Mrrzy:

All well and good. The question arises on the focus and precision required.

Hypothetically, If I take 100 people at random and ask them to recall times when they really felt in communication, or really felt affection, for example, I expect well above 50% would say they felt more cheerful afterwards. From this (if my guess were correct) you could advance some tentative conclusions about the functions involved.

Of course, leaving the response entirely up to the responder to that degree means you are introducing a wild variable in the content of the memories, obviously.   You have some many differences between two people that the replication you describe can only be in the broadest terms.

If you limit yourself to mechanical measures like response time to a flash of light, you get baselines of how well the body and nerves respond to input. Or perhaps the degree to which someone is paying attention. But even though your standard of mechanical replication is higher in the latter case, it seems to me the degree of useful insight is lower. OR, at least, using that standard steers you directly into a presumed model of mechanism, because it accepts mechanical replication as signal and dismisses as noise a large chunk of bandwidth that might have information more telling in seeking a "realistic" or at least workable model.

A