Multiple Pieces Of Information Research Articles

Self-reported cognitive decline in Japanese patients with breast cancer treated with endocrine therapy.

Despite contributing to the control of hormone receptor-positive breast cancer, a highly prevalent cancer type, endocrine therapy affects patients' cognitive function. We aimed to identify cognitive decline following the start of endocrine therapy using patient-reported measures and investigate factors associated with cognitive difficulties. This cross-sectional survey used a self-administered, anonymous questionnaire. The participants were 876 patients with breast cancer who experienced subjective cognitive difficulties after starting endocrine therapy. Our sample was recruited from 11 patient advocacy groups, 5 clinics, and 2 hospitals in Japan. The questionnaire assessed subjective cognitive difficulties (30 items), psychological well-being, demographic and clinical information, and other subjective symptoms. Of 510 (58.2%) responses, we analyzed 405 (46.2%) questionnaires. Exploratory factor analysis identified three factors of cognitive difficulties: Factor 1, "difficulties in manipulating memory and language;" Factor 2, "difficulties in processing multiple pieces of information;" and Factor 3, "difficulties in maintaining attention and concentration." Factor 1 was the most common type, and it was significantly related to the treatment characteristics of endocrine therapy. Multivariate logistic regression analysis revealed that fewer household members, a history of breast surgery, more severe menopausal symptoms, and greater psychological distress were significantly associated with cognitive difficulties. As cognitive difficulties increased, the proportion of participants suspected to have psychological disorders increased significantly. Patients treated with endocrine therapy for breast cancer experience intricately intertwined impairments in several domains of cognitive function. They have an increased risk of psychological disorders corresponding to the degree of subjective cognitive function.

Co-filing and De Jure Co-referential Thought in the Mental Files Framework

In the mental files framework, mental files contain pieces of information. Then, how can we explain the fact that multiple pieces of information are stored in a single mental file? This fact can be called ‘co-filing’. Recanati recommends an account of co-filing as a way to avoid the circularity that can occur when one attempts to explain co-filing in terms of the fact that pieces of information are taken to be about the same object. I argue that his account is far from being satisfactory and that co-filing needs to be regarded as a primitive fact. In other words, co-filing is not what needs to be explained within the mental files framework. The right question to be dealt with is what we can explain based on co-filing.

Cumulative activation in social networks

Most studies on influence maximization focus on one-shot propagation, i.e. the influence is propagated from seed users only once following a probabilistic diffusion model and users' activation are determined via single cascade. In reality it is often the case that a user needs to be cumulatively impacted by receiving enough pieces of information propagated to her before she makes the final purchase decision. In this paper we model such cumulative activation as the following process: first multiple pieces of information are propagated independently in the social network following the classical independent cascade model, then the user will be activated (and adopt the product) if the cumulative pieces of information she received reaches her cumulative activation threshold. Two optimization problems are investigated under this framework: seed minimization with cumulative activation (SM-CA), which asks how to select a seed set with minimum size such that the number of cumulatively active nodes reaches a given requirement $\eta$; influence maximization with cumulative activation (IM-CA), which asks how to choose a seed set with fixed budget to maximize the number of cumulatively active nodes. For SM-CA problem, we design a greedy algorithm that yields a bicriteria $O(\ln n)$-approximation when $\eta=n$, where $n$ is the number of nodes in the network. For both SM-CA problem with $\eta<n$ and IM-CA problem, we prove strong inapproximability results. Despite the hardness results, we propose two efficient heuristic algorithms for SM-CA and IM-CA respectively based on the reverse reachable set approach. Experimental results on different real-world social networks show that our algorithms significantly outperform baseline algorithms.

A single retinal circuit model for multiple computations.

Vision is dependent on extracting intricate features of the visual information from the outside world, and complex visual computations begin to take place as soon as at the retinal level. In multiple studies on salamander retinas, the responses of a subtype of retinal ganglion cells, i.e., fast/biphasic-OFF ganglion cells, have been shown to be able to realize multiple functions, such as the segregation of a moving object from its background, motion anticipation, and rapid encoding of the spatial features of a new visual scene. For each of these visual functions, modeling approaches using extended linear-nonlinear cascade models suggest specific preceding retinal circuitries merging onto fast/biphasic-OFF ganglion cells. However, whether multiple visual functions can be accommodated together in a certain retinal circuitry and how specific mechanisms for each visual function interact with each other have not been investigated. Here, we propose a physiologically consistent, detailed computational model of the retinal circuit based on the spatiotemporal dynamics and connections of each class of retinal neurons to implement object motion sensitivity, motion anticipation, and rapid coding in the same circuit. Simulations suggest that multiple computations can be accommodated together, thereby implying that the fast/biphasic-OFF ganglion cell has potential to output a train of spikes carrying multiple pieces of information on distinct features of the visual stimuli.

