The Absolute State of Neuroscience In the year of our Lord 2008 a team of researchers in Leiden University conducted a study aimed at comparing the effects of punishment versus praise in the process of learning. At some pragmatic level the question is perfectly legit, though boringly unsurprising, what stimuli should we use in what proportion to what categories of students. Psychology Today writes about this research (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/family-affair/200809/rewards-are-better-punishment-here-s-why): " The work involved 8/9 and 11/12-year olds who were given the opportunity to learn some basic tasks by means of positive, rewarding feedback or negative, "punishing" feedback. Specifically, all children were given a computer task which required them to discover rules, and when they correctly inferred a rule, as revealed by choices they made in the task, a check--positive reward--appeared on the screen; but if their choice indicated that they had not correctly figured out the rule of the task, then a cross--punishment--appeared on the screen. Repeated running of the task showed that performance improved substantially when the feedback was positive in the case of the younger children, telling them they did well when they did, rather than negative, telling them that they did poorly when they did in fact do badly. Just the opposite proved true in the case of older children, who functioned just like young adults aged 18-25 who were also tested. That is, negative feedback improved performance more for these individuals than did positive feedback. " The author of this article, (((Jay Belsky Ph.D. Director of the Institute for the Study of Children, Families and Social Issues and Professor of Psychology at Birkbeck University of London))) takes it as far as: " Many a child developmental professional will advise parents to try to ignore children's bad behavior and reward their good behavior ...it turns out that most experts are correct. Rewards are more effective than punishment. ...parents must control their irritability in the face of annoying child behavior, so that we can ignore it. " Given the ethnicity of the author, you are not surprised with his recommendation, he recommends to you white people what is best for his people, but I am more interested in the research he mentioned. It seems from this brief description that children were divided in two groups: one with emphasis on "punishment", and one with emphasis on "reward" -- from this division we might have worked the efficiency discrepancy "punishment vs reward". I prepared myself to assume this research is perfectly legit, interpreted and relayed correctly, and I prepared a powerful punchline for you: HOW IS THIS A PUNISHMENT TO BE SHOWN AN ABSTRACT SYMBOL ON A TV SCREEN?!?!?!?!?!?!? Picture that, people are conducting research about the punishment efficiency and they chose as a model punishment AN IMAGE ON A SCREEN, not whipping, not electro-shock, not hunger, not flashbang, and not even a picture of a predator! but a picture of a perfectly abstract shape -- a red diagonal cross -- OH MY GOD! I AM SOOOOO PUNISHED!!!Certainly this research provided us with a deep insight into human learning under the stress of punishment, so deeply consequential it is! It turned out that all my assumptions were completely wrong -- once again I was too generous to the official researchers. They ruined all the comedic effect of my punchline by writing a research that is wrong in every step: hypothesis, methodology, procedure, conclusion, interpretation, publication, experts response -- everything is so thoroughly flawed that instead of a funny, witty, striking commentary I have to take you down the rabbit hole of anti-science and anti-logic. The Jay of Psychology Today did not provide links to his sources, very considerate of a respected scientific journal. A quick phrase-search reveals a publication by E-Science News Com (http://esciencenews.com/articles/2008/09/25/from.12.years.onward.you.learn.differently): " Dr Eveline Crone and her colleagues used fMRI research to compare the brains of three different age groups: children of eight to nine years, children of eleven to twelve years, and adults aged between 18 and 25 years. The researchers gave children of both age groups and adults aged 18 to 25 a computer task while they lay in the MRI scanner. The task required them to discover rules. If they did this correctly, a tick appeared on the screen, otherwise a cross appeared. MRI scans showed which parts of the brain were activated. In children of eight and nine, these areas of the brain react strongly to positive feedback and scarcely respond at all to negative feedback. But in children of 12 and 13, and also in adults, the opposite is the case. Their 'control centres' in the brain are more strongly activated by negative feedback and much less by positive feedback. " My assumption that children were PROPERLY divided into two groups with different emphasis on punishment shakes. On the other hand the focus moves to the "opposite", the authors suggest that the learning mode switches at around 11 y/o to its "opposite": " Crone herself was surprised at the outcome: 'We had expected that the brains of eight-year-olds would function in exactly the same way as the brains of twelve-year-olds, but maybe not quite so well. Children learn the whole time, so this new knowledge can have major consequences for people wanting to teach children: how can you best relay instructions to eight- and twelve-year-olds? ... Children of eight may well be able to learn extremely efficiently, only they do it in a different way.' " Fortunately E-Science News Com names the article they quote from, which is "Learning From Mistakes Only Works After Age 12" (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080925104309.htm) by Science Daily. Note the bold statement that Science Daily made, we are about to verify it. It furthers the emphasis on the learning mode switching. Science Daily claims they bought this shit directly from Leiden University, and supply a link that does not work. (One more nail to the idea of Hypertext in the modern www) Fortunately they also provide a journal reference, which is perfectly searchable: Anna C. K. van Duijvenvoorde, Kiki Zanolie, Serge A. R. B. Rombouts, Maartje E. J. Raijmakers, and Eveline A. Crone. Evaluating the Negative or Valuing the Positive? Neural Mechanisms Supporting Feedback-Based Learning across Development. The Journal of Neuroscience, 