Hasil untuk "Neurophysiology and neuropsychology"

Sonya V. Troller-Renfree, Molly A. Costanzo, Greg J. Duncan et al.

Early childhood poverty is associated with neurodevelopmental differences, but causal evidence linking income to brain development is sparse. In the present study, we examine whether four years of monthly unconditional cash transfers to mothers experiencing low income cause differences in their preschoolers’ brain activity. Shortly after giving birth, mothers were randomized to receive $333/month or $20/month for the first several years of their child’s life as a part of the Baby’s First Years study. Here we report on the impact of these cash gifts on resting brain electric activity recorded at 4 years of age as measured by electroencephalography (EEG). We find no impact on our primary preregistered outcome (an aggregated index of mid-to-high-frequency brain activity) or our secondary preregistered outcome frontal gamma power. We did find, in additional exploratory analyses that were part of our pre-registered analytic plan, that preschoolers in the high-cash gift group had higher alpha power compared to those in the low-cash gift group. There were no differences in theta, beta, or gamma power between groups. Although the primary and secondary preregistered outcomes showed no group differences our exploratory analyses provide some evidence for impacts on children’s alpha power during the preschool years, although this evidence needs further investigation and replication.

Xiaojun Huang and. Song-Ying Li

We prove that the Bergman space of a Stein manifold separates points whenever its Bergman metric is well defined and has non-positive constant holomorphic sectional curvature. This, combined with earlier proved results, shows that a Stein manifold cannot admit a well-defined flat Bergman metric, and that it has a well-defined Bergman metric with negative constant holomorphic sectional curvature if and only if it is biholomorphic to the unit ball of the same dimension possibly with a pluripolar set removed. The proof is based on the Hormander L2-estimate for d-bar equations; and the curvature condition together with Calabi's rigidity and extension theorems is used to construct the required bounded strictly plurisubharmonic functions.

Khadeeja Ahmed, Omar Yousaf

The present study employed a mixed-method approach to explore Muslims’ experiences of the role of attention and mindfulness during the Islamic prayer (i.e. salah). A total of 78 Muslim participants took part in the online study, of which 38 were UK-based and 40 were based in Pakistan. Four themes were generated from the qualitative results: (1) Salah is used to build and nurture a relationship with Allah; (2) Salah as a reminder of the big picture; (3) Salah helps lighten the burdens of everyday life; (4) Paying attention enhances the experience of salah. The quantitative results showed that prayer frequency, importance of paying undivided attention to prayer, and the religious orientation of quest scores positively predicted 36% (adjusted R2) of the variance in mindfulness during worship scores, F (3, 76) = 14.94, p < .001. The study has identified a number of psychological functions of the salah. The implications of these findings for research and theory within the field of the psychology of prayer are discussed.

Chengxiang Zhao, Wenjun Zhang, Haotong Wang et al.

We theoretically investigate the electric field-tuning plasmons and plasmon-phonon couplings of two-dimensional (2D) transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), such as monolayer MoS2, under the consideration of spin-orbit coupling. It is revealed that the frequencies of plasmons and coupled plasmon-phonon modes originating from electron-electron and electron-phonon interactions can be effectively changed by using applied driving electric fields. Notably, these frequencies exhibit a decreasing trend with an increasing electric field. Moreover, the weak angular dependence of these modes suggests that the driving electric field does not induce significant anisotropy in the plasmon modes. The outcomes of this work demonstrate that the plasmon and coupled plasmon-phonon modes can be tuned not only by manipulating the electron density via the application of a gate voltage but also by tuning the applied driving electric field. These findings hold relevance for facilitating the application of 2D TMDs in optoelectronic devices.

Hendrio Braganca, Diego Kreutz, Vanderson Rocha et al.

We present MH-1M, one of the most comprehensive and up-to-date datasets for advanced Android malware research. The dataset comprises 1,340,515 applications, encompassing a wide range of features and extensive metadata. To ensure accurate malware classification, we employ the VirusTotal API, integrating multiple detection engines for comprehensive and reliable assessment. Our GitHub, Figshare, and Harvard Dataverse repositories provide open access to the processed dataset and its extensive supplementary metadata, totaling more than 400 GB of data and including the outputs of the feature extraction pipeline as well as the corresponding VirusTotal reports. Our findings underscore the MH-1M dataset's invaluable role in understanding the evolving landscape of malware.

