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1500 questions
11
votes
1 answer
Bias towards purchasing tangible vs virtual goods
People may have very little hesitation in spending $3 on a coffee once a week, but when it comes to buying things online, such as virtual goods or services, they are often much more reluctant.
Is there a block when it comes to buying things…
Shlomo Zalman Heigh
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11
votes
1 answer
Do readers consider the passive voice as more authoritative?
In the middle of the last century (roughly from the 20s-70s) the passive voice dominated scientific writing; or should it be said that scientific writing was dominated by the passive voice?
Nowadays, there is pushback against the passive voice with…
Artem Kaznatcheev
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10
votes
2 answers
Plotting publication-quality ball-and-stick models of brain connectivity in 3D
I'm working on brain imaging (fMRI) and I'm looking for a way to plot brain effective connectivity (dynamic causal modeling) parameters between different brain regions in a 3D plot. The plotting software should have the following input and…
nrz
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10
votes
2 answers
What research has been done on brain-to-brain interfaces?
Is there an existing research area focusing on brain to brain interfaces? If so, what are some papers that have been published in this area?
Xingdong Zuo
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10
votes
4 answers
Are mentally ill people more violent?
A lot of people are afraid of people with mental illnesses because they think they're more violent but is that true?
I think it's wrong even though I don't really understand the pages I found on google. I found this article from University of…
Laura
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10
votes
2 answers
Conscious basis for gender identification
What conscious experiences lead a transgender person to identify with the opposite sex?
Physiology is clearly not determining.
Sexual orientation is not determining (homosexuality).
Clothing preference is not determining (cross-dressing).
To put…
lemon
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10
votes
1 answer
Are the center surround receptive fields learnt or inherited?
I know that neurons higher in visual pathways can learn their receptive fields after birth, but what about the connections between bipolar cells and Amacarine cells which form center/surround on/off receptive fields? Are they learnt or genetic…
Ziqian Xie
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10
votes
2 answers
Do 10.000 hours of practice make you an expert?
With his book "Outliers" Malcolm Gladwell has widely popularized the idea that the requirement to become an expert in any field is largely to invest at least 10.000 hours of deliberate practice.
What is the scientific basis of this conclusion?
It…
user7759
10
votes
2 answers
Do alpha waves vanish when I open my eyes in a dark room?
Alpha brain waves show up in your EEG when you close your eyes.
Do they vanish when I open my eyes in a dark room?
To put it in a different way: Is it necessary to have your eyes shut or that you don't see anthing?
draks ...
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10
votes
1 answer
Correlation between selfie and Narcissism
Are there scientific evidence to correlate selfie pictures and Narcissism? I am curious when and after what threshold does self love move into the Narcissistic phase?
mindless_thought
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10
votes
2 answers
How does this illusion - that I just inadvertently created - work?
As I was working on a basic chess application for Android, I loaded some chess clip art into my imageviews. Then this happened. Look closely at the top two rows.
At first I was startled. My imageviews had reformatted themselves! But no. All the…
zlaporta
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10
votes
3 answers
Calculating d-prime
I'm currently working on a research that has to use and calculate D Prime values for a task where subjects are presented an image at different speeds and they have to report if they saw the image or not. I've read different basic articles on D Prime…
TiasNM
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10
votes
5 answers
Visual search: complexity of positive vs negative search tasks
Thinking about experiments where participants perform visual search tasks, I remember hearing in a Cog Psych lecture that if the instructions of the task were of the form "find the element that has property X", the participants would accomplish the…
Roly
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10
votes
2 answers
Are good students truly good at all things?
Source: 'Putting a Bolder Face on Google' By LAURA M. HOLSON
At a recent personnel meeting, she homes in on grade-point averages and SAT scores to narrow a list of candidates, many having graduated from Ivy League schools, whom she wanted to meet…
user6479
10
votes
8 answers
Can the mind affect the physical brain? - a simple thought experiment
Scientists maintain that "a physical action requires a physical cause".
However, if I am in deep thought about my dead spouse, for example, and a tear comes to my eye, how is it that the mind (thought) can cause a physiological response (a…
Alberto
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