Understanding and Information Constellations in Ultrarunning

There have been many conceptualizations of knowledge in information studies. Though presently disparate, they can be brought together under a common framework with the concept of understanding. As such, understanding can provide an account for how bodily experience, recorded information, and other forms of information can contribute together epistemically. This paper provides a way for researchers to analyze understanding informationally: It defines information as form-and-activity and suggests that multiple pieces of information can be bundled together as information constellations with narrative as a cohering structure. The concept of information constellation is illustrated in a hermeneutic-phenomenological study of the information experience of ultrarunners. The resulting anecdotes and information constellation mappings show how multiple forms and activities of information are integrated as understanding even in the “simple” act of running. This discussion puts embodied, experiential, corporeal information on equal footing with the external, recorded forms of information that have been the traditional focus of information studies.

What kind of independence do we need for multiple iterated belief change?

Multiple iterated revision requires advanced belief revision techniques that are able to integrate several pieces of new information into epistemic states. A crucial feature of this kind of revision is that the multiple pieces of information should be dealt with separately. Previous works have proposed several independence postulates which should ensure this. In this paper, we argue, first, that these postulates are too strong as they may enforce beliefs without justification, and second, that they are not necessary to ensure the principal aim of multiple revision. Instead, principles of conditional preservation guarantee a suitable handling of sets of sentences under revision. We formalize such a principle for multiple propositional revision for ranking functions, and we propose some novel postulates for multiple iterated revision that are in line with AGM and the Darwiche & Pearl postulates. We show that just a few fundamental postulates are enough to cover major approaches to (multiple) iterated belief revision, and that independence in the sense of Thielscher, Jin, and Delgrande is optional. As a proof of concept, we present propositional c-revisions of ranking functions.

Uncertainty of oil field GHG emissions resulting from information gaps: a Monte Carlo approach.

Regulations on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from liquid fuel production generally work with incomplete data about oil production operations. We study the effect of incomplete information on estimates of GHG emissions from oil production operations. Data from California oil fields are used to generate probability distributions for eight oil field parameters previously found to affect GHG emissions. We use Monte Carlo (MC) analysis on three example oil fields to assess the change in uncertainty associated with learning of information. Single factor uncertainties are most sensitive to ignorance about water-oil ratio (WOR) and steam-oil ratio (SOR), resulting in distributions with coefficients of variation (CV) of 0.1-0.9 and 0.5, respectively. Using a combinatorial uncertainty analysis, we find that only a small number of variables need to be learned to greatly improve on the accuracy of MC mean. At most, three pieces of data are required to reduce bias in MC mean to less than 5% (absolute). However, the parameters of key importance in reducing uncertainty depend on oil field characteristics and on the metric of uncertainty applied. Bias in MC mean can remain after multiple pieces of information are learned, if key pieces of information are left unknown.

Executive control processes underlying multi-item working memory.

A dominant view of prefrontal cortex (PFC) function is that it stores task-relevant information in working memory. To examine this and determine how it applies when multiple pieces of information must be stored, we trained two macaque monkeys to perform a multi-item color change-detection task and recorded activity of neurons in PFC. Few neurons encoded the color of the items. Instead, the predominant encoding was spatial: a static signal reflecting the item's position and a dynamic signal reflecting the animal's covert attention. These findings challenge the notion that PFC stores task-relevant information. Instead, we suggest that the contribution of PFC is in controlling the allocation of resources to support working memory. In support of this, we found that increased power in the alpha and theta bands of PFC local field potentials, which are thought to reflect long-range communication with other brain areas, was correlated with more precise color representations.

