Quantifying Aphantasia through drawing: Those without visual imagery show deficits in object but not spatial memory

Congenital aphantasia is a recently characterized variation of experience defined by the inability to form voluntary visual imagery, in individuals who are otherwise high performing. Because of this specific deficit to visual imagery, individuals with aphantasia serve as an ideal group for probing the nature of representations in visual memory, particularly the interplay of object, spatial, and symbolic information. Here, we conducted a large-scale online study of aphantasia and revealed a dissociation in object and spatial content in their memory representations. Sixty-one individuals with aphantasia and matched controls with typical imagery studied real-world scene images, and were asked to draw them from memory, and then later copy them during a matched perceptual condition. Drawings were objectively quantified by 2,795 online scorers for object and spatial details. Aphantasic participants recalled significantly fewer objects than controls, with less color in their drawings, and an increased reliance on verbal scaffolding. However, aphantasic participants showed high spatial accuracy equivalent to controls, and made significantly fewer memory errors. These differences between groups only manifested during recall, with no differences between groups during the matched perceptual condition. This object-specific memory impairment in individuals with aphantasia provides evidence for separate systems in memory that support object versus spatial information. The study also provides an important experimental validation for the existence of aphantasia as a variation in human imagery experience

Sum of Lyapunov exponents of the Hodge bundle with respect to the Teichmuller geodesic flow

We compute the sum of the positive Lyapunov exponents of the Hodge bundle with respect to the Teichmuller geodesic flow. The computation is based on the analytic Riemann-Roch Theorem and uses a comparison of determinants of flat and hyperbolic Laplacians when the underlying Riemann surface degenerates.Comment: Minor corrections. To appear in Publications mathematiques de l'IHE

Association of metabolic syndrome and change in Unified Parkinson\u27s Disease Rating Scale scores.

OBJECTIVE: To explore the association between metabolic syndrome and the Unified Parkinson\u27s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) scores and, secondarily, the Symbol Digit Modalities Test (SDMT). METHODS: This is a secondary analysis of data from 1,022 of 1,741 participants of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke Exploratory Clinical Trials in Parkinson Disease Long-Term Study 1, a randomized, placebo-controlled trial of creatine. Participants were categorized as having or not having metabolic syndrome on the basis of modified criteria from the National Cholesterol Education Program Adult Treatment Panel III. Those who had the same metabolic syndrome status at consecutive annual visits were included. The change in UPDRS and SDMT scores from randomization to 3 years was compared in participants with and without metabolic syndrome. RESULTS: Participants with metabolic syndrome (n = 396) compared to those without (n = 626) were older (mean [SD] 63.9 [8.1] vs 59.9 [9.4] years; p \u3c 0.0001), were more likely to be male (75.3% vs 57.0%; p \u3c 0.0001), and had a higher mean uric acid level (men 5.7 [1.3] vs 5.3 [1.1] mg/dL, women 4.9 [1.3] vs 3.9 [0.9] mg/dL, p \u3c 0.0001). Participants with metabolic syndrome experienced an additional 0.6- (0.2) unit annual increase in total UPDRS (p = 0.02) and 0.5- (0.2) unit increase in motor UPDRS (p = 0.01) scores compared with participants without metabolic syndrome. There was no difference in the change in SDMT scores. CONCLUSIONS: Persons with Parkinson disease meeting modified criteria for metabolic syndrome experienced a greater increase in total UPDRS scores over time, mainly as a result of increases in motor scores, compared to those who did not. Further studies are needed to confirm this finding. CLINICALTRIALSGOV IDENTIFIER: NCT00449865

The Paranormal is (Still) Normal: The Sociological Implications of a Survey of Paranormal Experiences in Great Britain

Historically, there has been limited sociological interest in the paranormal and no systematic study of reported paranormal experiences. There are also few medium-to-large-scale survey results with nationally representative populations focusing on paranormal experiences. This paper provides details of an exploratory survey conducted in 2009 with a nationally representative sample of 4,096 adults aged 16 years and over across Great Britain. Our findings show that 37% of British adults report at least one paranormal experience and that women, those who are middle-aged or individuals resident in the South West are more likely to report such experiences. These results establish incidence levels of reported paranormal experiences in contemporary Britain. We argue also that they merit a more sustained sociological consideration of the paranormal. In this respect we renew and update the robust justification and call for serious research positioning the paranormal as a social phenomenon, originally proposed well over thirty years ago by Greeley (1975)

‘Video Replay: Families, films and fantasy’ as a transformational text: Commentary on Valerie Walkerdine's ‘Video Replay’.

In this commentary I explore the significance of Valerie Walkerdine's paper ‘Video Replay: Families, Films and Fantasy’. I review its impact in 1986 and then discuss how some of its ideas about subjectivity and popular culture – specifically film - can be developed in the contemporary context. A recurring fantasy of Rocky II and its reception is that of social and psychological transformation. I address this theme by drawing on the work of Christopher Bollas to argue that Walkerdine's psychosocial analysis continues to facilitate, across a range of contexts, some of the transformational processes described in her article

Square-tiled cyclic covers

A cyclic cover of the complex projective line branched at four appropriate points has a natural structure of a square-tiled surface. We describe the combinatorics of such a square-tiled surface, the geometry of the corresponding Teichm\"uller curve, and compute the Lyapunov exponents of the determinant bundle over the Teichm\"uller curve with respect to the geodesic flow. This paper includes a new example (announced by G. Forni and C. Matheus in \cite{Forni:Matheus}) of a Teichm\"uller curve of a square-tiled cyclic cover in a stratum of Abelian differentials in genus four with a maximally degenerate Kontsevich--Zorich spectrum (the only known example found previously by Forni in genus three also corresponds to a square-tiled cyclic cover \cite{ForniSurvey}). We present several new examples of Teichm\"uller curves in strata of holomorphic and meromorphic quadratic differentials with maximally degenerate Kontsevich--Zorich spectrum. Presumably, these examples cover all possible Teichm\"uller curves with maximally degenerate spectrum. We prove that this is indeed the case within the class of square-tiled cyclic covers.Comment: 34 pages, 6 figures. Final version incorporating referees comments. In particular, a gap in the previous version was corrected. This file uses the journal's class file (jmd.cls), so that it is very similar to published versio

