Is conscious awareness needed for all working memory processes?

Stein and colleagues argue there is no yet conclusive evidence for nonconscious working memory (WM) and that is critical to probe WM while ensuring null sensitivity to memory cues. While this stringent approach reduces the likelihood of nonconscious signaling for WM, we discuss existing work meeting this null sensitivity criteria, and, related work on nonconscious cognition in keeping with WM/awareness dissociations on the basis of a functional operational definition of WM. Further, because it is likely that WM is a nonunitary functional construct and visual awareness a gradual phenomenon, we propose that delineating the neural mechanisms for distinct WM types across different levels of awareness may prove the most fruitful approach for understanding the interplay between WM and consciousness.

You Should Never Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth: One-Size-Fits-All Compensation in Wrongful Conception

This article reconsiders the House of Lords decision in Rees v. Darlington Memorial Hospital NHS Trust (2003) and the decision to award a conventional award of £15,000 in all cases of failed sterilisation resulting in the birth of an unwanted child. In so doing, it briefly recites the history of the Wrongful Conception action and the unique facts of Rees. It then goes on the consider the implications of two fundamental aspects of the judgment. Firstly, it looks at the 'conventional award' itself and considers the reasoning behind the award and the effect that it has on our understanding of (particularly women's) reproductive autonomy. Secondly, it analyses the rather 'unique' judgment of Lord Scott and his decision to evaluate these cases using the possessory analogy of an unwanted foal; particular focus is given to the notion of parental 'choice' in these cases and whether mitigation (i.e. abortion or adoption) can ever be considered "reasonable".

What is universal and what differs in language development?

Goldin-Meadow (2015) presents an exceptional synthesis of work from studies of children acquiring language under variable circumstances of input or processing abilities. Deaf children who acquire homesign without any well- formed model from which to learn language represent a powerful example. Goldin-Meadow argues that the resilient properties of language that nevertheless emerge include simple syntactic structures, hierarchical organisa- tion, markers modulating the meaning of sentences, and social-communicative functions. Among the fragile or input-dependent properties are the orders that the language follows, the parts into which words are decomposed, and the features that distinguish nominals from predicates. Separation of these two types of properties poses questions concerning the innate constraints on language acquisition (perhaps these equate to the resilient properties) and con‐ cerning the specificity of processes to language (e.g., whether properties such as hierarchical organisation are specific to language or originate in the structure of thought). The study of the resilient properties of human language in the face of adversity and the relation of these properties to the information that is encoded in the human genome represent a research strategy that draws inferences about species universals (properties that all humans share) from data about individual differences (IDs; factors that make humans different from one another). In the following, we suggest three reasons to be cautious about this approach.

Low Complexity All-Pass Based Polyphase Decimation Filters for ECG Monitoring

This paper presents a low complexity high efficiency decimation filter which can be employed in EletroCardioGram (ECG) acquisition systems. The decimation filter with a decimation ratio of 128 works along with a third order sigma delta modulator. It is designed in four stages to reduce cost and power consumption. The work reported here provides an efficient approach for the decimation process for high resolution biomedical data conversion applications by employing low complexity two-path all-pass based decimation filters. The performance of the proposed decimation chain was validated by using the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database and comparative simulations were conducted with the state of the art.