# Tag Info

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Scientists studying the matter generally believe multitasking, and women's superiority at it, to be a myth. Men come out slightly better multitaskers than women but there's not really any meaningful difference. The way it's defined is critical though; it's being able to do two things that typically require focal attention at the exact same time. For ...

12

In speaking to constructs vs. measures, I believe that the difference is clear and implied in your background: constructs are that which cannot be directly measured (but we assume exists), where measures are directly measurable attributes that we assume relate to the construct. The process you seem to be questioning is that of the operational definition, or ...

11

The question which of these two descriptions is correct? is perhaps natural in the context of, say, someone studying for an examination. Epistemologists might suggest that a better formulation would be is either of these correct? However, as stated here there are clear reasons for preferring the first formulation to the second. I shall first explain why, ...

10

The Computational Theory of Mind is not that the mind does some form of computation in the wide sense of computation. Rather, look at the examples for the CToM given in the Wikipedia article; people like Fodor, Pinker, Marr. Their view is very much the opposite to the Connectionist position of West Coast scientists like Rumelhart, Elman and McClelland. Both ...

9

Humans actually exhibit both slow and fast learning and they have somewhat different properties. One distinction is between "declarative" memory (for example, facts like "tigers have stripes" or "Paris is the capital of France") and "procedural" learning (such as perceptuo-motor skills like riding a bike or playing a musical instrument). Declarative memory ...

9

My answer is probably a weird hodgepodge of sometimes poorly explained stuff, but hopefully it's coherent enough :P For many decades in psychology, we've had a mechanistic stimulus-organism-response understanding of the brain. That is, a stimulus triggers an internal psychological process, which produces some behavioral response. One of the major ...

8

In general, there are two types of 'complexity' that are studied. Usually, when people talk about 'complexity', especially on the internet, they mean Santa Fe Institute style complexity. This is a vague and poorly defined concept that has struggled for a number of years without making significant progress. It uses pretty words, but has yet to deliver on any ...

8

I don't think there's any evidence suggesting that mindfulness or meditation are the opposite of self-regulation. In arguing why, it'll be useful to define terms. Meditation and mindfulness First off, meditation and mindfulness are not the same thing. Meditation generally refers to a family of practices for investigating or inducing different states of ...

8

Apologies in advance for the long answer. I tried to narrow down the scope by focusing on only a single construct, and only a single aspect of validity, and it still turned out like an essay... Let's take intelligence research as an example. This work started with an intelligence concept – a fairly vague and ambiguous idea about a personality trait that ...

8

ACT-R can best be summarized with this (tiny but more recent) graph: ACT-R is a cognitive architecture that tries to explain as much of human behavior as possible with as little rules as possible. It works at a high level of abstraction and came down to a list of so-called "modules", each having its own functions. The exact mechanisms of each of these ...

7

I like to think of multitasking as rapid task switching. See Pashler's (2000) article for the implications of "multitasking." References Pashler, H. (2000). Task switching and multitask performance. To appear in Monsell, S., and Driver, J. (editors). Attention and Performance XVIII: Control of mental processes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

7

One common way of framing numerical cognition is in terms of a "mental number line". This mental number line is thought to have a logarithmic scale, so perceived differences are inversely proportional to their magnitude. For example, the difference between 6 and 7 is perceived as bigger than the difference between 76 and 77. This is just a variant of the ...

7

I think this recent paper fits your requirements. It considers biological plausibility by showing that the number of neurons required in the proposed method is within a reasonable size for the human brain, and dismisses a series of unreasonable models. Specifically, they create a neural network using the Neural Engineering Framework (NEF) and the Semantic ...

7

In general, what you're looking for is a biologically plausible model of reinforcement learning and/or conditioning. I know of two publications in particular that address this. The first is A Biologically Plausible Spiking Neuron Model of Fear Conditioning and the second is A Spiking Neural Integrator Model of the Adaptive Control of Action by the Medial ...

7

It appears that there is little scientific backing for Jung's theories. As these theories were first suggested at the start of the 20th century they have had a considerable amount of time to receive scientific support. If they were accepted by scientists it therefore seems like they would have been widely used and cited by scholars in the interim period. ...

7

Read dayan and abbot "theoretical neuroscience" Learn differential equations Know the relationship between voltage, current, resistance and conductance Differential equations is absolutely essential though. you don't need to learn to solve them (the computer will do that for you), you just need to learn to know what they mean. How do researchers ...

6

As per the comments to the question, human research observing this distinction does exist. CHCH possibly alludes to an article by Gläscher, Daw, Dayan and O'Doherty (2010) which concisely defines the difference between model-free learning and model-based learning: Reinforcement learning (RL) uses sequential experience with situations (“states”) and ...

6

From personal observation, the consensus seems to be that the two streams hypothesis is an oversimplification of the truth, albeit a useful one. The primary reason that this hypothesis is seen as an oversimplification is because there is a lot of cross-talk between the two streams. For example, Zanon et al. (2010) provides evidence for functional ...

6

The Benjamin Franklin Effect is generally cited as being an example of cognitive dissonance, which is when your brain struggles to reconcile your beliefs with your actions. So let’s say your beliefs about your job are that you deserve to be paid a higher rate, you deserve to be treated more respectfully by your employer and your skills are being wasted in ...

6

Thoughts on the paper The paper appears to provide a high level overview of the role of mathematics in cognitive science. I'm not a sufficient expert in the overall field of cognitive science where I'd feel comfortable to truly judge the accuracy of the overall synthesis that Andler (2012) provides. That said, much of the paper is about providing examples ...

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Has dom-ter loops theory been expressed formally in any kind of Jungian function theory study? Based on a reasonably diverse search of Google Scholar, Web of Science and Scopus, I am concluding that dominant-tertiary loop theory seems to be an original proposal by the author of the forum post cited by the question author. It appears to be a theory which has ...

6

While both prism adaptation and negative transfer are pointers to the right direction, I'd see this as a question concerning brain plasticity (you may want to tag the question with that, I don't have the required points to create a new tag). The guy could indeed learn to ride the reverse bike, but he would have to work hard on it, and would have a hard ...

6

Here's a quick answer from general background knowledge, not from any specific knowledge of "Bayesian Program Synthesis (BPS)" In general, Bayesian models can use strongly informed priors or diffuse "could be anything" priors. Strong priors specify that a lot of parameter values are very unlikely, while a few other parameter values are possible descriptions ...

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Short answer Perception and imagination in the visual system use pretty much the same neural machinery, but in opposite directions - perception goes bottom-up, from the periphery to the central nervous system, while imagery uses the top-down approach, travelling from the higher associative cortices to the lower visual areas in the brain. Background The ...

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To my knowledge, there is no adjusted RMSD. RMSD, unlike $R^2$, isn't typically used to compare models across the literature. $R^2$ represents the proportion of variance explained by the model, a construct which translates well across different experimental designs. Adjusted $R^2$ distorts this by accounting for the number of parameters in your model, but ...

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The ability to discretize numbers seems to depend on having words for discrete numbers. But humans seem to be able to estimate, regardless of linguistic constraints. As a cool counterexample to "typical educated adults" as evidence for exact, symbolic representation of number, the Pirahã people of Brazil do not have words for numbers and do not seem to ...

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