Any research on IQ (general) and coping with abstract concepts?

I think the answer here is easier than you imagine. Many of the tasks associated with IQ and general intelligence tests contain tasks that are specifically about abstraction. For example, an SAT reading comprehension question depends on verbal and reading skills, but tasks like in an IQ test (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices) don't correspond to any existing verbal or other knowledge and are therefore tapping a type of abstract thinking.

If that's not what you meant by abstract, consider researching what kinds of cognitive operations are associated with the types of abstraction you had in mind.

Also, note there are a lot of threads in this group about intelligence, and many of them cover the same useful ground, such as different types of intelligence, the difference between IQ and general intelligence, etc. Wikipedia is also a good source on those definitions.


Does writing something on computer help memorize it?

According to a study by Anne Mangen and Jean-Luc Velay of the University of Stavanger, handwriting is better than typing for learning:
http://www.uis.no/research-and-phd-studies/research-areas/school-and-learning/learning-environment/better-learning-through-handwriting-article29782-8869.html

  Mangen refers to an experiment involving two groups of adults, in
  which the participants were assigned the task of having to learn to
  write in an unknown alphabet, consisting of approximately twenty
  letters. One group was taught to write by hand, while the other was
  using a keyboard. Three and six weeks into the experiment, the
  participants’ recollection of these letters, as well as their rapidity
  in distinguishing right and reversed letters, were tested. Those who
  had learned the letters by handwriting came out best in all tests.
  Furthermore, fMRI brain scans indicated an activation of the Brocas
  area within this group. Among those who had learned by typing on
  keyboards, there was little or no activation of this area.

However, I'm having a hard time finding the actual research paper.


How to measure galvanic skin response with wearables?

A system that I am currently testing is the MoviSens EdaMove. The system consists of a small device that can be attached to the arm, and two electrodes to measures EDA at the palms of your hand. The EdaMove uses the exosomatic method, by applying a 0.5V direct current, and samples with 32 Hz. An accelerometer is also included in the sensor, so that you can correct the EDA recordings for movement.

So far, the recordings are pretty good, but I haven't done any formal testing yet. Usability-wise, it may not be the best solution, since it is somewhat more intrusive than a wristband/watch.

Update: This is the fun part. Skin conductance is a measure of skin sweatiness. Unfortunately, the stickers that attach the sensors to the skin (similar to how ECG/EEG-reference sensors are attached) let loose when the hands start to sweat. This is even more so with many movements. For tasks that require much manual work or fine hand-movements, the EdaMove may not be the best sensor.

From the E4, I know that performance is not perfect, but it is okay. Benefit is that the E4 also includes an PPG sensor and accelerometer. Moreover, the E4 allows you to monitor the recordings in real time with their Android/iPhone app.

There are two major issues though with the E4. 1: It needs a good connection with the skin. If not, you could rather easily have missing data (especially so for the HRV sensor). The sensor should thus fit rather tightly. 2: Empatica applies some filtering of the data before you can extract it. It is not clear, however, to what extent it is being filtered. NB. The website states that raw-data is provided. Only the interbeat intervals (IBI), an HRV metric appears to be filtered.


It could be to some extent, for example, because gambling behaviour is mediated by traits like impulsiveness {1,2} which are heritable {3}.

References

{1} Steel, Z. and A. Blaszczynski (1998). "Impulsivity, personality disorders and pathological gambling severity." Addiction 93(6): 895-905.

{2} Michalczuk, R., et al. (2011). "Impulsivity and cognitive distortions in pathological gamblers attending the UK National Problem Gambling Clinic: a preliminary report." Psychological Medicine 41(12): 2625-2635.

{3} Bezdjian, S., et al. (2011). "Genetic and environmental influences on impulsivity: A meta-analysis of twin, family and adoption studies." Clinical psychology review 31(7): 1209-1223.


Name for problems with a short-term pay off but small long term cost?

I agree with @Fizz that there is probably no specific name for the type of problem in question, but the behaviour involved is referred to as self-control, or more loosely, willpower.  Thus, the type of problem can be referred to as a self-control dilemma:

  Self-control dilemmas occur when long-term goals and values clash with
  short-term temptations. ... One of the most common self-control
  dilemmas involves the desire for unhealthy or unneeded food
  consumption versus the desire to maintain long-term health. ... Weak
  temptations present more of a challenge to overcome than strong
  temptations, because they appear less likely to compromise long-term
  values.

and accordingly temptation:

  Temptation is a desire to engage in short-term urges for enjoyment,
  that threatens long-term goals.

Chronic failure to meet long-term goals / succumbing to temptations is called akrasia, or "weakness of will".  The opposite is delayed gratification - also see the Marshmallow experiment.


Is there a criterion to distinct between a philia and a paraphilia?

As far as I am aware, there is no such word in the English language as Philia, but it is a suffix within words.

Also, the suffix of -philia in a word does not necessarily denote anything sexual.

The -philia suffix denotes one of the following (Merriam-Webster, n.d.):

friendly feeling toward(as in Francophilia)
tendency toward(as in hemophilia)
abnormal appetite or liking for(as in necrophilia)

The term paraphilia

  denotes any intense and persistent sexual interest other than sexual interest in genital stimulation or preparatory fondling with phenotypically normal, physically mature, consenting human partners (APA, 2013 p.685).

So a man or woman in uniform will not be a paraphilia. For more on paraphilias see McManus, et al. (2013).

On the subject of -philias, there is one point you made which is not entirely accurate. You said

  Both pedophilia and zoophilia are rare harmful paraphilias that require hospitalization, therapy, surveillance and generally also chemical castration.

I am not sure on zoophilia, but:

paedophilia and hebephilia is extremely common and therefore not rare (Gerwinn et al., 2018).

  Contrary to public perception, child sex offending (CSO) and paedophilia are not the same. Only half of all cases of CSO are motivated by paedophilic preference, and a paedophilic preference does not necessarily lead to CSO. However, studies that investigated clinical factors accompanying and contributing to paedophilia so far mainly relied on paedophiles with a history of CSO.

Estimates on the prevalence of paedophile CSO are wide ranging, and more accurate with better reporting, but they include:

12.7% (Stoltenborgh, M. et al., 2011)
24.7% (Oluwatosin, & Akinbo, 2017) and
27% girls and 16% boys (Finkelhor et al., 1990)
60% girls (McConaghy, 1998).

there are hebephiles and paedophiles who do not act out on their desires, and there are helplines such as Stop It Now! for those who are worried they may act out, so therefore
these sexual tendencies do not necessarily need hospitalization, therapy, surveillance and chemical castration.

Chemical castration is an idea put forward to deal with pedophilia, and even made mandatory in states such as Alabama (LegiScan, 2019). However, there is no strong scientific evidence to back the idea that this helps to stop pedophilia or hebephilia, and many criminologists argue that police investigators treating castrated men as less likely to reoffend than non-castrated men may cause an investigation bias and self-fulfilling prophecy (Horne & Lovaglia, 2008; Sismondo & Greene, 2015; Fridell, 2016).

References

American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM-5®). American Psychiatric Pub.

Gerwinn, H., Weiß, S., Tenbergen, G., Amelung, T., Födisch, C., Pohl, A., ... & Wittfoth, M. (2018). Clinical characteristics associated with paedophilia and child sex offending–Differentiating sexual preference from offence status. European Psychiatry, 51, 74-85. doi: 10.1016/j.eurpsy.2018.02.002

Horne, Christine; Lovaglia, Michael J. (2008). Experiments in criminology and law: a research revolution. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-0-7425-6027-7

Finkelhor, D., Hotaling, G., Lewis, I. A., & Smith, C. (1990). Sexual abuse in a national survey of adult men and women: prevalence, characteristics, and risk factors. Child abuse & neglect, 14(1), 19. doi: 10.1016/0145-2134(90)90077-7

Fridell, Lorie A. (2016). Producing Bias-Free Policing: A Science-Based Approach. Springer. ISBN 978-3-319-33175-1

LegiScan. (2019). Alabama House Bill 379.
In LegiScan API Retrieved from: https://legiscan.com/AL/bill/HB379/2019

McConaghy, N. (1998). Paedophilia: a review of the evidence. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 32(2), 252-265. doi: 10.3109/00048679809062736

McManus, M. A., Hargreaves, P., & Lee Rainbow, L. J. A. (2013). Paraphilias: definition, diagnosis and treatment. F1000prime reports, 5. doi: 10.12703/P5-36 pmcid: PMC3769077

Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). -philia. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved from: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/-philia

Oluwatosin, S. A., & Akinbo, O. T. (2017). Prevalence and Public Perception on Causes of Paedophilia in Osun State Nigeria. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 4(24). doi: 10.14738/assrj.424.3847

Sismondo, Sergio; Greene, Jeremy A. (2015). The Pharmaceutical Studies Reader. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-1-118-89654-9

Stoltenborgh, M., van Ijzendoorn, M.H., Euser, E.M., & Bakermans-Kranenburg, M.J. (2011) A global perspective on child sexual abuse: meta-analysis of prevalence around the world. Child Maltreat, 16(2), 79-101, doi: 10.1177/1077559511403920


What causes people to betray each other when facing the prisoner's dilemma?

'Short' answer
The way people respond to the prisoner's dilemma strongly depends on how the experiment is set up. In a repeated game, where the same 'prisoners' meet each other multiple times, the tit-for-tat strategy seems to be favored. This, because contenders learn the other's behavior and start anticipating the choice from their opponent to manipulate the outcome. It is not so that people by default betray their opponent. The betrayal (confession) is the selfish option and is favorable when you have no idea what the other will do, as it will always work in favor of yourself. The cooperation (keeping silent) is the most risky one and you only do that when you like to take big risks (unlikely, most people don't), or when you have a fairly good idea what your opponent will do.

Background
The prisoners’ dilemma is about cooperation and competition and applies to social settings, business and politics. In the traditional version of the game, the police have arrested two suspects A and B. Both were involved in he same crime and they are interrogated separately. The police offers A and B to confess and by doing so giving away the accomplice, or to keep silent (source: Library of Economics & Liberty).

