Hasil untuk "Neurophysiology and neuropsychology"

Tanja Auge, Sascha Genehr, Meike Klettke and et al.

Provenance information are essential for the traceability of scientific studies or experiments and thus crucial for ensuring the credibility and reproducibility of research findings. This paper discusses a comprehensive provenance framework combining the two types 1. workflow provenance, and 2. data provenance as well as their dimensions and granularity, which enables the answering of W7+1 provenance questions. We demonstrate the applicability by employing a biomedical research use case, that can be easily transferred into other scientific fields. An integration of these concepts into a unified framework enables credibility and reproducibility of the research findings.

A. Kaan Ata Yilmaz, Abhishek Kulkarni, Ufuk Topcu

In multiplayer games with sequential decision-making, self-interested players form dynamic coalitions to achieve most-preferred temporal goals beyond their individual capabilities. We introduce a novel procedure to synthesize strategies that jointly determine which coalitions should form and the actions coalition members should choose to satisfy their preferences in a subclass of deterministic multiplayer games on graphs. In these games, a leader decides the coalition during each round and the players not in the coalition follow their admissible strategies. Our contributions are threefold. First, we extend the concept of admissibility to games on graphs with preferences and characterize it using maximal sure winning, a concept originally defined for adversarial two-player games with preferences. Second, we define a value function that assigns a vector to each state, identifying which player has a maximal sure winning strategy for certain subset of objectives. Finally, we present a polynomial-time algorithm to synthesize admissible strategies for all players based on this value function and prove their existence in all games within the chosen subclass. We illustrate the benefits of dynamic coalitions over fixed ones in a blocks-world domain. Interestingly, our experiment reveals that aligned preferences do not always encourage cooperation, while conflicting preferences do not always lead to adversarial behavior.

Amel Amara, Baha Eddine Somii, Hamdi El Kefi et al.

Background: Medical students are future physicians, so it is important that they adopt compassionate attitudes toward suicidal patients and possess a good level of suicide literacy. we aimed to evaluate stigmatizing beliefs and suicide literacy among medical students and identify the factors that influence stigmatizing beliefs and suicide literacy among medical students. Methods: This was a cross-sectional study conducted on a representative sample of medical students at Faculty of medicine of Sousse during the 2022–2023 academic year. A . Results: The total number of students included was 265, of whom 65% were female. T Regarding suicide-related history, 38% had experienced suicidal thoughts and 20% had attempted suicide. The average LOSS (Literacy of Suicide Scale) score was 4.17. The average scores for the subdimensions of the SOSS (Stigma of Suicide Scale) – Stigmatization, Glorification, and Isolation – were 2.27, 2.41, and 3.4, respectively. Multivariate analysis showed that having a family member with a history of suicide was associated with a higher level of suicide literacy (p < 0.001). Being male (p < 0.001) and not passing the psychiatry exam (p < 0.001) were associated with more stigmatizing attitudes toward suicide. Conclusion: Students at our faculty demonstrated a low level of suicide literacy. They did not exhibit stigmatizing attitudes toward suicide. The theoretical and practical teaching module had an impact on suicide stigma but not on literacy levels.

Miguel F. Arevalo-Castiblanco, Eduardo Mojica-Nava and, César A. Uribe

We propose a robust adaptive online synchronization method for leader-follower networks of nonlinear heterogeneous agents with system uncertainties and input magnitude saturation. Synchronization is achieved using a Distributed input Magnitude Saturation Adaptive Control with Reinforcement Learning (DMSAC-RL), which improves the empirical performance of policies trained on off-the-shelf models using Reinforcement Learning (RL) strategies. The leader observes the performance of a reference model, and followers observe the states and actions of the agents they are connected to, but not the reference model. The leader and followers may differ from the reference model in which the RL control policy was trained. DMSAC-RL uses an internal loop that adjusts the learned policy for the agents in the form of augmented input to solve the distributed control problem, including input-matched uncertainty parameters. We show that the synchronization error of the heterogeneous network is Uniformly Ultimately Bounded (UUB). Numerical analysis of a network of Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) systems supports our theoretical findings.

Victoria Leong, Marina Kalashnikova, Denis Burnham et al.

Rachel C. Rice, Daniela V. Gil, Annalisa M. Baratta et al.

