Neural correlates of task switching in paternal 15q11-q13 deletion Prader-Willi syndrome

We report a first study of brain activity linked to task switching in individuals with Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS) PWS individuals show a specific cognitive deficit in task switching which may be associated with the display of temper outbursts and repetitive questioning The performance of participants with PWS and typically developing controls was matched in a cued task switching procedure and brain activity was contrasted on switching and non switching blocks using SARI Individuals with PWS did not show the typical frontal-parietal pattern of neural activity associated with switching blocks, with significantly reduced activation in regions of the posterior parietal and ventromedial prefrontal cortices We suggest that this is linked to a difficulty in PWS in setting appropriate attentional weights to enable task set reconfiguration In addition to this, PWS individuals did not show the typical pattern of deactivation, with significantly less deactivation in an anterior region of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex One plausible explanation for this is that individuals with PWS show dysfunction within the default mode network which has been linked to attentional control The data point to functional changes in the neural circuitry supporting task switching in PWS even when behavioural performance is matched to controls and thus highlight neural mechanisms that may be involved in a specific pathway between genes cognition and behaviour (C) 2010 Elsevier B V All rights reserved

The development of the experience and anticipation of regret

Although recent studies have established that children experience regret from around 6 years, we do not yet know when the ability to anticipate this emotion emerges, despite the importance of the anticipation of regret in decision-making. We examined whether children will anticipate they will feel regret if they were to find out in a box-choosing game that, had they made a different choice, they would have obtained a better prize. Experiment 1 replicated Guttentag and Ferrell’s study in which children were asked what they hoped was in a non-chosen box. Even 8- to 9-year olds find this question difficult. However, when asked what might make them feel sadder, 7- to 8-year olds (but not younger children) predicted that finding the larger prize in the unchosen box would make them feel this way. In Experiments 2 and 3, children predicted how they would feel if the unchosen box contained either a larger or smaller prize, in order to examine anticipation of both regret and of relief. Although 6- to 7-year olds do experience regret when they find out they could have won a better prize, they do not correctly anticipate feeling this way. By around 8 years, the majority of children are able to anticipate both regret and relief.

Temporal and statistical information in causal structure learning

Three experiments examined children’s and adults’ abilities to use statistical and temporal information to distinguish between common cause and causal chain structures. In Experiment 1, participants were provided with conditional probability information and/or temporal information and asked to infer the causal structure of a three-variable mechanical system that operated probabilistically. Participants of all ages preferentially relied on the temporal pattern of events in their inferences, even if this conflicted with statistical information. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants observed a series of interventions on the system, which in these experiments operated deterministically. In Experiment 2, participants found it easier to use temporal pattern information than statistical information provided as a result of interventions. In Experiment 3, in which no temporal pattern information was provided, children from 6-7 years, but not younger children, were able to use intervention information to make causal chain judgments, although they had difficulty when the structure was a common cause. The findings suggest that participants, and children in particular, may find it more difficult to use statistical information than temporal pattern information because of its demands on information processing resources. However, there may also be an inherent preference for temporal information.

Interpreting pedestrian behaviour by visualising and clustering movement data

Recent technological advances have increased the quantity of movement data being recorded. While valuable knowledge can be gained by analysing such data, its sheer volume creates challenges. Geovisual analytics, which helps the human cognition process by using tools to reason about data, offers powerful techniques to resolve these challenges. This paper introduces such a geovisual analytics environment for exploring movement trajectories, which provides visualisation interfaces, based on the classic space-time cube. Additionally, a new approach, using the mathematical description of motion within a space-time cube, is used to determine the similarity of trajectories and forms the basis for clustering them. These techniques were used to analyse pedestrian movement. The results reveal interesting and useful spatiotemporal patterns and clusters of pedestrians exhibiting similar behaviour.

Three Types of Temporal Perspective: Characterizing Developmental Changes in Temporal Thought

This paper provides an outline of the development of temporal thinking that is underpinned by the idea that temporal cognition shifts from being event dependent to event independent over the preschool period. I distinguish between three different ways in which it may be possible to have a perspective on time: (1) a perspective that is grounded in script-like representations of repeated events; (2) a more sophisticated perspective that brings in an fundamental categorical distinction between events that have already happened and events that are yet to come; and (3) a mature temporal perspective that involves orienting oneself in time using a linear temporal framework, with a grasp of the distinctions between past, present, and future. I propose that, with development, children possess each of these types of perspective in turn, and that only the last of these involves being able to represent time in an event-independent way.

Harmful transgressions qua moral transgressions: A deflationary view

One important issue in moral psychology concerns the proper characterization of the folk understanding of the relationship between harmful transgressions and moral transgressions. Psychologist Elliot Turiel and associates have claimed with a broad range of supporting evidence that harmful transgressions are understood as transgressions that are authority independent and general in scope, which, according to them, characterizes these transgressions as moral transgressions. Recently, many researchers questioned the position advocated by the Turiel tradition with some new evidence. We entered this debate proposing an original, deflationary view in which perceptions of basic-rights violation and injustice are fundamental for the folk understanding of harmful transgressions as moral transgressions in Turiel’s sense. In this article, we elaborate and refine our deflationary view, while reviewing the debate, addressing various criticisms raised against our perspective, showing how our perspective explains the existent evidence, and suggesting new lines of inquiry.

Oxidation of N-(4-methoxybenzyl)-2-pyrrolidinones to N-(4-methoxybenzoyl)-2-pyrrolidinones. Rapid entry to optically active Aniracetam analogues.

