What would explain an intense feeling of being extremely present, for no reason?

Apparently I have a proclivity for long answers, but I thought I'd respond given the viewership on this question.

We can whittle your question down to a more general form: Can my subjective experience be categorized?  The answer to that basic question is of course! You made a categorization of how you felt in that moment, and you concluded that you had a feeling of "being extremely present."

But why did you make this categorization? And would others agree with you on it?  Would others understand what you mean when you talk about the feeling of being present?  Would they make the same categorization?

Conceptualization

In brief, you categorized your internal state on the basis of (1) conceptual knowledge that you had accumulated from past experience combined with (2) your perception of the present situation (e.g., Barsalou, 2009; also here). With this information, you cohered all of those disparate and ambiguous elements of your subjective experience into a single concept of "feeling present." And now you're able to reflect on it more easily, act on it more easily, and talk to us about it more easily. Pretty cool!

The Anger Concept

To understand this a bit better, consider a prominent emotion theory (Barrett, 2014), which holds that the sociocultural knowledge we accumulate about emotion categories (e.g., anger, fear) allows us to categorize our own experiences, categorize others' experiences, and communicate those experiences.  So as you learn about the concept of "anger," for example, you develop the capacity to categorize your angry experiences ("I'm angry"), others' angry experiences ("She's angry"), and communicate those angry experiences (see, e.g., Caron, Caron, & Myers, 1985; Widen & Russell, 2008).   Over time, you learn to make this anger categorization automatically and often unconsciously (cf. Barsalou, 2009).

We know that in many countries, anger is a concept that most people would understand (although even then, there may be differences in definition and understanding; e.g., for the word "happiness": Oishi et al., 2013).  However, it's not clear whether most would understand your concept of "feeling extremely present."  After all, it's not a traditional Western idea, nor does it fit into a traditional taxonomy of feeling states.  Moreover, it's not entirely clear that you can communicate its contents effectively (which is true for many feelings we have).

Other Definitions?

We can look at research that has operationalized feelings of presence and compare them to yours.  For example, one well-known study defined feeling present as a focus on momentary experience (Farb et al., 2007), which they validated in an fMRI study.  Would the experience they defined match up with yours?

Streams not Boxes

I can't really speak to whether the feeling you described has a name or is well-known. However, the important thing to note is that subjective experience isn't carved up neatly into boxes.  It only seems that way because humans have a natural tendency to constantly categorize things (see again, Barsalou, 2009), which, as you can imagine, is very useful.

Instead, we might describe subjective experience as a "continuous stream." Anywhere along that stream, we can make some arbitrary division. "This part of my subjective experience, and all related instances, will be called anger." "I'll categorize this part as feeling present." And so on. There are virtually infinite ways of categorizing your subjective experience, and so we can't possibly come up with names for all of them.  But as you've done, we can try our hardest to communicate our feelings, and most of the time, it won't be in vain!


What is the scientific basis for long-term negative physiological effects of overstudying?

The research literature on stress in general and burnout in particular would be relevant. The stress literature is massive and there are studies that have a particular focus on students.

For example Jacobs and Dodd did a study on college student burnout:

  Measures of social support (Multidimen- sional Scale of Perceived
  Social Support), personality (General Temperament Survey), and
  workload were related to psychological burnout (Maslach Burnout
  Inventory) among 149 college students ( M = 20.8 yrs.). High levels of
  burnout were predicted by negative temperament and subjective
  workload, but actual workload (academic and vocational) had little to
  do with burnout. Low levels of burnout were predicted by positive
  tempera- ment, participation in extracurricular activities, and social
  support, especially from friends.

They also cite some of the literature on stress in college  students:

  there has been a substantial amount of research on
  stress among general college students. Stress has been shown to be
  correlated with college students’ health behaviors (Weidner, Kohl-
  mann, Dotzauer, & Burns, 1996), anxiety concerning exams (Abouserie,
  1994; Ever- son, Tobias, Hartman, & Gourgey, 1993; Sloboda, 1990),
  self-esteem (Abouserie; Newby-Fraser & Schlebusch, 1997), and coping
  strategies that students use (Dwyer & Cummings, 2001). To the extent
  that stress is an important component of burnout (Maslach & Jackson,
  1981), this research is relevant to the development of a model of
  burnout among college students. Between classes, exams, employment,
  and extra- curricular activities, students are likely to experience
  high levels of stress, but do they experience burnout? Much research
  is needed to determine the prevalence of burnout, to identify
  important intrapersonal and interpersonal factors that influence
  burnout, and to develop effective inter- ventions to prevent and
  reduce burnout in college students.

References

Jacobs, S.R. & Dodd, D. (2003). Student burnout as a function of personality, social support, and workload. Journal of College Student Development, 44, 291-303.


Can speech dysarthria occur in schizophrenia without other neurological or medication-induced disruptions?

There's one somewhat obscure paper by Varambally et al. (2012) that (apparently) says that dysarthria can be a part of the "Neurological Soft Signs" (NSS) of schizophrenia itself. They examined "32 never-treated patients with schizophrenia" vs healthy controls and found that

  A stepwise multiple discriminant analysis identified two ICARS sub-scores to be significant (Kinetic sub-score and Dysarthria sub-score), which accounted for 78% classification.

The broader topic of NSS in schizophrenia (either in patients or even in their relatives) has received a fair bit of attention, but the above is the only paper that mentioned dysarthria in this context. One potential problem that I see is that there isn't a commonly agreed way to measure NSS. One meta-analysis found that three studies used NES, two used SNE, and two the Rossi scale. I looked at these scales briefly and they don't seem to address dysarthria; it's possible that I've missed something and they call it something else...

The question is a bit vague (and given its age and one-time involvement of the asker it seems unlikely it will see clarification). The title seem to ask if medication can also cause dysarthria. Apparently, yes, there is one study by Caroff et al. (2011) which does mention it as an extreme form of (antipshyctohic) drug-induced dystonia:

  Dystonia is an acute, alarming involuntary movement disorder that can be painful and distressing, and erodes patient trust and compliance. It is characterized by briefly sustained or intermittent spasms or contractions of antagonistic muscle groups resulting in twisting and repetitive movements or postures. Drug-induced dystonia can affect any muscle group, but most commonly involves the head, neck, jaw, eyes and mouth resulting in spasmodic torticollis, retro- or anterocollis, trismus and dental trauma, forced jaw-opening or dislocation, grimacing, blepharospasm, tongue biting, protrusion or twisting, and distortion of the lips. It is not action or sensory stimulus dependent. More subtle signs, including muscle cramps or tightness of the jaw and tongue with difficulty speaking or chewing, may precede dystonia or occur alone. At the other extreme, dystonia may present as an oculogyric crisis or with other forced eye movements, or with dysarthria, dysphagia and potentially lethal respiratory stridor if pharyngeal or laryngeal musculature is affected. Less frequently observed, dystonia may affect axial, truncal or limb movements occasionally leading to camptocormia, pleurothotonus (Pisa syndrome) or opisthotonus.

The same paper mentions that dysarthria may also occur in the more dangerous neuroleptic malignant syndrome, in which the more classic symptoms of hyperthermia and generalized rigidity also occur (and can be used for differential diagnosis.)

There's one other paper by Mathews et al. (2005) about antipsychotic-induced movement disorders that I've looked at, but it doesn't mention dysarthria. From this I guess that it's a rather rare occurrence as a side-effect of antipsychotic medication. I didn't find anything more detailed about prevalence etc.


Psychometric scale with items in sets where responses imply a rank order of items

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

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

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

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

References

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


There is no ambiguity as such with respect to expectations in those examples. When you buy a Kinder Egg, you know up front you won't know what's in there. In other words, it's perfectly unambiguous that you don't know what to expect from a Kinder Egg.


How many calories do we burn when we try to understand mathematical proofs?

Not many.

  Although firing neurons summon extra blood, oxygen and glucose, any local increases in energy consumption are tiny compared with the brain's gluttonous baseline intake. So, in most cases, short periods of additional mental effort require a little more brainpower than usual, but not much more. Most laboratory experiments, however, have not subjected volunteers to several hours' worth of challenging mental acrobatics.

-Scientific America Does Thinking Really Hard Burn More Calories?

  Our results conclude that the measured Ff,ATPase reflects the oxidative phosphorylation rate in resting rat brains, that this flux is tightly correlated to the change of energy demand under varied brain activity levels, and that a significant amount of ATP energy is required for “housekeeping” under the isoelectric state. These findings reveal distinguishable characteristics of ATP metabolism between the brain and heart, and they highlight the importance of in vivo 31P MT approach to potentially provide a unique and powerful neuroimaging modality for noninvasively studying the cerebral ATP metabolic network and its central role in bioenergetics associated with brain function, activation, and diseases.

-PNAS Tightly coupled brain activity and cerebral ATP metabolic rate


Freeware for measuring keystroke duration

Psychopy (http://psychopy.org) can do this. It can do it in two ways.

Using iohub. Iohub is a crazy powerful way to get any information about any kind of input to your system, from keyboard, mouse, eye-trackers, etc. You can see the documentation for keyboard here.

from psychopy.iohub import launchHubServer
io = launchHubServer()
keyboard = io.devices.keyboard  # handy name

print 'start pressing a key now'
key_info = keyboard.waitForReleases()[0]  # Just grab first release, even if there are multiple
print 'Press time was', key_info.duration
print '... and BTW, all key event info was', key_info

Using pyglet:

from psychopy import visual, event, core
win = visual.Window()  # Disadvantage: you need to have a window open to record it.
clock = core.Clock()

# Start listening
print 'start pressing a key now'
key, time = event.waitKeys(timeStamped=True)[0]
clock.reset()  # Key down time
while event.getKeys():
    pass
print 'key lasted', clock.getTime(), 'seconds'

If measuring key strokes is the only thing you need, psychopy may be a bit heavy since it is meant for running full experiments, but it will do the job!