17 September 2008 (https://www.jneurosci.org/content/28/38/9495.full) Note the title, it is not the "Reward wins against Punishment" this time, but it does not make the research itself any more valid than it is. Below I translate the most important snippets of the original article from the scientific legalese to humane English, for the verbatim quotation would only cause confusion and nothing more, at the same time you have access to the original article and able to verify my translation if you please. The section Materials and Methods They took 55 healthy volunteers ages from 8 to 25: 18 adults, 19 kids 11..13 y/o, 18 kids 8..9 y/o. Right from the start we are dealing with a research of N=18. They investigated the effect (claimed in the conclusion) on EIGHTEEN subjects. Can you get more representative than that? Maybe 9 subjects? The entire Freudianism rests on just 9 sunjects! So? These Eveline Crone's researchers are doing twice better than Freud. So good so far. One funny quote deserves to be put verbatim: " All procedures were approved by the Leiden University Department of Psychology and the medical ethical committee of the Leiden University Medical Center. " This is the section "Materials and Methods". They put a statement of bureaucracy into the description of their actual EXPERIMENT next to the statement of the participants heath conditions. For faq's sake! How does any bureaucratic approval affects the scientific validity of a research?!?!? It speaks volumes of the mindset of these "scientists". The participants were given the following visual sequence: a "ready" sign, pause, a pair of images (simultaneously), pause, then either a "well done" or "error" sign, pause, the same pair of images, pause. When presented a pair of images the participant must choose one. One choice is "right" another one is "wrong". There are only two choices and exactly one correct choice. After the first choice the participant is informed about his result and then he is expected to make the same choice using the information he was given. Obviously he has all the information he needs to make the correct choice this second time -- he can either switch his choice or not. It is also important to note that the correct answer DOES NOT FOLLOW FROM ANYTHING IN THE PICTURE. The participant has to GUESS first time (50% chance he is correct), then he learns if his guess is correct, and the second time he knows exactly which picture he has to choose. Simple? Not for the "neuroscientists" they went long way to obscure the procedure beyond recognition, it took 678 words, they even invented 5 brand new terms to "describe" it (or shall I say "undescribe"), for example, the choice between two unrelated pictures they called: "a rule selection task". They even supplied a picture (https://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/28/38/9495/F1.large.jpg) that clarifies absolutely nothing. They even supplied a citation! Yes, this simple task has to be someone's doctoral thesis, of course! (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18387586?dopt=Abstract) Ah! snap! The Eveline Crone again. Someone has to work on your "significance" metrics too. They speculate at length that this task somehow involves colours and patterns recognition, and participants must perform some sort of associations between abstract features of the images... The only thing they "forgot" to mention is that the SPACE OF THE CHOICE HAS THE SIZE OF EXACTLY TWO OPTIONS -- you are free to do your colours recognition but the correct answer follows from the first feedback invariably without any further mental gymnastic, if you see "wrong" you change your choice, if you see "correct" you repeat your choice. This is the essence of the task, the colours and shapes are superficial, any reasoning about them is scientifically invalid, because the participants can (and I dare say MUST) bypass all of it with a piece of trivial logic available for kids as young as 3 y/o. Quote: "The feedback was successfully used to find the appropriate rule" WRONG! the feedback was used to find the CORRECT ANSWER, the knowledge of its correctness was made available to the participants regardless of your "rules"! The famous official neuroscientists clearly demonstrate the inability to remove INSIGNIFICANT VARIABLES! This is the Leiden University for you. The section Results What was measured? The delay before the second correct answer, and the proportion of correct answers in the second trial (when you must know the correct answer already). here are the results (https://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/28/38/9495/F2.large.jpg) All these time measurements were carried out inside an fMRI scanner of course, how do you think a NEURO-science has to be done?! What do we see here? That in an ABSTRACT SETTING with hard logical rules adults think faster than children, and significantly more accurately they provide their answers. How surprising! What else do we see here? The diff between gray and black lines -- it shows us that logical negation takes longer than logical repetition! Wow! That's a huge surprise! Who would have thought! People repeat faster than they negate a binary choice! What don't we see here? We don't see the promised switch of the learning mode between 8 y/o and 12 y/o! Do you remember they told us "12 y/o learn from mistakes whereas 8 y/o do not"(https://medicalxpress.com/news/2008-09-years-onward-differently.html)? Do you know how this learning mode switch would look on the presented graphs? LIKE AN INTERSECTION OF THE GRAY AND BLACK LINES between 8 and 12 years. Eveline Crone claimed an effect that clearly absent in her very own paper! And every respectable journal published it! And of course, we don't see here an effect of punishment at all! The imaginary punishment is just another INSIGNIFICANT VARIABLE in this research because it is shadowed by the logical negation that participants had to perform, the same way the "colour-shape rule" is shadowed. You may argue about few bad apples, and my far fetched overgeneralization... Halt! It was published in 2008 by every "respectable" journal, re-interpreted and mis-interpreted multiple times, and never retracted. Grants were distributed, conclusions were made, citations multiply themselves, Hirsch grows. It is now A PIECE OF UNIVERSALLY ACCEPTED NEUROSCIENCE. Psychology Today, Cortex, Science Daily, J-Neurosci, Medical Express, Pubmed... These are representative of the global state of so called science nowadays.