Decision theory is the analysis of the behavior of an individual facing nonstrategic uncertainty—that is, uncertainty that is due to what we term “Nature” (a stochastic natural event such as a coin flip, seasonal crop loss, personal illness, and the like) or, if other individuals are involved, their behavior is treated as a statistical distribution known to the decision maker. Decision theory d...

Recent advances in pattern recognition has allowed computer scientists and psychologists to jointly address automatic analysis of of human behavior via computers. The Workshop on Human Behavior Understanding at the International Conference on Pattern Recognition explores a number of different aspects and open questions in this field, and demonstrates the multi-disciplinary nature of this resear...

It has become commonplace in recent years for marketers to dip into the social sciences to see what tools they can borrow to better understand human behaviors. The current mania for neuroscience is an excellent example. One rarely discussed problem with these carefree forays is that individual social sciences make very different assumptions about the behaviors they describe. To the classical ec...

Why we sleep remains one of the greatest mysteries in science. In the past few years, great advances have been made to better understand this phenomenon. Human genetics has contributed significantly to this movement, as many features of sleep have been found to be heritable. Discoveries about these genetic variations that affect human sleep will aid us in understanding the underlying mechanism ...

Human behavior is influenced by many factors; among these are hormones or other chemicals produced by various tissues or glands throughout the body. This paper reviews the current status of research relating hormones to human behavior. To provide background for this discussion, a brief history of this field and a primer in behavioral endocrinology are provided. Although, reproductive hormones, ...

A recent article by Middlemist, Knowles, and Matter (1976) reported on a field experiment in a men's lavatory. Men who entered a "three-urinal lavatory" at a midwestern U.S. university were subjected to one of three conditions: The unknowing subjects either urinated "alone," directly adjacent to a confederate of the experimenter, or into one urinal at a distance removed from a confederate. Anot...

Columbia School Linguistics views itself as a functional approach to language where problems, typically defined in terms of non-random skewings of sounds in the speech stream, are explained in terms of aspects of human behavior. In the realm of phonology, or sound patterns, the Columbia School was ahead of its time in formulating specific hypotheses where both phonetic and nonphonetic factors w...

For many people, psychoanalysis conveys the image of a patient lying on a couch, speaking endlessly (that is, session after session, and for many years) about dreams and sexual fantasies to a bearded and elderly psychoanalyst who remains relatively silent, except for an occasional oracular comment known as an interpretation. For those who have been superficially exposed to Freud in undergraduat...

This paper presents novel details on the dynamic behavior of human eyes (see Fig. 1). A high speed camera is used to capture the movement of the eye surface, which is excited by an air jet. For a group of subjects the dynamic response ends shortly after the excitation is over. For another group of subjects this first phase ends with a distinct offset in the displacement, which takes a significa...