How does the inner ear encode sound intensity?

Short answer
Hair cells in the cochlea can code sound intensity via the amount of neurotransmitter they release. Higher sound levels result in more neurotransmitter release and in turn to higher firing rates in the spiral ganglion cells of the auditory nerve.

Background
Sound waves are picked up by the mechanoreceptors in the inner ear: the hair cells. Hair cells release the excitatory neurotransmitter glutamate. Dependent on the direction of the deflection of the hairs (stereocilia) on the hair cells, the hair cell releases more neurotransmitter (activation) or less (inhibition) than at its resting state (Fig. 1). The released glutamate activates the primary sensory neurons that connect to the hair cells, namely the spiral ganglion cells (SGCs). The axons of the SGCs combine to form the auditory nerve (Fuchs, 2005).

Fig. 1. Hair cells are activated when their stereocilia are bent in one direction (depolarization) or inhibited when the cilia bend to the other direction (hyperpolarization). source: Yanowski

The hair cell cilia contain mechanoreceptor proteins, that open or close, dependent on the direction in which the cilia bend (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Mechanoreceptors in the cochlear hair cell. source: Hudspeth (2014)

Because sound waves have sinusoidal shapes, hair cells undergo cycles of activation and inhibition, closely following the input waves. Louder stimuli cause the cilia to bend further. This causes larger responses in the hair cell and larger amounts of neurotransmitter to be released in the depolarizing phase of the auditory stimulus. This in turn leads to higher spike rates in the spiral ganglion cell axons (Fuchs, 2005). Spike rate in the spiral ganglion cells are thought to primarily encode sound intensity (Heil et al., 2011)

A secondary mechanism of loudness coding may be related to the fact that increased sound levels activate a larger area in the cochlea, due to the low-frequency tail (Kiang & Moxon, 1974). Hence, more neurons start firing at higher sound levels when the tone frequency is the same. However, although it is a plausible mechanism, it is a secondary intensity code, if any.

References
- Fuchs, J Physiol (2005); 566(1): 7–12
- Heil et al., J Neurosci 2011; 31(43): 15424-37
- Hudspeth, Nature Rev Neurosci (2014); 15: 600–14
- Kiang & Moxon, JASA 1954; 55(3): 620-30


How does daily amount of sleep vary within and between healthy adults?

Just a starting point.
Jean-Louis et al (2000) provide one sample of population adult sample using objective sleep measures. To quote the abstract

  Using Actillumes, we investigated whether self-reported sleep
  durations were indicative of a population decline in sleep duration.
  We also explored illumination and activity patterns. Methods: San
  Diego adults (n = 273, age range: 40–64) were recruited through random
  telephone calls and were monitored at home while engaging in usual
  daily routines. Results: Volunteers slept an average of 6.22 hours and
  received an average of 554 lux (environmental illumination). The
  timing of sleep, illumination, and activity occurred at 2:44, 12:57,
  and 13:43, respectively.

References

Jean-Louis, G., Kripke, D.F., Ancoli-Israel, S., Klauber, M.R. & Sepulveda, R.S. (2000). Sleep duration, illumination, and activity patterns in a population sample: effects of gender and ethnicity. Biological psychiatry, 47, 921-927.


Difference between concentration and attention

Concentration is focusing on a task (e.g. reading a book). Attention is focusing on a person (e.g. listening during a conversation). The verb, focus, is the same in both instances. The noun, task and person, is the point of differentiation.


Does rTMS therapy require medical licensing?

It depends on the country, but, for most of them (incl. USA and EU), you don't need a medical license to perform biomedical research, including human experiments with TMS. However, you will need legal approval, such as certified research environment, ethics/IRB permission, etc. Also, one should delineate research and clinical trials, which are governed by a special set of rules and, most often, require medical environment.


Who are the main authors who studied meditation with scientific methods?

Searching for "meditation" on Google Scholar  sorts articles by relevance and provides counts of citations that each has received. From the first page of about 686,000 results, these are the references with over 1000 citations each (I've sorted them by citations, which Google Scholar does not do easily):

Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever you go, there you are: Mindfulness meditation in everyday life. Hyperion.

1971 citations!

Davidson, R. J., Kabat-Zinn, J., Schumacher, J., Rosenkranz, M., Muller, D., Santorelli, S. F., ... & Sheridan, J. F. (2003). Alterations in brain and immune function produced by mindfulness meditation. Psychosomatic Medicine, 65(4), 564–570.

1811 citations!

Kabat-Zinn, J. (1982). An outpatient program in behavioral medicine for chronic pain patients based on the practice of mindfulness meditation: Theoretical considerations and preliminary results. General Hospital Psychiatry, 4(1), 33–47.

1315 citations.

Peterson, L. G., & Pbert, L. (1992). Effectiveness of a meditation-based stress reduction program in the treatment of anxiety disorders. Am J Psychiatry, 149, 936–943.

1295 citations.

Kabat-Zinn, J., Lipworth, L., & Burney, R. (1985). The clinical use of mindfulness meditation for the self-regulation of chronic pain. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 8(2), 163–190.

1002 citations; same author as the top result – probably one to follow for buzzworthy work.

Of course, you can edit the search terms, or set a custom range of publication dates if you want to look for references of more historical relevance. I don't think you should prefer textbooks over articles unless you're really looking to refer your audience to a comprehensive introduction to the topic.


Are there working computational frameworks for human behavior and personality?

Cognitive Architectures

The description most closely matches the concept of a cognitive architecture. Whereas I would say most empirical cognitive science focuses on isolating cognitive functions or behavioral substrates, cognitive architectures are relatively unique because they attempt to run bottom-up simulations of interdependent sets of cognitive functions.

Example: ACT-R framework

An influential example of a cognitive architecture is Carnegie Mellon's Adaptive Control of Thought—Rational (ACT-R), which is a hybrid cognitive architecture--meaning it comprises both symbolic pattern recognition and underlying processes such as utility functions. The ACT-R framework distinguishes between modules (perceptual-motor and memory), buffers for accessing memory, and pattern recognition between buffer states and perceptual-motor production.

ACT-R model

ACT-R usage

ACT-R allows researchers to obtain standard quantities like response times and accuracy on a very large amount of tasks. (Apparently it now also affords obtaining fMRI data, but I am not at all familiar with this.) It has been used to model virtually every kind of behavior and cognitive function, and there is little point in giving specific examples. The ACT-R website's publications section features a staggering amount of well-categorized articles, if you want to know more, but since you wanted to know about personality in particular, it merits pointing out that it does include individual differences.

Conclusion

Cognitive architectures are an exciting development that promise to solve the dirty little secret of most cognitive science: while we are developing increasingly powerful explanations for isolated cognitive functions and behaviors, there was no way to bridge most of these models, or to combine them into a model of a coherent "mind" (i.e., a cause of behavior). While they are not the only player in that game (e.g., embodied cognition and dynamical systems), the concept of cognitive architecture, unlike competing concepts, has the advantage of being immediately compatible with the cognitive literature, and very amenable to digital simulation.


A paper by Kaul et al. from 2010 suggest that meditation can indeed decrease the need for sleep. Meditation acutely improves psychomotor vigilance, and may decrease sleep need

Quote from conclusions:

  These results suggest that meditation provides at least a short-term performance improvement even in novice meditators. In long term meditators, multiple hours spent in meditation are associated with a significant decrease in total sleep time when compared with age and sex matched controls who did not meditate. Whether meditation can actually replace a portion of sleep or pay-off sleep debt is under further investigation.


At what point does a complex become pathological?

I don't think there is an easy answer to this question. It is a bit like asking how long is a piece of string. Really what you are asking is, what is the defining point between a lesser problem and a greater problem, that it can be diagnosed as a pathological.

My answer would be once a complex impacts on an individual's ability to function normally, becomes a more persistent within the person's thoughts or in any way crippling then it is pathological. Or better put in the following quote:

  psychoneurosis, also called neurosis, plural psychoneuroses, or
  neuroses ,  mental disorder that causes a sense of distress and
  deficit in functioning.

Firstly to define what Jung considered to be a complex.

  Jung's theory of complexes with key citations.
  A "complex" meaning a personal unconscious, core pattern of emotions,
  memories, perceptions, and wishes organized around a common theme
  (Shultz and Shultz, 2009). .../...

  Jung often used the term "complex" to describe a usually unconscious,
  repressed, yet highly influential symbolic material that is
  incompatible with the consciousness (Daniels, 2010).  .../...

  Some complexes usurp power from the ego and can cause constant
  psychological disturbances and symptoms of neurosis (Daniels, 2010)

So given that  when a complex becomes a greater problem, it's a  neurosis. We need to define neurosis.

  Neurosis is a class of functional mental disorders involving
  distress but neither delusions nor hallucinations, whereby behavior is
  not outside socially acceptable norms.1 It is also known as
  psychoneurosis or neurotic disorder, and thus those suffering from it
  are said to be neurotic. The term essentially describes an "invisible
  injury" and the resulting condition.