Chronic stress and alcohol (ethanol) use are highly interrelated and can change an individual’s behavior through molecular adaptations that do not change the DNA sequence, but instead change gene expression. A recent wealth of research has found that these nongenomic changes can be transmitted across generations, which could partially account for the “missing heritability” observed in genome-wide association studies of alcohol use disorder and other stress-related neuropsychiatric disorders. In this review, we summarize the molecular and behavioral outcomes of nongenomic inheritance of chronic stress and ethanol exposure and the germline mechanisms that could give rise to this heritability. In doing so, we outline the need for further research to: (1) Investigate individual germline mechanisms of paternal, maternal, and biparental nongenomic chronic stress- and ethanol-related inheritance; (2) Synthesize and dissect cross-generational chronic stress and ethanol exposure; (3) Determine cross-generational molecular outcomes of preconception ethanol exposure that contribute to alcohol-related disease risk, using cancer as an example. A detailed understanding of the cross-generational nongenomic effects of stress and/or ethanol will yield novel insight into the impact of ancestral perturbations on disease risk across generations and uncover actionable targets to improve human health.

Wei Huang, Xingyu Zheng, Xudong Ma et al.

Abstract The LLaMA family, a collection of foundation language models ranging from 7B to 65B parameters, has become one of the most powerful open-source large language models (LLMs) and the popular LLM backbone of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs), widely used in computer vision and natural language understanding tasks. In particular, LLaMA3 models have recently been released and have achieved impressive performance in various domains with super-large scale pre-training on over 15T tokens of data. Given the wide application of low-bit quantization for LLMs in resource-constrained scenarios, we explore LLaMA3’s capabilities when quantized to low bit-width. This exploration can potentially provide new insights and challenges for the low-bit quantization of LLaMA3 and other future LLMs, especially in addressing performance degradation issues that suffer in LLM compression. Specifically, we comprehensively evaluate the 10 existing post-training quantization and LoRA fine-tuning (LoRA-FT) methods of LLaMA3 on 1-8 bits and various datasets to reveal the low-bit quantization performance of LLaMA3. To uncover the capabilities of low-bit quantized MLLM, we assessed the performance of the LLaMA3-based LLaVA-Next-8B model under 2-4 ultra-low bits with post-training quantization methods. Our experimental results indicate that LLaMA3 still suffers from non-negligible degradation in linguistic and visual contexts, particularly under ultra-low bit widths. This highlights the significant performance gap at low bit-width that needs to be addressed in future developments. We expect that this empirical study will prove valuable in advancing future models, driving LLMs and MLLMs to achieve higher accuracy at lower bit to enhance practicality.

Eva C. Bach, Jeff L. Weiner

With the recent rise in the rate of alcohol use disorder (AUD) in women, the historical gap between men and women living with this condition is narrowing. While there are many commonalities in how men and women are impacted by AUD, an accumulating body of evidence is revealing sex-dependent adaptations that may require distinct therapeutic approaches. Preclinical rodent studies are beginning to shed light on sex differences in the effects of chronic alcohol exposure on synaptic activity in a number of brain regions. Prior studies from our laboratory revealed that, while withdrawal from chronic intermittent ethanol (CIE), a commonly used model of AUD, increased excitability in the ventral hippocampus (vHC) of male rats, this same treatment had the opposite effect in females. A follow-up study not only expanded on the synaptic mechanisms of these findings in male rats, but also established a CIE-dependent increase in the excitatory-inhibitory (E-I) balance of a glutamatergic projection from the basolateral amygdala to vHC (BLA-vHC). This pathway modulates anxiety-like behavior and could help explain the comorbid occurrence of anxiety disorders in individuals suffering from AUD. The present study sought to conduct a similar analysis of CIE effects on both synaptic mechanisms in the vHC and adaptations in the BLA-vHC pathway of female rats. Our findings indicate that CIE increases the strength of inhibitory neurotransmission in the vHC and that this sex-specific adaptation blocks, or at least delays, the increases in intrinsic vHC excitability and BLA-vHC synaptic transmission observed in males. Our findings establish the BLA-vHC pathway and the vHC as important circuitry to consider for future studies directed at identifying sex-dependent therapeutic approaches to AUD.

Um-e- Rubbab, Muhammad Irshad, Sidra Abid et al.