When A will confess and gives away B, A will be granted a shorter sentence as A has confessed and has aided the cops in sentencing B, and vice versa when B confesses. If A so confesses, but B holds silent (not knowing he has been given away), B will face an exceptionally harsh sentence because of refusing to admit his crimes (say 5 years in jail).

When both confess they will both face reduced sentences because they are helping the police as a witness (say 2 year in jail).

When both keep silent they can only be sentenced on minor charges because of a lack of proof (say a sentence of just 1 year).

The “dilemma” faced by the prisoners is that, whatever the other does, each is better off confessing than remaining silent. But the outcome obtained when both confess is worse for each than the outcome they would have obtained had both remained silent.

The prisoner's dilemma can be viewed at as a puzzle, illustrating the conflict between individual and group rationality. A group whose members pursue rational self-interest may all end up worse off than a group whose members act contrary to rational self-interest. More generally, if the payoffs are not assumed to represent self-interest, a group whose members rationally pursue any goals may all meet less success than if they had not rationally pursued their goals individually (source: Stanford University).

A slightly different interpretation takes the game to represent a choice between selfish behavior and socially desirable altruism (behavior of an individual that benefits another at its own expense). The move corresponding to confession benefits the actor, no matter what the other does (selfish), while the move corresponding to silence benefits the other player no matter what that other player does (altruism). Benefiting oneself is not always wrong, of course, and benefiting others at the expense of oneself is not always morally required, but in the prisoner's dilemma game both players prefer the outcome with the altruistic moves to that with the selfish moves. This observation has led David Gauthier and others to take the Prisoner's Dilemma to say something important about the nature of morality (source: Stanford University).

Now - to come to your question - you talk about 'betrayal' (which is probably referring to 'confessing') and cooperation (probably referring to 'holding silent'). You have to realize that keeping silent means you have to know that the other person will (likely) do that too. In a one-shot situation you cannot know. However, it is only when the game is repeatedly performed, and when the subjects can learn the behavior of their 'accomplice' that subjects start to make educated guesses. A particularly fruitful strategy, surprisingly, in a repeated game is the 'tit-for-tat' approach, an almost childish approach to the dilemma, where people cooperate with their partner on the first round, then adjust their behavior to match your partner’s, as in, you do to them what they just did to you. If your partner cooperated (stayed silent) the last time, you also choose to cooperate (stay silent too) this time; if they defected (confessed) last time, you respond in kind by retaliating (confessing) against them (source: Seltzer in Psychology Today, 2016).


Has "induced savantism" been further explored beyond Snyder 2009?

There are no other studies I can find where TMS (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation) was used in the same way, but there is a paper mentioning Snyder (2009) whilst discussing safety and other ethical considerations required regarding neural enhancement using noninvasive brain stimulation.

Hamilton, et al. (2011) said the following about Snyder (2009)(References re-numbered for formatting purposes and converted to APA style)

  Finally, one set of cognitive skills in which the role of TMS and tDCS has been especially controversial is the unmasking of so-called savant-like abilities. Snyder2 argued that inhibition of the left anterior temporal lobe (LATL) with brain stimulation interferes with semantic networks that normally impose top-down constraints on human perception—in short, making conception play a diminished role in perception. These investigators suggest that suppressing the LATL increases access to less-processed information, improving performance in perceptual abilities on tasks such as drawing, proof-reading, numerosity judgment,1 and other cognitive processes in which conceptual knowledge biases performance.3,4

  Snyder, A. W., Mulcahy, E., Taylor, J. L., Mitchell, D. J., Sachdev, P., & Gandevia, S. C. (2003). Savant-like skills exposed in normal people by suppressing the left fronto-temporal lobe. Journal of integrative neuroscience, 2(2), 149-158.DOI: 10.1142/S0219635203000287PDF: http://howieswebs.ipage.com/pdf/savantskills.pdf
  Snyder, A. (2009). Explaining and inducing savant skills: privileged access to lower level, less-processed information. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 364(1522), 1399-1405.DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2008.0290PDF: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/364/1522/1399.full.pdf
  Gallate, J., Chi, R., Ellwood, S., & Snyder, A. (2009). Reducing false memories by magnetic pulse stimulation. Neuroscience letters, 449(3), 151-154.DOI: 10.1016/j.neulet.2008.11.021PDF: http://www.centreforthemind.com/publications/FalseMemories160109.pdf
  Oliveri, M., Romero, L., & Papagno, C. (2004). Left but not right temporal involvement in opaque idiom comprehension: A repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation study. Journal of cognitive Neuroscience, 16(5), 848-855.DOI: 10.1162/089892904970717PDF: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Costanza_Papagno/publication/8506415_Left_But_Not_Right_Temporal_Involvement_in_Opaque_Idiom_Comprehension_A_Repetitive_Transcranial_Magnetic_Stimulation_Study/links/09e4150b4c7a9f03be000000.pdf

Regarding the safety of TMS, Hamilton, et al. (2011) said the following:

  There are known and possibly unknown safety concerns associated with noninvasive brain stimulation. The most important safety risk associated with TMS is the risk of inducing seizures. Since the introduction of published safety parameters for the use of rTMS, the incidence of induced seizure is exceptionally rare. All current evidence indicates that tDCS is extremely safe; its main safety risks are mild headache and a mild burning or itching sensation under the electrodes. Given the newness of these methodologies, one caveat is that not much is known about the chronic effects of either magnetic or electrical brain stimulation. Future studies may reveal unsuspected side effects and risks that are more serious than those associated with some conventional methods of behavioral cognitive manipulation (e.g., psychotherapy)....

There is quite a bit more on the safety and other ethical considerations, which I will leave you to read.

References

Hamilton, R., Messing, S., & Chatterjee, A. (2011). Rethinking the thinking cap: Ethics of neural enhancement using noninvasive brain stimulation. Neurology, 76(2), 187-193.DOI: 10.1212/WNL.0b013e318205d50d


Can someone clarify whether the term "heuristic" as used in psychology can be used to refer to an intentionally chosen strategy?

Short Answer:

Yes it can.

Long Answer:

According to Wikipedia,

  A heuristic is “any approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical methodology not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals.” Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic.

This is a good general definition that seems to adequately capture the meaning behind "heuristic" as used in different fields. However, one must be careful to understand the specific use in a given context.

With regard to psychology, there seems to be some confusion because there are both intentional and unintentional heuristics.   Examples of unintentional ones are the availability heuristic. Some of the unintentional ones are more prominent and have received more attention and, as a result, I am not sure this distinction that there are "intentional" heuristics is always made.

However, according to Tversky and Kahneman (Nobel laureate in Economics),

  The term judgmental heuristic refers to a strategy ― whether deliberate or not ― that relies on a natural assessment to produce estimation or a prediction. One of the manifestations of a heuristic is the relative neglect of other considerations (Tversky and Kahneman, 294).

  Source: "Extensional Versus Intuitive Reasoning: The Conjunction Fallacy in Probability Judgment" by Tversky and Kahneman in Psychological Review Vol. 90 No. 4, 1983.

Note: the notion of a "judgmental heuristic" means simply a heuristic used in the mental faculty of "judgement," which I will not attempt to define.


Is it possible to bridge implicit and explicit memory?

Short answer: It does not make sense to talk about 'bridging' implicit and explicit memory.

Longer answer: Explicitness and implicitness of memory is most appropriately considered a property of the memory test, not the memory being tested. Memories, physically speaking, have both explicit and implicit properties. They are 'bridged' by default.

The difference between explicit (and more specifically declarative) memory and implicit memory is more definitional and epistemic, i.e., related to our ability to measure and analyze, than anything empirical. Memory is declarative, by definition, when it can be tested by way of an articulated participant response. Memory is implicit, by definition, when it can be tested by way of behavioral performance.

For example, consider something basic like transporting yourself from point A (say, your house) to point B (say, the train station). You have implicit memory of this route, which we can see by observing you move from A to B. You also have explicit memory of this route, which we can see by having you describe the path from A to B. It is fundamentally no more complex than that.


Can a brain be modeled as a simplified interaction of different states and their triggers?

My answer is probably a weird hodgepodge of sometimes poorly explained stuff, but hopefully it's coherent enough :P

For many decades in psychology, we've had a mechanistic stimulus-organism-response understanding of the brain.  That is, a stimulus triggers an internal psychological process, which produces some behavioral response.  One of the major limitations of this kind of thinking is that it assumes that the mind is at rest until it's stimulated by something in the environment (even if we add a recursive component to it). However, this is fundamentally untrue.

Instead, the brain is a predictive organ (e.g., Clark, 2013). It's loaded with prior knowledge about past experiences, which is constantly used to predict incoming sensory information. If there is a discrepancy between incoming information and past experience (i.e., prediction error), then our knowledge is updated. This is most clearly seen in the literature on vision, which shows how top-down expectations and prior knowledge robustly bias early visual activity, even in the absence of a visual stimulus (Summerfield & de Lange, 2014). The trigger-state model could not easily account for this.

Moreover, dividing up the brain into mental states may not actually represent how the brain functions.  The brain isn't really faithful to the kinds of distinctions we make between cognition and emotion, for example (e.g., Barrett, 2009; Pessoa, 2008).  And not only that, those higher order states like anxiety and sexual arousal can be represented in the brain in many different ways. Indeed, there is no dedicated mechanism in the brain or body for producing states like anxiety or creative inspiration (e.g., Wager et al., 2015).  They're merely concepts for organizing and communicating our experience.  And even then, our brain may not really "have" concepts (see Laurence Barsalou's work; but see also Blouw, Solodkin, Thagard, & Eliasmith, 2015), although it may have a conceptual system that allows us to conceptualize (e.g., Barsalou, 2005).

So I guess what I'm getting at is that brain function is nonlinear, spatiotemporally dynamic, and doesn't adhere to folk psychological categories. Thus, it would probably be difficult to understand the brain by attempting to reduce linear trigger-state relationships to the level of networks, regions, and cells. However, maybe (probably) someone has a better informed, more balanced answer than me! :)


How strong is the correlation between selfies and narcissism?

