Neural mechanisms of response-preparation and inhibition in bilingual and monolingual children: Lateralized Readiness Potentials (LRPs) during a nonverbal Stroop task

Inhibitory control is a core executive function (EF) skill, thought to involve cognitive 'interference suppression' and motor 'response inhibition' sub-processes. A few studies have shown that early bilingualism shapes interference suppression but not response inhibition skills, however current behavioral measures do not fully allow us to disentangle these subcomponents. Lateralized Readiness Potentials (LRPs) are centroparietal event-related potentials (ERPs) that track motor response-preparations between stimulus-presentation and behavioral responses. We examine LRPs elicited during successful inhibitory control on a nonverbal Stroop task, in 6-8 year-old bilingual (n = 44) and monolingual (n = 48) children from comparable socio-economic backgrounds. Relative to monolinguals, bilinguals showed longer and stronger incorrect-response preparations, and a more mature pattern of correct-response preparation (shorter peak-latencies), underlying correct responses on Stroop-interference trials. Neural markers of response-inhibition were comparable between groups and no behavioral differences were found between-groups on the Stroop task. Results suggest group differences in underlying mechanisms of centroparietal motor-response preparation mechanisms in this age group, contrary to what has been shown using behavioral tasks previously. We discuss neural results in the context of speed-accuracy trade-offs. This is the first study to examine neural markers of motor-responses in bilingual children.Published versio

Quark and Gluon Tagging at the LHC

Being able to distinguish light-quark jets from gluon jets on an event-by-event basis could significantly enhance the reach for many new physics searches at the Large Hadron Collider. Through an exhaustive search of existing and novel jet substructure observables, we find that a multivariate approach can filter out over 95% of the gluon jets while keeping more than half of the light-quark jets. Moreover, a combination of two simple variables, the charge track multiplicity and the $p_T$-weighted linear radial moment (girth), can achieve similar results. While this pair appears very promising, our study is only Monte Carlo based, and other discriminants may work better with real data in a realistic experimental environment. To that end, we explore many other observables constructed using different jet sizes and parameters, and highlight those that deserve further theoretical and experimental scrutiny. Additional information, including distributions of around 10,000 variables, can be found on this website http://jets.physics.harvard.edu/qvg .Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures. v2 published versio

MMTF: The Maryland-Magellan Tunable Filter

This paper describes the Maryland-Magellan Tunable Filter (MMTF) on the Magellan-Baade 6.5-meter telescope. MMTF is based on a 150-mm clear aperture Fabry-Perot (FP) etalon that operates in low orders and provides transmission bandpass and central wavelength adjustable from ~5 to ~15 A and from ~5000 to over ~9200 A, respectively. It is installed in the Inamori Magellan Areal Camera and Spectrograph (IMACS) and delivers an image quality of ~0.5" over a field of view of 27' in diameter (monochromatic over ~10'). This versatile and easy-to-operate instrument has been used over the past three years for a wide variety of projects. This paper first reviews the basic principles of FP tunable filters, then provides a detailed description of the hardware and software associated with MMTF and the techniques developed to observe with this instrument and reduce the data. The main lessons learned in the course of the commissioning and implementation of MMTF are highlighted next, before concluding with a brief outlook on the future of MMTF and of similar facilities which are soon coming on line.Comment: 38 pages, 12 figures, 3 tables, now accepted for publication to the Astronomical Journa

Searches For New Bosons Coupling To e-q Pairs At HERA And Other Colliders

The early observation at HERA of an excess of events compared to the expectation from the Standard Model in very short distance $e^+p$ deep-inelastic scattering processes has renewed the interest in the search for new physics which could manifest in electroweak-like interactions. New preliminary results from the H1 and ZEUS experiments making use of all available $e^+p$ data are reviewed here, with an emphasis on the search for new bosons possessing Yukawa couplings to lepton-quark pairs. The sensitivity of HERA to leptoquarks, and to squarks of R-parity violating supersymmetry, is confronted to existing indirect constraints from rare and forbidden semi-leptonic decays, atomic parity violation and neutrinoless double-beta decay, as well as to direct constraints from LEP and Tevatron colliders. The HERA and Tevatron colliders are found to offer exciting prospects for new physics, accessing yet unexplored domains of the mass-coupling plane. Possible striking manifestation of explicit lepton flavour violation is also discussed.Comment: 27 pages, 16 figures. Proceedings of the WEIN'98 Symposium (June 1998

A Survey for Transient Astronomical Radio Emission at 611 MHz

We have constructed and operated the Survey for Transient Astronomical Radio Emission (STARE) to detect transient astronomical radio emission at 611 MHz originating from the sky over the northeastern United States. The system is sensitive to transient events on timescales of 0.125 s to a few minutes, with a typical zenith flux density detection threshold of approximately 27 kJy. During 18 months of around-the-clock observing with three geographically separated instruments, we detected a total of 4,318,486 radio bursts. 99.9% of these events were rejected as locally generated interference, determined by requiring the simultaneous observation of an event at all three sites for it to be identified as having an astronomical origin. The remaining 3,898 events have been found to be associated with 99 solar radio bursts. These results demonstrate the remarkably effective RFI rejection achieved by a coincidence technique using precision timing (such as GPS clocks) at geographically separated sites. The non-detection of extra-solar bursting or flaring radio sources has improved the flux density sensitivity and timescale sensitivity limits set by several similar experiments in the 1970s. We discuss the consequences of these limits for the immediate solar neighborhood and the discovery of previously unknown classes of sources. We also discuss other possible uses for the large collection of 611 MHz monitoring data assembled by STARE.Comment: 24 pages, 6 figures; to appear in PAS