Now we compare this with the definition of what pathology is in psychology.

  Psychological Pathology   Definition   The scientific study of
  psychological disorders and their causes.   Description
  Psychological pathology is the study of the causes, components,
  course, and consequences of psychological disorders. These are
  characterized by abnormality and dysfunction.   Abnormality
  Psychological disorders are defined by diagnostic criteria, like those
  outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
  (DSM; American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2000) or the
  International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related
  Health Conditions (ICD; World Health Organization, 2007).

The inclusion of neurosis in the DSM has been controversial and neurosis is not considered a part of anxiety conditions.


Recognizing which object is new, while forgetting original objects

Is there a name for this phenomenon in cognitive science?

What you are describing is a number of things that in general have to do with attention and memory.

The first one of them is priming. Memory can be both conscious and unconscious, or declarative and implicit, and attended vs unattended. I've always found the names a bit confusing, but in short there is a lot of information that your brain stores without you being in the know. The priming bit comes from experiments where sets of words were presented to test subjects as part of a context, that is they were not part of the main activity or focus, and later when tested for another set of words that included those same first words, the subjects scored higher on recognizing them. An advertising billboard on the highway or street is designed to take advantage of priming.

The second thing at play here is what's called pop-out search ( Treisman & Gelade ,1980). When a target of a visual search can be identified by a single feature such as color, it pops-out, in the image below, how long does it take you to find the special K ?

So, back to the candy bar example: by staring longingly into the first vending machine, you primed yourself with candy bars unknowingly, and upon encountering a second one, your undirected visual search immediately noticed the one that was different from the first set.

  Perhaps it had some early evolutionary advantage?

I believe it could, imagine you live in the savanah so something like this might be your day to day, you are familiar with it, yet if a lion or other predator  were to be in the mix, this popout search + familiarity would help you spot it.


Any research on right-hand/left-hand based preferences when interacting with an interface?

There is indeed some research on handedness and user interfaces but not exactly at the level you seem to be after. Handedness matters for tablet interfaces, hand occlusion is a particular concern there.

Some references: http://hal.inria.fr/hal-00670516/en and http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.89.4546

Speculating myself a little bit, I would however be careful when drawing practical conclusions from any putative “natural” handedness-related inclination. Maybe there is such a thing and it could conceivably be measured but you need much more than that to justify any UI decision.

In particular, cultural factors (in a broad sense, including web and platform conventions) could just as well play a big role. The usability literature has always emphasized consistency and the fact that your interface is just going to be one of many interfaces with which users are regularly interacting so when in doubt always try to follow common practice, not necessarily because it is better as such but simply to avoid confusing your users. In any case, there is no reason to worry specifically about “natural” inclinations (as opposed to learned ones).


The heart isn't really "controlled" by the nervous system in the same way, say, the limbs are.  Heart muscle cells (cardiac myocytes) beat with a steady rhythm even in complete isolation.  Collections of isolated cardiac myocytes will beat synchronously.  The beating of the heart is controlled internally by two bundles of specialized cardiac myocytes, the sinoatrial node being the primary controller and the atrioventricular node regulating how the beat changes between the upper and lower chambers of the heart.

Although the heart beating it controlled internally, the nervous system does have an influence.  This comes more generally from the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, which control how our bodies respond to various levels of arousal and stress.  These systems influence many parts of the body, but they influence the heart by "instructing" the sinoatrial node to alter its rate of beating.  This is controlled primarily by the vagus nerve, if you are wondering about the specific neural anatomy.  That nerve is involved in a wide variety of tasks, but it is particular important for the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems.


What is the term for judging based on a simulation of the same parameters on oneself

In naïve realism, the subject acknowledges others' points of view while affirming the superiority of his/her own. Ross and Ward (1996) review the literature. I tried to write a summary of their fine paper, but I couldn't do it justice. I provide a link to it below.

In selfishness or unenlightened self-interest, the subject may consider multiple points of view, but ultimately chooses by myopically predicting maximal net personal gain.

In philosophy, moral relativism is concerned with (inter-personal or inter-group) differences in moral judgements, and whether and how they can be reconciled. My point here is that your subjects' moral relativistic beliefs may impact their decision mechanisms and thus may be worth surveying.

References

  Ross, L., & Ward, A. (1996) Naive realism in everyday life: Implications for social conflict and misunderstanding. In T. Brown, E. S. Reed & E. Turiel (Eds.), Values and knowledge (pp. 103–135). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. [pdf]


William James "Principles of Psychology" and Brain Plasticity

Short answer
Neural plasticity is a broad term. While it has long been recognized, the fact that the adult brain is plastic even at the gross structural level has taken a long time to become widely accepted.

Background
There are a few things that play a role here.

First and foremost, neural plasticity is a term encompassing many different processes. Neuroplasticity can be observed from microscopic (molecular) changes in individual neurons, to large-scale structural changes, such as cortical remapping in response to injury.
Secondly, the small scale changes have long been recognized, the gross structural changes were only discovered much later.
Thirdly, neuroplasticity has indeed been long recognized, but it has long been thought that there were critical periods in life (Sylva et al., 1997) where after plasticity was no longer present. In a way, that idea is still recognized, and is the reason why, e.g., congenitally deaf children are receiving cochlear implants in the first months of their lives to allow the plastic brain to develop hearing and speech development during this "critical period" where these developments are accompanied by gross changes in the brain not possible later in life (Snik et al., 1997). Untreated prelingual deafness therefore results in impaired speech understanding and the typical 'deaf speech' when they receive an implant after this critical period. Paul Bach-y-Rita and Michael Merzenich are often credited for their ideas on the plastic adult brain. For instance, Bach-y-Rita recognized that his dad, by then an aged man, was still capable to re-learn many tasks after serious brain injury. He recognized that hence, the adult brain is plastic too (plastic, in terms of gross changes that allow re-allocation of healthy brain tissue to take over the tasks from damaged regions). The idea of the adult brain being able for gross plastic changes has taken a while to become accepted.

References
- Snik et al., Int J Ped Otorhinolayngol (1997); 41(2):121-31
- Sylva et al., Br Med Bull (1997); 53(1): 185-19


Are there already models for planning and goal-directed behaviour?

Reward systems are one of the most actively studied topics in (cognitive) neuroscience and prediction error - that is, deviations from expected "future" reward - play a big role in that. Since you're particularly interested in models, I recommend checking out the work of Matt Botvinick and Nathaniel Daw. Here are a few papers that might be good starting points:

Glascher, Daw, Dayan, & O’Doherty (2010). States versus Rewards: Dissociable Neural
Prediction Error Signals Underlying Model-Based and Model-Free Reinforcement Learning. Neuron, 66, 585-595.

den Ouden, Friston, Daw, McIntosh, & Stephan (2009). A Dual Role for Prediction Error in
Associative Learning. Cerebral Cortex, 19, 1175-1185.

Solway & Botvinick (2012). Goal-directed decision making as probabilistic inference: A computational framework and potential neural correlates. Psycholological Review, 119, 120-154.

Botvinick & Plaut (2004). Doing without schema hierarchies: A recurrent connectionist approach to routine sequential action and its pathologies. Psychological Review, 111, 395-429.


What is the line between daily conversation and therapy?

For the answer to this question, you need to look at the definition of the word therapy in the context of psychology.

Therapy is a treatment for psychological problems in which therapists and clients work together to understand problems and come up with plans for fixing them, generally by changing ineffective thoughts, emotions or behaviors (APA, n.d. [in the website meta description not in the web content]).

The borders between therapy and general socratic questioning between friends/work colleagues is very thin (if at all existent).  It can be very therapeutic to feel you can talk to a very good friend or colleague about a problem, but sometimes the situation can be misjudged. With all the best will in the world, sometimes people find it difficult to be non-judgemental of a friend who has confided in them.
Trained therapists, who are registered and licenced, are vetted by their managing bodies to provide a safe therapeutic environment to their clients, free of judgement and respectful of client autonomy (Fundamental principles of all codes of ethics — e.g. National Counselling Society (updated June 2020)).

Therapy provides a supportive, non-judgemental environment where you might feel more able to talk openly about your experiences.
Your therapist and you will work together to make changes that you want to achieve to feel a greater sense of happiness, empowerment, or perhaps to feel less affected by particular experiences (Devon Partnership NHS Trust, n.d.).

You said that

in a therapeutic relationship the therapist has power (which can be used to exploit the client if they want)

Remember that although therapists are in a position of power, if true autonomy is provided, the client has all the power to control the therapeutic relationship.
Among other big differences including closed vs open questioning, one big difference between friends/colleagues and a therapist who works within the ethical framework is that a friend/colleague may tell you what they would do or suggest what you should do to deal with a situation.
Respecting client autonomy, a therapist can not and must not do that.  An ethical therapist will work with the client to work out what options the client has and possible pros and cons associated with those options in order for the client to choose their own course of action.

Psychotherapy is a collaborative treatment based on the relationship between an individual and a psychologist. A psychologist provides a supportive environment that allows you to talk openly with someone who is objective, neutral and nonjudgmental (APA, n.d.).