Oxidation of readily available N-(4-methoxybenzyl)-5-alkylpyrrolidin-2-ones to the corresponding N-(4-methoxybenzoyl)-5-alkylpyrrolidin-2-ones gives direct access to enantiomerically pure 5-alkyl analogues of the cognition activating agent Aniracetam. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd

PAlliative Care in chronic Kidney diSease: the PACKS study—quality of life, decision making, costs and impact on carers in people managed without dialysis

BACKGROUND: The number of patients with advanced chronic kidney disease opting for conservative management rather than dialysis is unknown but likely to be growing as increasingly frail patients with advanced renal disease present to renal services. Conservative kidney management includes ongoing medical input and support from a multidisciplinary team. There is limited evidence concerning patient and carer experience of this choice. This study will explore quality of life, symptoms, cognition, frailty, performance decision making, costs and impact on carers in people with advanced chronic kidney disease managed without dialysis and is funded by the National Institute of Health Research in the UK.

METHODS: In this prospective, multicentre, longitudinal study, patients will be recruited in the UK, by renal research nurses, once they have made the decision not to embark on dialysis. Carers will be asked to 'opt-in' with consent from patients. The approach includes longitudinal quantitative surveys of quality of life, symptoms, decision making and costs for patients and quality of life and costs for carers, with questionnaires administered quarterly over 12 months. Additionally, the decision making process will be explored via qualitative interviews with renal physicians/clinical nurse specialists.

DISCUSSION: The study is designed to capture patient and carer profiles when conservative kidney management is implemented, and understand trajectories of care-receiving and care-giving with the aim of optimising palliative care for this population. It will explore the interactions that lead to clinical care decisions and the impact of these decisions on informal carers with the intention of improving clinical outcomes for patients and the experiences of care givers.

Sonification as Concurrent Augmented Feedback for Motor Skill Learning and the Importance of Mapping Design

In recent years, sonification of movement has emerged as a viable method for the provision of feedback in motor learning. Despite some experimental validation of its utility, controlled trials to test the usefulness of sonification in a motor learning context are still rare. As such, there are no accepted conventions for dealing with its implementation. This article addresses the question of how continuous movement information should be best presented as sound to be fed back to the learner. It is proposed that to establish effective approaches to using sonification in this context, consideration must be given to the processes that underlie motor learning, in particular the nature of the perceptual information available to the learner for performing the task at hand. Although sonification has much potential in movement performance enhancement, this potential is largely unrealised as of yet, in part due to the lack of a clear framework for sonification mapping: the relationship between movement and sound. By grounding mapping decisions in a firmer understanding of how perceptual information guides learning, and an embodied cognition stance in general, it is hoped that greater advances in use of sonification to enhance motor learning can be achieved.

A Woodcut and Its Wanderings in Seventeenth-Century England

This essay traces the career of a distinctive woodcut picture that appears on dozens of seventeenth-century ballad broadsheets. Christopher Marsh argues that woodcuts have often been neglected by scholars and that they deserve careful attention. The common habit of redeploying old pictures on new ballads may, for example, have encouraged consumers to build associations between individual woodcuts and particular characteristics or themes. In order to understand the visual aesthetic of early-modern balladry, it is therefore necessary to think in fresh and creative ways about the effects of the repetition of pictures on cognition.

To fasten words again to visible – and invisible – things

In this extended introductory essay, Catherine Gander and Sarah Garland suggest new ways of looking at the correspondences between visual and verbal practices to consider their material and conceptual connections in a specifically American set of histories, contexts and interpretive traditions. Tracing a lineage of experiential philosophy that is grounded in the overturning of a Cartesian mind/body split, the authors argue for pluralistic perspectives on intermedial innovations that situate embodied and imaginative reader-viewer response as vital to the life of the artwork. Gander and Garland chart two main strands to this approach: the pragmatist strain of American aesthetics and social politics, rooted in the essays of transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson and emanating from the writings of John Dewey and William James; and the conceptualist strain of French-American Marcel Duchamp, whose ground-breaking ideas both positioned the artwork as a phenomenological construction and liberated the artist from established methods of practice and discourse. The ‘imagetext’ (after W. J. T. Mitchell) is therefore, argue Gander and Garland, a site consisting of far more than word and image – but a living assemblage of language, idea, thing, cognition, affect and shared experience.

Testing the channel-based model of duration perception

The channel-based model of duration perception postulates the existence of neural mechanisms that respond selectively to a narrow range of stimulus durations centred on their preferred duration (Heron et al Proceedings of the Royal Society B 279 690–698). In principle the channel-based model could
explain recent reports of adaptation-induced, visual duration compression effects (Johnston et al Current Biology 16 472–479; Curran and Benton Cognition 122 252–257); from this perspective duration compression is a consequence of the adapting stimuli being presented for a longer duration than the test stimuli. In the current experiment observers adapted to a sequence of moving random dot patterns at the same retinal position, each 340ms in duration and separated by a variable (500–1000ms) interval. Following adaptation observers judged the duration of a 600ms test stimulus at the same location. The test stimulus moved in the same, or opposite, direction as the adaptor. Contrary to the channel-based
model’s prediction, test stimulus duration appeared compressed, rather than expanded, when it moved in the same direction as the adaptor. That test stimulus duration was not distorted when moving in the opposite direction further suggests that visual timing mechanisms are influenced by additional neural processing associated with the stimulus being timed.