Table 1  of Fox and Rooney (2015) report this correlation between selfies posted on social networks and narcissim to be r = .19 in a sample of 800 U.S. men, (mean age = 29, SD = 6.5). I.e., the observed correlation was small in a general sense. But in the broader domain of personality-behaviour correlations, .19 is fairly moderate.

  Participants’ selfie posting behavior was assessed with one item
  inquiring how many pictures they had taken of themselves and posted on
  SNSs in the past week (M = 0.56, SD = 2.33; min = 0, max = 30).

Fox, J., & Rooney, M. C. (2015). The Dark Triad and trait self-objectification as predictors of men’s use and self-presentation behaviors on social networking sites. Personality & Individual Differences, 76, 161-165. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2014.12.017


Does limiting one's trivial decisions free more energy for bigger decisions?

Evidence on this question stems from research on ego depletion and the "Strength Model of Self Control" (Baumeister, Vohs, & Tice, 2007). The theory posits that successful self-control relies on a limited resource that is depleted by tasks requiring self control.

In series of experiments, Vohs and colleagues (2008) have investigated the hypothesis that, because making choices is mentally taxing, subsequent attempts to engage in self-regulation are more likely to fail.

Citing from their abstract:

  The current research tested the hypothesis that making many choices impairs subsequent self-control. Drawing from a limited-resource model of self-regulation and executive function, the authors hypothesized that decision making depletes the same resource used for self-control and active responding. In 4 laboratory studies, some participants made choices among consumer goods or college course options, whereas others thought about the same options without making choices. Making choices led to reduced self-control (i.e., less physical stamina, reduced persistence in the face of failure, more procrastination, and less quality and quantity of arithmetic calculations). A field study then found that reduced self-control was predicted by shoppers’ self-reported degree of previous active decision making. Further studies suggested that choosing is more depleting than merely deliberating and forming preferences about options and more depleting than implementing choices made by someone else and that anticipating the choice task as enjoyable can reduce the depleting effect for the first choices but not for many choices.

So judging from this research, if you stand in front of your wardrobe every morning and experience the decision between the black and the grey t-shirt as an arduous and mentally taxing choice exercise, it might indeed be better to always wear grey, as Mark Zuckerberg does.

It has to be said, however, that some people have doubted whether self-control can really be understood as a finite resource that can be depleted and favor a motivational account of the effects (e.g., Inzlicht, Schmeichel, & Macrae, 2014; Job, Dweck, & Walton, 2010).

Furthermore, the specific data about making decisions is only the result of one paper (I am not aware of independent replications, but they might exist) and, more generally, there are some doubts about how strong and reliable ego depletion effects are (see this earlier question).

In conclusion, it doesn't hurt to avoid complicated but trivial choices. Nevertheless, I would still hold on to those black shirts (my heuristic is to take the one that lies on top, by the way).

References

Baumeister, R. F., Vohs, K. D., & Tice, D. M. (2007). The strength model of self-control. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16(6), 351–355. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2007.00534.x

Inzlicht, M., Schmeichel, B. J., & Macrae, C. N. (2014). Why self-control seems (but may not be) limited. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18(3), 127–133. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2013.12.009

Job, V., Dweck, C. S., & Walton, G. M. (2010). Ego depletion--Is it all in your head?: implicit theories about willpower affect self-regulation. Psychological Science, 21(11), 1686–1693. http://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610384745

Vohs, K. D., Baumeister, R. F., Schmeichel, B. J., Twenge, J. M., Nelson, N. M., & Tice, D. M. (2008). Making choices impairs subsequent self-control: A limited-resource account of decision making, self-regulation, and active initiative. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94(5), 883–898. http://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.94.5.883


Is a cognitive test invalid if self-administered?

There are quite a few factors to consider when taking an assessment. For one, the external conditions of your environment, and your internal mindset should ideally be standardised.
An example of external standardised conditions are a consistent room temperature, a quite space to take the test, or an external examiner to check that no one cheats.
Internally, the test taker should not be hungry, and should understand the test instructions, for example.
By taking the test yourself, the conditions will likely not meet this criteria of standardisation necessary for the results to be comparable. If you want to know a bit more, there are norm-referenced, and criterion-referenced assessments. The first kind compare your scores to the scores of other test takers, like a pub quiz, for example; scores are compared, and the team with the most points wins. Here, if the conditions are not standardised, your results will not be comparable to others.
Criterion-referenced measures compare your score to a predetermined benchmark, like an exam at school; if you score above 50%, you pass. In this case, a lack of standardised conditions means you may not answer the questions as intended, and so the benchmark comparison will also lose meaning.
Reference
C. Foxcroft & G. Roodt. (2001). Introduction to psychological assessment in the South African context.


Ignoring minority while generalizing about a group, any theoretical reference?

I think the exceptions are implied. If someone says, "All Russians like vodka" then we understand that there are no exceptions to the rule. People get frustrated when you're overly specific about the percent of Russians who like vodka. Instead it's safer to just say Russians like vodka. And bears.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion talks about why we operate based on generalizations. We would freeze if we analysed all the details of every situation before we act, so we make generalizations.

Thinking, Fast and Slow is an excellent book talking about the latest research in human biases from one of the foremost experts in the field.


Why do people tend to avoid desperate people?

From a personal standpoint I would avoid these people because I expect people to be continually getting such needs met. I would wonder why a person doesn't already have a support network in place and be suspicious of them.

I the situation with the beggar I would think this would link more closely to the bystander effect whereby as an individual you feel less inclined and less responsible as there are many other people in the vicinity that could also make a difference.


What are the effects of alcohol on muscle memory?

Alcohol consumption causes deficits in motor coordination by affecting the cerebellum, which is the main area involved in regulating finer adjustments in movement and motor learning. From Belmeguenai et. al (2008):

  It has previously been shown that ethanol modulates inhibitory transmission in the cerebellum and affects synaptic transmission and plasticity at excitatory climbing fiber (CF) to Purkinje cell synapses. However, it has not been examined thus far how acute ethanol application affects long-term depression (LTD) and long-term potentiation (LTP) at excitatory parallel fiber (PF) to Purkinje cell synapses, which are assumed to mediate forms of cerebellar motor learning.

The tasks you have outlined above are all considered 'fine motor skills', and are thus mediated in part by the cerebellum. It is certainly the case that alcohol consumption affects finer muscle coordination. It is also the case that hangover effect reduces athletic performance by up to 11.4% in trained athletes (who would fit the 'expert' level you have described above).

There aren't many studies on alcohol's effects on muscle memory specifically, though there are studies on how sleep affects motor learning. There is also evidence that alcohol consumption mimics the effects of sleep deprivation, and affects sleep quality directly.


Does dream recall interfere with "reverse learning"? (Crick and Mitchison's theory of REM sleep)

Recent supporting work

In a paper published in the Jan 2017 issue of Nature Neuroscience, Wei Li and colleagues propose a mechanism that supports the "reverse learning" process based on dendritic calcium spikes that regulate spine formation.

However, as the authors discuss, the implications of their findings are more nuanced. They support the idea of reverse learning but show that it is not the only thing going on in REM sleep:

  REM sleep is not simply a substitute for wakefulness to stimulate plasticity, for pruning synapses during development or for persevering genetic identities of neuronal circuits. Instead, REM sleep is important for selectively incorporating new synapses into the existing circuits. It could be viewed as a “selection committee” for building and maintaining the synaptic network.

Dream recall

If we accept that reverse learning functions by the proposed mechanism, I would guess it would not be perturbed significantly by dream recall. This is because the calcium spikes in their experiments occurred on the order of seconds, and only during REM sleep. Dream recall, on the other hand, is is a high-level mental process that is probably restricted to humans.

This is just my best intuitive guess. For all we know, any neural event anywhere in the brain can potentially influence a subsequent event anywhere else in the brain, so really all bets are still on the table.


The Dark Triad Abnormal Development or Base Human Nature?

The Dark Triad traits you speak of are subclinical personality traits, therefore they cannot be diagnosed. Everyone carries some of the characteristics of these traits. People high on these traits are also not considered to be defective, even better they may in some environments be considered to be an advantage (e.g., business areas).

You may want to read up on research on the Dark Triad, mainly that by Dr. P. K. Jonason. He is one of the main contributors to the Dark Triad research and uses an evolutionary paradigm to discuss his research, showing how the Dark Triad may be adaptive.


Why do difficult-to-learn subjects seem easier in retrospect?

There are at least two different lines of research that are relevant here.

Forecasting errors

One large line of research has shown that are pretty bad in forecasting future events. This can be seen, for example, in the stable tendency to overestimate the affective impact of negative as well as positive events in terms of intensity and duration. In other words, if people are facing a situation that will likely be negative (such as an "it will be hell" class or exam), the prediction of their negative affective reaction (How long intense will it be? How long will I suffer?) is stronger than their actual reaction. This tendency has been called the impact bias. Numerous sources of the impact bias have been identified, a good starting point into this research are the (somewhat older) reviews by Wilson and Gilbert (2003, 2005). As an example, one reason for the impact bias in response to negative events is the so-called immune neglect, which refers to people's tendency to underestimate their skill in coping with such events.

Below-average effect

It is also possible to frame the situation in a way that implies a comparison to others: Maybe you expected a difficult class in that you expected to fare worse than your fellow students (and were surprised that you were not).

A line of research has shown that people can be pretty bad in ranking their own skill in comparison to others. Mostly, this surfaces in an above-average effect: Most people think that they are better drivers than others, for example, which is logically impossible. However, research by Justin Kruger (1999), for example, has shown that this holds only for relatively easy tasks. For difficult tasks, this actually turns into a below-average effect. That is, when people think that a task requires much skill (such as a difficult class or exam) most actually think that they are worse than other people. One explanation for this tendency is that people "anchor" their judgment of their own skill only on their introspected self-assessment and fail to consider that it will be difficult for others too (information about ourself comes more easily to the mind, after all).

