Tag Archives: Cognitive Tests

More of my amazing ideas! Beware!




Can signal detection theory and changing criteria be used to study the sincerity of politicians in their responses to questions?

Can the funnel plot statistical method or something like it be used to predict the existence of undetected criminals within social groups?



Are prosopagnosics over-represented among scientists, science graduates or among popularizers of science? (Consider Dr Karl, science journalist Robyn Williams, Jane Goodall, Oliver Sacks…) If so, is this because they develop a skepticism about unconscious, intuitive ways of thinking that give instant insights, as typified by the process of normal face recognition, as a natural consequence of experiencing this type of thinking less often than most people do? Is this a motivation to seek and understand and advocate for the more deliberate, conscious and explicit ways of thinking and reasoning that make up the methods, processes and statistical techniques of science and critical thinking?


Is the Trolley Problem thought experiment relevant to the phenomenon of parents refusing to vaccinate their children? The Trolley Problem shows us that a minority of people express irrational reluctance to take an action that will kill a person in order to save the lives of a greater number of people. Obvious parallels can be pointed out between this situation and that of a parent who fears some aspect of vaccinations refusing to “harm” their child regardless of the benefits. If there something especially emotionally repellent about directly causing harm even if the aim is to promote a less salient and immediate good effect, surely the Trolley Problem might be a tool that can aid in understanding the phenomenon of vaccination refusal.

Can the normal mean score in a test be double-checked after it has been used in published studies by gathering up all of the data of the scores of control group or normal study participants who have been given the test, in a systematic search of the literature, and then pool this data to calculate an average score? Is this a more objective method of determining a normal score for a published test than merely relying on a norm researched by the team that originally researched the test, or a way of replicating this result?

Are super-recognizers super at facial recognition because they are faster or better at converting visual memories of seen but unfamiliar faces into memories of familiar faces? (In some ways the enhanced memory for familiar faces displayed by ordinary people resembles super-recognizers’ memory for faces only seen transiently or once). Are supers over-familiar in a facial kind of way? Do supers pay closer attention to people’s faces or in some other way have an advantage in the encoding stage of memory-formation? Does the process of converting an unfamiliar face memory into a familiar face memory involve an attribution of personality traits to faces (which may or may not be based on reasonable assumptions), in the manner of ordinal-linguistic personification synaesthesia?

Are geographically-isolated cities such as Perth characterized by mediocrity in professional standards in those cities, as a consequence of a lack of “new blood” and the opportunity for the formation of social networks within professions that are too stable and collegiate, or frankly corrupt networks within or between professions, preventing genuine professional peer-review or criticism of members of these professions? Some professions that I’d start with include dentistry, medical, legal, law enforcement, public service, education, journalism/press, academia, librarianship. I’ve found clear data-based evidence for this effect in relation to one profession, but some of the most important professions are hard to rate because of a lack of openly-available systematic measurement of professional standards and outcomes. If I ever had the means to study this question and found an effect, I’d call it “The Perth Problem”, but the effect should be globally applicable. Apparently in Darwin, the residents have such a low opinion of a hospital there that they have a saying:”If you feel a pain, book a plane.”

And finally, dammit, for a while I thought I was the first to think of the brilliant idea in the article linked to below. Apparently not, but I like that in the age of skyscrapers, drones and Google Earth, we can take this hybrid of gardening and graffiti to new levels entirely. http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/09/28/161947553/the-best-college-prank-of-the-1790s-with-bats-poop-grass

