From drop-down computer menus to department-store aisles, people in everyday life often choose from simultaneous displays of products or options. Studies of position effects in such choices show seemingly inconsistent results. For example, in restaurant choice, items enjoy an advantage when placed at the beginning or end of the menu listings, but in multiple-choice tests, answers are more popular when placed in the middle of the offered list. When reaching for a bottle on a supermarket shelf, bottles in the middle of the display are more popular. But on voting ballots, first is the most advantageous position. Some of the effects are quite sensible, while others are harder to justify and can aptly be regarded as biases. This paper attempts to put position effects into a unified and coherent framework, and to account for them simply, using a small number of familiar psychological principles.
This article is the first study of Appayya Da ksita's Upakramaparak- rama. Here he attacks Vyasatirtha's new and provocative argument according to which the hermeneutic protocols of Vedic passages always assumed that the closing of a passage overrides its opening. Appayya offers a systematic refutation of Vyasatirtha's examples in an effort to show that sequence matters and that, as was known at least since the time of ͆abara, it is the opening that outweighs the closing and not the other way around. But, as the article shows, midway through the work the author presents a new and comprehensive theory that, he believes, underlies both Mimamsa and Vedanta reading protocols, one in which sequence is completely immaterial. The article argues that the tension between these two voices is not entirely resolvable and is, moreover, emblematic of the author's intellectual legacy and of scholarly work in his period more generally.
While individual differences in decision-making have been examined within the social sciences for several decades, this research has only recently begun to be applied by computer scientists to examine privacy and security attitudes (and ultimately behaviors). Specifically, several researchers have shown how different online privacy decisions are correlated with the "Big Five" personality traits. However, in our own research, we show that the five factor model is actually a weak predictor of privacy preferences and behaviors, and that other well-studied individual differences in the psychology literature are much stronger predictors. We describe the results of several experiments that showed how decision-making style and risk-taking attitudes are strong predictors of privacy attitudes, as well as a new scale that we developed to measure security behavior intentions. Finally, we show that privacy and security attitudes are correlated, but orthogonal.
Dynamic remodeling of connectivity is a fundamental feature of neocortical circuits. Unraveling the principles underlying these dynamics is essential for the understanding of how neuronal circuits give rise to computations. Moreover, as complete descriptions of the wiring diagram in cortical tissues are becoming available, deciphering the dynamic elements in these diagrams is crucial for relating them to cortical function. Here, we used chronic in vivo two-photon imaging to longitudinally follow a few thousand dendritic spines in the mouse auditory cortex to study the determinants of these spines' lifetimes. We applied nonlinear regression to quantify the independent contribution of spine age and several morphological parameters to the prediction of the future survival of a spine. We show that spine age, size, and geometry are parameters that can provide independent contributions to the prediction of the longevity of a synaptic connection. In addition, we use this framework to emulate a serial sectioning electron microscopy experiment and demonstrate how incorporation of morphological information of dendritic spines from a single time-point allows estimation of future connectivity states. The distinction between predictable and nonpredictable connectivity changes may be used in the future to identify the specific adaptations of neuronal circuits to environmental changes. The full dataset is publicly available for further analysis. Significance statement: The neural architecture in the neocortex exhibits constant remodeling. The functional consequences of these modifications are poorly understood, in particular because the determinants of these changes are largely unknown. Here, we aimed to identify those modifications that are predictable from current network state. To that goal, we repeatedly imaged thousands of dendritic spines in the auditory cortex of mice to assess the morphology and lifetimes of synaptic connections. We developed models based on morphological features of dendritic spines that allow predicting future turnover of synaptic connections. The dynamic models presented in this paper provide a quantitative framework for adding putative temporal dynamics to the static description of a neuronal circuit from single time-point connectomics experiments.
While pricing decisions that are based on experience are quite common, e.g., setting a selling price for a used car, this type of decision has been surprisingly overlooked in psychology and decision research. Previous studies have focused on either choice decisions from experience, or pricing decisions from description. Those studies revealed that pricing involves cognitive mechanisms other than choice, while experience-based decisions involve mechanisms that differ from description-based ones. Thus, the mutual effect of pricing and experience on decision-making remains unclear. To test this effect, we experimentally compared real-money pricing decisions from experience with those from description, and with choices from experience. The results show that the mode of acquiring information affects pricing: the tendency to underprice high-probability prospects and overprice low-probability ones is diminished when pricing is based on experience rather than description. The findings further reveal attenuation of the tendency to underweight rare events, which underlies choices from experience, in pricing decisions from experience. The difference occurs because the response mode affects the search effort and decision strategy in decisions from experience.
The patterning of various 2D and 3D substrates is accomplished using a new method, reactive transfer printing, combined with a self-reducing copper precursor. The ink composed of the metal precursor is printed on a donor substrate; during its decomposition, the metal is transferred to an acceptor substrate. This process is demonstrated with copper formate as the precursor, forming a copper pattern with excellent conductivity (50% that of bulk copper).
The dynamics of quantized magnetic vortices and their pinning by materials defects determine electromagnetic properties of superconductors, particularly their ability to carry non-dissipative currents. Despite recent advances in the understanding of the complex physics of vortex matter, the behavior of vortices driven by current through a multi-scale potential of the actual materials defects is still not well understood, mostly due to the scarcity of appropriate experimental tools capable of tracing vortex trajectories on nanometer scales. Using a novel scanning superconducting quantum interference microscope we report here an investigation of controlled dynamics of vortices in lead films with sub-Angstrom spatial resolution and unprecedented sensitivity. We measured, for the first time, the fundamental dependence of the elementary pinning force of multiple defects on the vortex displacement, revealing a far more complex behavior than has previously been recognized, including striking spring softening and broken-spring depinning, as well as spontaneous hysteretic switching between cellular vortex trajectories. Our results indicate the importance of thermal fluctuations even at 4.2 K and of the vital role of ripples in the pinning potential, giving new insights into the mechanisms of magnetic relaxation and electromagnetic response of superconductors.
The invention provides a process of forming a continuous pattern on a surface composed of two or more surface regions, each of the regions being of a different surface energy, the process utilizing a novel ink formulation for printing on such multi-region surfaces. [on SciFinder(R)]
We investigated the course of language processing in the context of a verification task that required numerical estimation and comparison. Participants listened to sentences with complex quantifiers that contrasted in Polarity, a logical property (e.g., more-than-half, less-than-half), and then performed speeded verification on visual scenarios that displayed a proportion between 2 discrete quantities. We varied systematically not only the sentences, but also the visual materials, in order to study their effect on the verification process. Next, we used the same visual scenarios with analogous non-verbal probes that featured arithmetical inequality symbols (<, >). This manipulation enabled us to measure not only Polarity effects, but also, to compare the effect of different probe types (linguistic, non-linguistic) on processing. Like many previous studies, our results demonstrate that perceptual difficulty affects error rate and reaction time in keeping with Weber's Law. Interestingly, these performance parameters are also affected by the Polarity of the quantifiers used, despite the fact that sentences had the exact same meaning, sentence structure, number of words, syllables, and temporal structure. Moreover, an analogous contrast between the non-linguistic probes (<, >) had no effect on performance. Finally, we observed no interaction between performance parameters governed by Weber's Law and those affected by Polarity. We consider 4 possible accounts of the results (syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, frequency-based), and discuss their relative merit.
