Unpredictable homeodynamic and ambient constraints on irrational decision making of aneural and neural foragers

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin B. Clark
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Life History ◽  
Survival Strategies ◽  
Cellular Life ◽  
Dietary Cues ◽  
Context Dependent ◽  
Life On Earth ◽  
Outcome Predictions

AbstractForaging for nutritional sustenance represents common significant learned/heritable survival strategies evolved for phylum-diverse cellular life on Earth. Unicellular aneural to multicellular neural foragers display conserved rational or irrational decision making depending on outcome predictions for noise-susceptible real/illusory homeodynamic and ambient dietary cues. Such context-dependent heuristic-guided foraging enables optimal, suboptimal, or fallacious decisions that drive organismal adaptation, health, longevity, and life history.

Maternal investment mediates offspring life history variation with context-dependent fitness consequences

Ecology ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 96 (9) ◽  
pp. 2499-2509 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P. Moore ◽  
Tobias Landberg ◽  
Howard H. Whiteman
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Maternal Investment ◽  
Life History Variation ◽  
Fitness Consequences ◽  
Context Dependent

A preliminary study of gray matter volume differences related to context-dependent and independent decision-making

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhang Jinbo
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Decision Maker ◽  
Gray Matter ◽  
Cognitive Bias ◽  
Gray Matter Volume ◽  
Neural Basis ◽  
Matter Volume ◽  
Decision Styles ◽  
Context Dependent ◽  
Independent Decision

Facing the high degree of uncertainty of the environment, we have evolved two kinds of decision-making styles: context-dependent and context-independent decision. However, the underlying neural basis of these two kinds of decision styles was mostly unknown. Here, the cognitive bias task was applied to split participants into the context-independent decision-maker and context-dependent decision-maker based on the cognitive bias task scores. Then, we used voxel-based morphometry to directly investigate its underlying differences in gray matter volume. We found that the gray matter volume of the prefrontal cortex and parietal regions, such as inferior parietal lobule, was larger in context-dependent decision-makers than that of the context-independent decision-maker.

Childhood Environmental Adversity and Career Decision-Making Difficulty: A Life History Theory Perspective

2020 ◽  
pp. 106907272094097
Author(s):  
Hui Xu
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Life History ◽  
Emerging Adulthood ◽  
Life History Theory ◽  
Ambiguity Aversion ◽  
Career Decision ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Career Decision Making ◽  
Childhood Poverty ◽  
Career Interventions

Although research has examined and supported the role of environmental adversity in career decision-making, little is known about the prediction power of childhood environmental adversity for career decision-making. To provide guidance for early career interventions, particularly in disadvantaged populations, the current study drew on life history theory and used a sample of U.S. college students ( n = 310) and a sample of U.S. noncollege individuals during emerging adulthood ( n = 308) to examine a mediation model involving childhood unpredictability, childhood poverty, career decision ambiguity aversion, and career decision-making difficulty. The results support the mediation of ambiguity aversion in the positive predictions of childhood unpredictability for all four factors of career decision-making difficulty. However, the results do not support the indirect predictions of childhood poverty for all four factors of career decision-making difficulty through ambiguity aversion but support the direct prediction of childhood poverty for lack of readiness. Therefore, the current study illuminates the importance of a predictable family environment during childhood for career decision-making during emerging adulthood and provides implications for the validity of life history theory in career decision-making, the development of ambiguity aversion, and early career interventions. Implications and future directions of research regarding childhood poverty are also discussed.

scholarly journals A Geometric Framework for Understanding Dynamic Information Integration in Context-Dependent Computation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaohan Zhang ◽  
Shenquan Liu ◽  
Zhe Sage Chen
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Information Integration ◽  
Principal Component ◽  
Population Coding ◽  
Geometric Framework ◽  
Context Dependent ◽  
Activity State ◽  
Low Dimensional ◽  
Context Cues

AbstractPrefrontal cortex plays a prominent role in performing flexible cognitive functions and working memory, yet the underlying computational principle remains poorly understood. Here we trained a rate-based recurrent neural network (RNN) to explore how the context rules are encoded, maintained across seconds-long mnemonic delay, and subsequently used in a context-dependent decision-making task. The trained networks emerged key experimentally observed features in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) of rodent and monkey experiments, such as mixed-selectivity, sparse representations, neuronal sequential activity and rotation dynamics. To uncover the high-dimensional neural dynamical system, we further proposed a geometric framework to quantify and visualize population coding and sensory integration in a temporally-defined manner. We employed dynamic epoch-wise principal component analysis (PCA) to define multiple task-specific subspaces and task-related axes, and computed the angles between task-related axes and these subspaces. In low-dimensional neural representations, the trained RNN first encoded the context cues in a cue-specific subspace, and then maintained the cue information with a stable low-activity state persisting during the delay epoch, and further formed line attractors for sensor integration through low-dimensional neural trajectories to guide decision making. We demonstrated via intensive computer simulations that the geometric manifolds encoding the context information were robust to varying degrees of weight perturbation in both space and time. Overall, our analysis framework provides clear geometric interpretations and quantification of information coding, maintenance and integration, yielding new insight into the computational mechanisms of context-dependent computation.

scholarly journals Distributed context-dependent choice information in mouse dorsal-parietal cortex

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Javier Orlandi ◽  
Mohammad Adbolrahmani ◽  
Ryo Aoki ◽  
Dmitry Lyamzin ◽  
Andrea Benucci
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Decision Variable ◽  
Visual Stream ◽  
Posterior Cortex ◽  
Neural Data ◽  
Context Dependent ◽  
Cortical Regions ◽  
Low Dimensional ◽  
Independent Decision ◽  
The Brain

