Vanessa Ferdinand

Ideology, communication and polarization

Yoshihisa Kashima, Andrew Perfors, Vanessa Ferdinand, Elle Pattenden

Journal article  |  2021  |  PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES

Ideologically committed minds form the basis of political polarization, but ideologically guided communication can further entrenc..

Inferring an Observer's Prediction Strategy in Sequence Learning Experiments

Abhinuv Uppal, Vanessa Ferdinand, Sarah Marzen

Journal article  |  2020  |  ENTROPY

Cognitive systems exhibit astounding prediction capabilities that allow them to reap rewards from regularities in their environmen..

Dynamics of beneficial epidemics.

Andrew Berdahl, Christa Brelsford, Caterina De Bacco, Marion Dumas, Vanessa Ferdinand, Joshua A Grochow, Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, Yoav Kallus, Christopher P Kempes, Artemy Kolchinsky, Daniel B Larremore, Eric Libby, Eleanor A Power, Caitlin A Stern, Brendan D Tracey

Journal article  |  2019  |  Sci Rep

Pathogens can spread epidemically through populations. Beneficial contagions, such as viruses that enhance host survival or techno..

Rethinking animal social complexity measures with the help of complex systems concepts

Elizabeth A Hobson, Vanessa Ferdinand, Artemy Kolchinsky, Joshua Garland

Journal article  |  2019  |  ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR

Explaining how and why some species evolved to have more complex social structures than others has been a long-term goal for many ..

The cognitive roots of regularization in language.

Vanessa Ferdinand, Simon Kirby, Kenny Smith

Journal article  |  2019  |  Cognition

Regularization occurs when the output a learner produces is less variable than the linguistic data they observed. In an artificial..

Self-organisation of a learnable language: What happens when an alien language replicates through human brains

K Beuls, V Ferdinand, J Kanwal

Conference Proceedings  |  2012  |  2012 IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics, ICDL 2012

Through the use of an iterated learning experiment, we investigate the emergence of self-organised structure in a random initial a..