Towards a Characterization of Late Talkers: The Developmental Profile of Children with Late Language Emergence through a Web-Based Communicative-Language Assessment

Children acquire language naturally, but there is variation in language acquisition patterns. Indeed, different internal and external variables play a role in acquiring language. However, there are open research questions about the contribution of different variables to language development. Moreover, with societal changes and due to the pandemic situation, there has been a growing interest in testing digitalization related to indirect language acquisition assessment. In this study, a web-based assessment survey was developed to (1) describe the relation between expressive vocabulary, Socio- Conversational Skills (SCS), gender, parental education, executive functions (EFs), and pretend play; (2) determine whether the survey can detect differences between late talkers (LTs) and children with typical language development; (3) identify children with “overall high” and “overall low” communicative-language scores to test the validity of expressive vocabulary as a main indicator to detect LTs. The parents of 108 Italian children (51 males) aged 24–36 months participated in the study. The results showed that expressive vocabulary correlates with measures of SCS (assertiveness and responsiveness) and is reliable in identifying LTs (d = 2.73). Furthermore, SCS and EFs contribute to better characterizing the developmental profile of children aged 24–36 months

Neural Correlates of Direct Access Trading in a Real Stock Market: An fMRI Investigation

Background: While financial decision making has been barely explored, no study has previously investigated the neural correlates of individual decisions made by professional traders involved in real stock market negotiations, using their own financial resources. Aim: We sought to detect how different brain areas are modulated by factors like age, expertise, psychological profile (speculative risk seeking or aversion) and, eventually, size and type (Buy/Sell) of stock negotiations, made through Direct Access Trading (DAT) platforms. Subjects and methods: Twenty male traders underwent fMRI while negotiating in the Italian stock market using their own preferred trading platform. Results: At least 20 decision events were collected during each fMRI session. Risk averse traders performed a lower number of financial transactions with respect to risk seekers, with a lower average economic value, but with a higher rate of filled proposals. Activations were observed in cortical and subcortical areas traditionally involved in decision processes, including the ventrolateral and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC, dlPFC), the posterior parietal cortex (PPC), the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), and dorsal striatum. Regression analysis indicated an important role of age in modulating activation of left NAcc, while traders' expertise was negatively related to activation of vlPFC. High value transactions were associated with a stronger activation of the right PPC when subjects' buy rather than sell. The success of the trading activity, based on a large number of filled transactions, was related with higher activation of vlPFC and dlPFC. Independent of chronological and professional age, traders differed in their attitude to DAT, with distinct brain activity profiles being detectable during fMRI sessions. Those subjects who described themselves as very self-confident, showed a lower or absent activation of both the caudate nucleus and the dlPFC, while more reflexive traders showed greater activation of areas involved in strategic decision making. Discussion: The neural correlates in DAT are similar to those observed in other decision making contexts. Trading is handled as a well-learned automatic behavior by expert traders; for those who mostly rely on heuristics, cognitive effort decreases, and transaction speed increases, but decision efficiency lowers following a poor involvement of the dlPFC

War, human rights, and medical scientific publishing: European Journal of Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine will accept from now on only papers by authors signing the UN Declaration on Human Rights

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Gender-related variability in information processing of disclosure documents

Disclosure is used worldwide as a tool to increase transparency and help investors to make their decisions, thus partially overcoming asymmetric information in financial markets. This research seeks to explore gender–related variability in visual attention allocation to the Key Investor Information Document, and in the evaluation of product financial attractiveness. We exploited the eye–tracking methodology to collect neural data, responding to the call for considering new data sources. The analysis shows that men tend to dedicate more attention to the sections Objectives and Past performance while women spend more time to scan the sections Risk–reward profile and Costs and charges; when evaluating product financial attractiveness, women, with respect to men, tend to evaluate more often products as poorly financially attractive. Results reveal the existence of gender–related variability in the visual search strategy for relevant information, which, in turn, can impact on the phase of product evaluation. These findings highlight the professional responsibility of regulators and supervisors to monitor sellers’ and marketers’ behaviours when they interact with consumers. Moreover, this study could provide support to develop financial disclosure documents considering individual differences and ensuring that adequate attention is allocated by investors to all financial information sources, thus raising the level of investor protection. Eventually, the study stimulates innovations to be embedded in the world–wide ongoing regulatory developments that aim at increasing transparency requirements

