38,715 research outputs found
Adaptive Probability Theory: Human Biases as an Adaptation
Humans make mistakes in our decision-making and probability judgments. While the heuristics used for decision-making have been explained as adaptations that are both efficient and fast, the reasons why people deal with probabilities using the reported biases have not been clear. We will see that some of these biases can be understood as heuristics developed to explain a complex world when little information is available. That is, they approximate Bayesian inferences for situations more complex than the ones in laboratory experiments and in this sense might have appeared as an adaptation to those situations. When ideas as uncertainty and limited sample sizes are included in the problem, the correct probabilities are changed to values close to the observed behavior. These ideas will be used to explain the observed weight functions, the violations of coalescing and stochastic dominance reported in the literature
Synchronisation Induced by Repulsive Interactions in a System of van der Pol Oscillators
We consider a system of identical van der Pol oscillators, globally coupled
through their velocities, and study how the presence of competitive
interactions affects its synchronisation properties. We will address the
question from two points of view. Firstly, we will investigate the role of
competitive interactions on the synchronisation among identical oscillators.
Then, we will show that the presence of an intermediate fraction of repulsive
links results in the appearance of macroscopic oscillations at that signal's
rhythm, in regions where the individual oscillator is unable to synchronise
with a weak external signal
- …