The effects of normal ageing and processing style on explicit and implicit memory

Explicit memory (e.g. recognition) declines with age, but there is disagreement about whether implicit memory (e.g. priming) declines or remains intact with age. Processing style is one primary factor that may explain this discrepancy: there is evidence that ageing does not affect conceptual (meaning-based) and perceptual (feature-based) processing equally, yet processing demands have varied in prior studies. The aim of this thesis is to understand how the type of cognitive processing affects the magnitude of age effects on implicit memory. Five experiments were conducted (four online and one lab-based) to compare the performance of young (18-30 years) and older (+65 years) adults on a range of implicit tests while varying conceptual /perceptual processing at encoding (Experiments 1A, 1B and 2), and both encoding and test (Experiments 3-4). In Experiments 1A and 1B a perceptual implicit memory task (Continuous Identification Task with Recognition; CID-R) was used, while in Experiment 2 a conceptual implicit task (Category Exemplar Generation; CEG) was used, and a recognition task was also included to assess explicit memory. In Experiment 3 both conceptual and perceptual tasks were used in a within-subjects design, and the conceptual implicit task was changed to Category Verification with Recognition (CV-R). Experiment 4 replicated Experiment 3 but was performed in person after COVID-19 restrictions ended. The results showed an age-related decline in explicit memory in all experiments except Experiment 3, and the key finding in relation to implicit memory is that age differences were affected by the type of processing. In most cases, priming was reduced by age when items were encoded conceptually and the test phase involved perceptual processing. These new findings challenge the widely held view that implicit memory remains stable with age and suggest that age differences in implicit memory are mediated by the type of processing at encoding and test

Shopping Behavior Of Supermarket Consumers In Kuwait

This study determines the product selection processes from Kuwaiti nationals based on their shopping habits in the Co-Operative Supermarkets (A government owned grocery stores).  This paper expands the concept of Consumer Satisfaction and includes an evaluation of the post purchase affective response. It presents the development of a consumer typology based on affective response, basically broken into two groups. The first group is formed by consumers who face grocery shopping as their duty the second group considers grocery shopping as their pleasure. The paper also presents the implications of such typology in the Co-Op operation itself. The literature on consumer behavior and store choice suggests that consumers make decisions to patronize a particular store on the basis of a set of attributes that they view as important. This study attempts to explore the determinant attributes that influence the patronage decisions of supermarket consumers in Kuwait. Based on a descriptive analysis of data collected via an accidental sampling procedure, fourteen store attributes were identified. These attributes were factor analyzed, generating four image dimensions intuitively labeled merchandise, personnel, accessibility and promotion. A stepwise regression showed that merchandise image was the most salient in determining the frequency of supermarket shopping. None of the demographic characteristics of consumers did seem to have an impact on the perceived importance of the promotion image. Most of the differences among the categories of the consumers' demographic characteristics were found in the accessibility image, providing possible explanation for why the rank of the importance of accessibility elements varies considerably from one study to another. &nbsp

Protuupalno i analgetsko djelovanje novih derivata piridindikarbonitrila i benzopiranopiridina

In continuation of our search for new substituted pyridine based anti-inflammatories, reaction of 1-(2-thienyl or furanyl)-3-(2-hydroxyphenyl)-2-propen-1-ones (1) with malononitrile in alcoholic KOH solution afforded a mixture of 4-alkoxy-2-(2-thienyl or furanyl)-5H-[1]benzopyrano[3,4-c]pyridine-5-ones (2) and 2-alkoxy-4-amino-6-(2-thienyl or furanyl)-3,5-pyridinedicarbonitriles (3). Some of the synthesized compounds were evaluated for their anti-inflammatory and analgesic activities compared to diclofenac potassium as positive control. Detailed synthesis, spectroscopic and toxicity data are reported.U nastavku istraživanja derivata piridina s potencijalnim protuupalnim djelovanjem sintetizirani su 4-alkoksi-2-(2-tienil ili furanil)-5H-[1]benzopirano[3,4-c]piridin-5-oni (2) i 2-alkoksi-4-amino-6-(2-tienil ili furanil)-3,5-piridindikarbonitrili (3). Smjesa spojeva 2 i 3 dobivena je reakcijom 1-(2-tienil ili furanil)-3-(2-hidroksifenil)-2-propen-1-ona (1) s malononitrilom u alkoholnoj otopini KOH. Neki od sintetiziranih spojeva testirani su na protuupalno i analgetsko djelovanje, uz diklofenak kalij kao pozitivnu kontrolu. U radu su dani detaljni sintetski, spektroskopski i toksikološki podaci