References
APA. (n.d.) Therapy. American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/topics/therapy
Devon Partnership NHS Trust. (n.d.) What are psychological therapies? https://www.dpt.nhs.uk/our-services/psychology-and-psychological-therapies/what-are-psychological-therapies
National Counselling Society (2020). Code of Ethical Practice https://nationalcounsellingsociety.org/about-us/code-of-ethics


The unpredictable loading bar -- or, the slot machine effect

A couple of studies (Harrison et al, 2007; Amer & Johnson, 2016) tested pauses/stalls in progress, and concluded (respectively): "... participants perceived progress bars with pauses as taking longer to complete ..." and "... participants preferred a progress bar that moves consistently to a stalling progress bar, and judged the process duration to be shorter ..." suggesting that continuous/steady progress bars are preferred by users over intermittent/random indicators.
There is much more research on continuous progress indicators (eg, Villar, Callegaro, & Yang, 2013; Liu & Wronski, 2018) that suggests that users generally prefer fast-to-slow / decelerating progress - that is, inaccurate progress bars that overestimate progress early on.  Slot machines similarly use early success to increase player perseverance, a kind of anchoring bias.  However, most of this research is on progress indicators for active tasks such as filling out surveys.  Some experiments with passive waiting (like file transfers) align with their results (eg, Gronier & Baudet, 2019; Kuroki & Ishihara, 2015), but other studies show a preference for accelerating progress instead (eg, Harrison et al, 2007), so I would wait for a meta-analysis specific to passive tasks before making a firm conclusion.
There are also various exploratory studies testing alternative progress bar displays, such as different colours and shapes, designs and animations, adding audio and video, suggesting that user perceptions can be altered in a variety of novel ways.  As well, progress indicators on passive tasks may be affected by the labour illusion, in which user experience is influenced by the perceived amount of work done.


What are existing theories on competing wills in the mind?

Instead of pointing you to existing theories, which is (1) too advanced for you to understand at the current level of knowledge, and (2) too focused so that you don't have a big picture, why don't we just suggest you to read a textbook about cognition? It will solve both problems at the same time.

I recommend the book Cognitive Psychology, written by Strenberg, as the starting point. Cognition: Exploring the Science (author: Reisberg) is also a good one. If you are like me, you will realize how to make the question clearer just after some first few pages of reading.


Children's progression from counting to addition

Yes, addition becomes procedural knowledge. Below is an extract from the book "Smart Thinking by Art Markman", that clearly explains the process :

  When you are learning to do addition, the two procedures you have for
  adding compete with each other. One of those procedures requires some
  effort. You start with the bigger number and then count up. Adding two
  and four means starting with four and then counting to five and six.
  The other procedure is effortless. You try to remember the answer. If
  you finish counting before you pull up an answer from memory, then the
  counting procedure wins. If you are confident you have pulled up the
  right answer from memory before you finish counting, then the habit
  wins. After you solve the problem (by either method), you store
  another memory that 2 + 4 = 6. So, each attempt at an addition problem
  provides memories that will make it faster for you to remember the
  correct answer in the future.

  The difficulty with math is there are lots of similar facts. You are
  learning 2 + 4 = 6, but at the same time, you are also encountering
  problems like 2 + 7 = 9 and 2 + 5 = 7. Sometimes, when you see 2 + 4,
  you will also recall some of those similar problems. When you retrieve
  these conflicting answers, you are going to be uncertain about which
  answer is correct. So you will finish carrying out your counting
  procedure before you have an answer from memory. Once you have a lot
  of examples of addition problems in your memory, most of what you pull
  out of memory when you see 2 + 4 will be other situations in which you
  also saw 2 + 4. At that point, you retrieve information from memory
  faster than you can count, and so you have a habit.

  Chapter references:

  Logan, G. D. (1988). Toward an Instance Theory of Automaticity.
  Psychological Review 95: 492–527.

  Schneider, W., and Shiffrin, R. M. (1977). Controlled and Automatic
  Human Information Processing: 1. Detection, Search, and Attention.
  Psychological Review 84 (1): 1–66.

  Shiffrin, R. M., and Schneider, W. (1977). Controlled and Automatic
  Human Information Processing: 2. Perceptual Learning, Automatic
  Attending, and a General Theory. Psychological Review 84: 127–190.

The two competing systems mentioned above, are actually system 1 and system 2 that are explained in detail by Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking, fast and slow.


What makes words (entities) positive or negative?

The classification of affect as positive (as in "good") or negative (as in "bad") is called valence.

There is a large body of research regarding word valence, owing to interest from corporate communications and public messages, for example as delivered through social media.  To further address demand, Bradley & Lang (1999) developed a database of dictionary words and their valence scores, that is available for download.  More recently, such databases have been developed for dozens of languages, and the English database has been greatly expanded as well.  These databases often feature multiple dimensions of affect, but if you are not interested in them, then just look at valence and ignore the rest.

With such databases in hand, it is possible to test how different factors predict word valence.  Many hypotheses have been tested, such as word length, conjugations, age of acquisition, etc.  A comprehensive review by Warriner et al (2013) lists a few more examples of correlations with lexical properties, such as smell, color, and motion:

  Most correlations that emotional ratings show with other semantic
  properties are weak to moderate, with the exception of correlations
  with variables that directly tap into emotional states.

Of particular note, and extensively studied in this field, are concreteness, imageability, context availability, and familiarity.  Familiarity for example, is a term that has to do with how well known and how common words are - common words tend to be rated more positively than uncommon ones.  This has to do with the mere-exposure effect, and more generally, processing fluency (a.k.a. "cognitive ease"):

  Fluency and familiarity have been shown to lead to the mere exposure
  effect. Research has found that repetition of a stimulus can lead to
  fluent processing which leads to a feeling of liking. ... Later
  research observed that high perceptual fluency increases the
  experience of positive affect.

Another good list of databases and research on concreteness, imageability, context availability, and familiarity can be found in Riegel et al (2015).  As I said, it's a big field, but hopefully this gets you started.


Implementation Intentions and Mental Contrasting vs Meditation

I cannot fit this into a comment, so I would post this answer, hoping it may be useful to someone.

The affirmation of the form

  "If I encounter situation X then I will do this."

Has been tried by amateurs in the field of lucid dream induction. Lucid dreaming is about realizing that one is dreaming from within a dream. Normally people have very limited self control during dreams, and the affirmation statement attempts to increase it.  Such statement usually includes a "dreamsign", followed by an intention to realize the fact that the person is dreaming:

  "If I will find myself in math class, I will realize that I'm
  dreaming, because I have graduated from high school and college, and
  don't have to take any more math classes for the rest of my life".

Normally, rational thought is very hazy in a dream. For example, a typical scenario is a person may find himself in a math(chemistry/other hard subject) class dream, taking an exam that the person is not prepared for. The rational mind does not question this.

The interesting thing happens (at least to me) when the above mentioned affirmation does get triggered - still without clear rational thought I get up from the desk and walk out of the class. There's no clear awareness of why, but the behavior is changed when the stimuli is experienced.


What type of learning mechanism produces a consistent typo?

There is a scientific literature on typing. It's been a while since I've read the articles.
You might start by reading this excellent review of research and findings on transcription typing.

Salthouse, 1986: Perceptual, cognitive, and motoric aspects of transcription typing. PDF

General model of typing

Salthouse (1986) presents a model of the typing process

1. INPUT: Convert text into chunks
2. PARSING: Decompose chunks into ordinal strings of characters
3. TRANSLATION: Convert characters into movement specifications
4. EXECUTION: Implement movement in balistic fashion

A few other relevant points that Salthouse supports with multiple references:

"The rate of typing is nearly the same for random words as it is for
meaningful text."
"Successive keystrokes from fingers on alternate hands are faster than
successive keystrokes from fingers on the same hand."
"Letter pairs that occur more frequently in normal language
are typed faster than less frequent pairs."
Interkey interval varies with the context of the letters in a word.

These points basically state that typing involves various forms of motor chunking, that the word is a central chunk but that there are also many other lower level chunks (e.g., typing "ion" and "ier" is quite  common in English).

Errors

There's also a discussion of typing errors in the paper.

Salthouse mentions the taxonomy of typing errors proposed by  Wells (1916) of "substitutions, intrusions, ommissions, and transpositions", and also cites empirical estimates of prevalence of different types of errors.
"Many substitution errors involve adjacent keys."
"Most transposition errors are cross-hand rather than within-hand"

I suggest you have a read of the paper to get a deeper understanding of the types and proposed causes of typing errors.

Specific thoughts regarding your question

Perhaps in contrast to what you say, typos are not random. Rather, there is structure to the errors. For example, "Teh" is a common typo.
Obviously, having an incorrect belief about the spelling of a word could result in repeated errors, but I understand you are not talking about them.
So, with regards to a specific word that you frequently mistype, you might want to think whether there are characteristics of the word that make it difficult to type. Also, as you say, if you learn the wrong chunking at some point, you may need to unlearn this pattern.

References:

Wells, F. L. (1916). On the psychomotor mechanisms of typewriting. The American Journal of Psychology, 27(1), 47-70.


Are there first person accounts of monothematic delusions?

Since asking the question, I was able to locate a first-person account of monothematic delusion, namely, of denial of ownership of one's own limbs (somatoparaphrenia/asomatognosia). It is due to the neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks, who in his fourth book A Leg to Stand On (1984) described his recovery after a fall in a remote region of Norway in which he injured his leg. Following surgery to reattach his quadriceps muscle, he experienced an emotional period in which his leg no longer felt a part of his body. He describes his confusion, seeing the “disowned” plastered limb (Sacks 1984: 45,49, 49–50):

  I had felt the leg in front of me . . . but now I could see it wasn’t
  there at all but had got shifted and rotated. . . . I had a
  sudden sense of mismatch, of profound incongruity –
  between what I imagined I felt and what I actually saw,
  between what I had “thought” and what I now found. I felt, for
  a dizzying, vertiginous moment, that I have been profoundly
  deceived. . . .

