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The empirical evidence that human color categorization exhibits some universal patterns beyond superficial discrepancies across different cultures is a major breakthrough in cognitive science. As observed in the World Color Survey (WCS),…

Statistical science (as opposed to mathematical statistics) involves far more than probability theory, for it requires realistic causal models of data generators - even for purely descriptive goals. Statistical decision theory requires more…

Regularization occurs when the output a learner produces is less variable than the linguistic data they observed. In an artificial language learning experiment, we show that there exist at least two independent sources of regularization…

Social network structures play an important role in the lives of animals by affecting individual fitness and the spread of disease and information. Nevertheless, we still lack a good understanding of how these structures emerge from the…

The interaction of all mobile species with their environment hinges on their movement patterns: the places they visit and how frequently they go there. In human society, where the prevalent form of cohabitation is in cities, the highly…

While a large body of work has scrutinized the meaning of conditional sentences, considerably less attention has been paid to formal models of their pragmatic use and interpretation. Here, we take a probabilistic approach to pragmatic…

Most existing recommendation approaches implicitly treat user tastes as unimodal, resulting in an average-of-tastes representations when multiple distinct interests are present. We show that appropriately modelling the multi-faceted nature…

We are investigating a paradigm of instability in coalition forming among countries, which indeed is intrinsic to any collection of individual groups or other social aggregations. Coalitions among countries are formed by the respective…

This paper proposes a theory of creativity, referred to as honing theory, which posits that creativity fuels the process by which culture evolves through communal exchange amongst minds that are self-organizing, self-maintaining, and…

We study the consequences of introducing individual nonconformity in social interactions, based on Axelrod's model for the dissemination of culture. A constraint on the number of situations in which interaction may take place is introduced…

The cultural diversity of culinary practice, as illustrated by the variety of regional cuisines, raises the question of whether there are any general patterns that determine the ingredient combinations used in food today or principles that…

Our quantitative understanding of how scientists choose and shift their research focus over time is highly consequential, because it affects the ways in which scientists are trained, science is funded, knowledge is organized and discovered,…

We propose a stochastic map model of economic dynamics. In the last decade, an array of observations in economics has been investigated in the econophysics literature, a major example being the universal features of inequality in terms of…

Modern societies feature an increasing contact between cultures, yet we have a poor understanding of what the outcomes might be. Here we consider a mathematical model of contact between social groups, grounded in social psychology and…

It is generally agreed that one origin of machine bias is resulting from characteristics within the dataset on which the algorithms are trained, i.e., the data does not warrant a generalized inference. We, however, hypothesize that a…

Understanding the forces shaping ecological communities is crucially important to basic science and conservation. In recent years, considerable progress was made in explaining communities using simple and general models, with neutral theory…

We provide a formal, simple and intuitive theory of rational decision making including sequential decisions that affect the environment. The theory has a geometric flavor, which makes the arguments easy to visualize and understand. Our…

We present a dynamical theory of opinion formation that takes explicitly into account the structure of the social network in which in- dividuals are embedded. The theory predicts the evolution of a set of opinions through the social network…

Structure is one of the most essential aspects of music, and music structure is commonly indicated through repetition. However, the nature of repetition and structure in music is still not well understood, especially in the context of music…

Consumption practices are determined by a combination of economic, social, and cultural forces. We posit that lower economic constraints leave more room to diversify consumption along cultural and social aspects in the form of omnivorous or…