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Social Projection and a Quantum Approach for Behavior in Prisoner's Dilemma
Quantum Aspects of Semantic Analysis and Symbolic Artificial Intelligence
Modern approaches to semanic analysis if reformulated as Hilbert-space
problems reveal formal structures known from quantum mechanics. Similar
situation is found in distributed representations of cognitive structures
developed for the purposes of neural networks. We take a closer look at
similarites and differences between the above two fields and quantum
information theory.Comment: version accepted in J. Phys. A (Letter to the Editor
Uncovering the overlapping community structure of complex networks in nature and society
Many complex systems in nature and society can be described in terms of
networks capturing the intricate web of connections among the units they are
made of. A key question is how to interpret the global organization of such
networks as the coexistence of their structural subunits (communities)
associated with more highly interconnected parts. Identifying these a priori
unknown building blocks (such as functionally related proteins, industrial
sectors and groups of people) is crucial to the understanding of the structural
and functional properties of networks. The existing deterministic methods used
for large networks find separated communities, whereas most of the actual
networks are made of highly overlapping cohesive groups of nodes. Here we
introduce an approach to analysing the main statistical features of the
interwoven sets of overlapping communities that makes a step towards uncovering
the modular structure of complex systems. After defining a set of new
characteristic quantities for the statistics of communities, we apply an
efficient technique for exploring overlapping communities on a large scale. We
find that overlaps are significant, and the distributions we introduce reveal
universal features of networks. Our studies of collaboration, word-association
and protein interaction graphs show that the web of communities has non-trivial
correlations and specific scaling properties.Comment: The free academic research software, CFinder, used for the
publication is available at the website of the publication:
http://angel.elte.hu/clusterin
The hypothetical consent objection to anti-natalism
Abstract: A very common but untested assumption is that potential children would consent to be exposed to the harms of existence in order to experience its benefits (if it were possible for us to ask and for them to respond). And so, would-be parents might appeal to the following view: Procreation is all-things-considered permissible, as it is morally acceptable for one to knowingly harm an unconsenting patient if one has good reasons for assuming her hypothetical consentâand procreators can indeed reasonably rely on some notion of hypothetical consent. I argue that this view is in error. My argument appeals to a consent-based version of anti-natalism advanced by Seana Valentine Shiffrin. Anti-natalism is the view that it is (almost) always wrong to bring people (and perhaps all sentient beings) into existence. While, like Shiffrin, I stop short of advocating a thoroughgoing anti-natalism, I nevertheless argue that procreators cannot appeal to hypothetical consent to justify exposing children to the harms of existence. I end by suggesting a more promising route by which this justification might be achieved
Amygdala and Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex Function during Anticipated Peer Evaluation in Pediatric Social Anxiety
1. Context. Amygdala and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex dysfunction manifests in adolescents with anxiety disorders when they view negatively-valenced stimuli in threatening contexts. Such fear-circuitry dysfunction may also manifest when anticipated social evaluation leads socially anxious adolescents to misperceive peers as threatening. 2. Objective. To determine whether photographs of negatively-evaluated smiling peers, viewed during anticipated evaluation, engage the amygdala and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex differentially in adolescents with and without social anxiety. 3. Design. Case-control study. 4. Setting. Government clinical research institute. 5. Participants. Fourteen adolescents with anxiety disorders associated with marked social concerns and 14 diagnosis-free adolescents, matched on sex, age, IQ, and socio-economic status. 6. Main Outcome Measure(s). Blood oxygenation level-dependent signal measured with event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging. Before and during neuroimaging scans, participants anticipating social evaluation completed peer- and self-appraisals. Event-related analyses were tailored to participantsâ ratings of specific peers. 7. Results. Participants classified 40 pictures of same-age peers as ones they wanted to engage or not engage with for a social interaction. Anxious adolescents showed greater amygdala activation than healthy adolescents when anticipating evaluation from peers rated as undesired for an interaction. Viewing undesired peers engaged stronger positive amygdala-ventrolateral-prefrontal-cortex connectivity in anxious vs. healthy adolescents. 8. Conclusions. Anticipating social evaluation from negatively-perceived peers modulates amygdala and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex engagement differentially in anxious and healthy 3 adolescents. Amygdala and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex abnormalities in adolescent anxiety disorders are heightened in specific contexts of potential peer evaluation
Order and serial position effects in response time with multiple-item probe recognition
Attentional demand influences strategies for encoding into visual working memory
Visual selective attention and visual working memory (WM) share the same
capacity-limited resources. We investigated whether and how participants can
cope with a task in which these 2 mechanisms interfere. The task required
participants to scan an array of 9 objects in order to select the target
locations and to encode the items presented at these locations into WM (1 to 5
shapes). Determination of the target locations required either few attentional
resources (âpopout conditionâ) or an attention-demanding serial search (ânon
pop-out conditionâ). Participants were able to achieve high memory performance
in all stimulation conditions but, in the non popout conditions, this came at
the cost of additional processing time. Both empirical evidence and subjective
reports suggest that participants invested the additional time in memorizing the
locations of all target objects prior to the encoding of their shapes into WM.
Thus, they seemed to be unable to interleave the steps of search with those of
encoding. We propose that the memory for target locations substitutes for
perceptual pop-out and thus may be the key component that allows for flexible
coping with the common processing limitations of visual WM and attention. The
findings have implications for understanding how we cope with real-life
situations in which the demands on visual attention and WM occur
simultaneously
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