The experience of touching the leg was “inconceivably shocking and uncanny”:

  I seemed to have lost “my leg” – which was absurd, for there it
  was, inside the case, safe and sound – a “fact.” How could
  there be any doubt in the matter? And yet there was. On this very matter of “having” or “possessing” a leg, I was
  profoundly doubtful, fundamentally unsure.

This alarming state of uncertainty later resolves itself into
what seems closer to a fully delusional state:

  [the leg] became a foreign, inconceivable thing, which I looked
  at, and touched, without any sense whatever of recognition or
  relation. It was only then that I gazed at it, and felt I don’t
  know you, you’re not part of me, and, further, I don’t know this
  “thing,” it’s not part of anything. I had lost my leg. Again and
  again I came back to these five words: words which expressed
  a central truth for me, however preposterous they might
  sound to anyone else. In some sense, then, I had lost my leg.
  It had vanished; it had gone; it had been cut off at the top. I
  was now an amputee.

EDIT: I have found a first-person account of Cotard delusion in this blog post, thanks to Vaughan Bell who found it through Keith Frankish (both authors working extensively with delusions).


Excluding psychometry and interview methods, is there any physical or molecular method that can confirm mild autism?

No.

The key term that will help you look for research about this is the word "biomarker".

There are certainly correlations with autism and some of the measurement techniques, but they aren't specific enough to be used for diagnosis.

Plitt et al 2015 compared fMRI classification to a behavioral scale in high-functioning ASD vs IQ-matched typically developing. Their best imaging classification was about 77% accurate (and that's probably an overestimate due to selecting the 'best'), whereas behavioral classification was 95% accurate. This result is consistent with other studies.

It's possible to use these methods to find biomarkers at better than chance levels, but unless they become equivalent to other diagnostic methods, it is the diagnosis used to evaluate the biomarker rather than the biomarker used to evaluate the diagnosis.

Abraham, A., Milham, M. P., Di Martino, A., Craddock, R. C., Samaras, D., Thirion, B., & Varoquaux, G. (2017). Deriving reproducible biomarkers from multi-site resting-state data: an autism-based example. NeuroImage, 147, 736-745.

Ecker, C., Bookheimer, S. Y., & Murphy, D. G. (2015). Neuroimaging in autism spectrum disorder: brain structure and function across the lifespan. The Lancet Neurology, 14(11), 1121-1134.

Loth, E., Spooren, W., Ham, L. M., Isaac, M. B., Auriche-Benichou, C., Banaschewski, T., ... & Charman, T. (2016). Identification and validation of biomarkers for autism spectrum disorders. Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, 15(1), 70.

Plitt, M., Barnes, K. A., & Martin, A. (2015). Functional connectivity classification of autism identifies highly predictive brain features but falls short of biomarker standards. NeuroImage: Clinical, 7, 359-366.

Uddin, L. Q., Dajani, D. R., Voorhies, W., Bednarz, H., & Kana, R. K. (2017). Progress and roadblocks in the search for brain-based biomarkers of autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Translational psychiatry, 7(8), e1218.


Can information theory be applied to human interactions and communication?

Information and signal detection theory are commonly applied to cognitive situations. Examples include TSA agents searching for weapons among carry-on bags and sonar operators attempting to discern ships from fish. In addition, information theory itself is highly general, and has been proven to apply across disciplines. So I do think the premise is valid.

However, the example does not list an application, per se- it simply describes a situation where one might think about coming up with an information-theoric approach. Such an approach would certainly involve a lot of research because there are many confounding factors in communication between humans (not the least of which is the cognitive framework of the receiving individual). You would need to carefully define what is signal, what is noise, and where the boundaries lie. I contend that this would be particularly difficult in the general case.


Addiction is defined as not having control over doing, taking or using something to the point where it could be harmful to you.  Often it can start with a habit but then it becomes an addiction because there is a compulsion to continue the habit.

  Addiction is most commonly associated with gambling, drugs, alcohol and nicotine, but it's possible to be addicted to just about anything

Some of these addictions listed by Warren (the need to feel needed, the need for hope in difficult situations, the need to be noticed and feel understood, the need to know things others don’t, and the need to be right) can be classed as compulsions which can lead to a diagnosis of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and the others (the need for a scapegoat (to believe our problems are the fault of someone or something else) and the need to be right) are covered by cognitive biases such as confirmation bias as you thought. The need to feel a sense of power can be covered by both.

  Many people have focused thoughts or repeated behaviors. But these do not disrupt daily life and may add structure or make tasks easier. For people with OCD, thoughts are persistent and unwanted routines and behaviors are rigid and not doing them causes great distress.

In the case of needing to be right, you can have the need but it may not interfere with your life.  Where someone challenges you and the need is so strong that it stops you doing anything until you confirm that you are correct about something, then it is an addiction which can also be a part of OCD.

I would say that Warren has legitimately created a category of behaviour which fits the bill of addiction as these behaviours can indeed be habit formations leading to addiction. The thing to remember with these are that all of them are compulsive thoughts and behaviours but not all of them can lead to OCD diagnosis.


Is there any "predictive" component to positive/negative affect in Seasonal Affective Disorder and Bipolar Disorder?

I found the term "holiday anniversary  memory triggers" on a popular psychology website. It clusters a lot of symptoms together:

http://outofthefog.website/top-100-trait-blog/2015/11/4/holiday-anniversary-memory-triggers


There is a lot going on in your question. QUEST, as well as many other adaptive procedures, is well suited for a task like estimating morph distance in a 2-AFC paradigm. There are, however, a couple of points in your question, that make me think QUEST is not a good paradigm.

The QUEST paradigm is designed around setting the signal level to find the the "sweet point" of the psychometric function (something like the signal level that maximizes the Fisher Information). I am not aware of any psychometric function that has a sweet point of 75% correct (most are 90+ percent correct).

The second issue, is you mention a fixed number of trials. Typically, QUEST is used with a stopping rule that specifies the expected variance of the estimate (i.e., you run enough trials until the CI on the estimated threshold is small enough).

The easiest way to run these types of experiments is to use software written by someone else (that you trust). Pelli was involved in the early development of both the QUEST procedure and the Psych Toolbox for MATLAB/Octave. The Python based PsychoPy also provides the QUEST procedure and is commonly used.


Why do people suddenly look back if you look at them for a while?

What you describe is an illusion.

(a) The human field of view is almost 180° when staring straight ahead and 270° with eyeball rotation (looking to the side without turning your head).
If you look at someone from slightly behind and to the side, they will appear to be gazing forward, and you may feel unnoticed, but in fact you are within their field of view.

(b) The peripheral field of view is highly sensitive to motion. So if you turn your head towards someone while you are within their peripheral vision, their attention will automatically focus on this (danger! predator!) stimulus and they will turn their head to you. This is a reflex.

(c) On the bus or subway, if someone sits in your field of vision, they will have noticed you when you or they came in and therefore know you are there. If you both are in a public place, they might not have seen you arrive, but they will know that someone might have. Self-conscious people feel observed, and they continually check if someone watches them, who it is, and how they react. Now if you look in the general direction of a self-conscious person, and this person looks around like they do every few seconds, this movement will cause you to look at them in reflex, giving them the impression that you have been staring at them all along. If both of you stay in the same place for some time and they continually check on you, and their movement makes you look up almost every time, they will feel like you are watching them all the time, although you are focused on something else and only react to them looking at you.

(d) Please also look at Eoin's great answer explaining illusory correlation.


If it is a 30-digit number recited at once and you have to recall the longest range of subsequent digits you can recall in reverse order, it would be better to listen more carefully to the ones at the end, considering that it would much easier to recall a long string of numbers in reverse order from the end as you just heard it in comparison to the ones at the beginning which you are likely to forget by the time you reach the end of the thirty digit number. Now, you can increase the length of this string by grouping them together in packs of two or three, as @SerenaD mentioned. You can then reverse these numbers and answer accordingly. Another trick can be to find small patterns for every 3-4 digits, but this completely depends on how much time you get to analyze the numbers in this test, like at what speed do they read out the numbers and all. If it is slower, you will find it easier to form some correlations and remember these numbers better, if it is fast, the grouping strategy is your best hope. Practicing and playing memory games like finding the matching pair in cards and things like these can boost your memory, best of luck!!


How do personality tests work that require you to choose one of two statement that applies most to you?

There is a large general literature evaluating the degree to which personality tests predict job performance. In particular see for example the review by Barrick et al (2001). In general such reviews find that personality measures provide a small but meaningful prediction of job performance.

Ipsative testing

So in general, you are asking about how personality tests work. But more specifically, you are asking about ipsative personality tests:

  Ipsative is a descriptor used in psychology to indicate a specific
  type of measure in which respondents compare two or more desirable
  options and pick the one that is most preferred (sometimes called a
  "forced choice" scale).

Regarding your statement that you could not answer one of the questions, presumably the instructions asked you to indicate which statement applied most. Thus, it would be hoped that even if there were two statements that both applied to you a lot, or both applied a little, you would be able to indicate which applied more.

For general scientific use where you can rely on people to answer honestly, researchers typically do not use ipsative testing. Ipsative testing generally distorts the correlations between subscales.However, ipsative tests is popular in applied settings such as in selection and recruitment. The argument is that ipsative testing reduces faking.