References

Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2003). Affective Forecasting. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 35, pp. 345–411). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Kruger, J. (1999). Lake Wobegon be gone! The “below-average effect” and the egocentric nature of comparative ability judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 221–232. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.77.2.221

Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2005). Affective forecasting knowing what to want. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14, 131–134. doi:10.1111/j.0963-7214.2005.00355.x


Why are counsellors not supposed to give advice or lead the client? Is it possible for a counsellor not to be leading?

Counselors can be taught to "not give advice" and there are good reasons for this school of thought. But in professional practice such passivity is only one style among many counselors may choose. If you find yourself unhappy with your counselor's style, do both of you a favor and keep looking for greater compatibility. Better results will follow from greater comfort in sessions. The burden of finding the best match is on the client - the counselor will try to help the client as well as possible with the style the counselor believes is best for the client, but if you don't like such passivity, look for another counselor and say what you want during the first meeting (on the phone, even better.)

As to "why" some counselors believe it is helpful to not give advice: much work in psychotherapy requires the client to make every step, every decision following the client's own insight; this is a process of internal awareness and growth which places the counselor in the role of facilitator. A facilitator will make it easier for the client to make progress, but will not tell the client answers even if the counselor has opinions or preferences. As you put it, the goal is for the client to become more "self-empowering."

I hope this helps.
I have a Counseling M.A. and years' practice in a variety of healing arts.
clinical-psychology, conversation, style,counseling


How does my spinal cord know to take reflexive action?

It's not that your body knows, exactly, but that one's body is wired in such a way to support reflexes. There is a sudden electrical surge (electrochemical, actually) but it's more compartmentalized than "the nervous system."

Divide the nervous system in two: we've got one section containing our brain and spinal cord. That's called the central nervous system, or CNS. Everything else is our peripheral nervous system, called the PNS.

I'll use the stretch reflex because it's the one I'm more familiar with, but the same goes for all spinal reflexes. Our muscles actively contract, and we need a mechanism to make sure they don't extend past a certain point. The stretch reflex is such a mechanism: when that rubber hammer hits the tendon below the kneecap, the thigh muscle gets stretched. In turn, this causes the knee-jerk reflex as that muscle gets a sudden jolt of "oh my god we don't want that to stretch or else we might not be able to run if we need to or it might damage the muscle or..." (you get the idea, surely).

The reflex takes precedence above conscious thought. Usually. How it does this is through bypassing the brain. Think of how it might work otherwise: hm that stove is hot, I need to get away from it? There'd likely be far fewer humans in the world if that were the case. Instead, the surge (called an action potential) travels straight from sensing to action--preserve the organism, then it can think about whatever just happened.

As far as when to jump or not to jump, neurons either fire or they do not, as per the all-or-nothing principle. If there's enough stimulus (if it's hot enough), then that'll happen.


Are all psychological problems only biochemical in nature?

At some level, it's true that psychology reduces to biology and chemistry. If it didn't, then the widely-accepted view of physicialism/materialism would be wrong. But just because psychology can (in theory) be reduced to biochemistry, reductionism may not be the most productive way to approach the problem, for a couple of reasons:

The causes of psychological phenomena are likely to require such complex interactions at the level of biochemistry, that by the time you get around to explaining these interactions you're basically back at the level of describing the problem in terms of psychological constructs. Imagine trying to describe something like earthquakes using only concepts from quantum physics. It's theoretically possible, but not productive.
Psychological phenomena may have multiple ways of being instantiated. This is called multiple realizability. The key insight here is that two people may have thought processes that are very similar at a psychological level, but might be instantiated in different ways at a neural level. In such a case, the most productive way to describe the phenomena would probably be at the psychological level, since this is where the commonalities exist.


What speaker is commonly used for low-latency audio stimulation

There is generally an intervening stage between the sound card and the speaker, the amplifier. From the output of the amplifier to the speaker, there is an electrical signal traveling at like 0.01C that then drive the speaker via an electromagnet. The transmission and transduction time is essentially zero. Further, you can safely ignore any jitter.

For powered speakers, or amplifiers, there are all sorts of models. Some might have some built in filtering that could introduce a delay, but it is probably negligible.


You should check out the article on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#Other_related_phenomena

Though there is still some controversy surrounding some of the experiments, the overall evidence suggests that it's possible to trigger action without awareness, it's possible to manipulate the perception of intention (will) to action, and it's also possible to do both.

  In one study, directly stimulating the pre-SMA caused volunteers to
  report a feeling of intention, and sufficient stimulation of that same
  area caused physical movement.[35] In a similar study, it was found
  that people with no visual awareness of their body can have their
  limbs be made to move without having any awareness of this movement,
  by stimulating premotor brain regions.[60] When their parietal
  cortices were stimulated, they reported an urge (intention) to move a
  specific limb (that they wanted to do so). Furthermore, stronger
  stimulation of the parietal cortex resulted in the illusion of having
  moved without having done so.


How are IQ test scores affected by psychological stress or trauma?

Short answer: The effect of stress and trauma on IQ varies significantly according to type and severity, but is overall fairly low relative to normal variation in scores.
IQ test development is heavily concerned with reliability (consistent scores) so while some variation is inevitable, IQ tests are designed to minimize the impact of stress:

... test-takers may have varying scores when taking the same test on
differing occasions, and may have varying scores when taking different
IQ tests at the same age. ... For modern tests, the confidence interval
can be approximately 10 points ...

Additionally, particularly low or high IQ scores are less reliable than median scores.  Nonetheless:

Outside influences such as low motivation or high anxiety can
occasionally lower a person's IQ test score.

So, up to approximately 10 IQ points difference in scores can be accounted for by measurement error and performance variability, but stressors can potentially result in larger differences.
Despite the broad scope of the question, I was not able to find any recent dedicated literature reviews on the effects of any particular type of stress or trauma on IQ, so conclusions are based on a sample of recent available studies.
Marcus Jenkins et al (2013) looked at the effects of family stress on child IQ:

... we identified four subconstructs that capture family stress:
Marital conflict, parenting stress, depressive symptoms and maternal
history of psychiatric disorders. ... None of the family stress
components mediated the effect of the SES components on child IQ.

Delaney-Black et al (2002), Ratner et al (2006), Koenen et al (2003), Ybarra, Wilkens, & Lieberman (2007), and Ghazi et al (2012) looked at the effects of violence and trauma on child IQ:

... a child experiencing both violence exposure and trauma-related
distress at or above the 90th percentile would be expected to have a
7.5-point (SD, 0.5) decrement in IQ ...

Butler et al (2018) found similar effects on adolescent IQ.  However, Saigh et al (2006) and DePrince, Weinzierl, & Combs (2009) also looked at the impact of violence and trauma on child IQ, but found no effect.
Viezel, Freer, & Castillo (2015) looked at the effect of abuse and neglect, and found an approximately 5-point decrement in child IQ, while Doerfler, Toscano, & Connor (2008) looked at the effect of abuse on adolescent IQ:

For Performance IQ or Full Scale IQ scores, there were no significant
main effects for gender or abuse experience.

Kira et al (2012), Kira et al (2012), and Kira et al (2014) looked at the effect of a variety of different stressors and traumas - including abuse, bullying, abandonment, and violence - on adolescent IQ in 2 vulnerable sub-groups:

Our findings support the hypothesis that different trauma types have
different influences, some positive and some negative. ... In
conclusion, trauma type differentially impacts IQ.

However, the effect of stress on overall IQ was small (r<0.15).
Note that many studies found significant effects of stress and trauma on IQ sub-tests and sub-components, though overall IQ was often not significantly affected.  Note also that ethical conduct makes stress and trauma difficult to manipulate experimentally, so these studies are largely retrospective, or at best prospective, but not randomized controlled studies.  Thus, study quality is an issue, making conclusions tentative - in particular, the direction of causality is not always entirely clear.


Just speaking from personal experience, I've never experienced time distortion in my dreams as extremely as you describe. I've experienced moments scattered throughout narratives that would take longer than 20 minutes to elapse in real life, but since I never recall experiencing every single moment of those narratives, I wouldn't assume my sense of time had altered while dreaming. Maybe I'd just skipped around, experiencing only 20 minutes' worth of the dreams' narratives, or maybe I'd only imagined those moments as joined by an implicit narrative and not really experienced time passing during any one of them. I'd love to see empirical research on this, but it's somewhat hard for me to imagine how reliable information on these matters could be collected.

The duration of REM sleep is more objectively observable than the contents of dreams; I was surprised to find that Google produces a reference immediately in response to the query, "duration of rem sleep":

  The first REM period of the night may be less than 10 minutes in duration, while the last may exceed 60 minutes. [Stevens, 2013]

While cognitive function is clearly different while dreaming, I'm unaware of any evidence that it's enhanced in any ways that would be desirable during wakefulness. If you or anyone else can find any references to support your ideas, we could probably have a much more productive discussion here. Similarly, I'm skeptical of the comparisons of lucid dreaming to hypnosis and intoxication. These may be very different states of consciousness, and I definitely wouldn't call them "higher states".

Just to preserve the coherence of your response to my answer, here's the old content worth keeping:

Lucid dreams are by definition both conscious and occurrent during sleep, therefore:

It's not logically possible to have a lucid dream while awake. If you're trying to refer to a similar state that is not a dream, please define it directly rather than by analogy to a dream state.
Lucid dreams do not need to be brought to the boundaries of consciousness; they occur within those boundaries by definition. Maybe you mean to ask for ways of making ordinary dreams lucid.

The old "Let me Google Scholar that for you" offers plenty on lucid dreams and means of induction.  I'll even copy, paste, and format some below...(I'm absolutely not vouching for their scientific validity BTW. "Medical Hypotheses"? Sounds legit...) Looks like there are about 2,878 more where these came from.