Frode Moen, Kathrine Lervold, Maja Olsen Østerås et al.

The main purpose of the current study was to explore burnout and protective factors among elite sport coaches, more specifically how sex, perceived coach performance, grit, social competence and social resources was uniquely associated with coaches’ work-related, athlete-related, and personal-related burnout among Norwegian coaches in a variety of sports. A sample of 69 coaches were recruited from a Norwegian education coach program arranged by the Norwegian Olympic sport center (NOSC), a national Norwegian organization that is part of Norwegian Olympic and Paralympic Committee and Confederation of Sports. Three regression analysis’ revealed that burnout was predicted by grit and social resources. The models explained 46% (work-related burnout), 25% (athlete-related burnout), and 29% (personal-related burnout) of the variance. Neither sex, perceived coach performance nor social competence was statistically significant for any of the three models. The current study shows that both traits (grit) and states (social resources) have significant impact as protective factors towards burnout among sport coaches. These findings are expected and support previous research. The current results also show that the coaches’ perception of their own efficacy in the form of performance level or social competence have importance. These findings contrast previous research and need further scrutiny.

Seyed Mehdi Razavi Dehkordi, Saeed Keshavarz, Jamshid Banaei Borojeni et al.

Aim and Background: Due to the complications caused by overload on the cardiovascular system and the increase of these problems during old age, nowadays, combined exercises are used to reduce these complications. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of eight weeks of combined exercises on the expression of HIF1, VEGF, UCP1 genes and the body composition of overweight elderly men. Materials and Methods: In this research; 20 elderly men randomly assigned to combined exercise group (10 people) and control group (10 people) with age range 60.70 ± 3.78 (years), weight 91.35 ± 2.66 (kg), height (meters) 1.74 ± 0.337, body mass index (kg/m2) 29.68 ± 1.67, fat mass (percent) 27.61 ± 1.22, muscle mass (kg) 30.03 ± 1.34 and The maximum oxygen consumption (milliliters/kg/minute) was 31.94 ± 2.25, were present. mixed group; They did resistance training for eight weeks and 3 sessions per week. In order to measure HIF1 and VEGF gene expression in white blood cells and PGC1a plasma levels, blood sampling was done 48 hours before the start of the first training session and also 48 hours after the last training session, while all subjects were fasting. Real-time PCR method was used to measure HIF1, VEGF and UCP1 gene expression. In order to analyze the data, independent and dependent t-test was used at a significance level of 0.05, with SPSS version 22 software. Findings: The results of the present study showed that eight weeks of combined exercises caused a significant increase in the expression of HIF1, VEGF, UCP1 genes. There was a significant decrease in fat mass and body mass index (P=0.001). Conclusion: The findings of this research showed that combined exercises with the model described in this research should be used to improve the physiological condition and improve the body composition of elderly people

Michael A. Conoscenti, Daniel B. Weatherill, Yuqing Huang et al.

Firm conclusions regarding the differential effects of the maladaptive consequences of acute versus chronic stress on the etiology and symptomatology of stress disorders await a model that isolates chronicity as a variable for studying the differential effects of acute versus chronic stress. This is because most previous studies have confounded chronicity with the total amount of stress. Here, we have modified the stress-enhanced fear learning (SEFL) protocol, which models some aspects of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following an acute stressor, to create a chronic variant that does not have this confound. Comparing results from this new protocol to the acute protocol, we found that chronic stress further potentiates enhanced fear-learning beyond the nonassociative enhancement induced by acute stress. This additional component is not observed when the unconditional stimulus (US) used during subsequent fear learning is distinct from the US used as the stressor, and is enhanced when glucose is administered following stressor exposure, suggesting that it is associative in nature. Furthermore, extinction of stressor-context fear blocks this additional associative component of SEFL as well as reinstatement of generalized fear, suggesting reinstatement of generalized fear may underlie this additional SEFL component.

