Process reveals structure: How a network is traversed mediates expectations about its architecture.

ABSTRACT: Network science has emerged as a powerful tool through which we can study the higher-order architectural properties of the world around us. How human learners exploit this information remains an essential question. Here, we focus on the temporal constraints that govern such a process. Participants viewed a continuous sequence of images generated by three distinct walks on a modular network. Walks varied along two critical dimensions: their predictability and the density with which they sampled from communities of images. Learners exposed to walks that richly sampled from each community exhibited a sharp increase in processing time upon entry into a new community. This effect was eliminated in a highly regular walk that sampled exhaustively from images in short, successive cycles (i.e., tha

SUBMITTER: Karuza EA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5630604 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature