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1500 questions
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What is the name of the bias that associate a thing as good because it has a relation to another good thing?
A customer buys X from "brand A" and has positive experience with it. "Brand A" also sells Y. Now the customer things it is good to buy Y because of his/her positive experience with buying X from brand A and that since it was good, buying Y from…
ram
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Is there a "foreplay" equivalent, priming activity for thinking or conversation?
I've noticed the following phenomenon and am trying to find out if it is indeed true and if there is a scientific term for it:
When I think about ideas, I notice that I can rarely jump straight into "heavy" stuff, like thinking about a cognitive…
Alex Stone
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Can we stop the brain from processing a particular task?
Imagine a task of high involvement and great complexity, but one that is not very important, e.g., a strategic computer game. Because of high involvement, the brain continues to process the problem to find solutions after playing the game. Because…
dhblah
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Is there any research on what causes a pseudo-scientific mindset?
As of late I've been coming across a lot of people online who are convinced that, without much (or any) formal training and often without any collaboration, they have solved a major unsolved problem in the quantitative sciences. They are incredibly…
Eben Kadile
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How are musical hooks defined/studied in psychology?
I know about the common concept of a 'musical hook': a "short riff, passage, or phrase, that is used in popular music to make a song appealing and to 'catch the ear of the listener'."
The Wikipedia article mentions how it is studied in marketing…
Steven Jeuris
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Lottery question, why do we people think this is logic?
For a project we did a small survey, one of the questions was about the following scenario.
Last week the lottery was won by a ticket with the numbers x x x, this week you can make one choice. Pick a ticket with the numbers from last week or pick…
S.Visser
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In fMRI analyses, what is the t-test actually comparing?
In a 1st-level fMRI analysis, it is unclear to me what the t-test performed for each voxel is actually comparing. I've seen this being described in one of two different ways:
The t-test estimates how well the model (HRF curve convoluted with the…
z8080
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Is Maslow's hierarchy of needs really accurate at labeling sex as a physiological "need"?
Is Maslow's hierarchy of needs really accurate at labeling sex as a physiological "need"? If so, would that mean that single/celibate people cannot live self-actualized lives unless they have some sort of sexual outlet (e.g. masturbation)?
xwb
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Are emotions needed to make decisions?
Oprah.com says:
It turns out, though, that for most people there is no such thing as a purely rational self. Decision making is intrinsically linked to our emotions, so much so that when a person suffers damage to her orbitofrontal cortex—a part of…
the gods from engineering
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How do you know if it's psychosomatic or not?
"It's in your head" is often true and often offensive. But as your head can invent any number of psychological and physiological symptoms how can you distinguish whether something is or isn't psychosomatic?
My naive stance (which I'm looking to…
David
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How does this experiment prove a causal relation between coherence and good feelings?
I'm reading Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and I came across the following text:
The Remote Association Test has more to tell us about the link between cognitive ease and positive effect. Briefly consider the two triads of…
titusAdam
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Do persons with autism have a bigger genetic predisposition to psychosis/schizophrenia?
Do people with autism or Asperger's syndrome have a higher genetic predisposition to psychosis or schizophrenia than that of healthy people?
user914
8
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How repeatable are cognitive science findings within the same individual?
Thanks to this website, I've seen a number of papers and scholarly articles that deal with cognition. I'm interested in how repeatable the findings are that are discovered as a result of experiments.
For example, when a mechanical system is tested,…
Alex Stone
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Does learning (to play) music increase IQ?
In one fairly cited study by E. Glenn Schellenberg (~800 citations in Google Scholar) we find that
Compared with children in the control groups, children in the music groups exhibited greater increases in full-scale IQ. The effect was relatively…
the gods from engineering
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8
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How does the mind build a model of reality?
I'm interested if there has been any research or experiments that deal with how the human mind creates and perpetuates the idea of knowing something.
I'm struggling to concisely express the question, so a roundabout explanation is in order. I'm…
Alex Stone
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