More ideas to follow………………

October 16th 2017

Could the underlying cause of chronic hoarding behaviour be undiagnosed hyperostosis frontalis interna (AKA Morgagni-Stewart-Morel syndrome)? There are reasons to believe that at least one form of hoarding is caused by damage or dysfunction to parts of the brain in the frontal lobes that perform decision-making, and it seems obvious that damage or impairment of this part of the brain could be the result of HFI, which is an abnormal thickening of the inside of the front of the skull. One might argue that HFI is typically found in old ladies, while this might not be the case for hoarding, so the two aren’t linked. To that I would argue that HFI is thought to possibly be substantially underdiagnosed, and is typically only identified as an incidental finding when a patient is given an x-ray of their skull for some unrelated reason, and HFI is (incorrectly) considered by some doctors to be a benign condition, so no one can say how common HFI really is or what age or gender characteristics the genuine typical case posesses. If hoarders ever are treated by any health professional, I would guess this would only consist of CBT from a psychologist or happy pills from a GP, and I’m sure an x-ray of the skull or other non-trivial forms of medical testing are virtually never a part of investigations of cases of hoarding. HFI is associated with epilepsy (ample reason enough why it should not be considered benign) and possibly this could contribute towards the hoarder’s inability to make decisions about the importance of items (to keep or to toss), due to seizure activity in the frontal lobes altering the emotional state to make everything appear to be important or significant. Apparently a common report in temporal lobe epileptics is of a feeling of insight or significance or ecstasy as an aura or precursor to seizures. What if this kind of sensation was chronically activated? If this was possible, how would that affect behaviour? This also raises the question of a possible link between hoarding and the epilepsy-related personality disorder that was proposed as a psychiatric diagnosis in the 1970s and 1980s, known as Geschwind syndrome or Interictal Behavior Syndrome of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. I think this is another possible association worth researching. Obviously, I believe all of the disorders that I’ve mentioned in this paragraph should be the subjects of much more research and interest from the medical and psychological professions.



October 2018

Could super-recognizers be trained to identify sex offenders by viewing their faces or images of their faces, probably based on a typical facial expression?

Could fetomaternal microchimerism or male microchimerism explain the phenomenon of straight hair becoming curly with age in women?




Face recognition testing has a long history




An oldie but a goodie

Why you will leave shops empty-handed this Christmas season, just the same as last year, and the year before that….

As sure as night follows day, in the days leading up to Christmas supermarkets will run out of packets of dehydrated French onion soup, just when you had the idea to make your own cheap but tasty party dips out of cream cheese or sour cream and the aforementioned processed soup. I’m guessing this happens every year because the state-of-the-art stock ordering computer programs used by the supermarkets group products into categories, and soup being a product range that generally sells more in winter, is not ordered in any quantity in the summer season leading up to Christmas in Australia. Perhaps a similar logic explains why breakfast foods such as hash browns and kippers become scarce in the festive season. I’m guessing that cooked breakfast foods aren’t items in the summer range, even though big cooked breakfasts have been a popular form of family Christmas meal in Australia since the 1990s.

More common and perennial problems in stock replenishment in retail establishments are the big empty chasms where useful and desirable products are supposed to be stocked, and the related problem of the wrong product housed in slots on variety and supermarket shelves. These issues are a problem for retailers, as in the former situation a sale does not happen and in the latter situation the item stocked will most likely be advertised at the wrong price. If the shopper has seen a box of 375g salted mixed nuts stocked in a slot displaying a price of $3.00, around $3.05 less than the price that it scans at, the customer has every right to insist that they be sold the item at the lesser price that they saw when they selected the item, even though I’ve found that staff at a local Woolworths supermarket will defend their right to display $8 pots of bubble-mix in the slot in the toy section designated to $3 bubble mix, not conceding one red cent of discount, whatever the consumer law might say. Shoppers also have a problem when stuff isn’t kept in the shops where stuff is meant to be found. When confronted with fresh air where an item on their shopping list should be found a shopper could feel peeved, because they then have to walk across the shopping centre or drive across town to source an alternative, or do without. And when they are confronted with incorrectly shelved items they may become misled or confused over the price. And the problem goes deeper than that. When some dunce fills a box of Fimo soft light modelling clay packets into a slot at an Officeworks store which was supposed to house similar-sized packages of Das air-drying modelling clay, and hangs an “out-of-stock” sign where the Fimo item should reside, the Fimo is then advertised at the wrong price as a different product, and I’m guessing when the automatic stock-ordering system delivers more of the Das clay, which is really out-of-stock, the shelf-stocking person might find an full slot where their box of Das product should be placed. What happens next is anyone’s guess, but I know that in supermarket night-fill operations the workers are placed under constant pressure to throw product onto the shelves fast, so there isn’t time for anyone to pull the twenty-three blackcurrant jam jars out of the blackberry jam slot, rebox or rehouse them all, and then refill the slot with the contents of the box of blackberry jam. What will probably happen is that the box of blackberry jam will be marked as overstock and returned to the back of the supermarket on a cage to languish in darkness for an indefinite sentence. I hope you like blackcurrant jam, and I hope you don’t have an allergic reaction to the hazelnut wafers that were shelved in the chocolate wafers slot.

