Loads and loads and loads: the influence of prospective load, retrospective load, and ongoing task load in prospective memory

In prospective memory tasks different kinds of load can occur. Adding a prospective memory task can impose a load on ongoing task performance. Adding ongoing task load (OTL) can affect prospective memory performance. The existence of multiple target events increases prospective load (PL) and adding complexity to the to-be-remembered action increases retrospective load (RL). In two experiments, we systematically examined the effects of these different types of load on prospective memory performance. Results showed an effect of PL on costs in the ongoing task for categorical targets (Experiment 2), but not for specific targets (Experiment 1). RL and OTL both affected remembering the retrospective component of the prospective memory task. We suggest that PL can enhance costs in the ongoing task due to additional monitoring requirements. RL and OTL seem to impact the division of resources between the ongoing task and retrieval of the retrospective component, which may affect disengagement from the ongoing task. In general, the results demonstrate that the different types of load affect prospective memory differentially.

Influence of muscle fiber orientation on water and metabolite relaxation times, magnetization transfer, and visibility in human skeletal muscle

PURPOSE To gain a deeper understanding of the influence of skeletal muscle fiber orientation on metabolite visibility, magnetization transfer from water, and water proton relaxation rates in (1) H MR spectra. METHODS Non-water-suppressed MR spectroscopy was performed in tibialis anterior muscle (TA) of 10 healthy adults, with the TA oriented either parallel or at the magic angle to the 3T field. Spectra were acquired with metabolite-cycled PRESS, and water inversion from 50 to 2510 ms before excitation. Water proton T2 relaxation was sampled with STEAM with echo times from 12 to 272 ms. RESULTS Apparent concentrations of total creatine (tCr), taurine, and trimethylammonium compounds were reduced by 29% to 67% when TA was parallel to B0 . Both tCr peak areas were strongly correlated to the methylene peak splitting. Magnetization transfer rates from water to tCr CH3 were not significantly different between orientations. Water T1 s were similar between orientations, but T2 s were statistically significantly shorter by 1 ms in the parallel orientation (P = 0.002). CONCLUSION Muscle metabolite visibilities in MR spectroscopy and water T2 times depend substantially on muscle fiber orientation relative to B0 . In contrast, magnetization transfer rates appear to depend on muscle composition, rather than fiber orientation. Magn Reson Med, 2015. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Neglect and Motion Stimuli - Insights from a Touchscreen-Based Cancellation Task

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: In stroke patients, neglect diagnostic is often performed by means of paper-pencil cancellation tasks. These tasks entail static stimuli, and provide no information concerning possible changes in the severity of neglect symptoms when patients are confronted with motion. We therefore aimed to directly contrast the cancellation behaviour of neglect patients under static and dynamic conditions. Since visual field deficits often occur in neglect patients, we analysed whether the integrity of the optic radiation would influence cancellation behaviour. METHODS: Twenty-five patients with left spatial neglect after right-hemispheric stroke were tested with a touchscreen cancellation task, once when the evenly distributed targets were stationary, and once when the identic targets moved with constant speed on a random path. The integrity of the right optic radiation was analysed by means of a hodologic probabilistic approach. RESULTS: Motion influenced the cancellation behaviour of neglect patients, and the direction of this influence (i.e., an increase or decrease of neglect severity) was modulated by the integrity of the right optic radiation. In patients with an intact optic radiation, the severity of neglect significantly decreased in the dynamic condition. Conversely, in patients with damage to the optic radiation, the severity of neglect significantly increased in the dynamic condition. CONCLUSION: Motion may influence neglect in stroke patients. The integrity of the optic radiation may be a predictor of whether motion increases or decreases the severity of neglect symptoms.

EAACI IG Biologicals task force paper on the use of biologic agents in allergic disorders.

