Despite the large impact that superstitious beliefs have on the marketplace, we currently know very little about their implications for consumer judgment and decision making. We document the existence of the influence of superstitious beliefs on consumer behavior and specify their conscious and nonconscious underlying properties. In particular, we show that superstitious beliefs have a robust i...

In this paper we present our experience applying a new multi-layered project design method to a course on Virtual Reality. We contrast this approach with traditional project methods, based on their respective advantages and disadvantages. We also present the results of the VR course, which was focused on the topic of navigating Virtual Environments. In order to investigate navigation techniques...

Structuring full scale, highly interactive applications still involve complex design choices for programmers. This is because current techniques do not cover the issue of structuring applications at all scales. Programmers thus have to make choices without a good understanding of their consequences. We consider that this is similar to the problem encountered by a user who explores a user-driven...

The objective of the Arrowhead Framework is to efficiently support the development, deployment and operation of interconnected, cooperative systems. It is based on the Service Oriented Architecture philosophy. The building elements of the framework are systems that provide and consume services, and cooperate as systems of systems. Some commonly used systems, such as orchestration, authorization...

Choosing between smaller, assured rewards or larger, uncertain ones requires reconciliation of competing biases toward more certain or riskier options. We used disconnection and neuroanatomical techniques to reveal that separate, yet interconnected, neural pathways linking the medial prefrontal cortex (PFC), the basolateral amygdala (BLA), and nucleus accumbens (NAc) contribute to these differe...

The complex task of assessing the veracity of a statement is thought to activate uniquely distributed brain regions based on whether a subject believes or disbelieves a given assertion. In the current work, we present parallel machine learning methods for predicting a subject's decision response to a given propositional statement based on independent component (IC) features derived from EEG and...

Although there exist several software model checkers that check the code against properties specified e.g. via a temporal logic and assertions, or just verifying low-level properties (like unhandled exceptions), none of them supports checking of software components against a high-level behavior specification. We present our approach to model checking of software components implemented in Java a...

In this paper, a novel predictive maintenance policy with multi-level decision-making is proposed for multi-component systemwith complex structure. The main idea is to propose a decision-making process considered on two levels: system level and component one. The goal of the decision rules at the system level is to address if preventive maintenance actions are needed regarding the predictive re...

Findings from a complex decision-making task (the Iowa gambling task) show that individuals with neuropsychological disorders are characterized by decision-making deficits that lead to maladaptive risk-taking behavior. This article describes a cognitive model that distills performance in this task into three different underlying psychological components: the relative impact of rewards and punis...

BACKGROUND The most rigorous method for evaluating the effectiveness of diagnostic tests is through randomised trials that compare test-treatment interventions: complex interventions comprising episodes of testing, decision-making and treatment. The multi-staged nature of these interventions, combined with the need to relay diagnostic decision-making and treatment planning, has led researchers ...