I understand that once retail shelves have been allowed to degrade into a state of chaos the disorder becomes a self-perpetuating system, and I know that hope can never be held for any logic or order in any retail space devoted to an extensive range of light globes, but I also wonder whether I’m the only one who sees the errors in product stocking every time I walk into a shop or walk down a retail aisle. Do other shoppers notice the boxes of fish fingers heaped six-high above the fill-line in the freezers? Do store managers notice the expired use-by dates, the 600ml bottles sitting in the 300ml bottle slot, the grey bacon, or does it not register? If they do see the mess and the mistakes, does it not bother them?

The phrase “an eye for detail” pops up fairly frequently in the world of recruiting and HR but no one ever tests for it, and as far as I know, there are no valid, reliable, standardised tests relevant to “eye for detail” and I know of no scientific definition of this ability (readers please correct me and inform me if you know more about this than I do). The standard of spelling ability of job applicants might be used to estimate “eye for detail”, but this standard is a fairly low bar, and it is also not an area of ability that another poor speller is able to judge. One fundamental truth that I’ve learned in researching the science of face memory and visual recognition is that seeing doesn’t simply happen in the eyes, it happens in the eyes and brain. You can have your eyes open but not really see if your brain isn’t processing the information supplied by your eyes, and that is why we all get to see so many dark, empty spaces when we are trying to stock up for the silly season.

Don’t confuse poor face memory with aphasia


Famous faces to help spot early dementia.
Anna Salleh ABC. 13 August 2013.


Just added an important link to a cognitive test website

I’ve just added a new link to an important online resource to my large and well-considered collection of links at this blog. This online website is TestMyBrain from the Vision Lab at Harvard University. It is a place where researchers offer a group or battery of cognitive tests to the online public free of charge. It is my understanding that your test scores are collected and stored and are available to you to look at, in a “Brain Profile”, but remember to take a screen-shot of your results immediately because this data isn’t stored there permanently. Researchers haven’t just created this website out of the goodness of their hearts, it is my understanding that they use it to collect data for their studies. At the moment there is one face recognition or face memory test included in the collection of tests at TestMyBrain, which could be of value to anyone who suspects that they have a special gift or an impairment in face recognition or face memory. There’s also another tests that looks like it tests face matching ability, which is not quite the same thing as face memory. I haven’t done that test (yet). I consider that the best face memory test available today is the Cambridge Face Memory Test, which comes in a short and also a long version. In the past this test was available to the public through this website, but it isn’t there at the moment. Researchers appear to be reserving this test for use only in their private research studies, which I think is wrong, because people shouldn’t have to find a study to participate in in order to find out whether they have prosopagnosia or are a super-recognizer. Please note that the CFMT is an actual test. It is not just a questionnaire which asks subject whether or not they think they have good or bad face recognition or asks them about their experiences. The only way to find out a person’s real level of ability is to test it, so you need to do a test, and it needs to be a properly designed test. The only people who are likely to design such a test are researchers from a psychology department of some university. A person’s beliefs and impressions can be wildly wrong or uninformed, so questionnaires are pretty much a waste of everyone’s time. Test My Brain is the most reliable place on the internet that I know of for accessing face memory testing free of charge and with your own score freely available to you, so this is an important resource.