References
· Barrett, D. (1992). Just how lucid are lucid dreams? Dreaming, 2(4), 221–228.
· Garfield, P. (1975). Psychological concomitants of the lucid dream state. Sleep Research, 4, 184.
· Gillespie, G. (1983). Memory and reason in lucid dreams: A personal observation. Lucidity Letter, 2(1), 8–9.
· Green, C. E. (1968). Lucid dreams (Vol. 1). Institute of Psychophysical Research.
· Hearne, K. M. (1983). Lucid dream induction. Journal of Mental Imagery, 7(1), 19–23.
· LaBerge, S. P. (1980). Lucid dreaming as a learnable skill: A case study. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 51(3f), 1039–1042.
· LaBerge, S. P., Nagel, L. E., Dement, W. C., & Zarcone Jr, V. P. (1981). Lucid dreaming verified by volitional communication during REM sleep. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 52(3), 727–732.
· Sergio, W. (1988). Use of DMAE (2-dimethylaminoethanol) in the induction of lucid dreams. Medical Hypotheses, 26(4), 255–257.
· Stevens, M. S. (2013).  Normal sleep in adults, infants, and the elderly. Medscape: Normal sleep, sleep physiology, and sleep deprivation. Retrieved from http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/1188226-overview.
· Tart, C. (1979). From spontaneous event to lucidity: A review of attempts to consciously control nocturnal dreaming. In B. Wolman, M. Ullman, & W. Webb (Eds.), Handbook of dreams: Research, theories and applications (pp. 226–268). New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.
· Tart, C. (1984). Terminology in lucid dream research. Lucidity Letter, 3(1), 4–6. Retrieved from http://www.sawka.com/spiritwatch/terminol.htm.
· Tholey, P. (1983). Relation between dream content and eye movements tested by lucid dreams. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 56, 875–878.
· van Eeden, F. (1969). A study of dreams. In C. Tart (Ed.), Altered states of consciousness (pp. 145–157). New York: Wiley.


How to deal with APA in-text citations in long texts?

APA style is mostly designed for defining manuscript submission rules for journal articles.

When you seek to apply these rules to a thesis or book, you inevitably have to apply your own rules.

The general principle is that in-text citations should unambiguously identify an end of text reference. Thus, whatever principle you adopt should do this.

For a thesis, I think either approach would be fine. You could use et al across chapters or reset each chapter.

More generally, I think that if you have a combined reference list at the end of the book/thesis, then it's fine to not reset after each chapter. In contrast, if each chapter has its own reference section, then it makes sense to reset each chapter.


Can prolonged neural adaptation lead to HPPD?

No.  This disorder requires the sufferer to have used hallucinogenic substances in the past:

  Previous use of hallucinogens by the person is necessary, but not sufficient, for diagnosis of HPPD. For an individual to be diagnosed with HPPD, the symptoms cannot be due to another medical condition.

from Wikipedia following the DSM-IV criteria reproduced here.

  A. The reexperiencing, following cessation of use of a hallucinogen, of one or more of the perceptual symptoms that were experienced while intoxicated with the hallucinogen (e.g., geometric hallucinations, false perceptions of movement in the peripheral visual fields, flashes of color, intensified colors, trails of images of moving objects, positive afterimages, halos around objects, macropsia, and micropsia).


How can I recognize if a person is good subject for hypnosis?

Despite quite of lot of research looking for personality correlates of hypnotisability no very clear links have been found. There is evidence of weak associations between hypnotisability and absorption (the capacity to direct a great deal of attention to a narrow range of stimuli, such as getting caught up in film or book) and also of associations between hypnotisability and fantasy-proneness (the tendency to engage in imaginative activity) - but neither of these characteristics has much practical predictive value.

Instead, in scientific hypnosis, rather than using indirect personality measure to identify hypnotisable participants, researchers use measures specifically designed to measure hypnotisability. The most common measures are the Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotisability and the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale. Both of these are behavioural measures that consist of an induction followed series of simple hypnotic suggestions (e.g., your arm will heavy). Following the suggestions participants are scored as passing or failing each suggestion based on whether they meet a specific criteria (i.e., did they drop their arm more than 6 inches). The more items they pass, the higher their hypnotisability.

So in summary: personality cannot reliably predict hypnotisability. To tell if someone is susceptible, the best way is to see how they respond to hypnotic items.


What are the predominant cognitive effects that influence textual learning and recall?

Both the primacy and recency effects may also be referred to as parts of the serial position effect. Wikipedia has a list of memory biases you may want to peruse. Most entries are potentially relevant:

  Cryptomnesia: a form of misattribution where a memory is mistaken for imagination, because there is no subjective experience of it being a memory.[1][See misattribution of memory.]
  Egocentric bias: recalling the past in a self-serving manner, e.g., remembering one's exam grades as being better than they were...
  Fading affect bias: a bias in which the emotion associated with unpleasant memories fades more quickly than the emotion associated with positive events.[4]...
  Google effect: the tendency to forget information that can be easily found online...
  Humor effect: that humorous items are more easily remembered than non-humorous ones, which might be explained by the distinctiveness of humor, the increased cognitive processing time to understand the humor, or the emotional arousal caused by the humor...
  Leveling and Sharpening: memory distortions introduced by the loss of details in a recollection over time, often concurrent with sharpening or selective recollection of certain details that take on exaggerated significance in relation to the details or aspects of the experience lost through leveling. Both biases may be reinforced over time, and by repeated recollection or re-telling of a memory.[6]
  Levels-of-processing effect: that different methods of encoding information into memory have different levels of effectiveness (Craik & Lockhart, 1972).
  List-length effect: a smaller percentage of items are remembered in a longer list, but as the length of the list increases, the absolute number of items remembered increases as well...
  Misattribution of memory: when information is retained in memory but the source of the memory is forgotten. One of Schacter's (1999) Seven Sins of Memory, Misattribution was divided into Source Confusion, Cryptomnesia and False Recall/False Recognition.[1]
  Memory inhibition: that being shown some items from a list makes it harder to retrieve the other items (e.g., Slamecka, 1968).
  Modality effect: that memory recall is higher for the last items of a list when the list items were received via speech than when they were received via writing.
  Mood congruent memory bias: the improved recall of information congruent with one's current mood...
  Peak-end effect: that people seem to perceive not the sum of an experience but the average of how it was at its peak (e.g. pleasant or unpleasant) and how it ended...
  Picture superiority effect: that concepts are much more likely to be remembered experientially if they are presented in picture form than if they are presented in word form.[7]...
  Positivity effect: that older adults favor positive over negative information in their memories.
  Primacy effect, Recency effect & Serial position effect:[10] that items near the end of a list are the easiest to recall, followed by the items at the beginning of a list; items in the middle are the least likely to be remembered.[10]...
  Rosy retrospection: the remembering of the past as having been better than it really was.
  Self-reference effect: the phenomena that memories encoded with relation to the self are better recalled than similar information encoded otherwise...
  Source Confusion: [Omitted; redundant with misattribution of memory.]
  Spacing effect: that information is better recalled if exposure to it is repeated over a longer span of time. [Also mentioned as "lag effect".]
  Stereotypical bias: memory distorted towards stereotypes (e.g. racial or gender), e.g. "black-sounding" names being misremembered as names of criminals.[1]
  Suffix effect: the weakening of the recency effect in the case that an item is appended to the list that the subject is not required to recall (Morton, Crowder & Prussin, 1971)...
  Testing effect: that frequent testing of material that has been committed to memory improves memory recall.
  Tip of the tongue: when a subject is able to recall parts of an item, or related information, but is frustratingly unable to recall the whole item. This is thought to be an instance of "blocking" where multiple similar memories are being recalled and interfere with each other.[1]
  Verbatim effect: that the "gist" of what someone has said is better remembered than the verbatim wording (Poppenk, Walia, Joanisse, Danckert, & Köhler, 2006).
  Von Restorff effect: that an item that sticks out is more likely to be remembered than other items (von Restorff, 1933).
  Zeigarnik effect: that uncompleted or interrupted tasks are remembered better than completed ones.

I've reproduced most of the list, because most could apply for one kind of written material or another (e.g., novels, textbooks, one's own work). I've noted a few redundancies in brackets, but I may have missed others. I've also embedded a few extra hyperlinks to original sources where freely available.

References
1. Schacter, D. L. (1999). The seven sins of memory: Insights from psychology and cognitive neuroscience. American Psychologist, 54(3), 182–203. Retrieved from http://nwkpsych.rutgers.edu/~jose/courses/578_mem_learn/2012/readings/Schacter_1999.pdf.
4. Walker, W. R., Skowronski, J. J., & Thompson, C. P. (2003). Life is pleasant—and memory helps to keep it that way! Review of General Psychology, 7(2), 203–210. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/zs179s.
6. Koriat, A., Goldsmith, M., & Pansky, A. (2000). Toward a psychology of memory accuracy. Annual Review of Psychology, 51(1), 481–537. Retrieved from http://academic.udayton.edu/SusanDavis/PSY%20522/Articles/Towards%20a%20psychology%20of%20memory%20accuracy.pdf.
7. Nelson, D. L., Reed, V. S., & Walling, J. R. (1976). Pictorial superiority effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 2(5), 523–528.
10. Martin, G. N., Carlson, N. R., & Buskist, W. (2007). Psychology (3rd ed., pp. 309–310). Pearson Education.

- Craik, F. I., & Lockhart, R. S. (1972). Levels of processing: A framework for memory research. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 11(6), 671–684. Retrieved from http://www.numyspace.co.uk/~unn_tsmc4/prac/labs/depth/craiklock.pdf.
- Morton, J., Crowder, R. G., & Prussin, H. A. (1971). Experiments with the stimulus suffix effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 91(1), 169–190.
- Poppenk, J., Walia, G., Joanisse, M., Danckert, S., & Köhler, S. (2006). Why is form
information in sentences poorly remembered? An fMRI study on the role of
novelty-encoding processes. Supplement of the Journal of Cognitive
Neuroscience, 18, (Paper presented at the 13th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive
Neuroscience Society, San Francisco, California, USA).
- Slamecka, N. J. (1968). An examination of trace storage in free recall. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 76(4), 504–513. Retrieved from http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/stevesmith/689/Inhibition/Slamecka%201968.pdf.
- Von Restorff, H. (1933). Über die wirkung von bereichsbildungen im spurenfeld. Psychologische Forschung, 18(1), 299–342.


