This paper summarizes the current views on coping styles as a useful concept in understanding individual adaptive capacity and vulnerability to stress-related disease. Studies in feral populations indicate the existence of a proactive and a reactive coping style. These coping styles seem to play a role in the population ecology of the species. Despite domestication, genetic selection and inbree...

A Federal Trade Commission survey of contact lens wearers is used to estimate a multinomial logit-least-squares model of the joint determination of provider choice and quality of care in the contact lens industry. The effect of personal and industry characteristics on a consumer's choice among three types of providers--opticians, ophthalmologists, and optometrists--is estimated via multinomial ...

Temporal variation in selection has long been proposed as a mechanism by which genetic variation could be maintained despite short-term strong directional selection and has been invoked to explain the maintenance of consistent individual differences in behaviour. We tested the hypothesis that ecological changes through time lead to fluctuating selection, which could promote the maintenance of v...

Behavioral Extinction is a long established experimental procedure in animal learning studies that discover what happens when Action Selection fails. This paper integrates the results of these studies into the existing Dynamic Expectancy Model, and considers the impact this has on the Action Selection and learning properties of that model. A series of experimental investigations is presented to...

In this paper we name some of the advantages of virtual laboratories; and propose that a Behaviours Virtual Laboratory should be useful for both biologists and AI researchers, offering a new perspective for understanding adaptive behaviour. We present our development of a Behaviours Virtual Laboratory, which at this stage is focused in action selection, and show some experiments to illustrate t...

Under certain special conditions natural selection can be effective at the level of local populations, or demes. Such interpopulation selection will favor genotypes that reduce the probability of extinction of their parent population even at the cost of a lowered inclusive fitness. Such genotypes may be characterized by altruistic traits only in a viscous population, i.e., in a population in wh...

A majority of employees can choose among health insurance plans of varying generosity. They may switch plans if prices, information, or their health status change. This paper analyzes switching behavior presumptively caused by changes in health status. We show that people who move to a less generous plan have lower medical spending prior to the switch than the average for the generous plan in w...

This paper describes and evaluates a biologically-inspired adaptation mechanism that allows network application components (agents) to autonomously adapt to dynamic environment changes in the network (e.g. changes in network traffic and resource availability). Based on the observation that the immune system elegantly achieves autonomous adaptation, the proposed mechanism, called the iNet artifi...

Baseados em Comportamentos-um modelo de controlo de decisão. 1994, PhD dissertation (to be published) UNL. As a future development we plan to work on adaptation mechanisms for the model. These will enhance the chances of a good performance of the vehicle after an adaptation phase in which the vehicle produces, in runtime, alterations to the configuration parameters, either supervised or not by ...

in this study, trading patterns and constituents of trading performances of individual and institutional investors have been investigated in a weekly manner, using an auto regressive model and a grinblatt & titman portfolio performance measure spanning 2008-2012. the results show that while individual investors have a herding behavior, institutional investors take contrarian trading strategies....