There has been an increase in ethical misconduct among employees of service organizations which has fostered the need for awareness about such ethical practices that may promote employees’ constructive behaviors. The current study aims to extend the work on Islamic work ethics by studying its impact on influencing employee voice behavior through the underlying link of employee felt obligation for constructive change. It is proposed that employee sanctification may further serve as a boundary condition and enhance the positive relationship between Islamic work ethics and felt obligation for constructive change. Data (n = 343) felt obligation for constructive change, and both dimensions of voice behavior were collected from employees working in the health sector of Pakistan in three-time lags through questionnaires. Results of the study supported the mediation of felt obligation for constructive change between Islamic work ethics and employee voice behavior. Employee sanctification moderates the relationship between Islamic work ethics and felt obligation for constructive change. The findings of the study provide theoretical and practical implications. Limitations of the research and future directions have also been discussed.

Jinlin Pan, Rongchuan Zhao, Caihua Dong et al.

Abstract Background Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common malignant intracranial tumor with a low survival rate. However, only few drugs responsible for GBM therpies, hence new drug development for it is highly required. The natural product Cudraflavone B (CUB) has been reported to potentially kill a variety of tumor cells. Currently, its anit-cancer effect on GBM still remains unknown. Herein, we investigated whether CUB could affect the proliferation and apoptosis of GBM cells to show anti-GBM potential. Results CUB selectively inhibited cell viability and induced cell apoptosis by activating the endoplasmic reticulum stress (ER stress) related pathway, as well as harnessing the autophagy-related PI3K/mTOR/LC3B signaling pathway. Typical morphological changes of autophagy were also observed in CUB treated cells by microscope and scanning electron microscope (SEM) examination. 4-Phenylbutyric acid (4-PBA), an ER stress inhibitor, restored the CUB-caused alteration in signaling pathway and morphological change. Conclusions Our finding suggests that CUB impaired cell growth and induced cell apoptosis of glioblastoma through ER stress and autophagy-related signaling pathways, and it might be an attractive drug for treatment of GBM.

Lauren M. Smith, Julia Yurkovic-Harding, Leslie J. Carver

Joint attention (JA) is an early-developing behavior that allows caregivers and infants to share focus on an object. Deficits in JA, as measured through face-following pathways, are a defining feature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and are observable as early as 12 months of age in infants later diagnosed with ASD. However, recent evidence suggests that JA may be achieved through hand-following pathways by children with and without ASD. Development of JA through multimodal pathways has yet to be studied in infants with an increased likelihood of developing ASD. The current study investigated how 6-, 9- and 12-month-old infants with (FH+) and without (FH-) a family history of ASD engaged in JA. Parent-infant dyads played at home while we recorded the interaction over Zoom and later offline coded for hand movements and gaze. FH+ and FH- infants spent similar amounts of time in JA with their parents, but the cues available before JA were different. Parents of FH+ infants did more work to establish JA and used more face-following than hand-following pathways compared to parents of FH- infants, likely reflecting differences in infant motor or social behavior. These results suggest that early motor differences between FH+ and FH- infants may cascade into differences in social coordination.

Raghottam M. Sattigeri, Prafulla K. Jha, Piotr Śpiewak and et al.

Quantum materials such as Topological Insulators (TI) have been promising due to diverse applications of their robust surface/edge states in the bulk (3D) and two-dimensional (2D) regime. Such conducting surface states in 3D systems, host "\textit{electron bath}" which are known to facilitate catalysis. However, the analogous effects in 2D scenarios wherein, conducting helical edge states giving rise to Fermionic accumulation has been scarcely addressed. Using density functional theory based \textit{first-principles} calculations, we demonstrate that, the conducting edge states in 2D TI such as LiMgAs can be exploited to facilitate excellent catalytic response towards Hydrogen evolution reactions. The Gibbs free energy in such cases was found to be as low as $-$0.02 eV which is quite superior as compared to other materials reported in literature. The concept presented herein can be extended to other well known 2D TI and used to realise novel topological quantum catalysts for ultra-high performance and efficient catalytic applications.

Mojtaba Rahimi, Mohammad Malekmohammad, Majid Taghavi et al.

In this paper, a differential MOEMS accelerometer based on the Fabry-Perot (FP) micro-cavities is presented. The optical system of the device consists of two FP cavities and the mechanical system is composed of a proof mass that is suspended by four springs. The applied acceleration tends to move the PM from its resting position. This mechanical displacement can be measured by the FP interferometer formed between the proof mass cross-section and the optical fiber end face. The proposed sensor is fabricated on a silicon on insulator (SOI) wafer using the bulk micromachining method. The results of the sensor characterization show that the accelerometer has a linear response in the range of 1g. Also, the optical sensitivity and resolution of the sensor in the static characterization are 6.52 nm/g and 153ug. The sensor sensitivity in the power measurement is 49.6 mV/g and its resonant is at 1372 Hz. Using the differential measurement method increases the sensitivity of the accelerometer. Based on experimental data, the sensor sensitivity is two times as high as that of a similar MOEMS accelerometer with one FP cavity.

