Synchrony and social connection in immersive Virtual Reality

Synchronising movements in time with others can have significant positive effects on affiliative attitudes and behaviors. To explore the generalizability of synchrony effects, and to eliminate confounds of suggestion, competence and shared intention typical of standard laboratory and field experiments, we used an Immersive Virtual Reality (VR) environment. Participants, represented as virtual humans, took part in a joint movement activity with two other programmed virtual humans. The timings of the co-participant characters' movements were covertly manipulated to achieve synchrony or non-synchrony with the focal participant. Participants in the synchrony condition reported significantly greater social closeness to their virtual co-participants than those in the non-synchrony condition. Results indicate that synchrony in joint action causes positive social effects and that these effects are robust in a VR setting. The research can potentially inform the development of VR interventions for social and psychological wellbeing

Financial Literacy and Financial Behaviour:Experimental Evidence from Rural Rwanda

We organise a field experiment with smallholder farmers in Rwanda to measure the impact of financial literacy training on financial knowledge and behaviour. The training increased financial literacy of participants, changed their savings and borrowing behaviour and had a positive effect on the new business start-up. However, it failed to have a significant (short-term) impact on income. Using a two-stage regression framework, we identify enhanced financial literacy as one of the important factors explaining behavioural changes. We also test whether financial knowledge spillovers from trained farmers to their peers in local village banks but find no evidence for that.</p

Decreased corticospinal excitability after the illusion of missing part of the arm

Previous studies on body ownership illusions have shown that under certain multimodal conditions, healthy people can experience artificial body-parts as if they were part of their own body, with direct physiological consequences for the real limb that gets ‘substituted.' In this study we wanted to assess (a) whether healthy people can experience ‘missing’ a body-part through illusory ownership of an amputated virtual body, and (b) whether this would cause corticospinal excitability changes in muscles associated with the ‘missing’ body-part. Forty right-handed participants saw a virtual body from a first person perspective but for half of them the virtual body was missing a part of its right arm. Single pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation was applied before and after the experiment to left and right motor cortices. Motor evoked potentials (MEPs) were recorded from the first dorsal interosseous (FDI) and the extensor digitorum communis (EDC) of each hand. We found that the stronger the illusion of amputation and arm ownership, the more the reduction of MEP amplitudes of the EDC muscle for the contralateral sensorimotor cortex. In contrast, no association was found for the EDC amplitudes in the ipsilateral cortex and for the FDI amplitudes in both contralateral and ipsilateral cortices. Our study provides evidence that a short-term illusory perception of missing a body-part can trigger inhibitory effects on corticospinal pathways and importantly in the absence of any limb deafferentation or disuse

A Multicentre Study of Shigella Diarrhoea in Six Asian Countries: Disease Burden, Clinical Manifestations, and Microbiology

BACKGROUND: The burden of shigellosis is greatest in resource-poor countries. Although this diarrheal disease has been thought to cause considerable morbidity and mortality in excess of 1,000,000 deaths globally per year, little recent data are available to guide intervention strategies in Asia. We conducted a prospective, population-based study in six Asian countries to gain a better understanding of the current disease burden, clinical manifestations, and microbiology of shigellosis in Asia. METHODS AND FINDINGS: Over 600,000 persons of all ages residing in Bangladesh, China, Pakistan, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand were included in the surveillance. Shigella was isolated from 2,927 (5%) of 56,958 diarrhoea episodes detected between 2000 and 2004. The overall incidence of treated shigellosis was 2.1 episodes per 1,000 residents per year in all ages and 13.2/1,000/y in children under 60 months old. Shigellosis incidence increased after age 40 years. S. flexneri was the most frequently isolated Shigella species (1,976/2,927 [68%]) in all sites except in Thailand, where S. sonnei was most frequently detected (124/146 [85%]). S. flexneri serotypes were highly heterogeneous in their distribution from site to site, and even from year to year. PCR detected ipaH, the gene encoding invasion plasmid antigen H in 33% of a sample of culture-negative stool specimens. The majority of S. flexneri isolates in each site were resistant to amoxicillin and cotrimoxazole. Ciprofloxacin-resistant S. flexneri isolates were identified in China (18/305 [6%]), Pakistan (8/242 [3%]), and Vietnam (5/282 [2%]). CONCLUSIONS: Shigella appears to be more ubiquitous in Asian impoverished populations than previously thought, and antibiotic-resistant strains of different species and serotypes have emerged. Focusing on prevention of shigellosis could exert an immediate benefit first by substantially reducing the overall diarrhoea burden in the region and second by preventing the spread of panresistant Shigella strains. The heterogeneous distribution of Shigella species and serotypes suggest that multivalent or cross-protective Shigella vaccines will be needed to prevent shigellosis in Asia