David Aponte, Jonathan Barés, Mathieu Renouf et al.

In this study, we investigate the stability and solid fraction of columns comprised of highly non-convex particles. These particles are constructed by extruding arms onto the faces of Platonic solids, a configuration we term \emph{Platonic polypods}. We explore the emergence and disappearance of solid-like behavior in the absence of adhesive forces between the particles, referred to as \emph{geometric cohesion}. This investigation is conducted by varying the number of arms of the particles and the thickness of these arms. To accomplish this, columns are assembled by depositing particles within a cylindrical container, followed by the removal of the container to evaluate the stability of the resulting structures. Experiments were carried out using three distinct materials to assess the influence of the friction coefficient between the grains. Our findings reveal that certain granular systems exhibit geometric cohesion, depending on their geometrical and contact properties. Furthermore, we analyze the initial solid fraction of the columns, demonstrating that these arrangements can achieve stability even at highly loose states, which contrasts with traditional granular materials.

Kiyono Mizoguchi, Mayu Sato, Rina Saito et al.

Abstract Background The behavioral photosensitivity of animals could be quantified via the optomotor response (OMR), for example, and the luminous efficiency function (the range of visible light) should largely rely on the repertoire and expression of light-absorbing proteins in the retina, i.e., the opsins. In fact, the OMR under red light was suppressed in medaka lacking the red (long-wavelength sensitive [LWS]) opsin. Results We investigated the ultraviolet (UV)- or blue-light sensitivity of medaka lacking the violet (short-wavelength sensitive 1 [SWS1]) and blue (SWS2) opsins. The sws1/sws2 double or sws1/sws2/lws triple mutants were as viable as the wild type. The remaining green (rhodopsin 2 [RH2]) or red opsins were not upregulated. Interestingly, the OMR of the double or triple mutants was equivalent or even increased under UV or blue light (λ = 350, 365, or 450 nm), which demonstrated that the rotating stripes (i.e., changes in luminance) could fully be recognized under UV light using RH2 alone. The OMR test using dichromatic stripes projected onto an RGB display consistently showed that the presence or absence of SWS1 and SWS2 did not affect the equiluminant conditions. Conclusions RH2 and LWS, but not SWS1 and SWS2, should predominantly contribute to the postreceptoral processes leading to the OMR or, possibly, to luminance detection in general, as the medium-wavelength-sensitive and LWS cones, but not the SWS cones, are responsible for luminance detection in humans.

Alexandra Mayn, Vera Demberg

J. Manley, R. Stump, R. Petery et al.

We consider optical fibers as detectors for scalar ultralight dark matter (UDM) and propose using a fiber-based interferometer to search for scalar UDM with particle mass in the range $10^{-17} - 10^{-13}$ eV/$c^2$ $\left(10^{-3}- 10 \text{ Hz}\right)$. Composed of a solid core and a hollow core fiber, the proposed detector would be sensitive to relative oscillations in the fibers' refractive indices due to scalar UDM-induced modulations in the fine-structure constant $α$. We predict that, implementing detector arrays or cryogenic cooling, the proposed optical fiber-based scalar UDM search has the potential to reach new regions of the parameter space. Such a search would be particularly well-suited to probe for a Solar halo of dark matter with a sensitivity exceeding that of previous DM searches over the particle mass range $7\times 10^{-17} - 2\times 10^{-14}$ eV/$c^2$.

Danielle Huisman, Louise Sweeney, Kirsty Bannister et al.

The aim of the study was to explore beliefs about pain and related coping strategies of individuals experiencing abdominal pain during remitted inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), and their perception of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) in the context of IBD. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with 23 participants who self-reported experiences of abdominal pain during remitted IBD. The study was embedded in the constructivism tradition and reflexive thematic analysis was used to analyse the interviews. Results encompass 1) How IBS is perceived; 2) How individuals monitor symptoms to distinguish active from quiescent IBD; 3) Coping strategies employed to navigate the pain; 4)How manageability of pain guides the distinction between active and quiescent disease; v. How context influences pain interpretation and management; 5) What role illness history and health literacy play in the meaning of ongoing pain. The IBS label was perceived by some as invalidating, although it helped some people to worry less about ongoing pain and symptoms during remitted IBD. However, even for the latter individuals, IBS did not bring a clear understanding of painful symptoms. Participants’ responses highlight a need for explanations that incorporate both the complexity of IBD and underlying causes of ongoing pain during remission. Communication would benefit from the appreciation of pain (and symptoms) in the wider context of illness history and health literacy.