An Efficient Adaptive Filtering Scheme Based on Combining Multiple Metrics

SUMMARY We propose a novel adaptive filtering scheme named metric-combining normalized least mean square (MC-NLMS). The proposed scheme is based on iterative metric projections with a metric designed by combining multiple metric-matrices convexly in an adaptive manner, thereby taking advantages of the metrics which rely on multiple pieces of information. We compare the improved PNLMS (IPNLMS) algorithm with the natural proportionate NLMS (NPNLMS) algorithm, which is a special case of MC-NLMS, and it is shown that the performance of NPNLMS is controllable with the combination coefficient as opposed to IPNLMS. We also present an application to an acoustic echo cancellation problem and show the efficacy of the proposed scheme.

Distinct roles of dopamine and subthalamic nucleus in learning and probabilistic decision making

Even simple behaviour requires us to make decisions based on combining multiple pieces of learned and new information. Making such decisions requires both learning the optimal response to each given stimulus as well as combining probabilistic information from multiple stimuli before selecting a response. Computational theories of decision making predict that learning individual stimulus–response associations and rapid combination of information from multiple stimuli are dependent on different components of basal ganglia circuitry. In particular, learning and retention of memory, required for optimal response choice, are significantly reliant on dopamine, whereas integrating information probabilistically is critically dependent upon functioning of the glutamatergic subthalamic nucleus (computing the ‘normalization term’ in Bayes’ theorem). Here, we test these theories by investigating 22 patients with Parkinson’s disease either treated with deep brain stimulation to the subthalamic nucleus and dopaminergic therapy or managed with dopaminergic therapy alone. We use computerized tasks that probe three cognitive functions—information acquisition (learning), memory over a delay and information integration when multiple pieces of sequentially presented information have to be combined. Patients performed the tasks ON or OFF deep brain stimulation and/or ON or OFF dopaminergic therapy. Consistent with the computational theories, we show that stopping dopaminergic therapy impairs memory for probabilistic information over a delay, whereas deep brain stimulation to the region of the subthalamic nucleus disrupts decision making when multiple pieces of acquired information must be combined. Furthermore, we found that when participants needed to update their decision on the basis of the last piece of information presented in the decision-making task, patients with deep brain stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus region did not slow down appropriately to revise their plan, a pattern of behaviour that mirrors the impulsivity described clinically in some patients with subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation. Thus, we demonstrate distinct mechanisms for two important facets of human decision making: first, a role for dopamine in memory consolidation, and second, the critical importance of the subthalamic nucleus in successful decision making when multiple pieces of information must be combined.

Uncovering the Nature of Information Processing of Men and Women Online: The Comparison of Two Models Using the Think-Aloud Method

This paper compares two models predicting gender differences in information processing to determine if either of the models is more pertinent to goal-oriented Internet searches. The Selectivity Model (Meyers-Levy 1989) proposes that women make more comprehension effort than men whereas the Item-Specific/Relational Processing Model (Putrevu 2001) suggests that men and women differ primarily in their processing style, with men tending to use item-specific processing by focusing on product attributes and women tending to use relational processing by looking for interrelationships among multiple pieces of information. The study participants (106 total, 50% female) were asked to think aloud while performing one of two goal-oriented search tasks on a website. Their thoughts were then coded according to relevant categories by two independent analysts using Atlas TI software. Consistent with the Selectivity Model, women made more comprehension effort than did men. However, our hypotheses related to a difference in processing style between men and women received less support. Overall, the results help disentangle the two theories and provide website developers with a basis for creating sites that are suited to men's and women's distinctive information processing strategies.

Information Dissemination between Mobile Nodes for Collaborative Context Awareness

In our everyday life, we frequently experience cases where persons group together. In those cases, context-aware systems capture and process identical context. Therefore, the need to collaboratively address Context Awareness (CA) emerges. In the considered setting, ad hoc networking between mobile nodes enables the exchange of information, thus, CA is facilitated. The synergy between mobile nodes materializes the Collaborative CA (CCA) paradigm. We advance the general CCA concept by performing communication between nodes probabilistically in a way similar to virus (epidemic) spreading. Nodes feature a hierarchical information model, which can be exploited by an information diffusion process. Multiple pieces of information, exchanged as epidemics, can complete the information present at a certain node, which in turn infers and spreads new information. We study this novel scheme extensively through an information model for context and an analytical framework (Markov process) with simulations. Our findings show that the information spreading large benefits from the mobility of nodes and semantic processing of the information model.

