Mild acute stress improves response speed without impairing accuracy or interference control in two selective attention tasks: Implications for theories of stress and cognition.

Acute stress is generally thought to impair performance on tasks thought to rely on selective attention. This effect has been well established for moderate to severe stressors, but no study has examined how a mild stressor-the most common type of stressor-influences selective attention. In addition, no study to date has examined how stress influences the component processes involved in overall selective attention task performance, such as controlled attention, automatic attentional activation, decision-making, and motor abilities. To address these issues, we randomly assigned 107 participants to a mild acute stress or control condition. As expected, the mild acute stress condition showed a small but significant increase in cortisol relative to the control condition. Following the stressor, we assessed attention with two separate flanker tasks. One of these tasks was optimized to investigate component attentional processes using computational cognitive modeling, whereas the other task employed mouse-tracking to illustrate how response conflict unfolded over time. The results for both tasks showed that mild acute stress decreased response time (i.e., increased response speed) without influencing accuracy or interference control. Further, computational modeling and mouse-tracking analyses indicated that these effects were due to faster motor action execution time for chosen actions. Intriguingly, however, cortisol responses were unrelated to any of the observed effects of mild stress. These results have implications for theories of stress and cognition, and highlight the importance of considering motor processes in understanding the effects of stress on cognitive task performance

Z-boson as "the standard candle" for high precision W-boson physics at LHC

In this paper we propose a strategy for measuring the inclusive W-boson production processes at LHC. This strategy exploits simultaneously the unique flexibility of the LHC collider in running variable beam particle species at variable beam energies, and the configuration flexibility of the LHC detectors. We propose their concrete settings for a precision measurement of the Standard Model parameters. These dedicated settings optimise the use of the Z boson and Drell-Yan pair production processes as ``the standard reference candles''. The presented strategy allows to factorise and to directly measure those of the QCD effects which affect differently the W and Z production processes. It reduces to a level of 10^{-4} the impact of uncertainties in the partonic distribution functions (PDFs) and in the transverse momentum of the quarks on the measurement precision. Last but not the least, it reduces by a factor of 10 an impact of systematic measurement errors, such as the energy scale and the measurement resolution, on the W-boson production observables.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figure

Towards a methodical framework for comprehensively assessing forest multifunctionality

Funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Grant Number: DFG FOR 891/1-3 National Natural Science Foundation of China. Grant Numbers: 30710103907, 30930005, 31170457, 31210103910 Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Sino-German Centre for Research Promotion in Beijing. Grant Number: GZ 986Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Investigating the washback effects on improving the writing performance of Iranian EFL university student

Because of the complex nature of writing as a social, cultural and cognitive phenomenon, and the variety of challenges faced by both learners and teachers, learning and teaching writing in EFL context, this study aimed to investigate the washback effects on improving Iranian EFL students' writing performance. Two research questions were addressed. The first was whether the test-oriented writing classes provide teachers with a taxonomy of more common errors in university EFL learners' scripts or not. The second aimed at investigating the significance of the difference in the writing performance of university EFL learners receiving washback treatment and those taught by the traditional method. The subjects of the research were ninety Iranian university EFL students, making up two intact classes of thirdyear majors. There were forty-five students per class, which consisted almost entirely female. The control group continued the traditional way of practicing writing in the classroom. The experimental group received washback–based instruction. The instructional program was then steered toward improving the areas of difficulty and focusing on the aspects that require more practice. The study showed that the rate of grammatical and lexico-semantic errors was more than errors in keeping cohesion, coherence and rhetorical organization.The diagnostic instructional program based on washback effect was satisfactory in improving the students' writing performance

Increasing the Numeric Expressiveness of the Planning Domain Definition Language

The technology of artificial intelligence (AI) planning is being adopted across many different disciplines. This has resulted in the wider use of the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL), where it is being used to model planning problems of different natures. One such area where AI planning is particularly attractive is engineering, where the optimisation problems are mathematically rich. The example used throughout this paper is the optimisation (minimisation) of machine tool measurement uncertainty. This planning problem highlights the limits of PDDL's numerical expressiveness in the absence of the square root function. A workaround method using the Babylonian algorithm is then evaluated before the extension of PDDL to include more mathematics functions is discussed