Effects of the restoration actions to combat desertification on soils: the practice project study site in Pula (Sardinia, Italy)

Land Degradation and Desertification affect much of the world’s drylands, resulting in a significant loss of biological and economic productivity. Responding to desertification by improving the efficiency of land and resource management represents a crucial step towards social welfare in drylands. However, the evaluation of the actions to combat desertification remains limited. The PRACTICE EC-FP7 project develops and tests integrated evaluation protocols to assess the effectiveness of restoration practices in a network of study sites distributed among the most LD affected regions of the world

Visual representations of time elicit early responses in human temporal cortex

Time perception is inherently part of human life. All human sensory modalities are always involved in the complex task of creating a temporal representation of the external world. However, when representing time, people primarily rely on auditory information. Since the auditory system prevails in many audio-visual temporal tasks, one may expect that the early recruitment of the auditory network is necessary for building a highly resolved and flexible temporal representation in the visual modality. To test this hypothesis, we asked 17 healthy participants to temporally bisect three consecutive flashes while we recorded EEG. We demonstrated that visual stimuli during temporal bisection elicit an early (50–90 ms) response of an extended area of the temporal cortex, likely including auditory cortex too. The same activation did not appear during an easier spatial bisection task. These findings suggest that the brain may use auditory representations to deal with complex temporal representation in the visual system

Audio Cortical Processing in Blind Individuals

This chapter focuses on the cortical processing of auditory spatial information in blindness. Research has demonstrated enhanced auditory processing in blind individuals, suggesting they compensate for lacking vision with greater sensitivity in other senses. A few years ago, we demonstrated severely impaired auditory precision in congenitally blind individuals when performing an auditory spatial metric task: participants’ thresholds for spatially bisecting three consecutive, spatially distributed sound sources were seriously compromised. Here we describe psychophysical and neural correlates of this deficit, and we show that the deficit disappears if blind individuals are presented with coherent spatio-temporal cues (short space associated with short time and vice versa). Instead, when the audio information presents incoherent spatio-temporal cues (short space associated with long time and vice versa), sighted individuals are unaffected by the perturbation while blind individuals are strongly attracted to the temporal cue. These results suggest that blind participants use temporal cues to make audio spatial estimations and that the visual cortex seems to have a functional role in these perceptual tasks. In the present chapter, we illustrate our hypothesis, suggesting that the lack of vision may drive construction of multisensory cortical network coding space based on temporal instead of spatial coordinates

The Role of Visual Experience in Auditory Space Perception around the Legs.

It is widely accepted that vision plays a key role in the development of spatial skills of the other senses. Recent works have shown that blindness is often associated with auditory spatial deficits. The majority of previous studies have focused on understanding the representation of the upper frontal body space where vision and actions have a central role in mapping the space, however less research has investigated the back space and the space around the legs. Here we investigate space perception around the legs and the role of previous visual experience, by studying sighted and blind participants in an audio localization task (front-back discrimination). Participants judged if a sound was delivered in their frontal or back space. The results showed that blindfolded sighted participants were more accurate than blind participants in the frontal space. However, both groups were similarly accurate when auditory information was delivered in the back space. Blind individuals performed the task with similar accuracy for sounds delivered in the frontal and back space, while sighted people performed better in the frontal space. These results suggest that visual experience influences auditory spatial representations around the legs. Moreover, these results suggest that hearing and vision play different roles in different spaces

Non-spatial skills differ in the front and rear peri-personal space.

In measuring behavioural and pupillary responses to auditory oddball stimuli delivered in the front and rear peri-personal space, we find that pupils dilate in response to rare stimuli, both target and distracters. Dilation in response to targets is stronger than the response to distracters, implying a task relevance effect on pupil responses. Crucially, pupil dilation in response to targets is also selectively modulated by the location of sound sources: stronger in the front than in the rear peri-personal space, in spite of matching behavioural performance. This supports the concept that even non-spatial skills, such as the ability to alert in response to behaviourally relevant events, are differentially engaged across subregions of the peri-personal space

Circadian sleep propensity and alcohol interaction at the wheel

Study Objectives: The study was aimed at estimating the effect of alcohol consumption, time of day, and their interaction on traffic crashes in a real regional context. Methods: Blood alcohol concentration (BAC) data were collected from drivers involved in traffic accidents during one year in an Italian region and in a control group of drivers over the same road network. Mean circadian sleep propensity was estimated from a previous study as function of time of day. Accident risk was analyzed by logistic regression as function of BAC and circadian sleep propensity. Results: BAC values greater than zero were found in 72.0% of the drivers involved in crashes and in 40.4% of the controls. Among the former 23.6% of the drivers exceeded the BAC legal threshold of 0.05 g/dL, while illegal values were found in 10.4% of the controls. The relative risk showed a significant increase with both BAC and circadian sleep propensity (as estimated from time of day) and their interaction was significant. Conclusions: Due to the significant interaction, even low BAC levels strongly increased accident risk when associated with high sleep propensity

The Importance of Visual Experience, Gender, and Emotion in the Assessment of an Assistive Tactile Mouse

Tactile maps are efficient tools to improve spatial understanding and mobility skills of visually impaired people. Their limited adaptability can be compensated with haptic devices which display graphical information, but their assessment is frequently limited to performance-based metrics only which can hide potential spatial abilities in O&M protocols. We assess a low-tech tactile mouse able to deliver three-dimensional content considering how performance, mental workload, behavior, and anxiety status vary with task difficulty and gender in congenitally blind, late blind, and sighted subjects. Results show that task difficulty coherently modulates the efficiency and difficulty to build mental maps, regardless of visual experience. Although exhibiting attitudes that were similar and gender-independent, the females had lower performance and higher cognitive load, especially when congenitally blind. All groups showed a significant decrease in anxiety after using the device. Tactile graphics with our device seems therefore to be applicable with different visual experiences, with no negative emotional consequences of mentally demanding spatial tasks. Going beyond performance-based assessment, our methodology can help with better targeting technological solutions in orientation and mobility protocols

Comparisons between glucose analogue 2-deoxy-2-((18)F)fluoro-D-glucose and (18)F-sodium fluoride positron emission tomography/computed tomography in breast cancer patients with bone lesions

To compare 2-deoxy-2-((18)F)fluoro-D-glucose((18)F-FDG) and (18)F-sodium ((18)F-NaF) positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) accuracy in breast cancer patients with clinically/radiologically suspected or known bone metastases