Gongyang Li, Zhi Liu, Zhen Bai et al.

Salient object detection in optical remote sensing images (ORSI-SOD) has been widely explored for understanding ORSIs. However, previous methods focus mainly on improving the detection accuracy while neglecting the cost in memory and computation, which may hinder their real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a novel lightweight ORSI-SOD solution, named CorrNet, to address these issues. In CorrNet, we first lighten the backbone (VGG-16) and build a lightweight subnet for feature extraction. Then, following the coarse-to-fine strategy, we generate an initial coarse saliency map from high-level semantic features in a Correlation Module (CorrM). The coarse saliency map serves as the location guidance for low-level features. In CorrM, we mine the object location information between high-level semantic features through the cross-layer correlation operation. Finally, based on low-level detailed features, we refine the coarse saliency map in the refinement subnet equipped with Dense Lightweight Refinement Blocks, and produce the final fine saliency map. By reducing the parameters and computations of each component, CorrNet ends up having only 4.09M parameters and running with 21.09G FLOPs. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate that our lightweight CorrNet achieves competitive or even better performance compared with 26 state-of-the-art methods (including 16 large CNN-based methods and 2 lightweight methods), and meanwhile enjoys the clear memory and run time efficiency. The code and results of our method are available at https://github.com/MathLee/CorrNet.

Eleni Nisioti, Elías Masquil, Gautier Hamon et al.

In the intrinsically motivated skills acquisition problem, the agent is set in an environment without any pre-defined goals and needs to acquire an open-ended repertoire of skills. To do so the agent needs to be autotelic (deriving from the Greek auto (self) and telos (end goal)): it needs to generate goals and learn to achieve them following its own intrinsic motivation rather than external supervision. Autotelic agents have so far been considered in isolation. But many applications of open-ended learning entail groups of agents. Multi-agent environments pose an additional challenge for autotelic agents: to discover and master goals that require cooperation agents must pursue them simultaneously, but they have low chances of doing so if they sample them independently. In this work, we propose a new learning paradigm for modeling such settings, the Decentralized Intrinsically Motivated Skills Acquisition Problem (Dec-IMSAP), and employ it to solve cooperative navigation tasks. First, we show that agents setting their goals independently fail to master the full diversity of goals. Then, we show that a sufficient condition for achieving this is to ensure that a group aligns its goals, i.e., the agents pursue the same cooperative goal. Our empirical analysis shows that alignment enables specialization, an efficient strategy for cooperation. Finally, we introduce the Goal-coordination game, a fully-decentralized emergent communication algorithm, where goal alignment emerges from the maximization of individual rewards in multi-goal cooperative environments and show that it is able to reach equal performance to a centralized training baseline that guarantees aligned goals. To our knowledge, this is the first contribution addressing the problem of intrinsically motivated multi-agent goal exploration in a decentralized training paradigm.

Jan Scott, Florence Vorspan, Josephine Loftus et al.

Eun Jung Choi, Margot J. Taylor, Marlee M. Vandewouw et al.

Attachment security is formed through interactions with a main caregiver during the first three years of life and reflects inter-individual differences in mental representations for the relationship. The striatum is known to be a key structure to initiate attachment behaviours and maintain attachment relationships as well as to modulate reward-related processing as part of the approach module in current neurobiological models of human attachment. Although findings have suggested critical roles of the striatum in inter-individual differences in attachment, most studies were based on a wide variety of tasks and very few have investigated these associations in intrinsic brain connectivity in typically developing children. In the present study, using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examined the striatal functional connectivity according to children’s attachment security in 68 nine-year-olds (Secure attachment = 39, Insecure attachment = 29, mean age/SD = 9.62/0.69). Children with secure attachment demonstrated increased functional connectivity in the tempro-limbic region, compared to children with insecure attachment. In addition, the child-reported attachment security scores were negatively associated with the caudate-prefrontal connectivity, but positively with the putamen-visual area connectivity. These data demonstrate that inter-individual differences in attachment can be captured in striatal functional connectivity organization in the typical brain.

