The role of the ventral intraparietal area (VIP/pVIP) in parsing optic flow into visual motion caused by self-motion and visual motion produced by object-motion

Retinal image motion is a composite signal that contains information about two behaviourally significant factors: self-motion and the movement of environmental objects. It is thought that the brain separates the two relevant signals, and although multiple brain regions have been identified that respond selectively to the composite optic flow signal, which brain region(s) perform the parsing process remains unknown. Here, we present original evidence that the putative human ventral intraparietal area (pVIP), a region known to receive optic flow signals as well as independent self-motion signals from other sensory modalities, plays a critical role in the parsing process and acts to isolate object-motion. We localised pVIP using its multisensory response profile, and then tested its relative responses to simulated object-motion and self-motion stimuli; results indicated that responses were much stronger in pVIP to stimuli that specified object-motion. We report two further observations that will be significant for the future direction of research in this area; firstly, activation in pVIP was suppressed by distant stationary objects compared to the absence of objects or closer objects. Secondly, we describe several other brain regions that share with pVIP selectivity for visual object-motion over visual self-motion as well as a multisensory response

Prolonged extracorporeal membrane oxygenation therapy for severe acute respiratory distress syndrome in a child affected by rituximab-resistant autoimmune hemolytic anemia: a case report

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Introduction</p> <p>Autoimmune hemolytic anemia in children younger than 2 years of age is usually characterized by a severe course, with a mortality rate of approximately 10%. The prolonged immunosuppression following specific treatment may be associated with a high risk of developing severe infections. Recently, the use of monoclonal antibodies (rituximab) has allowed sustained remissions to be obtained in the majority of pediatric patients with refractory autoimmune hemolytic anemia.</p> <p>Case presentation</p> <p>We describe the case of an 8-month-old Caucasian girl affected by a severe form of autoimmune hemolytic anemia, which required continuous steroid treatment for 16 months. Thereafter, she received 4 weekly doses of rituximab (375 mg/m²/dose) associated with steroid therapy, which was then tapered over the subsequent 2 weeks. One month after the last dose of rrituximab, she presented with recurrence of severe hemolysis and received two more doses of rrituximab. The patient remained in clinical remission for 7 months, before presenting with a further relapse. An alternative heavy immunosuppressive therapy was administered combining cyclophosphamide 10 mg/kg/day for 10 days with methylprednisolone 40 mg/kg/day for 5 days, which was then tapered down over 3 weeks. While still on steroid therapy, the patient developed an interstitial pneumonia with Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome, which required immediate admission to the intensive care unit where extracorporeal membrane oxygenation therapy was administered continuously for 37 days. At 16-month follow-up, the patient is alive and in good clinical condition, with no organ dysfunction, free from any immunosuppressive treatment and with a normal Hb level.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>This case shows that aggressive combined immunosuppressive therapy may lead to a sustained complete remission in children with refractory autoimmune hemolytic anemia. However, the severe life-threatening complication presented by our patient indicates that strict clinical monitoring must be vigilantly performed, that antimicrobial prophylaxis should always be considered and that experienced medical and nursing staff must be available, to deliver highly specialized supportive salvage therapies, if necessary, during intensive care monitoring.</p

The role of intolerance of uncertainty in the acquisition and extinction of reward

Individuals, who score high in self-reported intolerance of uncertainty (IU), tend to find uncertainty anxiety-provoking. IU has been reliably associated with disrupted threat extinction. However, it is unclear whether IU would be related to disrupted extinction to other arousing stimuli that are not threatening (i.e., rewarding). We addressed this question by conducting a Pavlovian reward conditioning task with acquisition and extinction training phases (n = 58). In the Pavlovian reward conditioning task, we recorded liking ratings, skin conductance response (SCR), and corrugator supercilii activity (i.e., brow muscle indicative or negative and positive affect) to learned reward (CS+) and neutral (CS−) cues. Typical patterns of reward acquisition and extinction training were observed for liking ratings. There was evidence for conditioning in SCR during the extinction training phase but not the acquisition training phase. However, no evidence of conditioning in either the acquisition or extinction training phase was observed for the corrugator supercilii. IU was not related to any measures during the acquisition or extinction training phases. Taken together, these results suggest that the current Pavlovian reward conditioning task was not sufficient for eliciting a reliable conditioned reward response, and therefore, further research with optimized reward conditioning designs are required to test whether IU-related deficits occur during the extinction of reward

Muon Energy Estimate Through Multiple Scattering with the Macro Detector

Muon energy measurement represents an important issue for any experiment addressing neutrino induced upgoing muon studies. Since the neutrino oscillation probability depends on the neutrino energy, a measurement of the muon energy adds an important piece of information concerning the neutrino system. We show in this paper how the MACRO limited streamer tube system can be operated in drift mode by using the TDC's included in the QTPs, an electronics designed for magnetic monopole search. An improvement of the space resolution is obtained, through an analysis of the multiple scattering of muon tracks as they pass through our detector. This information can be used further to obtain an estimate of the energy of muons crossing the detector. Here we present the results of two dedicated tests, performed at CERN PS-T9 and SPS-X7 beam lines, to provide a full check of the electronics and to exploit the feasibility of such a multiple scattering analysis. We show that by using a neural network approach, we are able to reconstruct the muon energy for $E_\mu<$40 GeV. The test beam data provide an absolute energy calibration, which allows us to apply this method to MACRO data.Comment: 25 pages, 11 figures, Submitted to Nucl. Instr. & Meth.

