81 research outputs found
Thomas-Fermi-Dirac-von Weizsacker hydrodynamics in laterally modulated electronic systems
We have studied the collective plasma excitations of a two-dimensional
electron gas with an arbitrary lateral charge-density modulation. The dynamics
is formulated using a previously developed hydrodynamic theory based on the
Thomas-Fermi-Dirac-von Weizsacker approximation. In this approach, both the
equilibrium and dynamical properties of the periodically modulated electron gas
are treated in a consistent fashion. We pay particular attention to the
evolution of the collective excitations as the system undergoes the transition
from the ideal two-dimensional limit to the highly-localized one-dimensional
limit. We also calculate the power absorption in the long-wavelength limit to
illustrate the effect of the modulation on the modes probed by far-infrared
(FIR) transmission spectroscopy.Comment: 27 page Revtex file, 15 Postscript figure
Inference with interference between units in an fMRI experiment of motor inhibition
An experimental unit is an opportunity to randomly apply or withhold a
treatment. There is interference between units if the application of the
treatment to one unit may also affect other units. In cognitive neuroscience, a
common form of experiment presents a sequence of stimuli or requests for
cognitive activity at random to each experimental subject and measures
biological aspects of brain activity that follow these requests. Each subject
is then many experimental units, and interference between units within an
experimental subject is likely, in part because the stimuli follow one another
quickly and in part because human subjects learn or become experienced or
primed or bored as the experiment proceeds. We use a recent fMRI experiment
concerned with the inhibition of motor activity to illustrate and further
develop recently proposed methodology for inference in the presence of
interference. A simulation evaluates the power of competing procedures.Comment: Published by Journal of the American Statistical Association at
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01621459.2012.655954 . R package
cin (Causal Inference for Neuroscience) implementing the proposed method is
freely available on CRAN at https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=ci
Evidence accumulation models with R: A practical guide to hierarchical Bayesian methods
Evidence accumulation models are a useful tool to allow researchers to investigate the latent cognitive variables that underlie response time and response accuracy. However, applying evidence accumulation models can be difficult because they lack easily computable forms. Numerical methods are required to determine the parameters of evidence accumulation that best correspond to the fitted data. When applied to complex cognitive models, such numerical methods can require substantial computational power which can lead to infeasibly long compute times. In this paper, we provide efficient, practical software and a step-by-step guide to fit evidence accumulation models with Bayesian methods. The software, written in C++, is provided in an R package: 'ggdmc'. The software incorporates three important ingredients of Bayesian computation, (1) the likelihood functions of two common response time models, (2) the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm (3) a population-based MCMC sampling method. The software has gone through stringent checks to be hosted on the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) and is free to download. We illustrate its basic use and an example of fitting complex hierarchical Wiener diffusion models to four shooting-decision data sets
Defecting or not defecting: how to "read" human behavior during cooperative games by EEG measurements
Understanding the neural mechanisms responsible for human social interactions
is difficult, since the brain activities of two or more individuals have to be
examined simultaneously and correlated with the observed social patterns. We
introduce the concept of hyper-brain network, a connectivity pattern
representing at once the information flow among the cortical regions of a
single brain as well as the relations among the areas of two distinct brains.
Graph analysis of hyper-brain networks constructed from the EEG scanning of 26
couples of individuals playing the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma reveals the
possibility to predict non-cooperative interactions during the decision-making
phase. The hyper-brain networks of two-defector couples have significantly less
inter-brain links and overall higher modularity - i.e. the tendency to form two
separate subgraphs - than couples playing cooperative or tit-for-tat
strategies. The decision to defect can be "read" in advance by evaluating the
changes of connectivity pattern in the hyper-brain network
A quantitative description of the transition between intuitive altruism and rational deliberation in iterated Prisoner's Dilemma experiments
What is intuitive: pro-social or anti-social behaviour? To answer this
fundamental question, recent studies analyse decision times in game theory
experiments under the assumption that intuitive decisions are fast and that
deliberation is slow. These analyses keep track of the average time taken to
make decisions under different conditions. Lacking any knowledge of the
underlying dynamics, such simplistic approach might however lead to erroneous
interpretations. Here we model the cognitive basis of strategic cooperative
decision making using the Drift Diffusion Model to discern between deliberation
and intuition and describe the evolution of the decision making in iterated
Prisoner's Dilemma experiments. We find that, although initially people's
intuitive decision is to cooperate, rational deliberation quickly becomes
dominant over an initial intuitive bias towards cooperation, which is fostered
by positive interactions as much as frustrated by a negative one. However, this
initial pro-social tendency is resilient, as after a pause it resets to the
same initial value. These results illustrate the new insight that can be
achieved thanks to a quantitative modelling of human behavior
Neural correlates of evidence accumulation during value-based decisions revealed via simultaneous EEG-fMRI
Current computational accounts posit that, in simple binary choices, humans accumulate
evidence in favour of the different alternatives before committing to a decision. Neural
correlates of this accumulating activity have been found during perceptual decisions in
parietal and prefrontal cortex; however the source of such activity in value-based choices
remains unknown. Here we use simultaneous EEG–fMRI and computational modelling to
identify EEG signals reflecting an accumulation process and demonstrate that the within- and
across-trial variability in these signals explains fMRI responses in posterior-medial frontal
cortex. Consistent with its role in integrating the evidence prior to reaching a decision, this
region also exhibits task-dependent coupling with the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and
the striatum, brain areas known to encode the subjective value of the decision alternatives.
These results further endorse the proposition of an evidence accumulation process
during value-based decisions in humans and implicate the posterior-medial frontal cortex in
this process
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