Yiyun Luo, Will Wei Sun, and Yufeng Liu

Contextual dynamic pricing aims to set personalized prices based on sequential interactions with customers. At each time period, a customer who is interested in purchasing a product comes to the platform. The customer's valuation for the product is a linear function of contexts, including product and customer features, plus some random market noise. The seller does not observe the customer's true valuation, but instead needs to learn the valuation by leveraging contextual information and historical binary purchase feedbacks. Existing models typically assume full or partial knowledge of the random noise distribution. In this paper, we consider contextual dynamic pricing with unknown random noise in the valuation model. Our distribution-free pricing policy learns both the contextual function and the market noise simultaneously. A key ingredient of our method is a novel perturbed linear bandit framework, where a modified linear upper confidence bound algorithm is proposed to balance the exploration of market noise and the exploitation of the current knowledge for better pricing. We establish the regret upper bound and a matching lower bound of our policy in the perturbed linear bandit framework and prove a sub-linear regret bound in the considered pricing problem. Finally, we demonstrate the superior performance of our policy on simulations and a real-life auto-loan dataset.

Sima Nabipoor Gisi, Amin Rafieepoor, Kobra Haji Alizadeh

Aim and Background: Cancer is one of the most common chronic diseases that its patients face with various psychological problems; therefore, methods should be sought to reduce the severity of the psychological problems among these patients. Therefore this study was done aimed to evaluate of effectiveness of Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) on psychological symptoms of patients with cancer. Methods and Materials: It was a semi-experimental research and has been executed by pre-test and post-test with control group. The research population included all patients with cancer who referred to Shahid Mohammadi Hospital in Bandar Abbas. It contained 30 cancer patients who were selected through purposive sampling method and randomly placed in two experimental and control groups (15 individuals per group).The members of both groups completed the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS) before and after the sessions of group therapy (within three months). Findings have been analyzed by SPSS software and covariance analysis (ANCOVA). Findings: The results showed that the difference between experimental group and control group were significant respectively in psychological symptoms of depression (F= 84.11, p<0.001), anxiety (F= 47.52, p<0.001) and stress (F= 59.51, p<0.001). Conclusions: According to the results, it can be said that it is necessary for therapeutic centers and support forums related with cancer patients to use MBCT in their plans to reduce psychological symptoms of patients.

Maya L. Rosen, Andrew N. Meltzoff, Margaret A. Sheridan et al.

Childhood socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with numerous aspects of cognitive development and disparities in academic achievement. The specific environmental factors that contribute to these disparities remain poorly understood. We used observational methods to characterize three aspects of the early environment that may contribute to SES-related differences in cognitive development: violence exposure, cognitive stimulation, and quality of the physical environment. We evaluated the associations of these environmental characteristics with associative memory, cued attention, and memory-guided attention in a sample of 101 children aged 60–75 months. We further investigated whether these specific cognitive abilities mediated the association between SES and academic achievement 18 months later. Violence exposure was specifically associated with poor associative memory, but not cued attention or memory-guided attention. Cognitive stimulation and higher quality physical environment were positively associated with cued attention accuracy, but not after adjusting for all other environmental variables. The quality of the physical environment was associated with memory-guided attention accuracy. Of the cognitive abilities examined, only memory-guided attention contributed to SES-related differences in academic achievement. These findings suggest specificity in how particular aspects of early environmental experience scaffold different types of attention and memory subserved by distinct neural circuits and shed light on a novel cognitive-developmental mechanism underlying SES-related disparities in academic achievement. Keywords: Cognitive stimulation, Violence exposure, Physical environment, Attention, Memory, Socioeconomic status