Driven by widespread interest in improving health care quality and reducing costs and by the Affordable Care Act’s “accountable care” provisions, shared-savings programs are gaining traction as an alternative approach to paying health care providers. Providers receive a share of the savings they achieve by reducing the growth in costs for delivering care to a defined patient population. This re...

A central issue in the study of joint task performance has been one of whether co-acting individuals perform their partner's part of the task as if it were their own. The present study addressed this issue by using joint task switching. A pair of actors shared two tasks that were presented in a random order, whereby the relevant task and actor were cued on each trial. Responses produced action ...

The consequences of maintaining a task set in the context of the (speeded) attentional blink were investigated in a series of experiments. Observers were asked to either attend or ignore the first of two target stimuli (T1 and T2). The results showed that when T1 and T2 shared a task relevant feature that was unique to T2, but not to T1, a shallow attentional blink was observed, as well as a la...

A 'consensus decision' is when the members of a group choose, collectively, between mutually exclusive actions. In humans, consensus decisions are often made democratically or in an 'equally shared' manner, i.e. all group members contribute to the decision. Biologists are only now realizing that shared consensus decisions also occur in social animals (other than eusocial insects). Sharing of de...

Prior research in chip-level reconfigurable computing has involved augmenting a single processor core with reconfigurable logic. Despite significant performance gains for some applications, the area and power costs can easily outweigh the benefits, especially when considering the breadth of applications run on a general purpose processor and the benefit they receive from reconfigurable logic, f...

In many situations of computer-supported collaborative learning, it is a challenge to increase the willingness of those involved to share their knowledge with other group members. To study a prototype of such a situation of computer-supported information exchange, we arranged a shared database setting as a basis of an empirical research program. This knowledge-exchange situation represented a s...

Sexual conflict occurs whenever there is sexually antagonistic selection on shared traits. When shared traits result from interactions (e.g., mating rate) and have a different genetic basis in each sex (i.e., interlocus conflict), then sex-specific traits that shift the value of these interaction traits toward the sex-specific optimum will be favored. Male traits can be favored that increase th...

Complex problem solving can be substantially improved by the reuse of experience from previously solved problems. This requires that case libraries of successful problem solutions are transformed into problem solving knowledge with high utility, i.e. knowledge which causes high savings in search time, high application probability and low matching costs. Planning can be improved by explanation-b...

Power-law distributions are common, particularly in social physics. Here, we explore whether power-laws might arise as a consequence of a general variational principle for stochastic processes. We describe communities of ‘social particles’, where the cost of adding a particle to the community is shared equally between the particle joining the cluster and the particles that are already members o...

shared psychotic disorder also known as folie a dues is thought to occur in persons who live close together, so that delusions of the primarily ill patient are transferred to the partner. a case of shared paranoid psychotic disorder, with primary diagnosis of persecutory delusional disorder in the husband is described. the delusion and its consequent safety behaviors were so strong that led to ...