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This eBook is a collection of articles from a Frontiers Research Topic. Frontiers Research Topics are very popular trademarks of the Frontiers Journals Series: they are collections of at least ten articles, all centered on a particular subject. With their unique mix of varied contributions from Original Research to Review Articles, Frontiers Research Topics unify the most influential researchers, the latest key findings and historical advances in a hot research area! Find out more on how to host your own Frontiers Research Topic or contribute to one as an author by contacting the Frontiers Editorial Office: frontiersin.org/about/contact

Civil engineering, surveying & building --- Biotechnology --- Computational models --- Algorithms --- Technologies --- Visual System --- mechanisms --- Computational models --- Algorithms --- Technologies --- Visual System --- mechanisms

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To communicate, speakers need to make it clear what they are talking about. Referring expressions play a crucial part in achieving this, by anchoring utterances to things. Examples of referring expressions include noun phrases such as “this phenomenon”, “it” and “the phenomenon to which this Topic is devoted”. Reference is studied throughout the Cognitive Sciences (from philosophy and logic to neuro-psychology, computer science and linguistics), because it is thought to lie at the core of all of communication. Recent years have seen a new wave of work on models of referring, as witnessed by a number of recent research projects, books, and journal Special Issues. The Research Topic “Models of Reference” in Frontiers in Psychology is a new milestone, focusing on contributions from Psycholinguistics and Computational Linguistics. The articles in it are concerned with such issues as audience design, overspecification, visual perception, and variation between speakers.

Communication --- Psychological aspects. --- Over-specification --- Variation between Speakers --- referring expressions --- Computational models --- audience design --- Visual Perception

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Since 2003, when spontaneous activity in cortical slices was first found to follow scale-free statistical distributions in size and duration, increasing experimental evidences and theoretical models have been reported in the literature supporting the emergence of evidence of scale invariance in the cortex. Although strongly debated, such results refer to many different in vitro and in vivo preparations (awake monkeys, anesthetized rats and cats, in vitro slices and dissociated cultures), suggesting that power law distributions and scale free correlations are a very general and robust feature of cortical activity that has been conserved across species as specific substrate for information storage, transmission and processing. Equally important is that the features reminiscent of scale invariance and criticality are observed at scale spanning from the level of interacting arrays of neurons all the way up to correlations across the entire brain. Moreover, the existing relationship between features of structural connectivity and functional critical states remains partly unclear, although investigated with both analyses of experimental data and in silico models. Thus, if we accept that the brain operates near a critical point, little is known about the causes and/or consequences of a loss of criticality and its relation with brain diseases (e.g. epilepsy). The study of how pathogenetical mechanisms are related to the critical/non-critical behavior of neuronal networks would likely provide new insights into the cellular and synaptic determinants of the emergence of critical-like dynamics and structures in neural systems. At the same time, the relation between the impaired behavior and the disruption of criticality would help clarify its role in normal brain function. The main objective of this Research Topic is to investigate the emergence/disruption of the emergent critical-like states in healthy/impaired neural systems and to link these phenomena to the underlying cellular and network features, with specific attention to structural connectivity. In particular, we would like this Research Topic to collect contributions coming from the study of neural systems at different levels of architectural complexity (from in vitro neuronal ensembles up to the human brain imaged by fMRI).

Neurosciences. --- Nervous system. --- Neuroscience --- Human Anatomy & Physiology --- Health & Biological Sciences --- Computational models --- in vitro --- in vivo --- network dynamics --- self-organized criticality --- neuronal avalanches --- power law --- Computational models --- in vitro --- in vivo --- network dynamics --- self-organized criticality --- neuronal avalanches --- power law

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theoretical materials science --- computational models --- Chemistry, Physical and theoretical --- Chemistry, Physical and theoretical. --- Chemistry, Theoretical --- Physical chemistry --- Theoretical chemistry --- Chemistry

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Since 2003, when spontaneous activity in cortical slices was first found to follow scale-free statistical distributions in size and duration, increasing experimental evidences and theoretical models have been reported in the literature supporting the emergence of evidence of scale invariance in the cortex. Although strongly debated, such results refer to many different in vitro and in vivo preparations (awake monkeys, anesthetized rats and cats, in vitro slices and dissociated cultures), suggesting that power law distributions and scale free correlations are a very general and robust feature of cortical activity that has been conserved across species as specific substrate for information storage, transmission and processing. Equally important is that the features reminiscent of scale invariance and criticality are observed at scale spanning from the level of interacting arrays of neurons all the way up to correlations across the entire brain. Moreover, the existing relationship between features of structural connectivity and functional critical states remains partly unclear, although investigated with both analyses of experimental data and in silico models. Thus, if we accept that the brain operates near a critical point, little is known about the causes and/or consequences of a loss of criticality and its relation with brain diseases (e.g. epilepsy). The study of how pathogenetical mechanisms are related to the critical/non-critical behavior of neuronal networks would likely provide new insights into the cellular and synaptic determinants of the emergence of critical-like dynamics and structures in neural systems. At the same time, the relation between the impaired behavior and the disruption of criticality would help clarify its role in normal brain function. The main objective of this Research Topic is to investigate the emergence/disruption of the emergent critical-like states in healthy/impaired neural systems and to link these phenomena to the underlying cellular and network features, with specific attention to structural connectivity. In particular, we would like this Research Topic to collect contributions coming from the study of neural systems at different levels of architectural complexity (from in vitro neuronal ensembles up to the human brain imaged by fMRI).

Neurosciences. --- Nervous system. --- Neuroscience --- Human Anatomy & Physiology --- Health & Biological Sciences --- Computational models --- in vitro --- in vivo --- network dynamics --- self-organized criticality --- neuronal avalanches --- power law