44 research outputs found
The dark side of personality: anti-sociality increases strategic game play
We assess the role of anti-social personality traits in explaining heterogeneity in commonly observed social preferences. We identified a personality profile that clearly reflects anti-social personality characteristics, with high positive loadings on Machiavellianism and high negative loadings on empathy, trustworthiness and agreeableness. Anti-sociality predicts decision strategies in a manner that is consistent with its name: significantly lower levels of trust and decreased trustworthiness. To identify the strategic nature of anti-social behavior in changing environments, we assessed the moderating role of personality on investor trust and trustee reciprocity in the presence relative to the absence of the investor’s option to punish. Our results show that only the anti-social personality profile is associated with specific payoff maximizing strategy shifts induced by these environmental changes: when punishment was not available to investors, we observe significantly lower levels of investor trust and trustee reciprocity, while there is a significant increase in both behaviors when punishment was available. These effects were specific for anti-sociality, as no other personality factor was associated with such a strong adjustment of decision strategies in the presence of punishment. These results demonstrate that anti-social personality characteristics are associated with strategic behavioral shifts aimed at maximizing the extraction of resources from their counterparts. The reliability of the strategic effects of anti-social personality during trust, reciprocity and punishment strongly supports the notion that self-projection underlies anti-social decision-making
An open-source deep learning algorithm for efficient and fully-automatic analysis of the choroid in optical coherence tomography
Purpose: To develop an open-source, fully-automatic deep learning algorithm,
DeepGPET, for choroid region segmentation in optical coherence tomography (OCT)
data. Methods: We used a dataset of 715 OCT B-scans (82 subjects, 115 eyes)
from 3 clinical studies related to systemic disease. Ground truth segmentations
were generated using a clinically validated, semi-automatic choroid
segmentation method, Gaussian Process Edge Tracing (GPET). We finetuned a UNet
with MobileNetV3 backbone pre-trained on ImageNet. Standard segmentation
agreement metrics, as well as derived measures of choroidal thickness and area,
were used to evaluate DeepGPET, alongside qualitative evaluation from a
clinical ophthalmologist. Results: DeepGPET achieves excellent agreement with
GPET on data from 3 clinical studies (AUC=0.9994, Dice=0.9664; Pearson
correlation of 0.8908 for choroidal thickness and 0.9082 for choroidal area),
while reducing the mean processing time per image on a standard laptop CPU from
34.49s (15.09) using GPET to 1.25s (0.10) using DeepGPET. Both
methods performed similarly according to a clinical ophthalmologist, who
qualitatively judged a subset of segmentations by GPET and DeepGPET, based on
smoothness and accuracy of segmentations. Conclusions :DeepGPET, a
fully-automatic, open-source algorithm for choroidal segmentation, will enable
researchers to efficiently extract choroidal measurements, even for large
datasets. As no manual interventions are required, DeepGPET is less subjective
than semi-automatic methods and could be deployed in clinical practice without
necessitating a trained operator. DeepGPET addresses the lack of open-source,
fully-automatic and clinically relevant choroid segmentation algorithms, and
its subsequent public release will facilitate future choroidal research both in
ophthalmology and wider systemic health.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, 3 tables. Currently in submission to ARVO TVST
(Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology, Translational Vision
Science & Technology). GitHub link to codebase provided upon publicatio
Coordinated optimization of visual cortical maps (I) Symmetry-based analysis
In the primary visual cortex of primates and carnivores, functional
architecture can be characterized by maps of various stimulus features such as
orientation preference (OP), ocular dominance (OD), and spatial frequency. It
is a long-standing question in theoretical neuroscience whether the observed
maps should be interpreted as optima of a specific energy functional that
summarizes the design principles of cortical functional architecture. A
rigorous evaluation of this optimization hypothesis is particularly demanded by
recent evidence that the functional architecture of OP columns precisely
follows species invariant quantitative laws. Because it would be desirable to
infer the form of such an optimization principle from the biological data, the
optimization approach to explain cortical functional architecture raises the
following questions: i) What are the genuine ground states of candidate energy
functionals and how can they be calculated with precision and rigor? ii) How do
differences in candidate optimization principles impact on the predicted map
structure and conversely what can be learned about an hypothetical underlying
optimization principle from observations on map structure? iii) Is there a way
to analyze the coordinated organization of cortical maps predicted by
optimization principles in general? To answer these questions we developed a
general dynamical systems approach to the combined optimization of visual
cortical maps of OP and another scalar feature such as OD or spatial frequency
preference.Comment: 90 pages, 16 figure
Coordinated optimization of visual cortical maps (II) Numerical studies
It is an attractive hypothesis that the spatial structure of visual cortical
architecture can be explained by the coordinated optimization of multiple
visual cortical maps representing orientation preference (OP), ocular dominance
(OD), spatial frequency, or direction preference. In part (I) of this study we
defined a class of analytically tractable coordinated optimization models and
solved representative examples in which a spatially complex organization of the
orientation preference map is induced by inter-map interactions. We found that
attractor solutions near symmetry breaking threshold predict a highly ordered
map layout and require a substantial OD bias for OP pinwheel stabilization.
Here we examine in numerical simulations whether such models exhibit
biologically more realistic spatially irregular solutions at a finite distance
from threshold and when transients towards attractor states are considered. We
also examine whether model behavior qualitatively changes when the spatial
periodicities of the two maps are detuned and when considering more than 2
feature dimensions. Our numerical results support the view that neither minimal
energy states nor intermediate transient states of our coordinated optimization
models successfully explain the spatially irregular architecture of the visual
cortex. We discuss several alternative scenarios and additional factors that
may improve the agreement between model solutions and biological observations.Comment: 55 pages, 11 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with
arXiv:1102.335
Reply to Nielsen et al. social mindfulness is associated with countries’ environmental performance and individual environmental concern
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
From local social mindfulness to global sustainability efforts?
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Social mindfulness and prosociality vary across the globe
Humans are social animals, but not everyone will be mindful of others to the same extent. Individual differences have been found, but would social mindfulness also be shaped by one’s location in the world? Expecting cross-national differences to exist, we examined if and how social mindfulness differs across countries. At little to no material cost, social mindfulness typically entails small acts of attention or kindness. Even though fairly common, such low-cost cooperation has received little empirical attention. Measuring social mindfulness across 31 samples from industrialized countries and regions (n = 8,354), we found considerable variation. Among selected country-level variables, greater social mindfulness was most strongly associated with countries’ better general performance on environmental protection. Together, our findings contribute to the literature on prosociality by targeting the kind of everyday cooperation that is more focused on communicating benevolence than on providing material benefits