Decision Making: A Psychophysics Application Of Network Science

Book excerpt: This invaluable book captures the proceedings of a workshop that brought together a group of distinguished scientists from a variety of disciplines to discuss how networking influences decision making. The individual lectures interconnect psychological testing, the modeling of neuron networks and brain dynamics to the transport of information within and between complex networks. Of particular importance was the introduction of a new principle that governs how complex networks talk to one another — the Principle of Complexity Management (PCM). PCM establishes that the transfer of information from a stimulating complex network to a responding complex network is determined by how the complexity indices of the two networks are related. The response runs the gamut from being independent of the perturbation to being completely dominated by it, depending on the complexity mismatch.