Most of our perceptions of and engagements with the world are shaped by our immersion in social interactions, cultural traditions, tools and linguistic categories. In this study we experimentally investigate the impact of two types of language-based coordination on the recognition and description of complex sensory stimuli: that of red wine. Participants were asked to taste, remember and successively recognize samples of wines within a larger set in a two-by-two experimental design: (1) either individually or in pairs, and (2) with or without the support of a sommelier card—a cultural linguistic tool designed for wine description. Both effectiveness of recognition and the kinds of errors in the four conditions were analyzed. While our experimental manipulations did not impact recognition accuracy, bias-variance decomposition of error revealed non-trivial differences in how participants solved the task. Pairs generally displayed reduced bias and increased variance compared to individuals, however the variance dropped significantly when they used the sommelier card. The effect of sommelier card reducing the variance was observed only in pairs, individuals did not seem to benefit from the cultural linguistic tool. Analysis of descriptions generated with the aid of sommelier cards shows that pairs were more coherent and discriminative than individuals. The findings are discussed in terms of global properties and dynamics of collective systems when constrained by different types of cultural practices.

The microRNA (miRNA) biomolecules have a significant role in the development of breast cancer, and their expression profiles are different in each subtype of breast cancer. Thus, our goal is to use the Next Generation Sequencing provided high-throughput miRNA expression and clinical data in an integrated fashion to perform survival analysis in order to identify breast cancer subtype specific miRNAs, and analyze associated genes and transcription factors. We select top 100 miRNAs for each of the four subtypes, based on the value of hazard ratio and p-value, thereafter, identify 44 miRNAs that are related to all four subtypes, which we call as four-star miRNAs. Moreover, 12, 14, 9, and 15 subtype specific, viz. one-star miRNAs, are also identified. The resulting miRNAs are validated by using machine learning methods to differentiate tumor cases from controls (for four-star miRNAs), and subtypes (for one-star miRNAs). The four-star miRNAs provide 95% average accuracy, while in case of one-star miRNAs 81% accuracy is achieved for HER2-Enriched. Differences in expression of miRNAs between cancer stages is also analyzed, and a subset of eight miRNAs is found, for which expression is increased in stage II relative to stage I, including hsa-miR-10b-5p, which contributes to breast cancer metastasis. Subsequently we prepare regulatory networks in order to identify the interactions among miRNAs, their targeted genes and transcription factors (TFs), that are targeting those miRNAs. In this way, key regulatory circuits are identified, where genes such as TP53, ESR1, BRCA1, MYC, and others, that are known to be important genetic factors for the cause of breast cancer, produce transcription factors that target the same genes as well as interact with the selected miRNAs. To provide further biological validation the Protein-Protein Interaction (PPI) networks are prepared and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathway and gene ontology (GO) enrichment analysis are performed. Among the enriched pathways many are breast cancer-related, such as PI3K-Akt or p53 signaling pathways, and contain proteins such as TP53, also present in the regulatory networks. Moreover, we find that the genes are enriched in GO terms associated with breast cancer. Our results provide detailed analysis of selected miRNAs and their regulatory networks.

The dendritic spines play a crucial role in learning and memory processes, epileptogenesis, drug addiction, and postinjury recovery. The shape of the dendritic spine is a morphological key to understand learning and memory process. The classification of the dendritic spines is based on their shapes but the major questions are how the shapes changes in time, how the synaptic strength changes, and is there a correlation between shapes and synaptic strength? Because the changes of the classes by dendritic spines during activation are time dependent, the forward-directed autoregressive hidden Markov model (ARHMM) can be used to model these changes. It is also more appropriate to use an ARHMM directed backward in time. Thus, the mixture of forward-directed ARHMM and backward-directed ARHMM (MARHMM) is used to model time-dependent data related to the dendritic spines. In this article, we discuss (1) how to choose the initial probability vector and transition and dependence matrices in ARHMM and MARHMM for modeling the dendritic spines changes and (2) how to estimate these matrices. Many descriptors to classify dendritic spines in twodimensional or/and three-dimensional (3D) are available. Our results from sensitivity analysis show that the classification that comes from 3D descriptors is closer to the truth, and estimated transition and dependence probability matrices are connected with the molecular mechanism of the dendritic spines activation.

We study mathematical models of the collaborative solving of a two-choice discrimination task. We estimate the difference between the shared performance for a group of n observers over a single person performance. Our paper is a theoretical extension of the recent work of Bahrami et al. (2010) from a dyad (a pair) to a group of n interacting minds. We analyze several models of communication, decision-making and hierarchical information-aggregation. The maximal slope of psychometric function (closely related to the percentage of right answers vs. easiness of the task) is a convenient parameter characterizing performance. For every model we investigated, the group performance turns out to be a product of two numbers: a scaling factor depending of the group size and an average performance. The scaling factor is a power function of the group size (with the exponent ranging from 0 to 1), whereas the average is arithmetic mean, quadratic mean, or maximum of the individual slopes. Moreover, voting can be almost as efficient as more elaborate communication models, given the participants have similar individual performances.Comment: 22 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables; after the final revisio

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The radical embodied approach to cognition directs researchers' attention to skilled practice in a structured environment. This means that the structures present in the environment, including structured interactions with others and with artifacts, are put at least on a par with individual cognitive processes in explaining behavior. Both ritualized interactive formats and artifacts can be seen as forms of "external memory," usually shaped for a particular domain, that constrain skilled practice, perception, and cognition in online behavior and in learning and development. In this paper, we explore how a task involving the recognition of difficult sensory stimuli (wine) by collective systems (dyads) is modified by a domain-specific linguistic artifact (a sommelier card). We point to how using the card changes the way participants explore the stimuli individually, making it more consistent with culturally accrued sommelier know-how, as well as how it transforms the interaction between the participants, creating specific divisions of labor and novel relations. In our exploratory approach, we aim to integrate qualitative methods from anthropology and sociology with quantitative methods from psychology and the dynamical systems approach using both coded behavioral data and automatic movement analysis.

This paper explores how information flow properties of a network affect the formation of categories shared between individuals, who are communicating through that network. Our work is based on the established multi-agent model of the emergence of linguistic categories grounded in external environment. We study how network information propagation efficiency and the direction of information flow affect categorization by performing simulations with idealized network topologies optimizing certain network centrality measures. We measure dynamic social adaptation when either network topology or environment is subject to change during the experiment, and the system has to adapt to new conditions. We find that both decentralized network topology efficient in information propagation and the presence of central authority (information flow from the center to peripheries) are beneficial for the formation of global agreement between agents. Systems with central authority cope well with network topology change, but are less robust in the case of environment change. These findings help to understand which network properties affect processes of social adaptation. They are important to inform the debate on the advantages and disadvantages of centralized systems.

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