Knowing when to slow down

Behavior: Knowing When to Walk Away, Knowing When to Run

A new model has been proposed indicating that humans and other animals weigh the metabolic cost of pursuit in deciding how fast to move toward a given reward, providing a powerful framework for understanding behavior.

Knowing When to Stop

Stopping movements: when others slow us down.

Previous research has shown that performing joint actions can lead to the representation of both one's own and others' actions. In the present study we explored the influence of co-representation on response stopping. Are joint actions more difficult to stop than solo actions? Using a variation of the stop-signal task, we found that participants needed more time to stop a planned joint action c...

When overconfident agents slow down collective learning

This paper presents a model of influence where agents’ beliefs are based on an objective reality, such as the properties of an environment. The perception of the objective reality is not direct: all agents know is that the more correct a belief, the more successful the actions that are deduced from this belief. A pair of agents can influence eachother when they perform joint action. They are no...

Knowing when to let go

uring meiosis I, some mechanism must allow homologous chromosomes to separate while keeping sister chromatids paired until meiosis II. How does a cell make this distinction? On page 219, Rogers et al. propose that in C. elegans the aurora-B kinase AIR-2 is largely responsible for ensuring that cohesion between chromosomes breaks down at the proper place and time. The authors also identified add...