High clarity speech separation using synchro extracting transform

Degenerate unmixing estimation technique (DUET) is the most ideal blind source separation (BSS) method for underdetermined conditions with number of sources exceeds number of mixtures. Estimation of mixing parameters which is the most critical step in the DUET algorithm, is developed based on the characteristic feature of sparseness of speech signals in time frequency (TF) domain. Hence, DUET relies on the clarity of time frequency representation (TFR) and even the slightest interference in the TF plane will be detrimental to the unmixing performance. In conventional DUET algorithm, short time Fourier transform (STFT) is utilized for extracting the TFR of speech signals. However, STFT can provide on limited sharpness to the TFR due to its inherent conceptual limitations, which worsens under noise contamination. This paper presents the application of post-processing techniques like synchro squeezed transform (SST) and synchro extracting transform (SET) to the DUET algorithm, to improve the TF resolution. The performance enhancement is evaluated both qualitatively and quantitatively by visual inspection, Renyi entropy of TFR and objective measures of speech signals. The results show enhancement in TF resolution and high clarity signal reconstruction. The method also provides adequate robustness to noise contamination

The Parametric Ordinal-Recursive Complexity of Post Embedding Problems

Post Embedding Problems are a family of decision problems based on the interaction of a rational relation with the subword embedding ordering, and are used in the literature to prove non multiply-recursive complexity lower bounds. We refine the construction of Chambart and Schnoebelen (LICS 2008) and prove parametric lower bounds depending on the size of the alphabet.Comment: 16 + vii page

Zero-Reachability in Probabilistic Multi-Counter Automata

We study the qualitative and quantitative zero-reachability problem in probabilistic multi-counter systems. We identify the undecidable variants of the problems, and then we concentrate on the remaining two cases. In the first case, when we are interested in the probability of all runs that visit zero in some counter, we show that the qualitative zero-reachability is decidable in time which is polynomial in the size of a given pMC and doubly exponential in the number of counters. Further, we show that the probability of all zero-reaching runs can be effectively approximated up to an arbitrarily small given error epsilon > 0 in time which is polynomial in log(epsilon), exponential in the size of a given pMC, and doubly exponential in the number of counters. In the second case, we are interested in the probability of all runs that visit zero in some counter different from the last counter. Here we show that the qualitative zero-reachability is decidable and SquareRootSum-hard, and the probability of all zero-reaching runs can be effectively approximated up to an arbitrarily small given error epsilon > 0 (these result applies to pMC satisfying a suitable technical condition that can be verified in polynomial time). The proof techniques invented in the second case allow to construct counterexamples for some classical results about ergodicity in stochastic Petri nets.Comment: 20 page

Spectrophotometric Determination of Cerium in Some Ore in Kurdistan Region – Iraq

A simple and Sensitive Spectrophotometric method was observed for trace measurement of Cerium (IV) in different serpentinite rocks in two different positions in Kurdistan region of Iraq. The method is depended on absorbance measurement at (490 nm.) for the red complex (Ce - Sulphanilic acid) at pH = 4.75 reproducible results were obtained (Recovery 98 – 103) % for both ores and synthetic Samples of cerium in trace levels. Keywords: red complex, serpentinite rocks, spectrophotometric, ceriu

Hybrid Method for Digits Recognition using Fixed-Frame Scores and Derived Pitch

This paper presents a procedure of frame normalization based on the traditional dynamic time warping (DTW) using the LPC coefficients. The redefined method is called as the DTW frame-fixing method (DTW-FF), it works by normalizing the word frames of the input against the reference frames. The enthusiasm to this study is due to neural network limitation that entails a fix number of input nodes for when processing multiple inputs in parallel. Due to this problem, this research is initiated to reduce the amount of computation and complexity in a neural network by reducing the number of inputs into the network. In this study, dynamic warping process is used, in which local distance scores of the warping path are fixed and collected so that their scores are of equal number of frames. Also studied in this paper is the consideration of pitch as a contributing feature to the speech recognition. Results showed a good performance and improvement when using pitch along with DTW-FF feature. The convergence rate between using the steepest gradient descent is also compared to another method namely conjugate gradient method. Convergence rate is also improved when conjugate gradient method is introduced in the back-propagation algorithm