Cognitive Network Structure: An Experimental Study

Abstract

In this paper we present first experimental results about a small group of people exchanging private and public messages in a virtual community. Our goal is the study of the cognitive network that emerges during a chat seance. We used the Derrida coefficient and the triangle structure under the working assumption that moods and perceived mutual affinity can produce results complementary to a full semantic analysis. The most outstanding outcome is the difference between the network obtained considering publicly exchanged messages and the one considering only privately exchanged messages: in the former case, the network is very homogeneous, in the sense that each individual interacts in the same way with all the participants, whilst in the latter the interactions among different agents are very heterogeneous, and are based on "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"strategy. Finally a recent characterization of the triangular cliques has been considered in order to describe the intimate structure of the network. Experimental results confirm recent theoretical studies indicating that certain 3-vertex structures can be used as indicators for the network aging and some relevant dynamical features.

Social Pressure and Environmental Effects on Networks: A Path to Cooperation

“…• The results do not depend sensitively on the initial conditions (at least in heterogeneous topologies): this is a fundamental feature of the model since it is usually hard to determine the initial conditions for real social systems; on the other hand, in complete graphs (i.e., in mean-field approximation), this is not true, but only small human communities can be described in this way, and, in such cases, different dynamical mechanisms are at work [32].…”

Metastable structures and size effects in small group dynamics

“…As a first step in this direction, our group is developing a dedicated Virtual Ambient for the study of group interactions ( www.complexworld.net/virthulab ) in which many relevant aspect of the subjects' interactions can be tracked in vivo . We are particularly interested in analyzing small group dynamics under different task constraints (Grotto, 2012a ; Guazzini et al, 2012b ; Cini and Guazzini, 2013 ). In the present paper, for example, the simulated condition corresponds to an “ecological” ( ICT-mediated ) situation where the participants can freely interact for a given amount of time (i.e., ICT is used for Information and Communication Technologies).…”

Bluffing as a Rational Strategy in a Simple Poker-Like Game Model

“…Moreover, for practical purposes, a simpler model which can be more easily understood turns out to be very useful because it will result easier also in the realization and the analysis of experimental tests with real human agents, and hence it will be possible to plan more accurately other kinds of experimental tools. In particular, it will be straightforward to utilize a tool as in reference [22] for a test with real players and to exploit data from poker-online web sites for a statistical analysis of the outcomes of real poker games.…”