microbial endophytes, which make one of the most important classes of soil microorganisms, induce genetic, physiological and ecological alterations in their host plant and thus increase its yield and enable its cultivation in saline or dry soils or in climates facing biotic and abiotic stresses. the endophyte fungus piriformospora indica exhibits a high effect in plant growth and increased resi...

The President of the United States is chosen directly by the Electoral College, although indirectly the citizens select the President. Different states currently employ two systems of electoral-vote allocation under the Electoral College framework: the widely adopted winner-take-all system and the system adopted by Maine and Nebraska. The properties of these two systems are analyzed against the...

One of the classical topics in neural networks is winner-take-all (WTA), which has been widely used in unsupervised (competitive) learning, cortical processing, and attentional control. Owing to global connectivity, WTA networks, however, do not encode spatial relations in the input, and thus cannot support sensory and perceptual processing where spatial relations are important. We propose a ne...

This paper reports a series of self-paced reading time experiments designed to probe how the reference of pronominal expressions is resolved on-line in (Mandarin) Chinese. It is assumed that pronoun resolution is achieved by narrowing the candidate set of potential antecedents for a pronoun. The experimental evidence reported here indicates that two factors – syntactic prominence and the matchi...

Studies of collective human behavior in the social sciences, often grounded in details of actions by individuals, have much to offer ‘social’ models from the physical sciences concerning elegant statistical regularities. Drawing on behavioral studies of social influence, we present a parsimonious, stochastic model, which generates an entire family of real-world rightskew socio-economic distribu...

Cognitive development concerns the evolution of human mental capabilities through experience earned during life. Important features needed to accomplish this target are the self-generation of motivations and goals as well as the development of complex behaviors consistent with these goals. Our target is to build such a bio-inspired cognitive architecture for situated agents, capable of integrat...

Although conditional branching between possible behavioral states is a hallmark of intelligent behavior, very little is known about the neuronal mechanisms that support this processing. In a step toward solving this problem, we demonstrate by theoretical analysis and simulation how networks of richly interconnected neurons, such as those observed in the superficial layers of the neocortex, can ...

One of the classical topics in neural networks is winner-take-all (WTA), which has been widely used in unsupervised (competitive) learning, cortical processing, and attentional control. Owing to global connectivity, WTA networks, however, do not encode spatial relations in the input, and thus cannot support sensory and perceptual processing where spatial relations are important. We propose a ne...