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The major neural models of consciousness at the moment roughly fall into two camps: cognitive and phenomenological. They are defined by controversy surrounding what types of experience qualify as concious.
Cognitive models
On the one hand there are strong cognitive models of consciousness, such as the one proposed by Stanislas Dehaene, where consciousness ...
26
Before trying to give any sort of answer, it is important to address a common misconception. In popular culture, the terms child-molester and pedophile are often equated. Scientifically, they are not at all the same. The approximate scientific definition for a pedophile is:
an individual that has an unwavering sexual attraction to prepubescent children ...
24
I think it's important to clarify that pedophilia is currently classified by the DSM IV as a paraphilia. A paraphilia is as a "recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors generally involving non-human objects, the suffering or humiliation of oneself or one's partner, children, non-consenting persons.
The word "paraphilia" is ...
18
In short, no. Perry's essay is amusing and compelling, but incomplete. Procrastination is an epiphenomenon of motivation, an active area of research which has some models relevant to the study of procrastination, such as:
Hyperbolic Discounting
Temporal Motivation Theory
Rational Choice Theory
Expectancy Theory
Perry emphasizes task importance as the ...
17
In my experience, the term "semantic knowledge" (or semantic memory or conceptual knowledge) is generally used to refer to knowledge of objects, word meanings, facts and people, without connection to any particular time or place. The neural basis of this kind of knowledge is more or less agreed to depend on a distributed network of cortical brain regions (e....
16
I'd suggest checking out the Linear Ballistic Accumulator (Donkin et al., 2011) model for a scenario like this. While LBA can be used to model any number of alternatives in a speeded choice task, to model signal detection you'd want to model just two accumulators, one for the "signal" response and one for the "no signal" response. With this scenario, ...
15
For instance, the same behavior was also shown in orang-utan and dog. Already two years after the study by Skinner (1947) mentioned in the news article, Kellogg (1949) gave a review of some of the experimental results, but advocates a less anthropomorphic interpretation:
Kellogg, W. N. (1949) 'Superstitious' behavior in animals. Psychological Review, Vol ...
15
There is currently a lot of debate surrounding what questions Bayesian modeling is appropriate for answering within cognitive science, as well what makes a "poor model." Unfortunately these become extremely thorny issues very quickly, partly because what is called "bayesian modeling" actually refers to a rather heterogeneous set of approaches and ...
14
How to classify and understand emotions of people using chat and text messaging lingo and emoticons?
The field that is doing this work you describe is sentiment analysis. From Wikipedia:
A basic task in sentiment analysis is classifying the polarity of a given text at the document, sentence, or feature/aspect level — whether the expressed opinion in a document, a sentence or an entity feature/aspect is positive, negative, or neutral. Advanced, "beyond ...
14
I can speak to this question somewhat from a cognitive psychology standpoint. We memory researchers would think of text highlighting like this in terms of distinctiveness. (An article by McDaniel and Bugg (2008) may shed some light.) Simply put, highlighting a word in a different color than the rest of the text draws what we call item-specific processing ...
13
One of Koch's collaborators, Francis Crick (yes, that Francis Crick, much later in his career), put forth an interesting theory with Koch that while perhaps is a bit far fetched, it's worth mentioning for sake of a slightly different perspective.
Crick and Koch posited the claustrum (see diagram below) as one of the seats of consciousness in the brain. ...
12
Given your background and interest in modeling, I would highly recommend The Cambridge Handbook of Computational Psychology. The book provides an overview for several of the prominent modeling paradigms in cogsci, including dynamical systems, as well as many concrete examples--albeit most using other computational paradigms.
Dynamical systems, to my ...
12
Freudian psychology (and it's derivatives) are indeed pseudoscience, by and large. That said, Freud was arguably the first to systematically theorize and study human behavior and cognition, and in so doing laid the foundation for the scientific study of psychology. It's generally useful for the purpose of such discussions to distinguish between Freudian ...
11
General Review of Mindfulness Meditation on Cognitive Performance
There is a review article Chiesa et al (2011) which would provide a good starting point. They review 23 studies looking at the effect of mindfulness meditation on performance on objective cognitive tests.
Twenty
three studies providing measures of attention, memory, executive
...
