Reference is the cognitive mechanism that binds real-world entities to their conceptual counterparts. Recent psycholinguistic studies using eye-tracking have shed light on the mechanisms used to establish shared referentiality across linguistic and visual modalities. It is unclear, however, whether vision plays an active role during linguistic processing. Here, we present a language production ...

During social interaction, actions, and words may be expressed in different ways, for example, gently or rudely. A handshake can be gentle or vigorous and, similarly, tone of voice can be pleasant or rude. These aspects of social communication have been named vitality forms by Daniel Stern. Vitality forms represent how an action is performed and characterize all human interactions. In spite of ...

We are studying here a model of social influence in which actors are dwelling upon a social network and are influencing/influenced by each other through the recurrent and reproduced pattern of their relationships. Furthermore, we assume that influence outcomes represent preference orderings (among a number of alternatives) and, thus, they are located on a certain relational structure (a graph o...

In this paper we intend to understand the embeddedness of heterogeneous actors in the emerging field of telemedicine. We identify actors who possess medical knowledge and are classified as Experts, as well as other actors, Profanes, who control technology, another form of knowledge. Currently both sets of actors are merged and are involved in the creation of what may be seen as a social constru...

Centrality in a social network is found to have a significant effect on Asch-type conformity. Friendship affinity and respect social network data was collected on two different groups of actors. The effects of Asch-type conformity were empirically tested on central actors and peripheral actors in each group using a culturally appropriate version of Asch’s test. Findings show that central actors...

Network models of collective action commonly assume fixed social networks in which ties influence participation through social rewards. This implies that only certain ties are beneficial from the view of individual actors. Accordingly, in this study we allow that actors strategically revise their relations. Moreover, in our model actors also take into account possible network consequences in th...

This paper argues that the agent-based simulation approach is just the one appropriate to the social sciences (including economics). Although there were many predecessor approaches, which tried to build formal models of social systems, all of them fell short of the peculiar features of the objects of all social sciences: complex systems consisting of numerous autonomous actors who interact with...