The challenge of making a virtual world believable includes a requirement for AI entities which autonomously react to a dynamic environment. After the breakthroughs in believability introduced by modern lightning and physics techniques, the focus is shifting to better AI behaviour sophistication. Avatars and agents in a realistic virtual environment must exhibit a certain degree of presence and...

Looking at ambiguous figures results in rivalry with spontaneous alternation between two percepts. Using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we localized transient human brain activity changes during perceptual reversals. Activation occurred in ventral occipital and intraparietal higher-order visual areas, deactivation in primary visual cortex and the pulvinar. Thus, without an...

Dictyostelium discoideum slugs migrating in the absence of external stimuli tend to continue migrating in the original randomly 'chosen' direction. Spontaneous deviations from the starting direction accumulate with time at a rate that measures the 'physiological noise' in the slugs' steering mechanism. Most of the spontaneous turning signals arise in the transduction chain 'downstream' of the c...

Spontaneous (i.e., heuristic, fast, effortless, and associative) processing has clear advantages for human cognition, but it can also elicit undesirable outcomes such as stereotyping other biases. In the current article, we argue that biased judgements behaviour result from spontaneous be reduced by activating various flexibility mindsets. These mindsets are characterised consideration of alter...

Effects of 6-hydroxy-L-nicotine derived from nicotine catabolism in Arthrobacter nicotinovorans on learning and memory processes were examined in adult male Wistar rats. 6-hydroxy-L-nicotine (0.3 mg/kg, i.p., 7 consecutive days chronic administration) significantly increased spontaneous alternation in Y-maze task and working memory in radial arm-maze task, suggesting effects on short-term memor...

UNLABELLED The purpose of our study was the experimental research on the effects of pregabalin in two behavioural models in mice. MATERIAL AND METHODS The experiment was carried out with white Swiss mice treated intraperitoneally as follows: Group I (Control): distilled water 0.1 ml/10 g body weight; Group II (PGB 10): 10 mg/kbw pregabalin; Group III (PGB 20): 20 mg/kbw pregabalin. The psycho...

This paper studies the relationship between disjunctive form, a syntactic normal form for the modal μ calculus, and the alternation hierarchy. First it shows that all disjunctive formulas which have equivalent tableau have the same syntactic alternation depth. However, tableau equivalence only preserves alternation depth for the disjunctive fragment: there are disjunctive formulas with arbitrar...

Robots offer new possibilities for investigating animal social behaviour. This method enhances controllability and reproducibility of experimental techniques, and it allows also the experimental separation of the effects of bodily appearance (embodiment) and behaviour. In the present study we examined dogs' interactive behaviour in a problem solving task (in which the dog has no access to the f...

in this article, the causative alternation in persian is discussed. first, it is shown that persian anticausative verbs involve a cause component and an implicit external argument. second, we claim that causative alternation arises when a single change-of-state verb invokes more than one semantic frame (fillmore, 1985): causative frame and anticausative frame. these semantic frames are the resu...