Biologic agents (also termed biologicals or biologics) are therapeutics that are synthesized by living organisms and directed against a specific determinant, for example, a cytokine or receptor. In inflammatory and autoimmune diseases, biologicals have revolutionized the treatment of several immune-mediated disorders. Biologicals have also been tested in allergic disorders. These include agents targeting IgE; T helper 2 (Th2)-type and Th2-promoting cytokines, including interleukin-4 (IL-4), IL-5, IL-9, IL-13, IL-31, and thymic stromal lymphopoietin (TSLP); pro-inflammatory cytokines, such as IL-1β, IL-12, IL-17A, IL-17F, IL-23, and tumor necrosis factor (TNF); chemokine receptor CCR4; and lymphocyte surface and adhesion molecules, including CD2, CD11a, CD20, CD25, CD52, and OX40 ligand. In this task force paper of the Interest Group on Biologicals of the European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, we review biologicals that are currently available or tested for the use in various allergic and urticarial pathologies, by providing an overview on their state of development, area of use, adverse events, and future research directions.

ERS task force statement: diagnosis and treatment of primary spontaneous pneumothorax.

Primary spontaneous pneumothorax (PSP) affects young healthy people with a significant recurrence rate. Recent advances in treatment have been variably implemented in clinical practice. This statement reviews the latest developments and concepts to improve clinical management and stimulate further research.The European Respiratory Society's Scientific Committee established a multidisciplinary team of pulmonologists and surgeons to produce a comprehensive review of available scientific evidence.Smoking remains the main risk factor of PSP. Routine smoking cessation is advised. More prospective data are required to better define the PSP population and incidence of recurrence. In first episodes of PSP, treatment approach is driven by symptoms rather than PSP size. The role of bullae rupture as the cause of air leakage remains unclear, implying that any treatment of PSP recurrence includes pleurodesis. Talc poudrage pleurodesis by thoracoscopy is safe, provided calibrated talc is available. Video-assisted thoracic surgery is preferred to thoracotomy as a surgical approach.In first episodes of PSP, aspiration is required only in symptomatic patients. After a persistent or recurrent PSP, definitive treatment including pleurodesis is undertaken. Future randomised controlled trials comparing different strategies are required.

Visibility of lipid resonances in HR-MAS spectra of brain biopsies subject to spinning rate variation.

Lipid resonances from mobile lipids can be observed by (1)H NMR spectroscopy in multiple tissues and have also been associated with malignancy. In order to use lipid resonances as a marker for disease, a reference standard from a healthy tissue has to be established taking the influence of variable factors like the spinning rate into account. The purpose of our study was to investigate the effect of spinning rate variation on the HR-MAS pattern of lipid resonances in non-neoplastic brain biopsies from different regions and visualize polar and non-polar lipids by fluorescence microscopy using Nile Red staining. (1)H HR-MAS NMR spectroscopy demonstrated higher lipid peak intensities in normal sheep brain pure white matter biopsies compared to mixed white and gray matter biopsies and pure gray matter biopsies. High spinning rates increased the visibility particularly of the methyl resonances at 1.3 and the methylene resonance at 0.89ppm in white matter biopsies stronger compared to thalamus and brainstem biopsies, and gray matter biopsies. The absence of lipid droplets and presence of a large number of myelin sheaths observed in white matter by Nile Red fluorescence microscopy suggest that the observed lipid resonances originate from the macromolecular pool of lipid protons of the myelin sheath's plasma membranes. When using lipid contents as a marker for disease, the variable behavior of lipid resonances in different neuroanatomical regions of the brain and at variable spinning rates should be considered. The findings may open up interesting possibilities for investigating lipids in myelin sheaths.

Report of a European Society of Cardiology-European Association of Percutaneous Cardiovascular Interventions task force on the evaluation of coronary stents in Europe: executive summary.

The evaluation for European Union market approval of coronary stents falls under the Medical Device Directive that was adopted in 1993. Specific requirements for the assessment of coronary stents are laid out in supplementary advisory documents. In response to a call by the European Commission to make recommendations for a revision of the advisory document on the evaluation of coronary stents (Appendix 1 of MEDDEV 2.7.1), the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) and the European Association of Percutaneous Cardiovascular Interventions (EAPCI) established a Task Force to develop an expert advisory report. As basis for its report, the ESC-EAPCI Task Force reviewed existing processes, established a comprehensive list of all coronary drug-eluting stents that have received a CE mark to date, and undertook a systematic review of the literature of all published randomized clinical trials evaluating clinical and angiographic outcomes of coronary artery stents between 2002 and 2013. Based on these data, the TF provided recommendations to inform a new regulatory process for coronary stents. The main recommendations of the task force include implementation of a standardized non-clinical assessment of stents and a novel clinical evaluation pathway for market approval. The two-stage clinical evaluation plan includes recommendation for an initial pre-market trial with objective performance criteria (OPC) benchmarking using invasive imaging follow-up leading to conditional CE-mark approval and a subsequent mandatory, large-scale randomized trial with clinical endpoint evaluation leading to unconditional CE-mark. The data analysis from the systematic review of the Task Force may provide a basis for determination of OPC for use in future studies. This paper represents an executive summary of the Task Force's report.