11
As you have already hinted at, the issue is controversial. I could leave it at that and say "no, there is no consensus", and it would be a true answer, but it wouldn't be satisfying, wouldn't it? Instead, I'll briefly define the topic, give a few examples, and then a few recent criticisms. My answer will be weighted somewhat towards "cognition" instead of "...
10
In addition to Mike's answer, see the Ratcliff diffusion model E.g.:
Ratcliff, R., & Rouder, J. N. (1998). Modeling response times for two–choice decisions. Psychological Science, 9, 347–356.
Ratcliff, R., & Tuerlinckx, F. (2002). Estimating parameters of the diffusion model: Approaches to dealing with contaminant reaction times and parameter ...
10
Here's my basic overview of the psychology - statistics textbook market.
In general, I think the choice of textbook (where you have a choice) depends on a few factors:
Applied versus statistical theory (e.g., do you have immediate needs to analyse data)
Whether and which software package you want to use (e.g., SPSS, R, etc.)
Which techniques you want learn (...
10
Dehaene & Changeux (1991) made a neural-network model:
The coding units are clusters of neurons organized in layers, or assemblies. A sensonmotor loop enables the network to sort the input cards according to several criteria (color, form, etc.). A higher-level assembly of rule-coding clusters codes for the currently tested rule, which shifts when ...
10
@CHCH has provided a good broad overview, but I thought I would also append some specific experiments that are considered to be a weakness of Bayesian models. The whole theme of this answer is an extension of Tversky and Kahneman's program of rationality-violation. All of these experiments can be fitted by some Bayesian-ish just-so model of the sort Bowers &...
10
A nice summary about heuristics can be found in:
Gigerenzer, G., & Gaissmaier, W. (2011). Heuristic Decision Making. Annual Review of Psychology, 62, 451–482.
In this review "satisficing" (accepting a good enough option) is referred to an earlier reference than the 1958 you cite:
Simon, H.A. (1955). A behavioral model of rational choice. Q. J. Econ. ...
10
Rao et al. 2014 claims to be the first demonstration of a brain-brain interface in humans, using EEG and TMS.
Abstract
We describe the first direct brain-to-brain interface in humans and present results from experiments involving six different subjects. Our non-invasive interface, demonstrated originally in August 2013, combines ...
9
I have a similar background to you, and have found a lot of interesting things in evolutionary game theory (you can follow links from my profile for more). But on the specific content of your question: I have come across to uses of dynamic systems on the opposite ends of cognition. Beer's work on modeling minimal cognition, and Busemeyer & Townsend's ...
9
The study you are looking for is
Leventhal, H., Singer, R., & Jones, S. (1965). Effects of fear and
specificity of recommendation upon attitudes and behavior. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 2(1), pp. 20-29. doi:
10.1037/h0022089
The study is mostly how you remember (though it was tetanus instead of the flu). Critically, the ...
9
The easiest way to work forward from a well-cited article is to do a forward Google Search. My answer is almost completely based on such a search and concentrates on three brain regions: amygdala, insula cortex, and the anterior cingulate cortex; note that all three regions are linked to emotion.
Keep in mind: when you take any two groups of people that ...
9
It's not a journal article, but it's a project, called Reproducibility Project.
They are re-doing psychological studies to estimate the reproducibility of a sample of studies. They try to stay as close as possible on the original study (they e-mail the author(s) for the exact stimuli etc.).
Here's the main site and here's the link to their spreadsheet.
This ...
9
I'd like to address important issues that Jeromy Anglim raised in the "Personal thoughts" section of his answer, namely that correlation parameters (i.e., true, population, or infinite-sample correlations) often vary and covary among studies, and this between-studies\interstudy heterogeneity implies heterogeneity in studies' parameters for a structural ...
9
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 ...
9
I found the actual report on the PBS NewsHour. The program which teaches children empathy using infants is known as Roots of Empathy. It's Wikipedia article states:
The Roots of Empathy program effectiveness has been evaluated nine different times by independent reviewers. Overall, the results were positive. The results showed that students who ...
9
A study that used the field setting you describe is done by Bateson et al. (2006).
As for the mechanism, they write:
we believe that images of eyes motivate cooperative behaviour because they induce a perception in participants of being watched. Although participants were not actually observed in either of our experimental conditions, the human ...
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