Looking for the term for the relationship between "confidence" and "knowledge"

I cannot know what your friend or teacher ever told you, but you would be talking about cognizance.

Cognizance and Experience of Technology

http://staffweb.ncnu.edu.tw/clhung/MOT/papers/9.pdf

Knowledge base as a set of cognizance objects

http://web.csulb.edu/journals/jecr/issues/20004/paper3.pdf


Are there any fMRI decoding papers examining the relationship between attentional cueing and activity in V1?

Ha, I was going to mention the Kok Neuron paper :) The Cerebral Cortex one does not use decoding however.

This one may also be of interest to you:
Vetter, P., Smith, F. W., & Muckli, L. (2014). Decoding Sound and Imagery Content in Early Visual Cortex. Current Biology, 24(11), 1256-1262.

Lars Muckli is in general someone who might have more of the same.

I also know this lab does decoding and attention and V1, so maybe some of those publications will capture all three.

I'll edit later if I think of something else.


What constructs help explain limited cognitive processing and the cognitive effects of rules that limit decision making choices?

There is an unclear relationship between classical conceptions of a unitary view of mental workload to the modern constructs of cognitive psychology and neuroscience that are relevant to your question.  This is partly because mental workload is tough to define, and also because it is far too coarse a construct given the extremely large variety of dynamic cognitive factors that play a role in determining human performance. Hopefully this will become clear in the following description.

There is clearly difficulty incurred when one must pick just one option among many, without further guidance, as in your example.  Recent work (Snyder et al., PNAS 2010) indicates this kind of difficulty arises from at least two isolable sources: the relative prepotency of the various colors (e.g., the problem is easier if you have a single favorite color, and harder if you like all colors equally) and the total option space (e.g., easier if you only have 3 colors of paint to choose from, harder if you have 500).  These seem to have distinct and roughly additive effects on reaction time, at least in speeded lexical tasks, suggesting they both contribute to what you might call "mental workload."

This "underdetermined selection" problem can be made somewhat easier when additional criteria are specified, but not all criteria are equal.  "Not green" and "Not bright" are simple cues but are obviously less effective than "blue" or "0 0 255," both because they fail to reduce the problem space as effectively, and because they directly specify distracting information (the colors you're NOT supposed to pick), which will slow visual search processes (e.g., Kiyonaga, Egner & Soto, 2012).  Other cues - e.g., "something that goes well with the carpet" - may be more effective at reducing the problem space but probably incur additional mental workload, due to requiring what's known as relational reasoning.  There is also clearly a further "working memory load" incurred by the need to simultaneously consider many criteria in selecting the correct paint color.

To the extent that the number of rules given to you exceeds your working memory capacity, you may chose to store those rules in what's sometimes known as secondary memory (e.g., Unsworth & Engle, Psych Review 2007).  According to some conceptions of working memory (e.g., Oberauer et al Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2012), these items will then fall outside of the so-called "region of direct access," meaning that there are reaction time costs to retrieving these rules.  Moreover, maintaining the intention to retrieve those rules at a later point - say, after processing those that do currently occupy your working memory - may itself add a cost to reaction time (e.g., Einstein, et al JEP:G 2005).  There are also further "focus switching" costs (Oberauer, 2003) incurred when moving the single focus of attention to each of the rules that fall within the region of direct access.

If these rules are being provided during the "paint search task," they would also probably exert additional costs on reaction time.  This again is probably due to multiple sources of interference.  One of these likely reflects what's known as dual task costs - you're simultaneously listening to your wife while also trying to find the relevant paint color, and either resource sharing or rapid switching among tasks must occur.  On the other hand, even if these rules are provided soon after some other external event in this paint search task, you may also be substantially more delayed in acting upon them (this is known as the "psychological refractory period" effect).

As if that weren't enough, as recently demonstrated by Scalf, Dux & Marois (JoCN, 2011), encoding of information into working memory yields delays in top-down attention in visual cortex.

And finally, under conditions of high working memory load, perceptual selection processes operate less efficiently (e.g., Lavie et al JEP:G 2004), further exacerbating any of the above deleterious effects on your ability to rapidly choose an appropriate paint color from those in front of you.

References

Einstein, G.O., McDaniel, M.A., Thomas, R., Mayfield, S., Shank, H., Morrisette, N. & Breneiser, J. (2005). Multiple processes in prospective memory retrieval: factors determining monitoring versus spontaneous retrieval.. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 134, 327. PDF
Lavie, N., Hirst, A., de Fockert, J.W. & Viding, E. (2004). Load theory of selective attention and cognitive control.. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General; Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 133, 339.
Kiyonaga, A., Egner, T. & Soto, D. (2012). Cognitive control over working memory biases of selection. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, , 1-8.
Oberauer, K. (2003) Selective attention to elements in working memory. Experimental Psychology, 257-269.
Oberauer, K., Lewandowsky, S., Farrell, S., Jarrold, C. & Greaves, M. (2012). Modeling working memory: An interference model of complex span. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, , 1-41.
Scalf, P.E., Dux, P.E. & Marois, R. (2011). Working Memory Encoding Delays Top--Down Attention to Visual Cortex. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23, 2593-2604.
Snyder, H. R., Hutchinson, N., Nyhus, E., Curran, T., Banich, M. T., O'Reilly, R. C. & Munakata, Y. (2010). Neural inhibition enables selection during language processing. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107, 155-167.
Unsworth, N. & Engle, R.W. (2007). The nature of individual differences in working memory capacity: active maintenance in primary memory and controlled search from secondary memory.. Psychological review, 114, 104.  PDF


How are these review-forgetting curve calculated?

While I can't speak about the specific graph in question, I can explain the process of obtaining an empirical estimate of a forgetting curve.

The basic process is (1) collect data; (2) model and graph data.

Collecting data

A standard design would involve a set of participants completing an initial learning exercise (e.g., a word list; a set foreign language words with meanings; a set of facts; etc.). Participants would then be given a recognition task to measure proportion of facts remembered (e.g., a recall task; a recognition task, etc.). The recognition task would then be repeated at various intervals (e.g., after a few minutes, a day, a week, a month).

Model and graphing

You could then graph mean performance (i.e., proportion correct) on the recognition task at each time point (i.e., baseline and various follow-up time points).

A typical forgetting curve involves a monotonic reduction in recall over time where the rate of forgetting slows and recall approaches an asymptote. See for example Averell and Heathcote (2011) for discussion of power and exponential functions of forgetting.

You could then use the lines of best fit to interpolate points between the measured time points.

Comments on review and forgetting curves

There is research that looks at the combination of practice and forgetting and the resulting memory consolidation that occurs through spaced practice. See for example Pavlik and Anderson (2005). The general finding is that (a) people forget over time; (b) revision restores recall; (c) forgetting is less after second and subsequent revisions.

Thus, the basic idea implied by the graph that spaced revision improves longer term recall is supported by research.

The smooth increase shown in the plot is incorrect. Presumably revision would be a relatively short and discrete event (i.e., perhaps 20 minutes) which leads to an abrupt increase in recall. Furthermore, the size of the gains achieved by repeated practice would depend on a range of other factors and may not be as great as implied by the graph.

References

Averell, L., & Heathcote, A. (2011). The form of the forgetting curve and the fate of memories. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 55(1), 25-35.
Pavlik, P. I., & Anderson, J. R. (2005). Practice and Forgetting Effects on Vocabulary Memory: An Activation‐Based Model of the Spacing Effect. Cognitive Science, 29(4), 559-586.


Why did humans evolve to be traumatizable?

There are a lot of assumptions you are making here. "Being traumatizable" isn't really a trait. We evolved a brain in a certain way, with an amygdala and hippocampus that work a certain way. Those components have been critical in our ability to form knowledge + interact socially with one another. Instances of malfunction in the face of trauma/PTSD are a side-effect of an imperfect biological system, BUT that doesn't render the whole system useless/detrimental in the evolutionary sense.
Secondly, you're assuming it does reduce biological fitness. I'm sure it makes it harder in indirect ways, but ultimately, PTSD symptoms actively mess with very few people's ability to have sex and pass on genes. PTSD does seem to have a strong, albeit complex genetic component. For as long as people with PTSD are reproducing (and most of them are) then there will be a genetic predisposition for developing PTSD in the gene pool.
Third, how is it designed? I am confused by this one. People have a tendency to wrongly assume that almost every trait is an adaptive trait. Maybe in this case it is and we just haven't found what the beneficial feature is BUT, it is highly more likely and logical that a) as stated above, it's just a by-product of another highly adaptive trait aka, our particular brain structure and function. They come in a 2-for-1 deal and as much as PTSD sucks or might reduce biological fitness, those are completely offset by the benefits and increase in fitness due to our brain circuitry.
OR b) it's a neutral variation that doesn't significantly increase or decrease our fitness, therefore is maintained in the population because it has no reason to be selected out. Another reminder that our own negative human experience of suffering through PTSD doesn't inherently mean much in the eyes of evolution, as long as we can reproduce.


Emotional energy exchange between bodies?

I would not consider David Hawkins to be a credible source. His PhD was from a degree mill that was shut down by court order. He has been flagged by the Cult Education Institute and Quackwatch.

Emotional energy is not quantifiable in a physical sense. Most studies on the subject use a proxy for physical well-being such as vagal tone (Kok et al., 2013) or corrugator EMG/galvanic skin response/etc. (Witvliet et al., 2001). The general consensus of these studies are that forgiveness and pro-social behavior do lower both perceived (patient-described) and physiological markers of stress. That is, that being a pro-social person seems to be actually healthy.