Provider perceptions of health literacy in an urban community

Objective: To gain an understanding of health and social service providers' perceptions of the scope and nature of health literacy problems in an urban setting. Design: Qualitative study. Setting: Representatives of 13 local health care organizations, churches, and community-based organizations participated. Method: Representatives were placed in two focus group sessions and responded to questions regarding their assessment of the nature and scope of health literacy problems in the community and the multidimensional strategies required to improve health literacy among underserved populations. Results: Participants reported that approximately 30 to 80 percent of their clients/patients had low health literacy skills. They also reported that individuals with low literacy skills are often reluctant to self-disclose their inability to read or understand health information, have problems understanding food labels and medication dosage instructions, and do not know how to advocate for themselves. The participants highlighted the need for physicians, nurses, social workers, health care administrators and other health professions to adopt a multi-dimensional approach to address the needs of individuals with low literacy skills and to empower them to use available community resources such as language interpretation services. Low health literacy is common among Americans (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, 2004). Health literacy has been de ned as the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions (National Library of Medicine, 2000). In April of 2004, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a report titled, “Health Literacy: A Prescription to End Confusion.” The report showed that low health literacy adds as much as $58 billion a year to health care and people of all ages, races, incomes and education levels are challenged by low health literacy (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, 2004). Approximately 90 million adults in the United States scored on the two lowest levels of the five levels of the National Adult Literacy Survey (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, 2004). These levels are associated with having trouble finding pieces of information or numbers in lengthy text, integrating multiple pieces of information in a document, finding two or more numbers in a chart, and performing a calculation (Kirsch, Jungeblut and et al., 2002). Low health literacy has been associated with poorer knowledge about health conditions (Kalichman & Rompa, 2000), lower use of preventive services (Scott, Gazmararian and et al., 2002), higher rates of medication non-adherence (Kalichman, Ramachandra, & et al., 1999), high hospitalization rates (Baker, Parker and et al., 1998), (Baker, Parker and et al., 1997), poorer self-reported health, (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000), low utilization of potentially life-saving screening, poor patient- physician communication) inability to understand prescriptions, instructions and consent forms, low participation in health promotion and disease prevention activities, inability to understand and use information on food labels, poor self-management of chronic diseases, (Institute of Medicine, 2004), poor use of health care services, (Davis, Fredrickson and et al., 1998a) and negative health outcomes (Davis, Fredrickson and et al., 1998a). Most studies that have examined some of the barriers to improving health literacy skills have focused on the readability levels of health education materials (Dowe, Lawrence and et al, 1997), (Ley, Jain and et al., 1976), (Jolly, Scott and et al., 1995), (Sumner, 1991) (Davis, Fredrickson and et al., 1998a). For instance, one study involved matching the reading level of health materials with the reading ability of the patients using a randomized approach (Dowe, Lawrence and et al., 1997). One of the results of this study indicated that patients with low health literacy levels who received less complex health materials were more likely to read the leaflets than those who received more complex materials. However, changing the reading level of health materials alone will not be sufficient for helping to improve health literacy levels and outcomes. Plimpton and Root argue that the sole strategy of improving the readability of health materials falls short of addressing the needs of individuals with low health literacy skills and instead tends to benefit those with higher health literacy skills (Plimpton and Root, 1994).

Following your heart or your head: Focusing on emotions versus information differentially influences the decisions of younger and older adults.

Research on aging has indicated that whereas deliberative cognitive processes decline with age, emotional processes are relatively spared. To examine the implications of these divergent trajectories in the context of health care choices, we investigated whether instructional manipulations emphasizing a focus on feelings or details would have differential effects on decision quality among younger and older adults. We presented 60 younger and 60 older adults with health care choices that required them to hold in mind and consider multiple pieces of information. Instructional manipulations in the emotion-focus condition asked participants to focus on their emotional reactions to the options, report their feelings about the options, and then make a choice. In the information-focus condition, participants were instructed to focus on the specific attributes, report the details about the options, and then make a choice. In a control condition, no directives were given. Manipulation checks indicated that the instructions were successful in eliciting different modes of processing. Decision quality data indicate that younger adults performed better in the information-focus than in the control condition whereas older adults performed better in the emotion-focus and control conditions than in the information-focus condition. Findings support and extend extant theorizing on aging and decision making as well as suggest that interventions to improve decision-making quality should take the age of the decision maker into account.

