Attachment style moderates partner presence effects on pain : A laser-evoked potentials study

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly citedSocial support is crucial for psychological and physical well-being. Yet, in experimental and clinical pain research, the presence of others has been found to both attenuate and intensify pain. To investigate the factors underlying these mixed effects, we administered noxious laser stimuli to 39 healthy women while their romantic partner was present or absent, and measured pain ratings and laser-evoked potentials to assess the effects of partner presence on subjective pain experience and underlying neural processes. Further, we examined whether individual differences in adult attachment style, alone or in interaction with the partner's level of attentional focus (manipulated to be either on or away from the participant) might modulate these effects. We found that the effects of partner presence versus absence on pain-related measures depended on adult attachment style but not partner attentional focus. The higher participants' attachment avoidance, the higher pain ratings and N2 and P2 local peak amplitudes were in the presence compared to the absence of the romantic partner. As laser-evoked potentials are thought to reflect activity relating to the salience of events, our data suggest that partner presence may influence the perceived salience of events threatening the body, particularly in individuals who tend to mistrust others.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

A framework for the local information dynamics of distributed computation in complex systems

The nature of distributed computation has often been described in terms of the component operations of universal computation: information storage, transfer and modification. We review the first complete framework that quantifies each of these individual information dynamics on a local scale within a system, and describes the manner in which they interact to create non-trivial computation where "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts". We describe the application of the framework to cellular automata, a simple yet powerful model of distributed computation. This is an important application, because the framework is the first to provide quantitative evidence for several important conjectures about distributed computation in cellular automata: that blinkers embody information storage, particles are information transfer agents, and particle collisions are information modification events. The framework is also shown to contrast the computations conducted by several well-known cellular automata, highlighting the importance of information coherence in complex computation. The results reviewed here provide important quantitative insights into the fundamental nature of distributed computation and the dynamics of complex systems, as well as impetus for the framework to be applied to the analysis and design of other systems.Comment: 44 pages, 8 figure

Are Local Filters Blind to Provenance? Ant Seed Predation Suppresses Exotic Plants More than Natives

The question of whether species’ origins influence invasion outcomes has been a point of substantial debate in invasion ecology. Theoretically, colonization outcomes can be predicted based on how species’ traits interact with community filters, a process presumably blind to species’ origins. Yet, exotic plant introductions commonly result in monospecific plant densities not commonly seen in native assemblages, suggesting that exotic species may respond to community filters differently than natives. Here, we tested whether exotic and native species differed in their responses to a local community filter by examining how ant seed predation affected recruitment of eighteen native and exotic plant species in central Argentina. Ant seed predation proved to be an important local filter that strongly suppressed plant recruitment, but ants suppressed exotic recruitment far more than natives (89% of exotic species vs. 22% of natives). Seed size predicted ant impacts on recruitment independent of origins, with ant preference for smaller seeds resulting in smaller seeded plant species being heavily suppressed. The disproportionate effects of provenance arose because exotics had generally smaller seeds than natives. Exotics also exhibited greater emergence and earlier peak emergence than natives in the absence of ants. However, when ants had access to seeds, these potential advantages of exotics were negated due to the filtering bias against exotics. The differences in traits we observed between exotics and natives suggest that higher-order introduction filters or regional processes preselected for certain exotic traits that then interacted with the local seed predation filter. Our results suggest that the interactions between local filters and species traits can predict invasion outcomes, but understanding the role of provenance will require quantifying filtering processes at multiple hierarchical scales and evaluating interactions between filters.Fil: Pearson, Dean. University of Montana; Estados Unidos. United States Department of Agriculture; Estados UnidosFil: Icasatti, Nadia Soledad. United States Department of Agriculture; Estados Unidos. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Hierro, Jose Luis. Universidad Nacional de La Pampa. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Ciencias de la Tierra y Ambientales de La Pampa. Universidad Nacional de La Pampa. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Ciencias de la Tierra y Ambientales de La Pampa; ArgentinaFil: Bird, Benjamin B.. United States Department of Agriculture; Estados Unido

Functional Brain Hyperactivations Are Linked to an Electrophysiological Measure of Slow Interhemispheric Transfer Time after Pediatric Moderate/Severe Traumatic Brain Injury.

Increased task-related blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) activation is commonly observed in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of moderate/severe traumatic brain injury (msTBI), but the functional relevance of these hyperactivations and how they are linked to more direct measures of neuronal function remain largely unknown. Here, we investigated how working memory load (WML)-dependent BOLD activation was related to an electrophysiological measure of interhemispheric transfer time (IHTT) in a sample of 18 msTBI patients and 26 demographically matched controls from the UCLA RAPBI (Recovery after Pediatric Brain Injury) study. In the context of highly similar fMRI task performance, a subgroup of TBI patients with slow IHTT had greater BOLD activation with higher WML than both healthy control children and a subgroup of msTBI patients with normal IHTT. Slower IHTT treated as a continuous variable was also associated with BOLD hyperactivation in the full TBI sample and in controls. Higher WML-dependent BOLD activation was related to better performance on a clinical cognitive performance index, an association that was more pronounced within the patient group with slow IHTT. Our previous work has shown that a subgroup of children with slow IHTT after pediatric msTBI has increased risk for poor white matter organization, long-term neurodegeneration, and poor cognitive outcome. BOLD hyperactivations after msTBI may reflect neuronal compensatory processes supporting higher-order capacity demanding cognitive functions in the context of inefficient neuronal transfer of information. The link between BOLD hyperactivations and slow IHTT adds to the multi-modal validation of this electrophysiological measure as a promising biomarker

On the statistical interpretation of optical rogue waves

Numerical simulations are used to discuss various aspects of "optical rogue wave" statistics observed in noise-driven fiber supercontinuum generation associated with highly incoherent spectra. In particular, we consider how long wavelength spectral filtering influences the characteristics of the statistical distribution of peak power, and we contrast the statistics of the spectrally filtered SC with the statistics of both the peak power of the most red-shifted soliton in the SC and the maximum peak power across the full temporal field with no spectral selection. For the latter case, we show that the unfiltered statistical distribution can still exhibit a long-tail, but the extreme-events in this case correspond to collisions between solitons of different frequencies. These results confirm the importance of collision dynamics in supercontinuum generation. We also show that the collision-induced events satisfy an extended hydrodynamic definition of "rogue wave" characteristics.Comment: Paper accepted for publication in the European Physical Journal ST, Special Topics. Discussion and Debate: Rogue Waves - towards a unifying concept? To appear 201