EstuPlan: Methodology for the development of creativity in the resolution of scientific and social problems

[EN] Creative thinking is necessary to generate novel ideas and solve problems. "EstuPlan" is a methodology in which knowledge and creativity converge for the resolution of scientific problems with social projection. It is a training programme that integrates teachers, laboratory technicians and PhD students, master and undergraduate students which form working groups for the development of projects. Projects have a broad and essential scope and projection in terms of environmental problems, sustainable use of natural resources, food, health, biotechnology or biomedicine. The results show the success of this significant learning methodology using tools to develop creativity in responding to scientific and social demand for problem-solving to transfer academic knowledge to different professional environments. Bioplastics, Second Life of Coffee, LimBio, Algae oils, Ecomers, Caring for the life of your crop and Hate to Deforestate are currently being developed.Astudillo Calderón, S.; De Díez De La Torre, L.; García Companys, M.; Ortega Pérez, N.; Rodríguez Martínez, V.; Alzahrani, S.; Alonso Valenzuela, R.... (2019). EstuPlan: Methodology for the development of creativity in the resolution of scientific and social problems. En HEAD'19. 5th International Conference on Higher Education Advances. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 711-717. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAD19.2019.9205OCS71171

Atención emocional : influencia del contenido emocional sobre el direccionamiento etencional visual

Dada nuestra limitada capacidad de procesamiento de estímulos, la atención o habilidad de identificar y seleccionar la información relevante del ambiente externo o interno, es vital para la adaptabilidad del ser humano. Diferentes estímulos pueden capturar la atención de un individuo en forma automática, sin embargo durante la mayor parte del tiempo los sujetos observan libremente el entorno, dirigiendo y redirigiendo su atención hacia aquello que resulta relevante para la conducta en curso. Este direccionamiento atencional se acompaña de un direccionamiento de la mirada hacia el objeto o espacio atendido, a menos que se realice un esfuerzo voluntario para evitarlo, por lo que los movimientos oculares son un frecuente marcador atencional visual. A pesar del interés existente en cómo las propiedades físicas de los estímulos determinan la exploración visual, tales estudios no han logrado explicar la conducta en visión libre. Aspectos cognitivos de características top-down, tal como el procesamiento emocional, se encontrarían interactuando permanentemente con el direccionamiento atencional guiando así la exploración. En este estudio, utilizamos un paradigma de observación libre de imágenes con diverso contenido emocional, e investigamos cómo el valor emocional de los estímulos modula el direccionamiento atencional voluntario modificando el tiempo que los sujetos permanecen en cada categoría emocional y el número de fijaciones que en ellas realizan. Paralelamente, gracias a la medición continua del diámetro pupilar, dispusimos de un marcador de la respuesta emocional gatillada por las imágenes estableciendo el nexo entre emoción y direccionamiento atencional. Nuestros resultados confirman la relación entre emoción y direccionamiento atencional voluntario. Imágenes con contenido emocional, negativo y positivo, concentran un mayor tiempo de observación y número de fijaciones que imágenes neutras, especialmente las de naturaleza negativa. Similar efecto se obtiene al separar las imágenes según su nivel de arousal, posiblemente por el mayor arousal inherente a las imágenes negativas. La reactividad pupilar indica que imágenes de superiores arousals se acompañan de mayor dilatación pupilar, lo que reflejaría una rápida detección de la naturaleza de los estímulos y un consiguiente estado de activación autonómica preparatorio para una eventual respuesta conductual. Además de corroborar la hipótesis, nuestros resultados enfatizan la necesidad de considerar tanto la dimensión de valencia como el arousal en el estudio del procesamiento emocional y su interacción con otros procesos cognitivos tales como el direccionamiento atencional.Attention is the ability of identifying and selecting relevant information from outside or inside sources. Since our capacity of stimuli processing is limited, attention is deemed of utmost importance in human adaptability. When a stimulus suddenly appears or is highly outstanding, attention is automatically directed to the stimulus in an involuntary process, although most of the time stimulus are rather constant or fade in and out and attention is oriented from one to another according to its relevance for current behavior in a voluntary manner. In this process, gaze is directed to the object or space being attended, unless a conscious effort is made, hence ocular behavior is often used as visual attention maker. Physical properties of stimulus could be involved in the automatically capture of attention while cognitive aspects with top-down characteristics, such as emotional processing, would guide the voluntary orienting of attention. In natural situations, both mechanisms are in constant interaction and define the ocular behavior observed during free viewing. Through showing an arrangement of pictures with multiple emotional value, we looked for the influence of emotional content on the voluntary visual attentional orienting, reflected in the dwelling time and number of fixations in each affective category. Also, through the constant measure of pupil diameter we obtained an autonomic marker of the emotional response triggered by the pictures establishing a connection between emotion and attentional orienting. Our results confirm the influence of emotional content on attentional orienting. Pictures with affective content, negative and positive, display increased dwelling times and number of fixations when compared to neutral pictures, and between affective categories negative pictures are associated with the larger effects. This modulation is not exclusive of the emotional value; the level of arousal also triggers a divergence observed in behavior and pupillary response. Higher arousals are associated with larger dwelling times, number of fixations and pupillary dilations. Besides confirming our hypothesis, our results emphasize that arousal and valence should be considered different dimensions of emotional processing, whose interact in particular ways with other cognitive process as voluntary attentional orienting

Cortico-Striatal Oscillations Are Correlated to Motor Activity Levels in Both Physiological and Parkinsonian Conditions

Oscillatory neural activity in the cortico-basal ganglia-thalamocortical (CBGTC) loop is associated with the motor state of a subject, but also with the availability of modulatory neurotransmitters. For example, increased low-frequency oscillations in Parkinson’s disease (PD) are related to decreased levels of dopamine and have been proposed as biomarkers to adapt and optimize therapeutic interventions, such as deep brain stimulation. Using neural oscillations as biomarkers require differentiating between changes in oscillatory patterns associated with parkinsonism vs. those related to a subject’s motor state. To address this point, we studied the correlation between neural oscillatory activity in the motor cortex and striatum and varying degrees of motor activity under normal and parkinsonian conditions. Using rats with bilateral or unilateral 6-hydroxydopamine lesions as PD models, we correlated the motion index (MI)—a measure based on the physical acceleration of the head of rats—to the local field potential (LFP) oscillatory power in the 1–80 Hz range. In motor cortices and striata, we observed a robust correlation between the motion index and the oscillatory power in two main broad frequency ranges: a low-frequency range [5.0–26.5 Hz] was negatively correlated to motor activity, whereas a high-frequency range [35.0–79.9 Hz] was positively correlated. We observed these correlations in both normal and parkinsonian conditions. In addition to these general changes in broad-band power, we observed a more restricted narrow-band oscillation [25–40 Hz] in dopamine-denervated hemispheres. This oscillation, which seems to be selective to the parkinsonian state, showed a linear frequency dependence on the concurrent motor activity level. We conclude that, independently of the parkinsonian condition, changes in broad-band oscillatory activities of cortico-basal ganglia networks (including changes in the relative power of low- and high-frequency bands) are closely correlated to ongoing motions, most likely reflecting he operations of these neural circuits to control motor activity. Hence, biomarkers based on neural oscillations should focus on specific features, such as narrow frequency bands, to allow differentiation between parkinsonian states and physiological movement-dependent circuit modulation