
More recent experiments indicate that monkeys intentionally explore the "counterfactual space", i.e. try to find out what rewards they might have missed, even if they aren't just shown these potential rewards without them incurring an actual cost (in terms of missing other rewards, already known to them). Rather unsurprisingly, monkeys are willing to pay, in terms of missing certain rewards for finding out "what else is there", i.e. they ("deliberately") pay for information.
I think Chomsky isn't really talking about this though; actually he's not even using "counterfactual" in the para you cited but "minds capable of envisioning that the world could be otherwise than it is at this moment". Basically: do the monkeys merely think of the world in a seen-potential-reward and seeking-information-about-unknown-rewards fashion, or do they "truly imagine" there could be rewards they didn't ever see? That's probably (very) difficult to test. Basically, his thesis/question isn't really about counterfactual thinking, but whether monkeys "have imagination" in some kind of "visual language" perhaps...


Why is MATLAB so common in Neuroscience?

I think the major reason is inertia, in the sense that many labs use Matlab, so many Matlab toolboxes are available, so many labs train people in the use of Matlab...

However, as a trained software engineer turned Neuroscientist who has been programming in various languages for close to 30 years, there are several reasons why I actually enjoy using Matlab. One can also make arguments for why it's a good fit for labs filled with people who aren't programmers.

(As an aside, the .mat file format is actually a standard file format called "HDF". So I don't think that file format lock-in is a real reason.)

Things Matlab does well

Very good cross-platform support. Matlab runs out of the box on every major platform. In research, when you want something to just work, spending days getting a python distribution configured with a mutually-compatible set of package versions is just ridiculous. Caveat: I haven't tried anaconda, which hopefully has solved this problem.
Very low housekeeping overhead. No other serious language (is BASIC a serious language?) lets you start writing code without having to include headers, define namespaces, allocate memory... For biologists without programming experience, this is a godsend.
Integrated debugging environment. Non-programmers will not easily be able to learn a language that does not come with an IDE. R, I'm looking at you. Python has very nice options now.
Intrinsic vectorisation of operations. for loops are kind of ugly and error-prone, when what you really want to do is perform an operation on every element of a matrix or perform matrix operations. I know that Python has some add-ins to accomplish matrix operations, but Python itself is not vectorised.
Support for object-oriented software design. As a legacy language, Matlab has a whole bunch of baggage. Mathworks is slowly improving the design of the language and adding other niceties (the parallel computing toolbox is pretty great): the class system; tables with named columns; the ability to ignore return and input arguments in function calls; function handles; namespaces...
Ability to work across machine abstraction levels. Matlab used to be slow, but the JIT compilation works wonders and keeps improving. You can operate at a very high level of abstraction with classes and objects; if you need something fast and low-level, you can write a small amount of C code and call it natively from Matlab.

Things Matlab does badly

Graphics and GUIDE. Oh my god. Handle graphics is pretty horrible. I know they are working on version 2, and it can't come soon enough. matplotlib in Python looks much better, and R makes amazing graphs out of the box. GUIs are pretty ugly to design in any language, but GUIDE makes it very easy to write some really horrible code.
Global namespace. This is sort-of true, and sort-of makes sense for convenience's sake. It's an inherent tradeoff between ease of use and nice encapsulation. Matlab does provide namespace support now, but I think it's still true that the vast majority of toolboxes don't use it.
First-class functions. If the anonymous function system could be upgraded slightly to handle multiple return arguments and to handle currying... Also, intrinsic support for named arguments and parameters would be greatly helpful, especially considering that many Matlab functions accept named parameters as part of their calling syntax.