Emergence of good conduct, scaling and Zipf laws in human behavioral sequences in an online world

We study behavioral action sequences of players in a massive multiplayer online game. In their virtual life players use eight basic actions which allow them to interact with each other. These actions are communication, trade, establishing or breaking friendships and enmities, attack, and punishment. We measure the probabilities for these actions conditional on previous taken and received actions and find a dramatic increase of negative behavior immediately after receiving negative actions. Similarly, positive behavior is intensified by receiving positive actions. We observe a tendency towards anti-persistence in communication sequences. Classifying actions as positive (good) and negative (bad) allows us to define binary 'world lines' of lives of individuals. Positive and negative actions are persistent and occur in clusters, indicated by large scaling exponents alpha~0.87 of the mean square displacement of the world lines. For all eight action types we find strong signs for high levels of repetitiveness, especially for negative actions. We partition behavioral sequences into segments of length n (behavioral `words' and 'motifs') and study their statistical properties. We find two approximate power laws in the word ranking distribution, one with an exponent of kappa-1 for the ranks up to 100, and another with a lower exponent for higher ranks. The Shannon n-tuple redundancy yields large values and increases in terms of word length, further underscoring the non-trivial statistical properties of behavioral sequences. On the collective, societal level the timeseries of particular actions per day can be understood by a simple mean-reverting log-normal model.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure

A randomised feasibility trial comparing needle fasciotomy with limited fasciectomy treatment for Dupuytren’s contractures

© 2020 The Author(s). Purpose: The purpose of this study is to assess the feasibility of conducting a large, multicentre randomised controlled trial (RCT) comparing needle fasciotomy with limited fasciectomy for treatment of Dupuytren's contractures. Design: The design of this study is a parallel, two-arm, multicentre, randomised feasibility trial with embedded QuinteT Recruitment Intervention. Participants: Patients aged 18 years or over who were referred from primary to secondary care for treatment of a hand with Dupuytren's contractures of one or more fingers of more than 30° at the metacarpophalangeal (MCP) and/or proximal interphalangeal (PIP) joints and well-defined cord(s). Patients were excluded if they had undergone previous Dupuytren's contracture surgery on the same hand. Methods: Potential participants were screened for eligibility. Recruited participants randomised (1:1) to treatment with either needle fasciotomy or limited fasciectomy and followed-up for up to 6 months after treatment. Data on recruitment rates, completion of follow-up, and procedure costs were collected. Four patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) and objective outcome measures were collected before intervention and 6 weeks and 6 months afterwards. Results: One hundred and fifty-three of 267 (57%) primary-care referrals for Dupuytren's contractures met the eligibility criteria for the study. Seventy-one of the 153 (46%) agreed to participate and were randomly allocated to treatment with needle fasciotomy or limited fasciectomy. Sixty-seven of these underwent their allocated treatment, two were crossovers from limited fasciectomy to needle fasciotomy, and two (both allocated limited fasciectomy) received no treatment. Fifty-nine participants (85%) completed 6-month follow-up PROMs. Participants felt the MYMOP, PEM and URAM PROMs allowed them to better describe how their treatment affected their hand function than the DASH PROM. The estimated costs of limited fasciectomy (in an operating theatre) and needle fasciotomy (in a clinic room) were £777 and £111 respectively. Conclusion: A large RCT comparing treatment of Dupuytren's contractures by needle fasciotomy and limited fasciectomy is feasible. Data from this study will help determine the number of sites and duration of recruitment required to complete an adequately powered RCT and will assist the selection of PROMs in future studies on the treatment of Dupuytren's contractures. (Level 1 feasibility study)

Attention and automation: New perspectives on mental underload and performance

There is considerable evidence in the ergonomics literature that automation can significantly reduce operator mental workload. Furthermore, reducing mental workload is not necessarily a good thing, particularly in cases where the level is already manageable. This raises the issue of mental underload, which can be at least as detrimental to performance as overload. However, although it is widely recognized that mental underload is detrimental to performance, there are very few attempts to explain why this may be the case. It is argued in this paper that, until the need for a human operator is completely eliminated, automation has psychological implications relevant in both theoretical and applied domains. The present paper reviews theories of attention, as well as the literature on mental workload and automation, to synthesize a new explanation for the effects of mental underload on performance. Malleable attentional resources theory proposes that attentional capacity shrinks to accommodate reductions in mental workload, and that this shrinkage is responsible for the underload effect. The theory is discussed with respect to the applied implications for ergonomics research

The CMS Tracker Readout Front End Driver

The Front End Driver, FED, is a 9U 400mm VME64x card designed for reading out the Compact Muon Solenoid, CMS, silicon tracker signals transmitted by the APV25 analogue pipeline Application Specific Integrated Circuits. The FED receives the signals via 96 optical fibers at a total input rate of 3.4 GB/sec. The signals are digitized and processed by applying algorithms for pedestal and common mode noise subtraction. Algorithms that search for clusters of hits are used to further reduce the input rate. Only the cluster data along with trigger information of the event are transmitted to the CMS data acquisition system using the S-LINK64 protocol at a maximum rate of 400 MB/sec. All data processing algorithms on the FED are executed in large on-board Field Programmable Gate Arrays. Results on the design, performance, testing and quality control of the FED are presented and discussed