Relevant references include:

Heggestad et al (2006) interpreted their results to indicate that ipsative testing was not a viable method for controlling for faking:

  Recent research suggests multidimensional forced-choice (MFC) response
  formats may provide resistance to purposeful response distortion on
  personality assessments. It remains unclear, however, whether these
  formats provide normative trait information required for selection
  contexts. The current research evaluated score correspondences between
  an MFC format measure and 2 Likert-type measures in honest and
  instructed-faking conditions. In honest response conditions, scores
  from the MFC measure appeared valid indicators of normative trait
  standing. Under faking conditions, the MFC measure showed less score
  inflation than the Likert measure at the group level of analysis. In
  the individual-level analyses, however, the MFC measure was as
  affected by faking as was the Likert measure. Results suggest the MFC
  format is not a viable method to control faking.

However, Bowen et al reached a more positive conclusion about ipsative testing and the degree to which it is faking-resistant:

  The current study extends previous research by comparing empirical
  data on ipsative and normative versions of the 30-scale Occupational
  Personality Questionnaire (OPQ). Participants were randomly assigned
  to “honest” or “faking” groups. Results support the proposition that
  when the number of scales is large, the measurement dependency problem
  associated with the ipsative format is negligible. There was
  satisfactory convergent validity between ipsative and normative forms
  in both groups. On both forms, the distance between an ideal profile
  and participants' ratings were narrower in the faking group than in
  the honest group. The results suggest that though ipsative measures
  were not completely free from faking, they were relatively more
  effective in guarding against faking than more commonly used normative
  measures.

Meade (2004) discuss ipsative measurement more generally.

  Data are described as ipsative if a given set of responses always sum
  to the same total. However, there are many properties of data
  collection that can give rise to different types of ipsative data. In
  this study, the most common type of ipsative data used in employee
  selection (forced-choice ipsative data; FCID) is discussed as a
  special case of other types of ipsative data. Although all ipsative
  data contains constraints on covariance matrices (covariance-level
  interdependence), FCID contains additional item-level
  interdependencies as well. The psychological processes that give rise
  to FCID and the resultant psychometric properties are discussed. In
  addition, data from which both normative and ipsative responses were
  provided by job applicants illustrate very different patterns of
  correlations as well as very different selection decisions between
  normative, FCID and ipsatized measures.

References

Barrick, M. R., Mount, M. K., & Judge, T. A. (2001). Personality and performance at the beginning of the new millennium: what do we know and where do we go next?. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 9(1‐2), 9-30. PDF
Bowen, C. C., Martin, B. A., & Hunt, S. T. (2002). A comparison of ipsative and normative approaches for ability to control faking in
personality questionnaires. International Journal of Organizational
Analysis, 10(3), 240-259.
Heggestad, E. D., Morrison, M., Reeve, C. L., & McCloy, R. A. (2006). Forced-choice assessments of personality for selection:
Evaluating issues of normative assessment and faking resistance.
Journal of Applied Psychology, 91(1), 9.
Meade, A. W. (2004). Psychometric problems and issues involved with creating and using ipsative measures for selection. Journal of
Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 77(4), 531-551.


Does knowledge of tests like Iowa Gambling and Wisconsin Card-Sorting task enable a person to fake the test?

Yes, knowing they are under an Iowa (or Wisconsin) test will change their behavior---and most likely create all sorts of biases in the results.

And you're probably right; time constraints will most likely place subjects into system1 thinking.

Subjects' having knowledge about an experiment may generally ruin it, for it can make testability collapse (how will others reproduce the results?).  There are, moreover, all sorts of confounding factors that may directly influence subjects' behavior. Also, one cannot argue that 'they were concentrated on the task at hand', as they knew what was expected.  One of the basis of empiricism is to not intervene (as in the Milgram Authority experiment, for instance). In most experiments, subjects will either hear a fairytale story of what they are being asked to do, or are simply told no background story.  For example, experiments on priming with money generally hide the goals from subjects  (See also Bargh and colleagues experiments on priming, which follow the same route, and were considered extremely controversial by psychologists until the last years).

Of course, this is not a straightjacket rule.  One can do psychological experiments in which the subjects know what they must do and they should only "respond truthfully".  Perhaps the most famous example of those was Ariely's "adult" experiment (It's quite a read).  I have also conducted experiments in which subjects knew the goals completely, but one (control) group could not achieve it (low-skill group versus high-skill group, such as chess grandmasters). Ideally, however, subjects should be blind to the actual objective of the test conducted.


how can the development of sexual preferences be influenced?

A bit of background on me: I’m a clinical psychologist and have worked with many sexual disorders, ranging from paedophile, to gender identity disorder. I am however no expert in any of these, so my answer is based on my own clinical experience and reading of the literature.

Most of my colleagues, and me, think that the general answer is: no – there is not much you can do to stop the development of a fetish. The most common fetish I encounter is SM / bondage. Most of my patients that have this fetish; feel that they had this inclination very early in life, and seldom are they traceable to specific events or experiences in their life.

Same goes with paedophilia. Here I think things are a bit more complicated, as there seems to be two kinds of people (that enter therapy that is, and as such come in contact with me). One group seem to be born with this fetish, if you can call it that. They don’t know why, and how they developed it, and many of them have poor insight into their condition.

On the other hand, there are the ones that spontaneously develop an interest in adulthood. They usually descript their fetish more as a curiosity toward the subject. And most of them never develop into a pure disorder (at least they don’t act on their impulses), and drops it after a while. These people usually develop the fetish during periods of stress.

To build the argument that fetishes are innate. I don’t know if this is a valid comparison to make, but I think most gay people would say that their sexual preference is not something that could be controlled with masturbation-regulation, or whatever. I think most of them would say, that being gay, is just who they are. An assertion supported by the fact that all animals ever closely studied have shown to have a few members of their group who are gay. As such, one could argue that sexual interest seem to very much linked to genetics and biology.

All of the above does not however preclude us from looking for ways to modify a fetish and/or reduce it. When I work with people who are distressed; there are a few things I focus on.

1.Make sure that the fetish is an actual problem. You would be surprised by how often people get panicked by fetish thoughts alone, without the sexual arousal or interest in acting on the fetish. If this is the case, we would work in a metacognitive framework to reduce patient response and thought about the fetish-thoughts. Other times the fetish is not a problem because there actually is nothing wrong with being into “weird” stuff.

If the fetish is a problem. The next step is basic Cognitive Psychology. A lot of people can have quite a lot of change in their problematic fetishes if they are just able to have a good narrative and a good ability to articulate the consequences of the fetish. Sometimes people are not even fully aware of the negative sides of their actions, and the fetish will itself diminish somewhat once they have a fuller understanding of the implications of acting on their desire.
Stimulus control. You don’t start working in a bakery to “satisfy” you need for food, when you are trying to lose weight. For the same reason one should avoid situations that trigger the problematic lusts. I once had a paedophile that wanted to work in a kindergarden – thinking that he would get fulfilled his need just by watching the kids, so that he would feel less need to act on impulses later. Same as with the old catharsis theory from Freud, the mind doesn’t seem to work that way.
Establish overriding associations. Sometimes it can help to try to associate the destructive fetish with something negative. For instance one could try to associate rape with going to jail, being beaten up, or something else negative. This is quite hard to do, and there are no good mainstream guides on this. It’s kind of the opposite to when people overcome their fears be associating something scary with something positive (like when you try to imagine that you are friends with the ghost, instead of its victim). We often find that a good way to remove something from the brain, is to overwrite it.
Reduce other stressors in life. Often fetishisms pop up in response to overwhelming stress from other parts in a persons’ life. An example could be a male that gets fired by a female boss, and starts to really dig in on fantasies about raping and murdering women. Another example would be children that gets messed up by a horrible upbringing, and start feeding their aggressive and dominant sexual fantasies (sex, dominance and aggression are linked in the mind
for many people).
Learn coping strategies. Here one needs to be creative. This could range from not searching for related porn, all the way to masturbating instead of acting on an impulse. There are no “one answer fits all”, and needs to problem-solve with the person to find out what’s optimal, what’s necessary, and what’s possible.

One last note. Your question was mostly focused on the “development” of fetishes, and how to stop them. My answer was more a general answer to treatment of fetish disorders after they developed. But I do think that most of these points are relevant. When it comes to development of fetishes, I would say that my point 5 is most relevant – Try to reduce other stress, and try to create a happy life for the individual in general, and one significantly reduce the chance of antisocial behaviour of all kind, even destructive fetishes. Other than that, remember that you never change anybody, yourself or others, by force. They need to want it.


How effective are high audio frequencies in commercials in getting audience attention?

I am not aware of any use in using "high audio frequencies" in commercials, but there is a history of making commercials louder (presumably to attract attention). There are laws prohibiting increasing the loudness of commercials  (e.g., CALM Act). Increasing the loudness, without remotely adjusting the volume on the TV is not a trivial thing and potentially involves careful mixing of the audio signals as well as allowing acceptable levels of distortion.


Is there any research of spelling errors from a dual-process theory perspective?

Well, it turns out there is some related research, but there are complications because spelling & writing is harder to investigate (compared to syllogisms, for instance)...

