Explore the vast range of titles available.

With advances in tracking and database technologies, firms are increasingly able to understand their customers and translate this understanding into products and services that appeal to them. Technologies such as collaborative filtering, data mining, and click-stream analysis enable firms to customize their offerings at the individual level. While there has been a lot of hype about web personalization recently, our understanding of its effectiveness is far from conclusive. Drawing on the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) literature, this research takes the view that the interaction between a firm and its customers is one of communicating a persuasive message to the customers driven by business objectives. In particular, we examine three major elements of a web personalization strategy: level of preference matching, recommendation set size, and sorting cue. These elements can be manipulated by a firm in implementing its personalization strategy. This research also investigates a personal disposition, need for cognition, which plays a role in assessing the effectiveness of web personalization. Research hypotheses are tested using 1,000 subjects in three field experiments based on a ring-tone download website. Our findings indicate the saliency of these variables in different stages of the persuasion process. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

Audit research has generally concluded that auditors primarily organize their memory of financial statement errors by audit objective rather than transaction cycle. Although this stream of research has typically used the cue sorting method, the concept of primary organizing dimension is believed to be sufficiently general to obtain consistent results with other experimental methods (e.g., Nelson et al. 1995). The purpose of this study is to determine if the finding that auditor knowledge of financial statement errors is organized primarily around audit objectives can be replicated with a priming/reaction time method. The priming/reaction time method is widely used in knowledge structure research and appears consistent with the concept of primary organizing dimension discussed in the audit literature. We conducted a study with sorting and priming/reaction time phases. Consistent with prior research, the sorting phase found that audit objective was the primary organizing dimension for both managers and staff. However, the priming/reaction time phase found that managers’ knowledge was primarily structured around transaction cycle, while staff demonstrated no primary organizing structure.

Much of our behavior is guided by rules. Although human prefrontal cortex (PFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) are implicated in implementing rule-guided behavior, the crucial contributions made by different regions within these areas are not yet specified. In an attempt to bridge human neuropsychology and nonhuman primate neurophysiology, we report the effects of circumscribed lesions to macaque orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), principal sulcus (PS), superior dorsolateral PFC, ventrolateral PFC, or ACC sulcus, on separable cognitive components of a Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) analog. Only the PS lesions impaired maintenance of abstract rules in working memory; only the OFC lesions impaired rapid reward-based updating of representations of rule value; the ACC sulcus lesions impaired active reference to the value of recent choice-outcomes during rule-based decision-making.

Americans are sorting ideologically: Liberals and conservatives are more likely to respectively identify as Democrats and Republicans. They are sorting socially as well: Partisans like and trust copartisans more than opposing partisans. Existing explanations for these phenomena rely on exogenous factors, such as elite polarization. But exogenous explanations cannot fully explain variation in sorting. We argue that psychological characteristics can help explain the tendency to sort ideologically or socially. Specifically, we investigate an individual's responsiveness to internal values versus normative social pressures as a determinant of sorting. We test this theory with several nationally representative surveys, as well as one survey experiment, and find strong support that an individual's own tendency to respond to social cues, as opposed to ideological values, has important consequences for this process. Our work allows for a better understanding of the psychological factors that promote partisan sorting and for interpreting variation in the degree to which citizens sort into partisan groups.

Sorting objects and events into categories and concepts is a fundamental cognitive capacity that reduces the cost of learning every particular situation encountered in our daily lives. Relational concepts such as \"same,\" \"different,\" \"better than,\" or \"larger than\"—among others—are essential in human cognition because they allow highly efficient classifying of events irrespective of physical similarity. Mastering a relational concept involves encoding a relationship by the brain independently of the physical objects linked by the relation and is, therefore, consistent with abstraction capacities. Processing several concepts at a time presupposes an even higher level of cognitive sophistication that is not expected in an invertebrate. We found that the miniature brains of honey bees rapidly learn to master two abstract concepts simultaneously, one based on spatial relationships (above/below and right/left) and another based on the perception of difference. Bees that learned to classify visual targets by using this dual concept transferred their choices to unknown stimuli that offered a best match in terms of dual-concept availability: their components presented the appropriate spatial relationship and differed from one another. This study reveals a surprising facility of brains to extract abstract concepts from a set of complex pictures and to combine them in a rule for subsequent choices. This finding thus provides excellent opportunities for understanding how cognitive processing is achieved by relatively simple neural architectures.

Eukaryotic cells extend pseudopodia for movement. In the absence of external cues, cells move in random directions, but with a strong element of persistence that keeps them moving in the same direction Persistence allows cells to disperse over larger areas and is instrumental to enter new environments where spatial cues can lead the cell. Here we explore cell movement by analyzing the direction, size and timing of approximately 2000 pseudopodia that are extended by Dictyostelium cells. The results show that pseudpopod are extended perpendicular to the surface curvature at the place where they emerge. The location of new pseudopods is not random but highly ordered. Two types of pseudopodia may be formed: frequent splitting of an existing pseudopod, or the occasional extension of a de novo pseudopod at regions devoid of recent pseudopod activity. Split-pseudopodia are extended at approximately 60 degrees relative to the previous pseudopod, mostly as alternating Right/Left/Right steps leading to relatively straight zigzag runs. De novo pseudopodia are extended in nearly random directions thereby interrupting the zigzag runs. Persistence of cell movement is based on the ratio of split versus de novo pseudopodia. We identify PLA2 and cGMP signaling pathways that modulate this ratio of splitting and de novo pseudopodia, and thereby regulate the dispersal of cells. The observed ordered extension of pseudopodia in the absence of external cues provides a fundamental insight into the coordinated movement of cells, and might form the basis for movement that is directed by internal or external cues.

