Voice-based assessments of trustworthiness, competence, and warmth in blind and sighted adults

The study of voice perception in congenitally blind individuals allows researchers rare insight into how a lifetime of visual deprivation affects the development of voice perception. Previous studies have suggested that blind adults outperform their sighted counterparts in low-level auditory tasks testing spatial localization and pitch discrimination, as well as in verbal speech processing; however, blind persons generally show no advantage in nonverbal voice recognition or discrimination tasks. The present study is the first to examine whether visual experience influences the development of social stereotypes that are formed on the basis of nonverbal vocal characteristics (i.e., voice pitch). Groups of 27 congenitally or early-blind adults and 23 sighted controls assessed the trustworthiness, competence, and warmth of men and women speaking a series of vowels, whose voice pitches had been experimentally raised or lowered. Blind and sighted listeners judged both men’s and women’s voices with lowered pitch as being more competent and trustworthy than voices with raised pitch. In contrast, raised-pitch voices were judged as being warmer than were lowered-pitch voices, but only for women’s voices. Crucially, blind and sighted persons did not differ in their voice-based assessments of competence or warmth, or in their certainty of these assessments, whereas the association between low pitch and trustworthiness in women’s voices was weaker among blind than sighted participants. This latter result suggests that blind persons may rely less heavily on nonverbal cues to trustworthiness compared to sighted persons. Ultimately, our findings suggest that robust perceptual associations that systematically link voice pitch to the social and personal dimensions of a speaker can develop without visual input

Perspectives on engineering more usable context-aware systems

The expectations of the abilities of context-aware systems (C-AS) often differ from reality. It becomes difficult to program contextual services that react adequately to the circumstantial needs of users as developers need to know, beforehand: the set of contextual states that may exist, what information could accurately determine a contextual state within that set, and what appropriate action should be taken in that particular state. Although there exist many frameworks and tools which support the design and implementation of C-AS, there is less conceptual help for developers to inform them of what contextual situations and services are appropriate (or feasible) to be implemented. This report reviews the state-of-the-art conceptualisation of context, which is more focused on the representational interpretation of the concept, to introduce a perspective that also acknowledges its interactional interpretation. A combination of revised and new definitions is introduced, which give key insights for the development of more useful C-AS. By acknowledging situations as a dynamic phenomenon that arises from action (interaction), and needs to be understood by the developers, it facilitates the analysis of these subjective interpretations into programming constructs (representation). The conceptualisation is also complemented with a set of guidelines for developers, an illustration of their usage, and a further discussion on the future directions for the engineering of more usable C-AS. The introduced conceptualisation is targeted towards the creation of an open-source tool supported framework for the engineering of C-AS

Systems microscopy approaches to understand cancer cell migration and metastasis

Cell migration is essential in a number of processes, including wound healing, angiogenesis and cancer metastasis. Especially, invasion of cancer cells in the surrounding tissue is a crucial step that requires increased cell motility. Cell migration is a well-orchestrated process that involves the continuous formation and disassembly of matrix adhesions. Those structural anchor points interact with the extra-cellular matrix and also participate in adhesion-dependent signalling. Although these processes are essential for cancer metastasis, little is known about the molecular mechanisms that regulate adhesion dynamics during tumour cell migration. In this review, we provide an overview of recent advanced imaging strategies together with quantitative image analysis that can be implemented to understand the dynamics of matrix adhesions and its molecular components in relation to tumour cell migration. This dynamic cell imaging together with multiparametric image analysis will help in understanding the molecular mechanisms that define cancer cell migration

Seeding, Evolutionary Growth, and Reseeding: Constructing, Capturing, and Evolving Knowledge in DomainOriented Design Environments

We live in a world characterized by evolution -- that is, by ongoing processes of development, formation, and growth in both natural and human-created systems. Biology tells us that complex, natural systems are not created all at once but must instead evolve over time. We are becoming increasingly aware that evolutionary processes are ubiquitous and critical for technological innovations as well. This is particularly true for complex software systems because these systems do not necessarily exist in a technological context alone but instead are embedded within dynamic human organizations. The Center for LifeLong Learning and Design (L 3 D) at the University of Colorado has been involved in research on software design and other design domains for more than a decade. We understand software design as an evolutionary process in which system requirements and functionality are determined through an iterative process of collaboration among multiple stakeholders, rather than being completel..

Oxidation of hemoglobin and redistribution of band 3 promote erythrophagocytosis in visceral leishmaniasis

In visceral leishmaniasis (VL), oxidative assault on erythrocytes perturbs their cellular environment and makes them vulnerable to premature hemolysis. In this study, we assessed the contribution of oxidation-induced modifications of hemoglobin and membrane protein band 3 in the reduced survival of red cells in VL. Oxidative transformation of oxyhemoglobin to hemichrome enhanced its interaction with erythrocyte membrane in the infected animals. Association between denatured globin and band 3 contributed to the formation of insoluble copolymer of macromolecular dimension. Disulfide bonding appeared to be necessary in the making of high molecular weight aggregates during copolymerization. Hemichrome induced clustering of band 3 promoted generation of epitopes on erythrocyte cell surface. This provided a signal favoring immunologic recognition of redistributed band 3 by autologous IgG followed by erythrophagocytosis. An eventual outcome of the sequence of events pointed to early removal of affected red cells from circulation during the disease

Complex population evolutionary history of four cold-tolerant Notopterygium herb species in the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau and adjacent areas

Historical geological and climatic events are the most important drivers of population expansions/contractions, range shifts, and interspecific divergence in plants. However, the species divergence and spatiotemporal population dynamics of alpine cold-tolerant herbal plants in the high-altitude Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP) and adjacent areas remain poorly understood. In this study, we investigated population evolutionary history of four endangered Notopterygium herb species in the QTP and adjacent regions. We sequenced 10 nuclear loci, 2 mitochondrial DNA regions, and 4 chloroplast DNA regions in a total of 72 natural populations from the 4 species, and tested the hypothesis that the population history of these alpine herbs was markedly affected by the Miocene–Pliocene QTP uplifts and Quaternary climatic oscillations. We found that the four Notopterygium species had generally low levels of nucleotide variability within populations. Molecular dating and isolation-with-migration analyses suggested that Notopterygium species diverged ~1.74–7.82 million years ago and their differentiation was significantly associated with recent uplifts of the eastern margin of the QTP. In addition, ecological niche modeling and population history analysis showed that N. incisum and N. franchetii underwent considerable demographic expansions during the last glacial period of the Pleistocene, whereas a demographic contraction and a expansion occurred for N. forrestii and N. oviforme during the antepenultimate interglacial period and penultimate glacial period, respectively. These findings highlight the importance of geological and climatic changes during the Miocene–Pliocene and Pleistocene as causes of species divergence and changes in population structure within cold-tolerant herbs in the QTP biodiversity hotspot.This work was co-supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31470400), the Shaanxi Provincial Key Laboratory Project of Department of Education (grant number 17JS135), and the Open Foundation of Key Laboratory of Resource Biology and Biotechnology in Western China (Ministry of Education) (Number ZSK2017007).Peer reviewe