Prestimulus default mode activity influences depth of processing and recognition in an emotional memory task

Low self-referential thoughts are associated with better concentration, which leads to deeper encoding and increases learning and subsequent retrieval. There is evidence that being engaged in externally rather than internally focused tasks is related to low neural activity in the default mode network (DMN) promoting open mind and the deep elaboration of new information. Thus, reduced DMN activity should lead to enhanced concentration, comprehensive stimulus evaluation including emotional categorization, deeper stimulus processing, and better long-term retention over one whole week. In this fMRI study, we investigated brain activation preceding and during incidental encoding of emotional pictures and on subsequent recognition performance. During fMRI, 24 subjects were exposed to 80 pictures of different emotional valence and subsequently asked to complete an online recognition task one week later. Results indicate that neural activity within the medial temporal lobes during encoding predicts subsequent memory performance. Moreover, a low activity of the default mode network preceding incidental encoding leads to slightly better recognition performance independent of the emotional perception of a picture. The findings indicate that the suppression of internally-oriented thoughts leads to a more comprehensive and thorough evaluation of a stimulus and its emotional valence. Reduced activation of the DMN prior to stimulus onset is associated with deeper encoding and enhanced consolidation and retrieval performance even one week later. Even small prestimulus lapses of attention influence consolidation and subsequent recognition performance. Hum Brain Mapp, 2015. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Partitioning the Choice Task Makes Starbucks Coffee Taste Better

Consumers are often less satisfied with a product chosen from a large assortment than a limited one. Experienced choice difficulty presumably causes this as consumers have to engage in a great number of individual comparisons. In two studies we tested whether partitioning the choice task so that consumers decided sequentially on each individual attribute may provide a solution. In a Starbucks coffee house, consumers who chose from the menu rated the coffee as less tasty when chosen from a large rather than a small assortment. However, when the consumers chose it by sequentially deciding about one attribute at a time, the effect reversed. In a tailored-suit customization, consumers who chose multiple attributes at a time were less satisfied with their suit, compared to those who chose one attribute at a time. Sequential attribute-based processing proves to be an effective strategy to reap the benefits of a large assortment.

The asymmetrical influence of increasing time-on-task on attentional disengagement

Increasing time-on-task leads to fatigue and, as shown by previous research, differentially affects the deployment of visual attention towards the left and the right visual space. In healthy participants, an increasing rightward bias is commonly observed with increasing time-on-task. Yet, it is unclear whether specific mechanisms involved in the spatial deployment of visual attention are differentially affected by increasing time-on-task. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether prolonged time-on-task would affect a specific mechanism of visuo-spatial attentional deployment, namely attentional disengagement, in an asymmetrical fashion. For this purpose, we administered to healthy participants a prolonged gap/overlap saccadic paradigm, with left- and right-sided target stimuli. This oculomotor paradigm allowed to quantify disengagement costs according to the direction of the subsequent attentional shifts, and to evaluate the temporal development of disengagement costs with increasing time-on-task. Our results show that, with increasing time-on-task, participants demonstrated significantly lower disengagement costs for rightward compared to leftward saccades. These effects were specific, since concurring side differences of saccadic latencies were found for overlap trials (requiring attentional disengagement), but not for gap trials (requiring no or less attentional disengagement). Moreover, the results were paralleled by a non-lateralised decrease in saccadic peak velocity with increasing time-on-task, a common finding indicating an increasing level of fatigue. Our findings support the idea that non-spatial attentional aspects, such as fatigue due to increasing time-on-task, can have a substantial influence on the spatial deployment of visual attention, in particular on its disengagement, depending on the direction of the subsequent attentional shift.