In terms of emotional neglect leading to poor health, the most infamous experiments were performed by psychologist Harry Harlow, which he reported in "The Nature of Love" in 1958. His experiments focused primarily on maternal bonding, demonstrating that infant monkeys will most often choose the comfort of a mother-monkey effigy over food. These studies do seem to indicate that there is something crucial about positive socio-emotional contact that promotes well-being in primates.

Many psychologists and social neuroscientists are researching the effects of pro-social behavior, neglect, and stress. There are scientific journals dedicated to the subject (viz. Child Abuse & Neglect).

If you are interested in the question of why everyone doesn't stop behaving in a cooperative manner, there are many papers on the subject. Researchers are indeed looking into the matter:

Behavioral economists want to understand how collaboration builds economic societies. That is, the balance between pro-social behavior and selfishness that drives economics. (Bowles & Gintis, 1998)
Sociologists and social policy researchers want to understand the societal effects of neglect, abuse, and cooperation in order to understand the dynamics of large groups of people and to design better policies to improve the well-being of those societies (and the people in them). (Frey & Meier, 2005)
Evolutionary biologists, psychologists, and social neuroscientists want to understand the biological mechanisms that underlie pro-social behavior and its effects on reproduction and survival. (Lukas et al., 2011) (Frey & Meier, 2004)
Synthetic biologists and microbiologists are attempting to understand how colonies of bacteria solve these problems in the microbiome, in order to survive and propagate.

Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1998). The moral economy of communities: Structured populations and the evolution of pro-social norms. Evolution and Human Behavior, 19(1), 3-25.
Frey, B. S., & Meier, S. (2004). Pro-social behavior in a natural setting. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 54(1), 65-88.
Frey, B. S., & Meier, S. (2005). Social Comparisons and Pro-Social Behavior. American Economic Review,(forthcoming).
Harlow, H. F. (1958). The nature of love. American psychologist, 13(12), 673.
Kok, B. E., Coffey, K. A., Cohn, M. A., Catalino, L. I., Vacharkulksemsuk, T., Algoe, S. B., ... & Fredrickson, B. L. (2013). How positive emotions build physical health: Perceived positive social connections account for the upward spiral between positive emotions and vagal tone. Psychological science, 24(7), 1123-1132.
Lukas, M., Toth, I., Reber, S. O., Slattery, D. A., Veenema, A. H., & Neumann, I. D. (2011). The neuropeptide oxytocin facilitates pro-social behavior and prevents social avoidance in rats and mice. Neuropsychopharmacology, 36(11), 2159-2168.
Witvliet, C. V. O., Ludwig, T. E., & Laan, K. L. V. (2001). Granting forgiveness or harboring grudges: Implications for emotion, physiology, and health. Psychological science, 12(2), 117-123.


Why is solitary confinement used so widely?

Solitary confinement serves no therapeutic purpose. Two uses of solitary confinement are generally acknowledged, namely as safety measure to protect the individual from themselves or to protect others from harm, or as a measure of discipline (that is, punishment).

Deprived of normal human interaction, many segregated prisoners reportedly suffer from mental health problems including anxiety, panic, insomnia, paranoia, aggression and depression (Haney, 2003). In experimental subjects hallucinations have been reported too (source: Frontline).

To the question why these psychological effects happen there is not much known, as research into the topic is obviously deemed not ethical, and the use of it in correctional facilities and psychiatric wards is scrutinized. In fact, its use in psychiatric environments is starting to decline (source: APA).

However, some guesses might be made on the effects of solitary confinement on the brain. Hallucinations may be caused by the fact that sensory perception is accustomed to dealing with a large quantity of information. In fact, one of the major goals of the higher sensory centers is the filtering of irrelevant information rather than processing all of it. When sensory input is deprived, the brain starts to make up things, just as deaf people may develop tinnitus and blind people may see phosphenes and other visual hallucinations (source: BBC Future). The psychological deficits may be sought in the fact that we derive meaning from our emotional states largely through contact with others. Human emotions are thought to have evolved because they aided co-operation among our early ancestors who benefited from living in groups. With no one to mediate our feelings or to determine their appropriateness, the sense of self becomes distorted and the sense of reality disintegrates (source: BBC Future).

Reference
- Haney, Crime & Delinquency (2003); 49(1): 124-56


When is Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy not useful, or bad?

The mindfulness stress buffering account (Creswell, Lindsay, 2014) suggests that mindfulness practice  buffers acute stress reactivity, therefore it has more impact on health outcome of a high-stress group than a low-stress group.

Creswell, J. D., & Lindsay, E. K. (2014). How Does Mindfulness Training Affect Health? A Mindfulness Stress Buffering Account. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23(6), 401–407. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721414547415


What evidences this technique of visualizing different color words in sequence, to help you sleep?

Imagery Distraction

The technique referred to is called 'imagery distraction' (Harvey & Payne, 2002).

Some evidence has been found for “imagery distraction” being associated with shorter sleep onset latency and less frequent and distressing pre-sleep cognitive activity.

  The success of the “imagery distraction” task is attributed to it occupying sufficient “cognitive space” to keep the individual from re-engaging with thoughts, worries, and concerns during the pre-sleep period.

The type of imagery seems less important.  So visualizing coloured words should be equally as effective as counting sheep.

Harvey, A. G., & Payne, S. (2002). The management of unwanted pre-sleep thoughts in insomnia: distraction with imagery versus general distraction. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 40(3), 267–277. doi:10.1016/s0005-7967(01)00012-2


Analysis of parameter estimates from Ratcliff diffusion model

Using Parameters Estimated from an Individual in a Group Analysis

In a way this is exactly what usually happens when we calculate the mean reaction time across all conditions for a group of participants. When we normally calculate mean reaction times we assume that some process (P) takes t milliseconds to complete plus some Gaussian distributed noise. We want to estimate this parameter (t) across conditions, to make some statement about how the treatment effects processing. Then we calculate this set of parameters for a number of participants to ensure that we are looking at something interesting at the population level.

However, we can adopt more sophisticated models with more parameters that better represent how reaction times actually vary. Take the simple case of the ex-Gaussian distribution. This distribution is the combination of an exponential distribution and a Gaussian distribution. The shape of an ex-Gaussian is much closer to a distribution of observed reaction times than just the Gaussian alone. Reaction times modelled with an ex-Gaussian involve fitting two parameters; one for the Gaussian and one for the exponential components of the model. So in this case we would calculate these parameters for each condition and participant. Then we would enter these sets of parameters into two repeated measures ANOVAs; one for the Gaussian parameters and one for the exponential parameters. Then we can assess whether the treatment alters how the reaction times vary. The problem with the ex-Gaussian is that the two parameters have no psychological basis, so there is no meaningful interpretation of the treatment effect on these parameters.

This is where diffusion models are useful because the parameters in the model are psychologically meaningful, allowing us to make interesting inferences from changes in the parameters across conditions.

Same Model or the Best Model or each Participant?

I'm no expert with diffusion models, but I would expect that the same model should be applied to each participant. Not doing so would mean that you are assuming a different model for your reaction time distributions across participants.


Difference between Psychology & Neuroscience in lay man terms?

A lot of neuroscience has nothing to do with the brain (never mind the human brain). For example research to regrow peripheral neuron or neurons in the spinal cord to help paralyzed individuals would be neuroscience but not psychology.

In the limit all of psychology is related to neuroscience, since if we could model individual neurons, networks, and brains, then we could predict all of human and animal behavior. That is still a long way off so I think it is reasonable to say parts of psychology are unrelated to neuroscience (e.g., social psychology and psychometrics).


Evidence and arguments for and against bounded rationality?

The Paradox of Choice is probably the area best supported by empirical evidence that argues for [the existence of] satisficiers. If you'd rather read a shorter paper, "Maximizing versus satisficing: happiness is a matter of choice." with the same lead author (Barryt Schwartz) has > 1K citation in Google Scholar; there's a free pdf in CiteseerX. And on the flip-side of that, Scheibehenne et al.'s "Can There Ever Be Too Many Options? A
Meta-Analytic Review of Choice Overload" "a meta-analysis of 63 conditions from 50 published
and unpublished experiments (N = 5,036), we found a mean effect size of
virtually zero but considerable variance between studies". The latter paper has about 500 citations in GS, but it's also published in 2010 vs 2002 for the Schwartz et al. paper. That might not be the last word in this matter, because 2015 brought us Chernev et al.'s "Choice Overload: a Conceptual Review and Meta-analysis" while agreeing with the zero overall effect from the 2010 meta-analysis, does a meta-regression to obtain as significant explanatory variables for the variance: choice set complexity, decision task difficulty, preference uncertainty, and decision goal. As the names of these are not always self-explanatory, here's the authors' details:

  (1) The
  complexity of the choice set describes the aspects of the decision set associated with the particular values of the choice options: the presence of a dominant option in
  the choice set, the overall attractiveness of the options in the choice set, and the relationship between individual options in the decision set (alignability and
  complementarity); (2) The difficulty of the decision task refers to the general structural characteristics of the decision problem: time constraints, decision
  accountability, and number of attributes describing each option; (3) Preference uncertainty refers to the degree to which individuals have articulated preferences with
  respect to the decision at hand and has been operationalized by two factors: the level of product-specific expertise and the availability of an articulated ideal point; and
  (4) The decision goal reflects the degree to which individuals aim to minimize the cognitive effort involved in making a choice among the options contained in the
  available assortments and is operationalized by two measures: decision intent (buying vs. browsing) and decision focus (choosing an assortment vs. choosing a
  particular option). In this context, we expect higher levels of decision task difficulty, greater choice set complexity, higher preference uncertainty, and a more
  prominent, effort-minimizing goal to produce greater choice overload.

The latter paper is too new to assess its impact but insofar it has about 70 citations in GS, which is not too shabby.

Another highly cited paper is Kahneman's "Maps of Bounded Rationality: Psychology for Behavioral Economics". Although it has "Bounded Rationality" in its title and pays homage to Simon in the opening paragraph, this is farther from Simon's own ideas of satisficing as the basis of bounded rationality. Kahaneman proposes that "(i) that most judgments and most choices are made intuitively; (ii) that the rules that govern intuition are generally similar to the rules of perception". The kinds of problems used to illustrate the latter (e.g. the bat and ball problem) are not necessarily the choice problems that Simon had in mind.

