David Hubel's online book, Eye, Brain and Vision describes in great detail our early visual system. The image that we are conscious of when we open our eyes goes through a complex path: The final seamless, right-side up, 2.5D "image" that we "see" can only be assembled after V1, the primary v...

Mountcastle's hypothesis, which is based on the observation of uniform cortical anatomy, suggests that the there might be a uniform cortical "algorithm". The only reason that some cortical regions seem to be specialized for particular functions, like vision, hearing, etc. is that they happen to b...

Strunk & White has been criticized by linguists. The reasons (at a very high level) are that it is prescriptivist (and some style manuals in the US such as the Chicago Manual of Style have become quite liberal (meaning more descriptivist) recently) and linguists have demonstrated that it is i...

A previous question I asked dealt with Gamification techniques to encourage people to perform online workplace training. We are hoping that we can introduce some game techniques to lift the completion rates. However I am concerned that a certain percentage will be resistant to this. Perhaps ac...

I'm not a trained psychologist but here is my answer: "Their lives are perfectly fine" is a hard to test thing. Hard to compare. How people feel and respond is deeply contextual. However there are several potential reasons: They may be 'wired' to feel stress or respond emotionally (i.e. Due t...

I have heard that men find women in red more attractive (I can confirm this from personal experience as well). What color or colors do women prefer on men, if any?

I've recently started using my trackball left-handed after being right-handed my whole life. The motivation is partly to balance out wrist strain, and partly to see how much my brain rejects the idea. Since I am at the computer for a good portion of the day, this is a fundamental change. I start...

I just got my Google I/O Chromebook and one of the most interesting things about the keyboard layout is that certain keys have been replaced by Google with new ones that are more relevant for an operating system that is a browser. For instance, the caps lock is now a search button that opens a n...

I've created a user interface which re-purposes the Caps Lock key to something more useful. During user studies some participants mentioned they did use the Caps Lock key from time to time. (Sidenote: I replaced the behavior of Caps Lock with Caps Lock - A) This made me wonder whether any resear...

I hear there's a limited-time Solstice Dragon that looks like the Sun Dragon for the Summer Solstice. There was no in-game update referencing the dragon at all. How can I breed a Solstice Dragon?

This issue is something I have noticed with myself, people in my surroundings and random people on the internet. Their lives are perfectly fine, but yet they feel depressed. In my specific case it's a feeling that lasts for a few days typically and then magically disappears. Only to reappear a co...

Roughly speaking, we can imagine that people have a depression out of two different reasons: Endogenously induced: The person has some inherent inballance between different neurotransmittors; some part of the persons's brain that regulates emotions is damaged et cetera. Exogenously induced: The...

I've recently started using my trackball left-handed after being right-handed my whole life. The motivation is partly to balance out wrist strain, and partly to see how much my brain rejects the idea. Since I am at the computer for a good portion of the day, this is a fundamental change. I start...

Comments are impermanent and should only be kept around so long as they are interesting, useful and relevant (or some reasonable combination of the above). There's no value in keeping around comments saying "Please do X" long after X has been done, so please do flag obsolete comments for deleti...

I've little knowledge of (rigorous) cognitive science and most of what I know about expertise has been acquired by reading my Ericsson and Charness. Nothing in this textbook speaks about expertise in multiple interconnected domains. Is it possible to achieve expertise in two distinct but int...

I have come across a lot of articles that suggest learning across disciplines would improve cognitive abilities. This is more often referred to as Integrative Learning. Also, nowadayas a lot of emphasis seems to be placed on Interdisciplinarity and cross-disciplinary research. Thus (putting it p...

While searching for similar topics I found several discussions which mainly discuss whether or not to downvote in a particular situation. Usually I agree with the accepted answers. It seems to some extent the opinions on meta on when to downvote on other SE sites are in line. There are little p...