Dysregulation of the mTOR Pathway Mediates Impairment of Synaptic Plasticity in a Mouse Model of Alzheimer's Disease

Background: The mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) is an evolutionarily conserved Ser/Thr protein kinase that plays a pivotal role in multiple fundamental biological processes, including synaptic plasticity. We explored the relationship between the mTOR pathway and b-amyloid (Ab)-induced synaptic dysfunction, which is considered to be critical in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Methodology/Principal Findings: We provide evidence that inhibition of mTOR signaling correlates with impairment in synaptic plasticity in hippocampal slices from an AD mouse model and in wild-type slices exposed to exogenous Ab1-42. Importantly, by up-regulating mTOR signaling, glycogen synthase kinase 3 (GSK3) inhibitors rescued LTP in the AD mouse model, and genetic deletion of FK506-binding protein 12 (FKBP12) prevented Ab-induced impairment in long-term potentiation (LTP). In addition, confocal microscopy demonstrated co-localization of intraneuronal Ab42 with mTOR. Conclusions/Significance: These data support the notion that the mTOR pathway modulates Ab-related synaptic dysfunctio

To formalize or not to formalize: women entrepreneurs’ sensemaking of business registration in the context of Nepal

Despite the depiction of decisions to formalize informal firms as rational and ethical, many entrepreneurs in developing countries continue to operate informally regardless of its perceived illicit status. While existing research on why entrepreneurs choose informality emphasizes the economic costs and benefits of such decisions, this often overlooks the realities of the informal economy and the constraints which marginal populations—particularly women—face. In this paper, we use institutional theory and sensemaking to understand the experiences of women in the informal economy and what formalization means to them. We use a qualitative approach to collect data from 90 women entrepreneurs in three different cities in Nepal. In our findings, we identify three groups of women with distinctive understandings of formalization—business sustainability, livelihood sufficiency and strategic alignment. Their interpretation of formalization reveals the complex, dynamic, and cyclical nature of formalization decisions. Decisions are also guided by the optimization of social and emotional logics, whereby formalization is conceived differently depending on different life stages, experiences within the informal economy and wider socio-cultural contexts. Our findings highlight the ethical implications of formalization where being a ‘good citizen’, rather than complying with formal rules and regulations, is about attuning to and fitting in with socially prescribed roles. Our research provides a nuanced view of formalization decisions, challenging idealized and ethical notions of formalization as a desired end state

The Invariance Hypothesis Implies Domain-Specific Regions in Visual Cortex

Is visual cortex made up of general-purpose information processing machinery, or does it consist of a collection of specialized modules? If prior knowledge, acquired from learning a set of objects is only transferable to new objects that share properties with the old, then the recognition system’s optimal organization must be one containing specialized modules for different object classes. Our analysis starts from a premise we call the invariance hypothesis: that the computational goal of the ventral stream is to compute an invariant-to-transformations and discriminative signature for recognition. The key condition enabling approximate transfer of invariance without sacrificing discriminability turns out to be that the learned and novel objects transform similarly. This implies that the optimal recognition system must contain subsystems trained only with data from similarly-transforming objects and suggests a novel interpretation of domain-specific regions like the fusiform face area (FFA). Furthermore, we can define an index of transformation-compatibility, computable from videos, that can be combined with information about the statistics of natural vision to yield predictions for which object categories ought to have domain-specific regions in agreement with the available data. The result is a unifying account linking the large literature on view-based recognition with the wealth of experimental evidence concerning domain-specific regions.National Science Foundation (U.S.). Science and Technology Center (Award CCF-1231216)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant NSF-0640097)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant NSF-0827427)United States. Air Force Office of Scientific Research (Grant FA8650-05-C-7262)Eugene McDermott Foundatio