The undecided have the key: Interaction-driven opinion dynamics in a three state model

The effects of interpersonal interactions on individual's agreements result in a social aggregation process which is reflected in the formation of collective states, as for instance, groups of individuals with a similar opinion about a given issue. This field, which has been a longstanding concern of sociologists and psychologists, has been extended into an area of experimental social psychology, and even has attracted the attention of physicists and mathematicians. In this article, we present a novel model of opinion formation in which agents may either have a strict preference for a choice, or be undecided. The opinion shift emerges during interpersonal communications, as a consequence of a cumulative process of conviction for one of the two extremes opinions through repeated interactions. There are two main ingredients which play key roles in determining the steady state: the initial fraction of undecided agents and the conviction's sensitivity in each interaction. As a function of these two parameters, the model presents a wide range of possible solutions, as for instance, consensus of each opinion, bi-polarisation or convergence of undecided individuals. We found that a minimum fraction of undecided agents is crucial not only for reaching consensus of a given opinion, but also to determine a dominant opinion in a polarised situation. In order to gain a deeper comprehension of the dynamics, we also present the theoretical master equations of the model.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figure

Modeling Opinion Dynamics: Theoretical analysis and continuous approximation

Frequently we revise our first opinions after talking over with other individuals because we get convinced. Argumentation is a verbal and social process aimed at convincing. It includes conversation and persuasion. In this case, the agreement is reached because the new arguments are incorporated. In this paper we deal with a simple model of opinion formation with such persuasion dynamics, and we find the exact analytical solutions for both, long and short range interactions. A novel theoretical approach has been used in order to solve the master equations of the model with non-local kernels. Simulation results demonstrate an excellent agreement with results obtained by the theoretical estimation.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figure

Setting the Agenda: Different strategies of a Mass Media in a model of cultural dissemination

Day by day, people exchange opinions about a given new with relatives, friends, and coworkers. In most cases, they get informed about a given issue by reading newspapers, listening to the radio, or watching TV, i.e., through a Mass Media (MM). However, the importance of a given new can be stimulated by the Media by assigning newspaper's pages or time in TV programs. In this sense, we say that the Media has the power to "set the agenda", i.e., it decides which new is important and which is not. On the other hand, the Media can know people's concerns through, for instance, websites or blogs where they express their opinions, and then it can use this information in order to be more appealing to an increasing number of people. In this work, we study different scenarios in an agent-based model of cultural dissemination, in which a given Mass Media has a specific purpose: To set a particular topic of discussion and impose its point of view to as many social agents as it can. We model this by making the Media has a fixed feature, representing its point of view in the topic of discussion, while it tries to attract new consumers, by taking advantage of feedback mechanisms, represented by adaptive features. We explore different strategies that the Media can adopt in order to increase the affinity with potential consumers and then the probability to be successful in imposing this particular topic.Comment: 23 pages, 7 figure

Erdós-Rényi phase transition in the Axelrod model on complete graphs

The Axelrod model has been widely studied since its proposal for social influence and cultural dissemination. In particular, the community of statistical physics focused on the presence of a phase transition as a function of its two main parameters, F and Q. In this work, we show that the Axelrod model undergoes a second-order phase transition in the limit of F→∞ on a complete graph. This transition is equivalent to the Erdos-Rényi phase transition in random networks when it is described in terms of the probability of interaction at the initial state, which depends on a scaling relation between F and Q. We also found that this probability plays a key role in sparse topologies by collapsing the transition curves for different values of the parameter F.Fil: Pinto, Sebastián. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires; ArgentinaFil: Balenzuela, Pablo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires; Argentin

A neural mechanism for binaural pitch perception via ghost stochastic resonance

We present a physiologically plausible binaural mechanism for the perception of the pitch of complex sounds via ghost stochastic resonance. In this scheme, two neurons are driven by noise and different periodic signal each (with frequencies f1=kf0 and f2=(k+1)f0, where k>1), and their outputs (plus noise) are applied synaptically to a third neuron. Our numerical results, using the Morris-Lecar neuron model with chemical synapses explicity considered, show that intermediate noise levels enhance the response of the third neuron at frequencies close to f0, as in the cases previously described of ghost resonance. For the case of inharmonic combinations of inputs (both frequencies shifted by the same amount Df) noise is also seen to enhance the response of the third neuron at a frequency fr with also shift linearly with Df. In addition, we show that similar resonances can be observed as a function of the synaptic time constant. The suggested ghost-resonance-based stochastic mechanism can thus arise either at the peripheral level or at a higher level of neural processing in the perception of the pitchComment: 7 pages, 5 figure

On the role of chemical synapses in coupled neurons with noise

We examine the behavior in the presence of noise of an array of Morris-Lecar neurons coupled via chemical synapses. Special attention is devoted to comparing this behavior with the better known case of electrical coupling arising via gap junctions. In particular, our numerical simulations show that chemical synapses are more efficient than gap junctions in enhancing coherence at an optimal noise (what is known as array-enhanced coherence resonance): in the case of (nonlinear) chemical coupling, we observe a substantial increase in the stochastic coherence of the system, in comparison with (linear) electrical coupling. We interpret this qualitative difference between both types of coupling as arising from the fact that chemical synapses only act while the presynaptic neuron is spiking, whereas gap junctions connect the voltage of the two neurons at all times. This leads in the electrical coupling case to larger correlations during interspike time intervals which are detrimental to the array-enhanced coherence effect. Finally, we report on the existence of a system-size coherence resonance in this locally coupled system, exhibited by the average membrane potential of the array.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figure

A novel analytical formulation of the Axelrod model

The Axelrod model of cultural dissemination has been widely studied in the field of statistical mechanics. The traditional version of this agent-based model is to assign a cultural vector of $F$ components to each agent, where each component can take one of $Q$ cultural trait. In this work, we introduce a novel set of mean field master equations to describe the model for $F=2$ and $F=3$ in complete graphs where all indirect interactions are explicitly calculated. We find that the transition between different macroscopic states is driven by initial conditions (set by parameter $Q$) and the size of the system $N$, who measures the balance between linear and cubic terms in master equations. We also find that this analytical approach fully agrees with simulations where the system does not break up during the dynamics and a scaling relation related to missing links reestablishes the agreement when this happens

The brain: What is critical about it?

We review the recent proposal that the most fascinating brain properties are related to the fact that it always stays close to a second order phase transition. In such conditions, the collective of neuronal groups can reliably generate robust and flexible behavior, because it is known that at the critical point there is the largest abundance of metastable states to choose from. Here we review the motivation, arguments and recent results, as well as further implications of this view of the functioning brain.Comment: Proceedings of BIOCOMP2007 - Collective Dynamics: Topics on Competition and Cooperation in the Biosciences. Vietri sul Mare, Italy (2007