Sumedh Vilas Datar and, Jesus Gonzales Bernal

A portrait is a painting, drawing, photograph, or engraving of a person, especially one depicting only the face or head and shoulders. In the digital world the portrait of a person is captured by having the person as a subject in the image and capturing the image of the person such that the background is blurred. DSLRs generally do it by reducing the aperture to focus on very close regions of interest and automatically blur the background. In this paper I have come up with a novel approach to replicate the portrait mode from DSLR using any smartphone to generate high quality portrait images.

Nabarun Chakrabarty, Partha Konar, Rishav Roshan and et al.

If coupled \emph{feebly} to the Standard Model bath, a dark matter can evade the severe constraints from the direct search experiments. At the same time, such interactions help produce dark matter via the freeze-in mechanism. The freeze-in scenario becomes more interesting if one also includes the thermal masses of the different particles involved in the dark matter phenomenology. Incorporating such thermal corrections opens up the possibility of dark matter production via forbidden channels that remain kinematically disallowed in the standard freeze-in setup. Motivated by this, we investigate such freeze-in production of the dark matter in a minimally extended $U(1)_{L_μ-L_τ}$ framework that remains consistent with the recent muon $(g-2)$ data. Here, the role of the dark matter is played by the scalar with a non-trivial charge under the additional symmetry $U(1)_{L_μ-L_τ}$. This scalar dark matter obtains a thermally corrected mass at high temperatures for a not-so-small self-coupling. We show that the thermal correction to the dark matter mass plays a significant role in the dark matter phenomenology.

Remko Fermin, Bob de Wit and, Jan Aarts

The magnetic field dependent critical current $I_{\text{c}}(B)$ of a Josephson junction is determined by the screening currents in its electrodes. In macroscopic junctions, a local vector potential drives the currents, however, in thin film planar junctions, with electrodes of finite size and various shapes, they are governed by non-local electrodynamics. This complicates the extraction of parameters such as the geometry of the effective junction area, the effective junction length and, the critical current density distribution from the $I_{\text{c}}(B)$ interference patterns. Here we provide a method to tackle this problem by simulating the phase differences that drive the shielding currents and use those to find $I_{\text{c}}(B)$. To this end, we extend the technique proposed by John Clem [Phys. Rev. B, \textbf{81}, 144515 (2010)] to find $I_{\text{c}}(B)$ for Josephson junctions separating a superconducting strip of length $L$ and width $W$ with rectangular, ellipsoid and rhomboid geometries. We find the periodicity of the interference pattern ($ΔB$) to have geometry independent limits for $L \gg W$ and $L \ll W$. By fabricating elliptically shaped S$-$N$-$S junctions with various aspect ratios, we experimentally verify the $L/W$ dependence of $ΔB$. Finally, we incorporate these results to correctly extract the distribution of critical currents in the junction by the Fourier analysis of $I_{\text{c}}(B)$, which makes these results essential for the correct analysis of topological channels in thin film planar Josephson junctions.

Narges Khaton akram, Nemat Sotodeh Asl, raheb ghorbani et al.

Aim and Background: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease is one of the diseases that can limit the function of the lungs and consequently the function of the patient's whole body. Therefore, research related to this disease can be effective. Therefore, the aim of this study was to explain the severity of symptoms in patients with COPD based on health-promoting style with a mediating role of personality traits. Methods and Materials: The present study was descriptive and structural equation modeling. The statistical population of this study included all patients with COPD who referred to the health center of Kosar Hospital in Semnan for a period of 1 year from April to March 2016. 205 people were selected by random sampling method and completed the research questionnaires. Data were analyzed by Pearson correlation and structural equation modeling using SPSSV19 and LISRELV8.80 software. Findings: The results showed that health promotion has a negative and significant effect on neurosis and disease severity. Health promotion has a positive and significant effect on other personality traits (P<0.01). The results also showed that the health-promoting lifestyle variable has an indirect and significant effect on the severity of symptoms due to extraversion (-0.13) and conscientiousness (-0.15). Conclusions: The findings of this study indicate that the variables of personality traits and health-promoting style were related to the severity of symptoms in patients with COPD and had a direct and indirect effect on it. Therefore, experts' knowledge of these variables can help to improve the lifestyle of people with COPD.