Selecting Optimal Trace Clustering Pipelines with Meta-learning

Trace clustering has been extensively used to discover aspects of the data from event logs. Process Mining techniques guide the identification of sub-logs by grouping traces with similar behaviors, producing more understandable models and improving conformance indicators. Nevertheless, little attention has been posed to the relationship among event log properties, the pipeline of encoding and clustering algorithms, and the quality of the obtained outcome. The present study contributes to the understanding of the aforementioned relationships and provides an automatic selection of a proper combination of algorithms for clustering a given event log. We propose a Meta-Learning framework to recommend the most suitable pipeline for trace clustering, which encompasses the encoding method, clustering algorithm, and its hyperparameters. Our experiments were conducted using a thousand event logs, four encoding techniques, and three clustering methods. Results indicate that our framework sheds light on the trace clustering problem and can assist users in choosing the best pipeline considering their environment

Anchoring effect in visual information processing during financial decisions: an eye-tracking study

When reading a financial disclosure document, subjects are faced with multiple information cues and might simplify decisional complexity by relying on heuristics. This study explores whether, in an attempt to filter information from the Payment Account Fees Information Document (FID), subjects anchor their evaluation to a specific item, leading to biased financial choices. By detecting the visual search strategy in 70 subjects through eye tracking, we observed that people exhibited systematic visual anchoring to the top of the document, which corresponds to the Liquidity section that displays the Annual Fee. Moreover, data revealed that subjects sometimes fail to recognize the most advantageous products. This mainly occurs when the Annual Fee is high, even if the other charges compensate for that amount, clarifying the link between visual search strategy and financial decisions. Data also showed the role of financial literacy in modulating attention, as poorly financially literate subjects are more prone to anchoring bias. The findings contribute to the neuroeconomics literature on anchoring effect and highlight practical implications for financial regulators and managers involved in the ergonomics of documents

Trust/untrust is not the same as true/false. lessons learned and ethical questions on the application of untrustworthiness scales to judge individuals

This special paper reflects on trustworthiness and its implications for scientific medical journals and all the communities they serve: health professionals, policymakers, the public, and a specific discipline, in our case, Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine. We start from a recent episode: a paper claimed the untrustworthiness of two randomised controlled trials (RCTs) published in the European Journal of Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine based on a newly developed trustworthiness scale, used until now only in systematic reviews. This likely represents the first case of applying such a scale focusing on a single leading author. Developing a proper answer to this case led us to present some insights from the perspective of a Journal editor. We discuss the impact of false research results, why trust is needed in science and medicine, the difference between untrust and false results, the problems in judging trustworthiness, the unfortunately weak capacity of the peer review system in preventing these issues, the problems of "post-hoc" judgements and the emerging ethical issues. We conclude with some suggestions for the future based on prevention at the system level

Expanding Glucocerebrosidase Involvement in Neurodegeneration: D419H Mutation Causing Dementia with Lewy Bodies

Mutations in the glucocerebrosidase gene (GBA) are a common genetic risk factor for Dementia with Lewy Bodies (DLB). Hereby, we describe an Italian family with three DLB relatives harboring the D419H GBA variant. The pedigree analysis indicates a dominant inheritance pattern, suggesting that heterozygous GBA mutations may differently affect the risk of Parkinson-dementia syndromes. This should be taken into account for genetic counseling in relatives of patients with GBA associated Parkinson’s Disease/DLB

A Multi-Channel Low-Power System-on-Chip for in Vivo Recording and Wireless Transmission of Neural Spikes

This paper reports a multi-channel neural spike recording system-on-chip with digital data compression and wireless telemetry. The circuit consists of 16 amplifiers, an analog time-division multiplexer, a single 8 bit analog-to-digital converter, a digital signal compression unit and a wireless transmitter. Although only 16 amplifiers are integrated in our current die version, the whole system is designed to work with 64, demonstrating the feasibility of a digital processing and narrowband wireless transmission of 64 neural recording channels. Compression of the raw data is achieved by detecting the action potentials (APs) and storing 20 samples for each spike waveform. This compression method retains sufficiently high data quality to allow for single neuron identification (spike sorting). The 400 MHz transmitter employs a Manchester-Coded Frequency Shift Keying (MC-FSK) modulator with low modulation index. In this way, a 1.25 Mbit/s data rate is delivered within a limited band of about 3 MHz. The chip is realized in a 0.35 um AMS CMOS process featuring a 3 V power supply with an area of 3.1x 2.7 mm2. The achieved transmission range is over 10 m with an overall power consumption for 64 channels of 17.2 mW. This figure translates into a power budget of 269uW per channel, in line with published results but allowing a larger transmission distance and more efficient bandwidth occupation of the wireless link. The integrated circuit was mounted on a small and light board to be used during neuroscience experiments with freely-behaving rats. Powered by 2 AAA batteries, the system can continuously work for more than 100 hours allowing for long-lasting neural spike recordings