Why misinformation is reported: evidence from a warning and a source-monitoring task

People report suggested misinformation about a previously witnessed event for manifold reasons, such as social pressure, lack of memory of the original aspect, or a firm belief to remember the misinformation from the witnessed event. In our experiments (N = 429), which follow Loftus's paradigm, we tried to disentangle the reasons for reporting a central and a peripheral piece of misinformation in a recognition task by examining (a) the impact a warning about possible misinformation has on the error rate, and (b) whether once reported misinformation was actually attributed to the witnessed event in a later source-monitoring (SM) task. Overall, a misinformation effect was found for both items. The warning strongly reduced the misinformation effect, but only for the central item. In contrast, reports of the peripheral misinformation were correctly attributed to the misinformation source or, at least, ascribed to guesswork much more often than the central ones. As a consequence, after the SM task, the initially higher error rate for the peripheral item was even lower than that of the central item. Results convincingly show that the reasons for reporting misinformation, and correspondingly also the potential to avoid them in legal settings, depend on the centrality of the misinformation.

Blue bananas: development of a task to investigate the representation of synaesthetic experiences

Research has mainly focussed on the perceptual nature of synaesthesia. However, synaesthetic experiences are also semantically represented. It was our aim to develop a task to investigate the semantic representation of the concurrent and its relation to the inducer in grapheme-colour synaesthesia. Non-synaesthetes were either tested with a lexical-decision (i.e., word / non-word) or a semantic-classification (i.e., edibility decision) task. Targets consisted of words which were strongly associated with a specific colour (e.g., banana - yellow) and words which were neutral and not associated with a specific colour (e.g., aunt). Target words were primed with colours: the prime target relationship was either intramodal (i.e., word - word) or crossmodal (colour patch - word). Each of the four task versions consisted of three conditions: congruent (same colour for prime and target), incongruent (different colour), and unrelated (neutral target). For both tasks (i.e., lexical and semantic) and both versions of the task (i.e., intramodal and crossmodal), we expected faster reaction times (RTs) in the congruent condition than in the neutral condition and slower RTs in the incongruent condition than the neutral condition. Stronger effects were expected in the intramodal condition due to the overlap in the prime target modality. The results suggest that the hypotheses were partly confirmed. We conclude that the tasks and hypotheses can be readily adopted to investigate the nature of the representation of the synaesthetic experiences.

Knowledge-Based Task Structure Planning for an Information Gathering Agent

An effective solution to model and apply planning domain knowledge for deliberation and action in probabilistic, agent-oriented control is presented. Specifically, the addition of a task structure planning component and supporting components to an agent-oriented architecture and agent implementation is described. For agent control in risky or uncertain environments, an approach and method of goal reduction to task plan sets and schedules of action is presented. Additionally, some issues related to component-wise, situation-dependent control of a task planning agent that schedules its tasks separately from planning them are motivated and discussed.

VISUAL MEMORY PROCESSING BY PRIMATES AND AVIANS IN A RELATIONAL TASK

Three rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) and four pigeons (Columba livia) were trained in a visual serial probe recognition (SPR) task. A list of visual stimuli (slides) was presented sequentially to the subjects. Following the list and after a delay interval, a probe stimulus was presented that could be either from the list (Same) or not from the list (Different). The monkeys readily acquired a variable list length SPR task, while pigeons showed acquisition only under constant list length condition. However, monkeys memorized the responses to the probes (absolute strategy) when overtrained with the same lists and probes, while pigeons compared the probe to the list in memory (relational strategy). Performance of the pigeon on 4-items constant list length was disrupted when blocks of trials of different list lengths were imbedded between the 4-items blocks. Serial position curves for recognition at variable probe delays showed better relative performance on the last items of the list at short delays (0-0.5 seconds) and better relative performance on the initial items of the list at long delays (6-10 seconds for the pigeons and 20-30 seconds for the monkeys and a human adolescent). The serial position curves also showed reliable primacy and recency effects at intermediate probe delays. The monkeys showed evidence of using a relational strategy in the variable probe delay task. The results are the first demonstration of relational serial probe recognition performance in an avian and suggest similar underlying dynamic recognition memory mechanisms in primates and avians. ^