And on a somewhat (but not entirely) contrarian note, Camerer's book Behavioral Game Theory (>5 K citations if GS is correct) (see this for a review), which has a sort of precis in a paper of his (much less cited thatn the book though), states:

  Even though strategic thinking is limited, behaviour can
  approximate equilibrium predictions surprisingly well if
  people can learn over time (or through imitation or some
  other adaptive process).

And he has some experimental data to prove it. I'm a bit surprised computer scientists don't stroke their ego more often with the result from 'table 1' in this paper of Camerer. I guess it's not that well known (only about ~100 citations).

Anyway, my point here is that unlike the one-off experiments with choice or puzzles, iterated versions tend to produce results suggesting that the bounds on human rationality are farther than might be conceived in simpler experiments. But simultaneously this finding is also an argument for bounded rationality, at least a computational version thereof.

And speaking computational interpretations, there have been some theoretical works examining (arguing for) bounded rationality from the latter perspective, e.g. Kao and Velupillai; the latter author also has a book-length exposition titled Computable Economics. Frankly the only people who seem to argue against any bounds (as opposed to just bounds in some 'homo economicus' experiments) are those who argue for a non-computational theory of mind, like Penrose so forth; SEP has a good review of these.


Are there synapses on other neuron terminals in human brain like in Aplysia

A bunch of papers I was able to dig up after a cursory search on Google Scholar strongly indicates that heterosynaptic modulation does exist in man, at least in the motor cortex. In these papers the conclusion was reached by using indirect measures, namely by making use of specific stimulation strategies in intact brains in living humans. This as opposed to methods that more directly approach the question, like histology, or single-cell recordings.
References
- Hartwig et al., J Neurosci (2004); 24(13): 3379–85
- Jung & Ziemann, J Neurosci (2009); 29(17): 5597–604
- Nitsche et al., J Neurosci (2007); 27(14): 3807–12
- Zhen et al, J Neurosci (2014); 34(21): 7314–21


Are there gender differences in color discrimination ability?

Short answer: A recent study suggests that, if you rigorously restrict the sample to normal vision participants, women do not outperform men in color discrimination.

Long answer:

As @what has pointed out with the link to Google Scholar, there are a number of studies that have investigated sex differences with regard to color vision.

However, if one accounts for the fact that there are more men who have a deficiency in color vision (because they have only one X chromosome which is involved in color vision), the differences appear to be small and may even contradict the stereotype.

I found one study (Rodríguez-Carmona, Sharpe, Harlow, & Barbur, 2008) that seems particularly close to your specific question. Citing from the abstract (emphasis mine):

Background

  Generally women are believed to be more discriminating than men in the use of color names and this is often taken to imply superior color vision. However, if both X-chromosome linked color deficient males (8%) and females (<1%) as well as heterozygote female carriers (15%) are excluded from comparisons, then differences between men and women in red-green (RG) color discrimination have been reported as not being significant (e.g., Pickford, 1944; Hood et al., 2006).

Study Goal,  Method, and Sample

  We re-examined this question by assessing the performance of 150 males and 150 females on the color assessment and diagnosis (CAD) test (Rodriguez-Carmona et al., 2005). This is a sensitive test that yields small color detection thresholds. The test employs direction-specific, moving, chromatic stimuli embedded in a background of random, dynamic, luminance contrast noise. A four-alternative, forced-choice procedure is employed to measure the subject's thresholds for detection of color signals in 16 directions in color space, while ensuring that the subject cannot make use of any residual luminance contrast signals. In addition, we measured the Rayleigh anomaloscope matches in a subgroup of 111 males and 114 females.
  All the age-matched males (30.8 ± 9.7) and females (26.7 ± 8.8) had normal color vision as diagnosed by a battery of conventional color vision tests. Females with known color deficient relatives were excluded from the study.

Results

  Comparisons between the male and female groups revealed no significant differences in anomaloscope midpoints (p = 0.709), but a significant difference in matching ranges (p = 0.040); females on average tended to have a larger mean range (4.11) than males (3.75). Females also had significantly higher CAD thresholds than males along the RG (p = 0.0004), but not along the yellow-blue (YB) discrimination axis. The differences between males and females in RG discrimination may be related to the heterozygosity in X-linked cone photo pigment expression common among females.

What does this mean?

Citing from the conclusion of the paper

  Chromatic sensitivity was measured in a large population of normal trichromat males and females (...). On average, females were revealed to have significantly higher RG chromatic thresholds compared with men on
  the CAD test and larger red-green matching ranges on the Nagel anomaloscope. A correction was applied to exclude the possible effect of female heterozygotes that were undetected by our screening procedures upon our gender comparisons. On the basis of our results, we can confidently conclude that women do not have superior red-green colour discrimination than men. However, the possibility arises that they may on average have poorer discrimination. Genetic and physiological explanations related to a sexual dimorphism in X-linked cone photopigment expression are offered as to why this may be the case.

References

Rodríguez-Carmona, M., Sharpe, L. t., Harlow, J. a., & Barbur, J. l. (2008). Sex-related differences in chromatic sensitivity. Visual Neuroscience, 25, 433–440. doi:10.1017/S095252380808019X


There is a very short 10 item questionaire. The BFI-10 (see Rammstedt & John, 2007). I have never used it on my own, but i just read through it quickly. Although it seems fairly acceptable. So, if you want to use it, you should definitely read the article carefully.

Regarding your question: I would answer a careful 'yes'. In some cases it is possible to achieve a very basic degree of accuracy with just using a few items. However, this highly depends on the way the test is constructed and the kind of construct you want to investigate. The broader your construct, the more items you will need in order to account for every facet appropriately (e.g. a very broad personality aspect like 'extraversion' vs. a specific facet like 'assertiveness'). Furthermore, the longer your test, the better the reliability will tend to be (see Spearman-Brown Formula).

To sum up: It depends on the situation whether or not a short questionnaire can be basically accurate. You should always check for it´s reliability and validity.

Rammstedt, B., & John, O. P. (2007). Measuring personality in one minute or less: A 10-item short version of the Big Five Inventory in English and German. Journal of research in Personality, 41(1), 203-212.


What are the conditions of deliberate practice?

My causal impression is that the literature on deliberate practice is a little vague about how deliberate practice differs from other forms of practice.

I think it was Ericcson who distinguished between work, play, and deliberate practice. Work is to get something done, play is for enjoyment, and deliberate practice is activity completed with the goal of improving skill.

A few general features of deliberate practice include:

It should be effortful and is likely to involve a degree of focus
The intensity and focus of deliberate practice may limit the amount of time that can be dedicated to it per day, and it is important to get appropriate rest either side.

Deliberate practice is generally designed to be at the optimal level of challenge given your current ability. It should also include feedback.

In general it is going to help a lot to have a tutor. Tutors go by many names: coaches, supervisors, mentors, trainers, teachers, and so on. The tutor can assist in providing you with appropriate exercises and giving you the right feedback. So for example, music instructor may push you to master specific exercises or get you to master a particular musical piece because they can see that it will challenge you. Similarly, a tennis coach may get you repeating particular strokes with feedback.

That said, if you don't have a tutor, you can still attempt to apply the principles of deliberate practice to your own learning. It's harder and probably less efficient, but it is possible to teach yourself a lot of things. A few general suggestions:

Be clear on the skill you're actually trying to master. What is the goal state? What would be evidence of you achieving that state? For example, in academia, evidence of achievement might be seen in getting some top-tier publications. In golf, it might be achieving a certain handicap.
Try to create learning environments where you get feedback on your performance. For example, when doing mathematics exercises you get feedback. When you submit journal articles you get feedback through peer review.
Reflect on whether the activities you are doing are actually improving your skill. Be mindful of when you are getting stuck in a rut. Explore learning materials that might be useful.

I'd also make a final point about the importance of actual work in acquiring a skill. The deliberate practice literature does have a tendency to emphasise the importance of drills and background study (e.g., practicing your serve; studying famous chess masters, etc.). However, in many cases, actually doing the activity (i.e., that which is called work) can be an incredibly valuable learning experience. I vaguely recall a study that looked at soccer referees that showed that number of matches refereed was an independent predictor of referee performance over and above deliberate practice.


Super polymath feasibility: Is it possible to have the highest intellectual ability in every area?

I'm inclined to see it as more a matter of statistics. Since you're asking a question of rank, the possibility depends on the population. For an extreme example, if you were the last man on earth, you'd be your own super polymath by default! Given a population of $N>7\rm B$, competition is of course much fiercer. Since the chance of being #1 in any skill is infinitesimal to begin with, the chance of being #1 in multiple skills is several times more infinitesimal. Granted, these are not independent probabilities; there is evidence of a general factor of intelligence.

Nonetheless, math, soccer, creative writing, chess, physics, and music all involve somewhat different kinds of intelligence; quantitative, kinesthetic, verbal, strategic, spatial, and musical intelligences may all be partially independent. Furthermore, none of these are purely intuitive for anyone. Culture-dependent conventions influence each to at least limited extents. Therefore experience comes into play, and some amount of practice may be necessary to express ability in any of these domains. The more separate domains a person of any innate ability attempts to master through practice is the thinner the person's time for each will be spread, which further reduces one's competitiveness versus specialists.

In issues of rank, sometimes very small practical differences separate the performances of competitors; you need only watch a few minutes of the Olympics to see this principle demonstrated. You may also disagree with scoring systems in the Olympics if you watch a little longer. This indicates another problem with high-level competition: ability measurement becomes less reliable at extremes. See a related question: How can psychometry measure the very high IQ's in adults? Taking this into account, we now face the dual challenge of first producing an incredibly improbable individual with maximally extraordinary abilities, then having identified this individual (itself not a trivial task), performing accurate assessments demonstrating her/his superiority over all others. Again, from a statistical standpoint, odds aren't good.