Read a disappointing book recently called The Drunkard's Walk -- only disappointed because I thought it would be about the drunkard's walk but it was just about randomness in statistics and probability. Thought it would be about Levy flights, foraging behavior, random walks, saccades, etc. Something very fractal about the nature of these phenomena.
Explore or exploit: How our brains make choices
Apr 2022, phys.org
Basically, newer areas of the brain (evolutionarily speaking) such as the lateral prefrontal cortex, activated more when an unfamiliar choice was made while older brain systems including the amygdala and the orbitofrontal cortex showed increased activation while weighing the value of explorations vs. exploitation. This suggests that both the newer and older circuits in the brain worked together during the decision-making process rather than against each other as was previously thought.
via University of New Mexico: Jeremy Hogeveen et al, The neurocomputational bases of explore-exploit decision-making, Neuron (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2022.03.014
Typical movement behavior at large events increases risk of spreading infectious diseases
Sep 2022, phys.org
Burstiness (another word for foraging pattern behavior)
An earlier paper on this topic compared the movements of individuals in the crowd to the typical foraging patterns that were also present in our human hunter-gatherer ancestors.
The first author of the study, Ph.D. candidate Philip Rutten, says, "This [new study] shows that, if the infection probability is time-dependent, an intermittently moving but freely mixing crowd may present the highest level of transmission risk."
Because infection is a probability game.
via University of Amsterdam: Philip Rutten et al, Modelling the dynamic relationship between spread of infection and observed crowd movement patterns at large scale events, Scientific Reports (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-19081-z
Not-so private eyes: Eye movements hold clues to how we make decisions
Dec 2022, phys.org
"Unlike your arms or legs, the speed of eye movements is almost totally involuntary. It's a much more direct measurement of these unconscious processes happening in your brain."In the study, the team asked 22 human subjects to walk on a treadmill then choose between different settings displayed on a computer screen: a brief walk up a steep grade or a longer walk on flat ground.Researchers discovered that the subjects' eyes gave them away: Even before they made their choices, the treadmill users tended to move their eyes faster when they looked toward the options they ended up choosing. The more vigorously their eyes moved, the more they seemed to prefer their choice."Initially, the saccades to either option were similarly vigorous," Ahmed said. "Then, as time passed, that vigor increased and it increased even faster for the option they eventually chose."
via University of Colorado at Boulder: Colin C. Korbisch et al, Saccade vigor reflects the rise of decision variables during deliberation, Current Biology (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.10.053
Image credit: A laser beam (orange) creates excitons (purple) that are trapped inside the semicondcutor material by electric fields. Credit: Puneet Murthy / ETH Zurich
No comments:
Post a Comment