Conventional wisdom suggests that citizens who recognize party polarization exhibit well-sorted preferences. Curiously, however, this extant research has not grappled sufficiently with how pervasive perceptual biases might moderate the relationship between perceptions of elites and sorting. In this manuscript, I show that perceived out-group dissimilarity affects sorting, albeit in an asymmetric manner: perceived out-group dissimilarity corresponds to greater sorting for persons with right-leaning identities compared to those with left-leaning ones. I then analyze the 1992–1996 ANES Panel Study and find that these patterns mostly hold, with one caveat: sorting also shapes perceptions of out-group dissimilarity. These findings offer preliminary evidence of the existence of a feedback loop between perceptions of elites and sorting.

Animals often breed in colonies that can vary in size by several orders of magnitude. Colony-size variation is perplexing because individuals in some colony sizes have lower fitness than those in other colony sizes, yet extensive size variation persists in most populations. Natural variation in colony size has allowed us to better quantify the costs and benefits of coloniality, but what causes and maintains size variation is in general unknown. Ecological correlates of colony-size variation potentially include local availability of resources, such as food or nesting sites, and may also reflect individuals' sorting among colonies (based on life-history traits, morphology, or behavioral propensities) to find the social environment to which they are best suited. Preferences for particular colony sizes are genetically based in some species. The fitness differences observed among colony sizes may reflect unmeasured tradeoffs among life-history components and also could vary temporally or spatially. Colony-size variation might be maintained by fluctuating directional or stabilizing selection that alternately favors individuals in different group sizes and leads to stasis in the colony-size distribution over the long term. Recent focus on the cues individuals use to select breeding habitat (e.g., conspecific attraction, reproductive success of others) does not satisfactorily explain variation in colony size. Costs of dispersal, reliance on imperfect information, and collective nonrandom movement can also lead to colony-size variation in the absence of fitness-based site selection. Our understanding of factors generating and maintaining variation in colony size remains in its infancy and offers many opportunities for future research with broad implications for behavioral ecology.

One common assumption has been that prefrontal executive control is mostly required for target detection (Posner and Petersen in Ann Rev Neurosci 13:25–42, 1990). Alternatively, cognitive control has also been related to anticipatory updating of task-set (contextual) information, a view that highlights proactive control processes. Frontoparietal cortical networks contribute to both proactive control and reactive target detection, although their fast dynamics are still largely unexplored. To examine this, we analyzed rapid magnetoencephalographic (MEG) source activations elicited by task cues and target cards in a task-cueing analogue of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test. A single-task (color sorting) condition with equivalent perceptual and motor demands was used as a control. Our results revealed fast, transient and largely switch-specific MEG activations across frontoparietal and cingulo-opercular regions in anticipation of target cards, including (1) early (100–200 ms) cue-locked MEG signals at visual, temporo-parietal and prefrontal cortices of the right hemisphere (i.e., calcarine sulcus, precuneus, inferior frontal gyrus, anterior insula and supramarginal gyrus); and (2) later cue-locked MEG signals at the right anterior and posterior insula (200–300 ms) and the left temporo-parietal junction (300–500 ms). In all cases larger MEG signal intensity was observed in switch relative to repeat cueing conditions. Finally, behavioral restart costs and test scores of working memory capacity (forward digit span) correlated with cue-locked MEG activations at key nodes of the frontoparietal network. Together, our findings suggest that proactive cognitive control of task rule updating can be fast and transiently implemented within less than a second and in anticipation of target detection.

The establishment of precise neural circuits during development involves a variety of contact-mediated and secreted guidance molecules that are expressed in a complementary fashion by different cell types. To build a functional circuit, each cell type must first trigger an intrinsic genetic program that is led by their environment at a key time point. It is therefore essential to identify the different cell-specific and stage-specific transcriptional profiles expressed by neurons. However, very few studies have been done to address this issue thus far. Herein, we have carried out a large-scale quantitative real-time PCR analysis of all classical axon guidance molecules (i.e., Semaphorins, Netrins, Ephrins, and Slits) and their receptors expressed by Purkinje cells (PCs) at specific stages of postnatal cerebellar development in vivo. Most cerebellar connections are setup in a well-characterized sequential manner during postnatal development and lead to the fine regulation of the PC, the sole output of the structure. Our analysis of the relative expression of these guidance cues has uncovered a dynamic expression pattern corresponding to specific stages of cerebellar development, thus providing a starting point for studying the role of these axon guidance molecules in cerebellar wiring.