  Spelling relies on two sets of processes, depending on word
  frequency (for a review, see Tainturier and Rapp, 2001; Bonin,
  2003). For frequent words, the letter sequence is directly retrieved
  from the orthographic lexicon via the lexical route. For rare
  or unknown words, the letter sequence is arrived at indirectly,
  through a process of phoneme–grapheme conversion (assembled
  route). The resulting orthographic representation is stored in a
  graphemic buffer (Caramazza et al., 1987; Hillis and Caramazza,
  1989) until its graphomotor execution (i.e., initiation and implementation of motor programs and neuromuscular execution).
  Although the orthographic representation obviously needs to be
  retrieved or calculated prior to execution (i.e., during the writing
  latency; Bonin et al., 2002), Delattre et al. (2006) have shown that
  the orthographic processing of irregular and infrequent words is
  still generally incomplete at this stage, and therefore, continues
  during the graphomotor execution, thus, increasing handwriting duration. According to the authors, these results can be
  interpreted within the dual-route model. When a conflict arises
  between the outputs of the lexical and assembled spelling routes,
  it takes time to resolve, and the central processing of this conflict
  then cascades onto the graphomotor execution.

So yes, there is a posited "dual-route" model for spelling/writing, and yes, it's based on timing experiments... although these did not involve time pressure (or counting spelling errors by type), but rather is based on timing the writing of well-known vs obscure words. Whether this "dual route" neatly matches more conventional dual-process accounts of cognitions is a bit unclear to me.

The complications come from the fact that spelling and writing form a cascading process:

  Three factors seem to determine the temporal course of the
  central processing of spelling. The first one concerns the word’s
  lexical characteristics. The less frequent and/or regular the word,
  the longer the central processing takes and the more likely it is to
  be cascaded. The second factor concerns time pressure. Until now,
  the cascading phenomenon has only been observed for the production of successive words under time pressure (Delattre et al.,
  2006; Lambert et al., 2011; Maggio et al., 2012). Producing a single
  word without any time constraint should minimize cascading, by
  allowing the spelling process to be completed during the pause
  (i.e., latency) preceding execution. Third, according to capacity theory, the ability to cascade processing depends heavily on
  the writer’s development and expertise (Berninger and Swanson,
  1994; Alamargot et al., 2010). Because handwriting is not yet fully
  automatized in younger writers, especially those still in primary
  school (Bourdin and Fayol, 2000; Olive et al., 2009), they have to
  prevent overloading by segmenting and sequentializing the higher
  processes and are therefore, unable to engage in parallel, or cascaded, processing (see Olive and Kellogg, 2002; Alamargot et al.,
  2007).

Interestingly Kahaneman was also involved in formulating capacity theory. And it seems related to models of divided attention, which he also was involved with.

Anyway, if this is correct, an interesting conclusion is that if you have produce the spelling under time pressure and in a medium that you have little experience with (say you seldom handwrite, or you seldom type) then you are more likely to make spelling errors in that medium not simply because of mechanical issues, but also because it puts a sort of cognitive/time pressure even on processes that you have trained in (spelling).

The introduction of the Delattre paper also has some more interesting observations related to the complexity of the rules, particularly with respect to the how phonemic the orthography is and some empirical support from of specific forms of dysgraphia:

  The dual-route model of spelling production (e.g., Ellis, 1982)
  proposes that two processing systems operate in parallel: a lexical
  route that retrieves spellings of known words from a memory store
  of word-specific knowledge and a nonlexical (or assembled) route
  that generates spellings using a process of sublexical sound-to spelling
  conversion. The assembled spelling route would be efficient
  in languages whose orthographies have predictable or consistent
  orthographic-to-phonological correspondences (such as
  Turkish, Italian, and Japanese kana) but would be considerably
  less effective for English and French, whose orthographies are
  characterized by highly inconsistent relationships (e.g., the vowel
  /i:/ is spelled in many different ways in English words, as in eel,
  tea, theme, thief, Keith, people, me, key, quay, ski, etc.). There are
  many irregular and some almost arbitrarily spelled words in English
  (e.g., pint, yacht) and French (e.g., fraise, monsieur). The
  lexical route would work for all known words (irrespective of
  regularity) but could not provide spellings for new words or
  nonwords. The assembled route would work for nonwords but
  would often produce phonologically plausible errors (PPEs), particularly
  to irregular words, such as yacht (YOT) and monsieur
  (MESSIEU).

  Evidence consistent with the dual-route model comes primarily
  from studies of the spelling performance of neuropsychological
  patients with acquired central dysgraphia (for reviews see Barry,
  1994; Tainturier & Rapp, 2000). The separation of the dual routes
  is supported by the double dissociation between surface dysgraphia
  (e.g., Beauvois & De´rouesne´, 1981; Hatfield & Patterson,
  1983) and phonological dysgraphia (e.g., Shallice, 1981). Surfacedysgraphic
  people accurately spell more regular than irregular
  words (for which they make many PPEs) and are interpreted as
  having an impaired lexical route that forces overreliance on their
  preserved assembled route. Phonological-dysgraphic people have a
  marked impairment of nonword spelling but have relatively preserved
  word spelling and are interpreted as having an impaired
  assembled route but an intact lexical route.

  Although the lexical and assembled spelling routes are proposed
  to be separate, there are at least two lines of evidence to suggest
  that they interact at some level in normal spellers. First, observation
  of spelling errors in free writing (e.g., Ellis, 1979; Hotopf,
  1980) suggests that assembled spelling plays some role in writing;
  people sometimes make PPEs (e.g., Ver-knickers ayfasia) and may
  produce different alternative spellings on different occasions
  (which suggests that not all errors reflect inaccurate spelling
  knowledge). Second, there is experimental evidence showing lexical
  influence on assembled spelling; there are lexical priming
  effects on nonword spelling (e.g., Barry & Seymour, 1988; Campbell,
  1983; Perry, 2003). For example, the nonword /vi:m/ is more
  likely to be spelled as VEAM after hearing the word team, as
  VEEM after the word deem, and as VEME after the word theme.

  Dual-route models of spelling have been expressed in symbolic
  terms (e.g., Barry, 1994) but also as more interactive (Rapp,
  Epstein, & Tainturier, 2002) and connectionist (Houghton & Zorzi,
  2003) models. Although single-route models of spelling have been
  proposed (e.g., Brown & Loosemore, 1994; Bullinaria, 1997;
  Olson & Caramazza, 1994), Houghton and Zorzi (2003) have
  argued that these are currently unable to account for the full range
  of empirical data.

I quoted all this here because the Wikipedia article on spelling has basically zero psychology or neurology information.


I believe you're looking for this:

https://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf


How beneficial is attending a funeral in the process of grieving and why?

So I had a quick look into your question (not my area). It turns out there is long established  journal called "Death Studies" that focuses specifically on "bereavement and loss, grief therapy, death attitudes, suicide, and death education".

From a quick search on Google Scholar for "funerals grieving", I found an article by  Romanoff (1998) that looked like it might provide a starting point. That said, it's not especially empirical (i.e., it is not an RCT evaluating the effectiveness of funeral attendance).

For example, to quote the text:

  Funeral rituals are symbolic enactments that provide meaning- ful and affirming experiences for the bereaved. Funeral rituals mediate the transition of the deceased from life to death, and mediate the transition of the bereaved from one social status to another (Pine, 1989). They provide opportunities for the public display of grief, structures for the delimitation of grief, vehicles for affirming the relationship of the deceased to the community, and
  the continuity of the community in his or her absence (Fulton, 1988) . During this time of transition, members of the social group tend to the bereaved in an outpouring of human support that tran- scends social status ( Turner, 1969) . Postfuneral bereavement rituals, while rare in American culture (McGoldrick et al., 1991), provide structure to the grieving and full incorporation into a new social status ( Goldberg, 1981) .

References

Romanoff, B. D. (1998). Rituals and the grieving process. Death studies, 22(8), 697-711.


How to change the brain in order to change how one habitually thinks and feels?

There's over 100 years of learning research and theorization now that pretty well establishes that yes, if your behaviour changes then your brain changes (and vice versa).  When you learned to tie your shoes your brain changed.  It quickly became a habit and you don't even think of it... can't even do it if you do.  When you learned to speak your brain changed.  When you had a child of your own and spent 6 weeks without regular sleep your brain changed.  It's hard to give you a specific reference for any of that.  The brain is what guides your behaviour.  If your behaviour is changing then your brain is changing.  Your brain changing is neither magical or surprising, that's how you learn.

That said, I've never seen the "habit" centre.

If you really want a reference start with this.

[Aside: It's kind of absurd that he talks about how you are not your brain but now you're going to change your brain to make a new you.]


Are men subject to optimism bias when it comes to assessing their sexual/romantic appeal?

Short answer: Yes, but not really...

Self-enhancement:

Self-enhancement (sometimes referred to as positive illusions) refers to a general preference for positive self-views (in men and women alike).  It includes several common strategies, such as: The "above average effect" (aka illusory superiority), self-serving bias, and optimism bias.  Optimism bias however refers to perceived risk, whereas this question is about illusory superiority:

  ... a cognitive bias whereby individuals overestimate their own
  qualities and abilities, relative to others. This is evident in a
  variety of areas including intelligence, performance on tasks or
  tests, and the possession of desirable characteristics or personality
  traits.

Self-esteem is a particularly dicey subject matter - it seems to refer to a conglomerate of fairly independent / mildly correlated factors.  So when we examine say, self-perceived sexual attractiveness (sex appeal), the results are different from a variety of other similar sounding - but independent - constructs such as self-perceived physical attractiveness, sexual self-schema, self-valuation, sexual self-esteem, sexual satisfaction, sexual performance, body image, self-image, etc...