Anchor Selection and Group Dynamics in Newsvendor Decisions—A Note

We conducted a newsvendor experiment in which (i) the subjects were presented with multiple pieces of information that they could possibly use to anchor their decision and (ii) the subjects participated either as individuals or in groups of three. The primary objective was to determine whether the subjects tended to consistently anchor to the mean or change their anchor based on the experimental setting. The secondary objective was to study the impact of group dynamics on their decision-making approach. We observed that the subjects did not anchor to any one particular value, but rather chose an anchor that was closer to the optimal value. In addition, we observed that although there was no difference in their relative tendencies to anchor, the subjects in groups demonstrated a lower propensity for error than their individual counterparts.

The human brain: the final journey

The human brain: the final journey

Warnings and Pedestrian Behavior: A Case Study of Unintended Effects

We examine a case in which contradictory behaviors to a single safety stimulus occur even though the information content of the warning appears to have been correctly understood. Observations of pedestrian behavior at a grade crossing with active signals are reported. Some pedestrians often ignored warnings to stay out of the grade crossing while trains were entering or leaving the station. These data are consistent with proposals that hazard communications are among the multiple pieces of information that users may draw on in order to complete a desired objective. It is argued that pedestrian violations have different causes than motor vehicle violation, but personal goals and convenience play an important role in compliance with crossing signals. Frameworks for incorporating goal-oriented behavior into theories of warnings effectiveness, such as “affordances” are briefly discussed.

Short-range orientation in fish: How fish map space

One way in which fish can move around efficiently is to learn and remember a spatial map of their environment. This can be a relatively simple process where, for example, sequences of landmarks are learned. However, more complex spatial representations can be generated by integrating multiple pieces of information. In this review, we consider what types of information fish use to generate a spatial map; for instance, beacons (single landmarks) that signal a specific location, or learned geometric relationships between multiple landmarks that allow fish to guide their movements. Owing to the diversity of fish species and the broad range of environments that they inhabit, there is considerable diversity in the maps that they develop and the sensory systems that they use to detect spatial information. This chapter uses a series of examples to investigate the types of spatial information that fish encode, for instance, how they map three-dimensional space, how they make use of different sensory modalities, and where this information might be processed. We also highlight the versatility of short-range orientation in fish, and discuss a number of similarities between the mapping mechanisms used by fish and terrestrial vertebrates.

Advances in the Assessment and Prediction of Interpersonal Violence

This article underscores the weakness of clinical judgment as a mechanism for prediction with examples from other areas in the psychological literature. Clinical judgment has as its Achilles'heel the reliance on a person to incorporate multiple pieces of information while overcoming human judgment errors--a feat insurmountable thus far. The actuarial approach to risk assessment has overcome many of the weaknesses of clinical judgment and has been shown to be a much superior method. Nonetheless, the static/historical nature of the risk factors associated with most actuarial approaches is limiting. Advances in risk prediction will be found in part in the development of dynamic actuarial instruments that will measure both static/historical and changeable risk factors. The dynamic risk factors can be reevaluated on an ongoing basis, and it is proposed that the level of change in dynamic factors necessary to represent a significant change in overall risk will be an interactive function with static risk factors.

The impact matrix approach and decision rules to enhance index dimensionality, flexibility and representation

Abstract Many people use environmental indices to track and understand ecosystems. Indices make it possible to compare two or more complex, multifaceted systems at one time by reducing information about each system into a single number or diagram. Paradoxically, while this reductionism enhances understandability of the index, it works contrary to both the complex nature of the system and potentially disparate values that might be held by system users. A similar dilemma is found in the world of financial risk. We adapt the payoff matrix approach from financial risk to develop a comparable framework for ecosystem risk and call it the Impact Matrix. The payoff matrix utilizes the probability function for management alternatives to represent multiple pieces of information at one time (e.g. mean, variance, standard deviation). A matrix of these vectors allows for the development of many types of decision rules (e.g. minimax regret and maximin strategies) that can represent alternative value systems. In this paper we develop an “impact matrix” that uses similar features as the payoff matrix. The impact matrix concept is demonstrated for agricultural production systems through creation of a vector of possible environmental outcomes (e.g. surface runoff, nitrate in surface runoff, and soil erosion) for several agricultural management practices. We then develop criteria that utilize this information to represent the different ways that people think about environmental impacts. The result of this research is a tool that allows indicators to be incorporated in an index that can be adapted to different situations, and thus used in a variety of contexts while remaining simple to understand. That is, the impact matrix allows flexibility in developing indices of complex, multifaceted systems so that many disparate value systems may be easily represented.