Posts

Showing posts from February, 2014

Metastability and Eye Movements: A Dynamical‑Systems Interpretation

  1. Why metastability is a natural language for gaze behavior The idea that perception, attention, and neural activity evolve through transiently stable states has deep roots in cognitive science and neuroscience. Concepts such as attractors , basins , noise‑induced transitions , and escape times appear in work on perceptual switching, decision‑making, and neural population dynamics (Kelso, 1995; Rabinovich et al., 2008; Deco & Jirsa, 2012). Eye movements, especially the alternation between fixations and saccades ,   fit remarkably well into this metastable picture. The Freidlin–Wentzell theory of rare events (Freidlin & Wentzell, 2012) provides a rigorous mathematical language for these intuitions. 2. Fixations as metastable states  Consider the gaze position X t as the state of a stochastic dynamical system. During a fixation the  gaze remains confined to a small region, microsaccades and noise generate small fluctuations, and the gaze tends to return...

Global cooling. The crazy winter 2013-2014

Image
Another wave of frost is hitting the United States. The bad weather has caused paralysis of road traffic (with at least 13 deaths from traffic accidents) and the cancellation of about 6,000 flights in the last two days. The more dramatic  situation  is reported in North Carolina, where  because snow and ice have created an immense traffic jam in both directions of  the highway , with thousands of people trapped and hundreds of abandoned cars in the middle of the roadway . Just as had happened two weeks ago near Atlanta , Georgia. Over half a million homes and businesses were left without electricity due to power outage caused by snow and ice. President Barack Obama has declared a state of natural disaster in Georgia and South Carolina, sending federal aid. And the spate of bad weather is moving to the northeast, where heavy snowfalls are expected in Boston, the capital Washington and New York. The scenario is rather catastrophic . In the capital all federal offi...

Popular posts from this blog

Understanding Anaerobic Threshold (VT2) and VO2 Max in Endurance Training

Diagnosing Singular Fits in Linear Mixed Models: Practical Examples, Code, and Alternatives

Owen's Function: A Simple Solution to Complex Problems