Yuhao Liu, Jiake Xie, Yu Qiao et al.

Image matting is an ill-posed problem that aims to estimate the opacity of foreground pixels in an image. However, most existing deep learning-based methods still suffer from the coarse-grained details. In general, these algorithms are incapable of felicitously distinguishing the degree of exploration between deterministic domains (certain FG and BG pixels) and undetermined domains (uncertain in-between pixels), or inevitably lose information in the continuous sampling process, leading to a sub-optimal result. In this paper, we propose a novel network named Prior-Induced Information Alignment Matting Network (PIIAMatting), which can efficiently model the distinction of pixel-wise response maps and the correlation of layer-wise feature maps. It mainly consists of a Dynamic Gaussian Modulation mechanism (DGM) and an Information Alignment strategy (IA). Specifically, the DGM can dynamically acquire a pixel-wise domain response map learned from the prior distribution. The response map can present the relationship between the opacity variation and the convergence process during training. On the other hand, the IA comprises an Information Match Module (IMM) and an Information Aggregation Module (IAM), jointly scheduled to match and aggregate the adjacent layer-wise features adaptively. Besides, we also develop a Multi-Scale Refinement (MSR) module to integrate multi-scale receptive field information at the refinement stage to recover the fluctuating appearance details. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that the proposed PIIAMatting performs favourably against state-of-the-art image matting methods on the Alphamatting.com, Composition-1K and Distinctions-646 dataset.

Nahuel Barrios, John A. Gracey, Marcela Peláez and et al.

We evaluate all two-point correlation functions of the Curci-Ferrari (CF) model in four dimensions and in the presence of mass-degenerate fundamental quark flavors, as a natural extension of an earlier investigation in the quenched approximation. In principle, the proper account of chiral symmetry breaking ($χ$SB) and the corresponding dynamical generation of a quark mass function within the CF model requires one to go beyond perturbation theory \cite{Pelaez:2020ups}. However, it is interesting to assess whether a perturbative description applies to correlation functions that are not directly sensitive to $χ$SB, such as the gluon, ghost and quark dressing functions. We compare our two-loop results for these form factors to QCD lattice data in the two flavor case for two different values of the pion mass, one that is relatively far from the chiral limit, and one that is closer to the physical value. Our results confirm that the QCD gluon and ghost dressing functions are well described by a perturbative approach within the CF model, as already observed at one-loop order in Ref. \cite{Pelaez:2014mxa}. Our new main result is that the quark dressing function is also well captured by the perturbative approach, but only starting at two-loop order, as also anticipated in Ref. \cite{Pelaez:2014mxa}. The quark mass function predicted by the CF model at two-loop order is in good agreement with the data if the quarks are not too light but shows some clear tension with respect to the two-loop CF dressing functions in the close to physical case, as expected. Interestingly, however, we find that there is much less tension between the non-perturbative quark mass function, as it can be obtained from lattice simulations or from \cite{Pelaez:2020ups}, and the two-loop CF dressing functions, which confirms the perturbative nature of the latter.

Ioannis Zaganas, Pelagia Vorgia, Martha Spilioti et al.

We describe a cohort of 10 unrelated Greek patients (4 females, 6 males; median age 6.5 years, range 2–18 years) with heterogeneous epilepsy syndromes with a genetic basis. In these patients, causative genetic variants, including two novel ones, were identified in 9 known epilepsy-related genes through whole exome sequencing. A patient with glycine encephalopathy was a compound heterozygote for the p.Arg222Cys and the p.Ser77Leu AMT variant. A patient affected with Lafora disease carried the homozygous p.Arg171His EPM2A variant. A de novo heterozygous variant in the GABRG2 gene (p.Pro282Thr) was found in one patient and a pathogenic variant in the GRIN2B gene (p.Gly820Val) in another patient. Infantile-onset lactic acidosis with seizures was associated with the p.Arg446Ter PDHX gene variant in one patient. In two additional epilepsy patients, the p.Ala1662Val and the novel non-sense p.Phe1330Ter SCN1A gene variants were found. Finally, in 3 patients we observed a novel heterozygous missense variant in SCN2A (p.Ala1874Thr), a heterozygous splice site variant in SLC2A1 (c.517-2A>G), as a cause of Glut1 deficiency syndrome, and a pathogenic variant in STXBP1 (p.Arg292Leu), respectively. In half of our cases (patients with variants in the GRIN2B, SCN1A, SCN2A and SLC2A1 genes), a genetic cause with potential management implications was identified.