The epistemic structure of research on polarization in digitally-coupled social networks will be analyzed in order to develop strategies towards cohesive stewardship of collective behavior.
Behavioral contagion—the onset of a species-typical behaviour soon after witnessing it in a conspecific—forms the foundation of behavioral synchrony and cohesive group living in social animals. Although past research has mostly focused on negative emotions or neutral contexts, the sharing of positive emotions in particular may be key for social affiliation. This project investigated the contagion of two socially affiliative interactive behaviours, grooming and play, in chimpanzees.
Polar angle asymmetries (PAAs), the differences in perceptual experiences and performance across different regions of the visual field are present in various paradigms and tasks of visual perception. Currently, research in this area is sparse, particularly regarding the influence of PAAs during perceptual illusions, highlighting a gap in visual cognition studies. This work aims to fill this gap by measuring PAAs across the visual field during an illusion applied to test conscious vision widely.
This is a computational study of spatial planning under uncertainty using a novel Maze Search Task (MST), in which people search mazes for probabilistically hidden rewards. The MST is designed to resemble real-life spatial planning, where costs and rewards are physically situated as distances and locations. The researchers found that people’s spatial planning is best explained by planners with limited planning horizon, as opposed to both myopic heuristics or the optimal expected utility, showing that a limited planning horizon can generalize to spatial planning tasks. They also find that our results do not exclude the possibility that in human planning action values may be affected by cognitive mechanisms of numerosity and probability perception.
Cells can compensate a disruptive change in one ion channel by compensatory changes in other channels. This work has simulated the adaptation of a multicellular aggregate of non-excitable cells to the electrophysiological perturbation produced by the external blocking of a cation channel. In the biophysical model employed, the researchers consider that this blocking provokes a cell depolarization that opens a voltage-gated calcium channel, thus allowing toxic Ca2+ levels...