Visual information processing in the parietal lobe

The Superior Parietal Lobule is a region of the brain that has been implicated in a number of high-level cognitive functions, including shifting spatial attention between locations, the perception of heading direction and path of travel during locomotion, and motion tracking under attentional load. The wide range of cognitive functions linked to this region does not align with the high specificity normally seen in the brain, and therefore it might be possible that the SPL supports a lower-level function that is engaged in a wide range of cognitive tasks. Here we investigate the proposal that the lower-level function involves the perception of the 2D visual distances between objects. To test this hypothesis, we targeted the SPL with both high-frequency online repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) and offline continuous theta burst stimulation (cTBS) in order to explore the role played by this region in the perception of 2D visual space. We achieved this over three studies. In the first, we delivered online rTMS over the left SPL while participants performed a psychophysical task measuring the precision of their ability to judge the distance between objects. In the second, we explored the effect of delivering offline cTBS over the left SPL in relation to the effect of the Muller-Lyer illusion on the perception of the length of a line, as well as its effect on saccade amplitudes. In the final study, we broadened the investigation to also explore a possible role of the frontal eye field (FEF) in the perception of 2D visual distances. We explored the effect of delivering offline cTBS over the right SPL or the right Frontal Eye Field (FEF) on a range of tasks thought to rely on processing of visual distance including interception of a moving target, the magnitude of the Muller-Lyer illusion, amplitudes for reflexive, voluntary, and memory-guided saccades made to Muller-Lyer and control stimuli, and a reaction time control task. Overall, we observed no effect of rTMS and cTBS on the experimental tasks in Study 1 and Study 2, respectively, although rTMS did unexpectedly have a significant effect on the control task in Study 1. In Study 3, while we observed an effect of cTBS over the SPL for a subset of the experimental tasks, the same effect was observed when cTBS was delivered over the right FEF, which left us unable to rule out the possibility that the effects were a result of testing order rather than cTBS. Overall, the results obtained in this thesis do not fully elucidate the roles of the SPL or the FEF in the perception of 2D visual space, and therefore further research is suggested

Just let me check: the role of individual differences in self-reported anxiety and obsessive-compulsive features on subjective, behavioural, and physiological indices during a checking task

Checking behaviour has been described as a form of preventative behaviour used by an individual to establish control over the environment and avoid future misfortune. However, when compulsive, checking behaviours can become disabling and distressing and have been linked to the maintenance of anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders. Despite this, there is limited literature across the field that has assessed the impact of dimensional measures of anxiety and obsessive-compulsive features (i.e., negative affect, uncertainty, and perfectionism) in driving checking behaviour. As such, the present study examined the impact of individual differences in self-reported anxiety and obsessive-compulsive features on subjective, behavioural, and physiological indices during a visual discrimination and checking task (n = 87). Higher self-reported anxiety and obsessive-compulsive features were associated with higher subjective ratings of unpleasantness and the urge to check during the task. Moreover, higher self-reported anxiety and obsessive-compulsive features related to general negative affect, uncertainty, and perfectionism were associated with greater checking frequency during the task. Lastly, stronger obsessional beliefs about perfectionism and the need for certainty were found to predict poorer accuracy, slower reaction times, and higher engagement of the corrugator supercilii during the task. In sum, these findings demonstrate how different anxiety and obsessive-compulsive features, in particular perfectionism and the need for certainty, may relate to and maintain checking behaviour in low threat contexts, which likely has implications for models of excessive and persistent checking in anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders

Intolerance of uncertainty and physiological responses during instructed uncertain threat: a multi-lab investigation

Individuals with high self-reported Intolerance of uncertainty (IU) tend to interpret uncertainty negatively. Recent research has been inconclusive on evidence of an association between IU and physiological responses during instructed uncertain threat. To address this gap, we conducted secondary analyses of IU and physiology data recorded during instructed uncertain threat tasks from two lab sites (Wisconsin-Madison; n = 128; Yale, n = 95). No IU-related effects were observed for orbicularis oculi activity (auditory startle-reflex). Higher IU was associated with: (1) greater corrugator supercilii activity to predictable and unpredictable threat of shock, compared to the safety from shock, and (2) poorer discriminatory skin conductance response between the unpredictable threat of shock, relative to the safety from shock. These findings suggest that IU-related biases may be captured differently depending on the physiological measure during instructed uncertain threat. Implications of these findings for neurobiological models of uncertainty and anticipation in anxiety are discussed

DUNE Offline Computing Conceptual Design Report

International audienceThis document describes Offline Software and Computing for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) experiment, in particular, the conceptual design of the offline computing needed to accomplish its physics goals. Our emphasis in this document is the development of the computing infrastructure needed to acquire, catalog, reconstruct, simulate and analyze the data from the DUNE experiment and its prototypes. In this effort, we concentrate on developing the tools and systems thatfacilitate the development and deployment of advanced algorithms. Rather than prescribing particular algorithms, our goal is to provide resources that are flexible and accessible enough to support creative software solutions as HEP computing evolves and to provide computing that achieves the physics goals of the DUNE experiment

Reconstruction of interactions in the ProtoDUNE-SP detector with Pandora

International audienceThe Pandora Software Development Kit and algorithm libraries provide pattern-recognition logic essential to the reconstruction of particle interactions in liquid argon time projection chamber detectors. Pandora is the primary event reconstruction software used at ProtoDUNE-SP, a prototype for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment far detector. ProtoDUNE-SP, located at CERN, is exposed to a charged-particle test beam. This paper gives an overview of the Pandora reconstruction algorithms and how they have been tailored for use at ProtoDUNE-SP. In complex events with numerous cosmic-ray and beam background particles, the simulated reconstruction and identification efficiency for triggered test-beam particles is above 80% for the majority of particle type and beam momentum combinations. Specifically, simulated 1 GeV/$c$ charged pions and protons are correctly reconstructed and identified with efficiencies of 86.1$\pm0.6$% and 84.1$\pm0.6$%, respectively. The efficiencies measured for test-beam data are shown to be within 5% of those predicted by the simulation