Therefore, to keep the scope of this question manageable, I'll focus on gender differences in illusory superiority with respect to sexual attractiveness, though as will be discussed, physical attractiveness will come into play as well.

Research methodology:

Self-esteem factors such as perceived sexual attractiveness are measured using surveys / self-reporting.  For sexual attractiveness in particular, there doesn't appear to be a well-established scale in common use, so researchers tend to develop questionnaires as needed for their particular studies.  Furthermore, there is evidence that many confounding factors exist that cannot be easily controlled for, such as societal changes.  So unfortunately, some questions of validity and reproducibility of the results exist, as is common in many facets of social psychology and personality research.

Another issue is the extricability of sexual attractiveness from physical attractiveness.  Studies have shown that these are in fact two different constructs.  However, different scales used by different researchers emphasize physical attractiveness in sexual attractiveness measures to different degrees, making the separation difficult.

As suggested in the question, self-enhancement is known in general to increase when under threat - Wikipedia says:

  This motive becomes especially prominent in situations of threat,
  failure or blows to one's self-esteem.

and:

  Positive illusions are a form of self-deception or self-enhancement
  that feel good, maintain self-esteem or stave off discomfort at least
  in the short term.

To manipulate self-esteem in the lab, subjects can be presented with a comparison point (contrast), such as a photo or video of someone else that may be highly attractive, or unattractive.  An ego-threatening contrast may affect self-enhancement differently from an unthreatening scenario.

Summary of results:

As expected, both men and women report a "better-than-average" bias for sexual attractiveness - ie, the average rating compared to others is higher than average.  The bias is slightly greater for men than women on some scales, and not significantly different on others, eg:

  ... on the dimensions of Sexual Attractiveness, Sexual Restraint, and
  Sexual Orientation ... no significant sex differences [were] found.

Here is an example where women actually rated themselves higher than men:

  ... we found that males rate themselves higher on explicitly sexual
  dimensions (e.g., sexually responsive, experienced) and females
  perceive themselves to be more romantic and sexually attractive.

It would be good to see a meta-analysis of such studies to get a better idea of the overall effect, but the bottom line is that it's not clear - it may depend on the particular scale used, or any number of other confounding factors.

Some examples of such factors: Black men rate themselves higher than white men, but women do not; men and women base their ratings on physical traits to different degrees; self-esteem affects females differently from males; and effects vary in cultures where physical attractiveness is more or less emphasized.  That is, it appears that gender differences vary based on societal changes, such as before and after the feminist movement, differences in idealized representations in the media, cultural changes in messages such as "black is beautiful", etc.  And gender differences also vary depending on the incorporation of physical attractiveness.

Physical attractiveness:

In the 1980's and 90's, there was a flurry of research on self-perceived body image and physical attractiveness related to increased diagnosis of anorexia/bulemia, so much more is known about these measures.  In line with suggested epidemiology for anorexia, that is most associated with young women, body image is typically lower in females than males, and females are more often subject to a "lower-than-average" effect, while males more often rate their physical attractiveness as better than average.

As before, there are many confounding factors, including some of the same ones to do with skin colour, cultural context, different physical traits, and self-esteem.  Nonetheless, the effect suggested in the question is perhaps more pronounced for physical attractiveness than sexual attractiveness / romantic appeal.  And since self-perceived physical attractiveness often constitutes an important component of sexual attractiveness, then some of the differences in results may depend on how heavily a particular study incorporates physical attractiveness into their own measure of sexual attractiveness, and how important physical attractiveness is as a component of sexual attractiveness for the particular group studied.  With this factor removed, and limiting findings to modern Western culture, it may turn out that men and women do not differ in self-enhancement of sex appeal, or even that women do so to a greater degree.


Reason for Inter-stimulus-Interval in psychology studies

If you've ever tried doing an experiment with no inter-stimulus interval (ISI), you know from first-hand experience that it makes a difference in several ways:

If the task is about reaction times, you don't really have time to prepare. I.e. there is an attention-based interference effect. For Flanker tasks, Stroop tasks, go-nogo tasks, etc., you want to measure the optimal performance and hence you add ISI to reduce the interference. In other tasks, you set a short ISI exactly because of the interference effect, e.g. in some conditions of Conner's Continuous Performance Test, on Vigilance tasks to keep challenging attention (see e.g.McCormack, 1958), etc. Low ISIs are also quite useful for Task-Induced Stress.
There are other carry-over effects than a reduced/biased attention. For example, repetition priming is substantially reduced for longer ISI's (e.g., Ferrand, 1996). If you are not studying repetition priming, such effects constitute noise or a confounder, so you want to reduce it by having reasonable ISIs.
With ISI=0, the next stimulus appears to be caused by your response, so it feels like your key stroke "belongs" to the new stimulus rather than the previous. This can be confusing.


Where is the visual "image" that we "see" finally assembled?

I think you are succumbing to the homunculus argument, the fallacy that there is some sort of image in the brain for someone to view. There is no magical theater in your head where what is incident on your retina is projected. All you have in your brain is complicated patterns of neural activity, there are no images and nothing to view. However, these patterns of activity give rise to your phenomenological experience. To fully understand this you should ask:

What are current neuronal explanations and models of 'consciousness'?

But lets try to clear up some of the conceptual difficulties with vision in particular. Your experience of the visual world is effected by two types of inputs: (1) the data from your retina, and (2) data from the rest of your senses, including memory. Why is obvious that not everything comes from (1)? Consider one the following:

You experience a whole visual scene, there isn't a certain nothing-ness somewhere. Yet on your retina, there is a blind-spot, something fills in that part of your experience for you.
You have an experience of certain far away buildings being further then nearby buildings. Yet your eyes are too close together for the difference in angle of the two images to be measurable at the fidelity of your retina. How does your mind know the buildings are further? Parallax and memories of how big certain objects typically are and how this scales with distance.

If we concentrate only on method (1), then all the information is there from the retina on-wards and only degrades (as part of the signal is thrown away, compressed, or undergoes noise) on its way to V1 and on-wards. However, its encoding changes to become more compatible with integration with other sensory and memory information. By the time the data has reached V1 and V2, it is in an encoding that we understand well enough to reconstruct videos of what people are seeing/experiencing. As the Gallant Lab that ran the linked study summarizes:

  The human visual system consists of several dozen distinct cortical visual areas and sub-cortical nuclei, arranged in a network that is both hierarchical and parallel. Visual information comes into the eye and is there transduced into nerve impulses. These are sent on to the lateral geniculate nucleus and then to primary visual cortex (area V1). Area V1 is the largest single processing module in the human brain. Its function is to represent visual information in a very general form by decomposing visual stimuli into spatially localized elements. Signals leaving V1 are distributed to other visual areas, such as V2 and V3. Although the function of these higher visual areas is not fully understood, it is believed that they extract relatively more complicated information about a scene. For example, area V2 is thought to represent moderately complex features such as angles and curvature, while high-level areas are thought to represent very complex patterns such as faces. The encoding model used in our experiment was designed to describe the function of early visual areas such as V1 and V2, but was not meant to describe higher visual areas. As one might expect, the model does a good job of decoding information in early visual areas but it does not perform as well in higher areas.

Remember, there is no video in those areas. It is just firing of neurons that the scientists have figured out how to decode and interpret. As the quote mentions, the higher visual areas are not well understood right now, but presumably that is where a lot of the type (2) feedback is happening. Even inside the mildly understood visual areas, a lot of processing is distributed. For instance, take a look at the question about face-blindness:

Does the fusiform face area in patients with Prosopagnosia (face blindness) show lower activity under an fMRI?

By damaging one part of the brain (the fusiform face area) you are able to continue to 'see' tables and chairs perfectly fine, and yet you can't properly identify or recognize faces.

Hopefully this convinces you that it doesn't make sense to look for 'the image' in the brain. Together the mind and the eye are able to shape what you perceive and give it meaning, but it is a pseudo-question to ask where that image is finally assembled. It is not assembled, there is no image, there is only encoding of retina activity into higher level firing patterns that produces in us the experience of vision and meaning.


How to determine an unbiased estimate of threshold in a single-stimulus forced choice experiment?

Any estimate you make is going to be pretty bad. To answer this question requires so many assumptions about the data, experiment, and intended usage, it is just not possible. You would be better off running the experiment again after consulting someone who knows more about experimental design. Beyond that, you could hire a stats consultant.

Apart from the lack of catch trials, you only have 2 speeds. Even if you get lucky and they bracket threshold (e.g., d' of 1 or 75% correct), without more theory (or data), you cannot interpolate between the points.


How are humans able to read scrambled text/characters (e.g., CAPTCHA)?

A human brain recognises letters by their constituent features (sub-letter parts). It is modelized by a pandemonium model where printed information is extracted locally then globally. In the letter recognition literature, this type of feature-based hierarchical model competes with template matching theories (with an advantage to the pandemonium-like models such as deep-learning networks).

Scrambled characters are recognised the same way, with the difference that only part of the visual information is available. It relates to the theory of geons developed by Biedermann (Recognition by components, 1987). He wrote

  if an arrangement of two or three sub-components can be recovered from
  the input, objects can be quickly recognized even when they are
  occluded or extensively degraded.

Could you identify the following object? Left is the unrecoverable version.

REF:

Grainger et al (2008). Letter perception: from pixels to pandemonium. Trends in Cognitive Science.
Biederman, Psychological Review (1987) & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recognition-by-components_theory