16,545 research outputs found
Reliance on model-based and model-free control in obesity
Consuming more energy than is expended may reflect a failure of control over eating behaviour in obesity. Behavioural control arises from a balance between two dissociable strategies of reinforcement learning: model-free and model-based. We hypothesized that weight status relates to an imbalance in reliance on model-based and model-free control, and that it may do so in a linear or quadratic manner. To test this, 90 healthy participants in a wide BMI range (normal-weight (n=31), overweight (n=29), obese (n=30)) performed a sequential decision-making task. The primary analysis indicated that obese participants relied less on model-based control than overweight and normal-weight participants, with no difference between overweight and normal-weight participants. In line, secondary continuous analyses revealed a negative linear, but not quadratic, relationship between BMI and model-based control. Computational modelling of choice behaviour suggested that a mixture of both strategies was shifted towards less model-based control in obese participants. Furthermore, exploratory analyses of separate weights for model-free and model-based control showed stronger reliance on model-free control with increased BMI. Our findings suggest that obesity may indeed be related to an imbalance in behavioural control as expressed in a phenotype of less model-based control potentially resulting from enhanced reliance on model-free computations
A comparison of efficient permutation tests for unbalanced ANOVA in two by two designs--and their behavior under heteroscedasticity
We compare different permutation tests and some parametric counterparts that
are applicable to unbalanced designs in two by two designs. First the different
approaches are shortly summarized. Then we investigate the behavior of the
tests in a simulation study. A special focus is on the behavior of the tests
under heteroscedastic variances.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figures, Working Paper of the Department of Management
And Enigineering of the University of Padov
Rent increase strategies and distributive justice: the socio-spatial effects of rent control policy in Amsterdam
Nonequilibrium critical dynamics of ferromagnetic spin systems
We use simple models (the Ising model in one and two dimensions, and the
spherical model in arbitrary dimension) to put to the test some recent ideas on
the slow dynamics of nonequilibrium systems. In this review the focus is on the
temporal evolution of two-time quantities and on the violation of the
fluctuation-dissipation theorem, with special emphasis given to nonequilibrium
critical dynamics.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures.Contribution to the Proceedings of the ESF SPHINX
meeting `Glassy behaviour of kinetically constrained models' (Barcelona,
March 22-25, 2001). To appear in a special issue of J. Phys. Cond. Mat
Crack fronts and damage in glass at the nanometer scale
We have studied the low speed fracture regime for different glassy materials
with variable but controlled length scales of heterogeneity in a carefully
mastered surrounding atmosphere. By using optical and atomic force microscopy
(AFM) techniques we tracked in real-time the crack tip propagation at the
nanometer scale on a wide velocity range (mm/s - pm/s and below). The influence
of the heterogeneities on this velocity is presented and discussed. Our
experiments reveal also -for the first time- that the crack progresses through
nucleation, growth and coalescence of nanometric damage cavities within the
amorphous phase. This may explain the large fluctuations observed in the crack
tip velocities for the smallest values. This behaviour is very similar to what
is involved, at the micrometric scale, in ductile fracture. The only difference
is very likely due to the related length scales (nanometric instead of
micrometric). Consequences of such a nano-ductile fracture mode observed at a
temperature far below the glass transition temperature in glass is finally
discussed.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, submitted to Journal of Physics: Condensed
Matter; Invited talk at Glass and Optical Materials Division Fall 2002
Meeting, Pittsburgh, Pa, US
Fresh look at randomly branched polymers
We develop a new, dynamical field theory of isotropic randomly branched
polymers, and we use this model in conjunction with the renormalization group
(RG) to study several prominent problems in the physics of these polymers. Our
model provides an alternative vantage point to understand the swollen phase via
dimensional reduction. We reveal a hidden Becchi-Rouet-Stora (BRS) symmetry of
the model that describes the collapse (-)transition to compact
polymer-conformations, and calculate the critical exponents to 2-loop order. It
turns out that the long-standing 1-loop results for these exponents are not
entirely correct. A runaway of the RG flow indicates that the so-called
-transition could be a fluctuation induced first order
transition.Comment: 4 page
Pair Contact Process with Diffusion: Failure of Master Equation Field Theory
We demonstrate that the `microscopic' field theory representation, directly
derived from the corresponding master equation, fails to adequately capture the
continuous nonequilibrium phase transition of the Pair Contact Process with
Diffusion (PCPD). The ensuing renormalization group (RG) flow equations do not
allow for a stable fixed point in the parameter region that is accessible by
the physical initial conditions. There exists a stable RG fixed point outside
this regime, but the resulting scaling exponents, in conjunction with the
predicted particle anticorrelations at the critical point, would be in
contradiction with the positivity of the equal-time mean-square particle number
fluctuations. We conclude that a more coarse-grained effective field theory
approach is required to elucidate the critical properties of the PCPD.Comment: revtex, 8 pages, 1 figure include
The table mountain 8-mm-wavelength interferometer
The system components, performance, and calibration of two element radio interferometer operating at 8.33 mm wavelength are discussed. The interferometer employs a 5.5 m and a 3 m diameter antenna on an east-west baseline of 60 or 120 m, yielding fringe spacings at transit of 28 or 14 in. respectively. The broad intermediate frequency bandpass of 100 to 350 MHz and the system noise temperature of 500 K provide high sensitivity for the measurement of continuum sources. The interferometer has been used for high resolution studies of the planets and the Sun, and it is currently being adapted to study solar flare emissions at high spatial and time resolution
Disordered Electrons in a Strong Magnetic Field: Transfer Matrix Approaches to the Statistics of the Local Density of States
We present two novel approaches to establish the local density of states as
an order parameter field for the Anderson transition problem. We first
demonstrate for 2D quantum Hall systems the validity of conformal scaling
relations which are characteristic of order parameter fields. Second we show
the equivalence between the critical statistics of eigenvectors of the
Hamiltonian and of the transfer matrix, respectively. Based on this equivalence
we obtain the order parameter exponent for 3D quantum
Hall systems.Comment: 4 pages, 3 Postscript figures, corrected scale in Fig.
General framework of the non-perturbative renormalization group for non-equilibrium steady states
This paper is devoted to presenting in detail the non-perturbative
renormalization group (NPRG) formalism to investigate out-of-equilibrium
systems and critical dynamics in statistical physics. The general NPRG
framework for studying non-equilibrium steady states in stochastic models is
expounded and fundamental technicalities are stressed, mainly regarding the
role of causality and of Ito's discretization. We analyze the consequences of
Ito's prescription in the NPRG framework and eventually provide an adequate
regularization to encode them automatically. Besides, we show how to build a
supersymmetric NPRG formalism with emphasis on time-reversal symmetric
problems, whose supersymmetric structure allows for a particularly simple
implementation of NPRG in which causality issues are transparent. We illustrate
the two approaches on the example of Model A within the derivative expansion
approximation at order two, and check that they yield identical results.Comment: 28 pages, 1 figure, minor corrections prior to publicatio
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