Abstract Choice information appears in the brain as distributed signals with top-down and bottom-up components that together support decision-making computations. In sensory and associative cortical regions, the presence of choice signals, their strength, and area specificity are known to be elusive and changeable, limiting a cohesive understanding of their computational significance. In this study, examining the mesoscale activity in mouse posterior cortex during a complex visual discrimination task, we found that broadly distributed choice signals defined a decision variable in a low-dimensional embedding space of multi-area activations, particularly along the ventral visual stream. The subspace they defined was near-orthogonal to concurrently represented sensory and motor-related activations, and it was modulated by task difficulty and contextually by the animals’ attention state. To mechanistically relate choice representations to decision-making computations, we trained recurrent neural networks with the animals’ choices and found an equivalent decision variable whose context-dependent dynamics agreed with that of the neural data. In conclusion, our results demonstrated an independent decision variable broadly represented in the posterior cortex, controlled by task features and cognitive demands. Its dynamics reflected decision computations, possibly linked to context-dependent feedback signals used for probabilistic-inference computations in variable animal-environment interactions.

scholarly journals A decision-time account of individual variability in context-dependent orientation estimation

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ron Dekel ◽  
Dov Sagi
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Visual Processing ◽  
Initial Conditions ◽  
Decision Time ◽  
Individual Variability ◽  
Perceptual Bias ◽  
Large Individual ◽  
List Type ◽  
Tilt Aftereffect ◽  
Context Dependent

AbstractFollowing exposure to an oriented stimulus, the perceived orientation is slightly shifted, a phenomenon termed the tilt aftereffect (TAE). This estimation bias, as well as other context-dependent biases, is speculated to reflect statistical mechanisms of inference that optimize visual processing. Importantly, although measured biases are extremely robust in the population, the magnitude of individual bias can be extremely variable. For example, measuring different individuals may result in TAE magnitudes that differ by a factor of 5. Such findings appear to challenge the accounts of bias in terms of learned statistics: is inference so different across individuals? Here, we found that a strong correlation exists between reaction time and TAE, with slower individuals having much less TAE. In the tilt illusion, the spatial analogue of the TAE, we found a similar, though weaker, correlation. These findings can be explained by a theory predicting that bias, caused by a change in the initial conditions of evidence accumulation (e.g., prior), decreases with decision time (Dekel & Sagi, 2019b). We contend that the context-dependence of visual processing is more homogeneous in the population than was previously thought, with the measured variability of perceptual bias explained, at least in part, by the flexibility of decision-making. Homogeneity in processing might reflect the similarity of the learned statistics.HighlightsThe tilt aftereffect (TAE) exhibits large individual differences.Reduced TAE magnitudes are found in slower individuals.Reduced TAE in slower decisions can be explained by the reduced influence of prior.Therefore, individual variability can reflect decision making flexibility.

scholarly journals Radiación fotosintéticamente activa evaluada en la ciudad de Zacatecas

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Mónica Montserrat Escobedo-Sánchez ◽  
Ricardo Conejo-Flores ◽  
Sergio Miguel Durón-Torres ◽  
Juan Manuel García-González
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Solar Radiation ◽  
Production Planning ◽  
Photosynthetically Active Radiation ◽  
Detailed Knowledge ◽  
Active Radiation ◽  
Incident Solar Radiation ◽  
Daily Average ◽  
Life On Earth

The present investigation is related to one of the most important processes for the development of life on Earth; photosynthesis, an essential process in the cycle and development of living beings, centered on solar radiation that is useful for plants to carry out this process, Photosynthetically Active Radiation (PAR). The objective of this work is to generate information on the PAR through a database to collaborate in the decision-making of farmers in the area. For this purpose, a quantum sensor installed in building 6 of the UAZ Siglo XXI Campus was used. According to Abal (2013), in agricultural and production planning, it is especially important to have a detailed knowledge of incident solar radiation on the earth's surface (Abal and Durañona, 2013). When collecting, treating and analyzing the data, it was found that the daily average PAR is 819.52 μmol of photons m-2 s-1 (179.47 W m-2), if only the sunny hours are taken into account. It can be concluded that according to the PAR received in the evaluation region and the type of nutrients in the soil, other crop alternatives to those traditionally used can be sought.

scholarly journals Charting Spiritual Care: Ethical Perspectives

2020 ◽  
pp. 199-211
Author(s):  
Guy Jobin
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Life History ◽  
Clinical Practice ◽  
Electronic Health Records ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Care Team ◽  
Decision Making Process ◽  
Note Taking ◽  
Health Records ◽  
Joint Decision

Abstract The introduction of electronic health records (EHRs) into clinical practice appears to be irreversible. Where EHRs are used, chaplains have cooperated willingly with this way of reporting and sharing information with other members of the care team. They will have to, as a result, adapt their own note-taking practices to ensure effective, relevant and meaningful communication as part of the joint decision-making process. Although the specialized literature has addressed some of the “classic” ethical issues raised by EHRs, in particular those in connection with confidentiality and access, other questions, no less crucial, have received less attention and are addressed here. They include questions about the recognition of all players in the care relationship (both patients and caregivers) as subjects, and the communication of “non-generic” information about emotions, values, life history, etc. The fact that chaplains contribute to EHRs is both a sign of and a vector for recognition of their work within healthcare institutions – yet a recognition that could involve a price to pay for chaplains and patients.

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