Effects of Moderate Pressure Massage on Self-Regulation and Play in Preterm Babies

The purpose of this study was to examine whether mother-administered moderate pressure massage intervention could improve self-regulation, which would result in improvements in play outcomes. It was posited that a child who is self-regulated may be more successful in his/her play and that moderate pressure massage could be an effective tool to improve self-regulation in preterm infants with decreased self-regulation. Participants in the study were five preterm children ranging from 12 to 18 months corrected age and their mothers. The study utilized an A-B nonconcurrent multiple baselines across subjects design in which each participant acted as his/her own control as well as a pretesting and posttesting component with objective measures. Baselines were of varying lengths, ranging from 3 to 7 weeks. Intervention of mother-administered massage was 6 weeks long for all participants. Three objective standardized measures were used in pretesting and posttesting. These measures included the Infant Toddler Social Emotional Assessment to measure self-regulation, the Revised Knox Preschool Play Scale to measure play age, and the Test of Playfulness to measure playfulness. Visual analogue scales, with mother generated behavioral goals related to the three standardized assessments, were scored weekly by the mothers. The results indicated that moderate pressure massage had a calming and regulating effect on the child and resulted in improvements in the child’s play skills and playfulness over the course of the 6 weeks of intervention. The important clinical implications are that this cost-effective, parent-administered technique can positively affect outcomes of improved self-regulation, playfulness, and play skills. In addition, the study contributes important information about the influence of self-regulation on the development of play and playfulness in preterm babies and on mothers’ participation in their baby’s intervention, which contributes to a family-centered approach

Playing with Repetitions in Data Words Using Energy Games

We introduce two-player games which build words over infinite alphabets, and we study the problem of checking the existence of winning strategies. These games are played by two players, who take turns in choosing valuations for variables ranging over an infinite data domain, thus generating multi-attributed data words. The winner of the game is specified by formulas in the Logic of Repeating Values, which can reason about repetitions of data values in infinite data words. We prove that it is undecidable to check if one of the players has a winning strategy, even in very restrictive settings. However, we prove that if one of the players is restricted to choose valuations ranging over the Boolean domain, the games are effectively equivalent to single-sided games on vector addition systems with states (in which one of the players can change control states but cannot change counter values), known to be decidable and effectively equivalent to energy games. Previous works have shown that the satisfiability problem for various variants of the logic of repeating values is equivalent to the reachability and coverability problems in vector addition systems. Our results raise this connection to the level of games, augmenting further the associations between logics on data words and counter systems

Alternating Vector Addition Systems with States

International audienceAlternating vector addition systems are obtained by equipping vector addition systems with states (VASS) with 'fork' rules, and provide a natural setting for infinite-arena games played over a VASS. Initially introduced in the study of propositional linear logic, they have more recently gathered attention in the guise of multi-dimensional energy games for quantitative verification and synthesis. We show that establishing who is the winner in such a game with a state reachability objective is 2-ExpTime-complete. As a further application, we show that the same complexity result applies to the problem of whether a VASS is simulated by a finite-state system

Partial Order Reduction for Reachability Games

Partial order reductions have been successfully applied to model checking of concurrent systems and practical applications of the technique show nontrivial reduction in the size of the explored state space. We present a theory of partial order reduction based on stubborn sets in the game-theoretical setting of 2-player games with reachability/safety objectives. Our stubborn reduction allows us to prune the interleaving behaviour of both players in the game, and we formally prove its correctness on the class of games played on general labelled transition systems. We then instantiate the framework to the class of weighted Petri net games with inhibitor arcs and provide its efficient implementation in the model checker TAPAAL. Finally, we evaluate our stubborn reduction on several case studies and demonstrate its efficiency

Stubborn Set Reduction for Two-Player Reachability Games

Partial order reductions have been successfully applied to model checking of concurrent systems and practical applications of the technique show nontrivial reduction in the size of the explored state space. We present a theory of partial order reduction based on stubborn sets in the game-theoretical setting of 2-player games with reachability objectives. Our stubborn reduction allows us to prune the interleaving behaviour of both players in the game, and we formally prove its correctness on the class of games played on general labelled transition systems. We then instantiate the framework to the class of weighted Petri net games with inhibitor arcs and provide its efficient implementation in the model checker TAPAAL. Finally, we evaluate our stubborn reduction on several case studies and demonstrate its efficiency

Dual-task effects of concurrently coupling aerobic exercise with virtual navigation

Aerobic exercise is a modifiable lifestyle factor that is important for maintaining or improving both physical health and brain health. Maintaining or improving executive function throughout the lifespan is a prominent area of focus for academic research as the global population ages. Both executive training and aerobic exercise, in and of themselves, have been shown to be means of improving executive function. There has since been a focus on combining exercise and executive challenge to determine if this provides an additive benefit to executive ability. What is often overlooked, however, is how the concurrent exercise-executive challenge effects the outcome of the exercise itself, which is important as improving aerobic capacity is a goal of rehabilitation. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis was to investigate dual-task trade-off effects that occur when concurrently coupling aerobic cycling with a virtual navigation task. The primary aim of this work is to characterize behavioural parameters of both the cycling and navigation tasks, as well as the impact to the physiological parameters of the exercise. Study 1 was designed to describe the behavioural components of exercise and heart rate with respect to different concurrent executive demands. Study 2 was designed to inform the methodological task considerations of the virtual navigation task(s) that would be used in subsequent studies. Study 3 specifically examined dual-task trade-off effects of virtual navigation coupled with aerobic cycling on navigation performance, cycling cadence and heart rate, while Study 4 extended the work of Study 3 by examining if dual-task trade-off effects would be ameliorated with repeated exposure to the tasks. Overall, the findings of these studies show that young health adults are able to concurrently perform a virtual navigation task with an aerobic challenge, but that the task demands and design will directly impact performance of the exercise and the associated heart rates achieved. Moreover, despite the concurrent challenge being overall more demanding of mental resources, this was the task that the majority of participants found most enjoyable overall. Findings from this thesis provide a basic framework from which other dual-task exercise-executive challenge paradigms can be designed, and can inform task design considerations

Playing with Repetitions in Data Words Using Energy Games

We introduce two-player games which build words over infinite alphabets, and we study the problem of checking the existence of winning strategies. These games are played by two players, who take turns in choosing valuations for variables ranging over an infinite data domain, thus generating multi-attributed data words. The winner of the game is specified by formulas in the Logic of Repeating Values, which can reason about repetitions of data values in infinite data words. We prove that it is undecidable to check if one of the players has a winning strategy, even in very restrictive settings. However, we prove that if one of the players is restricted to choose valuations ranging over the Boolean domain, the games are effectively equivalent to single-sided games on vector addition systems with states (in which one of the players can change control states but cannot change counter values), known to be decidable and effectively equivalent to energy games. Previous works have shown that the satisfiability problem for various variants of the logic of repeating values is equivalent to the reachability and coverability problems in vector addition systems. Our results raise this connection to the level of games, augmenting further the associations between logics on data words and counter systems