The slippery slope of dishonesty

Recent experiments suggest that dishonesty can escalate from small levels to ever-larger ones along a 'slippery slope'. Activity in bilateral amygdala tracks this gradual adaptation to repeated acts of self-serving dishonesty

Cultural Differences in Affect Intensity Perception in the Context of Advertising

Cultural differences in the perception of positive affect intensity within an advertising context were investigated among American, Japanese, and Russian participants. Participants were asked to rate the intensity of facial expressions of positive emotions, which displayed either subtle, low intensity, or salient, high intensity expressions of positive affect. In agreement with previous findings from cross-cultural psychological research, current results demonstrate both cross-cultural agreement and differences in the perception of positive affect intensity across the three cultures. Specifically, American participants perceived high arousal (HA) images as significantly less calm than participants from the other two cultures, while the Japanese participants perceived low arousal (LA) images as significantly more excited than participants from the other cultures. The underlying mechanisms of these cultural differences were further investigated through difference scores that probed for cultural differences in perception and categorization of positive emotions. Findings indicate that rating differences are due to (1) perceptual differences in the extent to which HA images were discriminated from LA images, and (2) categorization differences in the extent to which facial expressions were grouped into affect intensity categories. Specifically, American participants revealed significantly higher perceptual differentiation between arousal levels of facial expressions in high and intermediate intensity categories. Japanese participants, on the other hand, did not discriminate between high and low arousal affect categories to the same extent as did the American and Russian participants. These findings indicate the presence of cultural differences in underlying decoding mechanisms of facial expressions of positive affect intensity. Implications of these results for global advertising are discussed

Cryopreservation of immature embryos of coconut (Cocos nucifera L.)

Réponse d'embryons immatures de cocotiers (7 à 8 mois après la pollinisation) à la congélation par azote liquide (-196¼C) : survie et germinatio

Embedding Reward Signals into Perception and Cognition

Despite considerable interest in the neural basis of valuation, the question of how valuation affects cognitive processing has received relatively less attention. Here, we review evidence from recent behavioral and neuroimaging studies supporting the notion that motivation can enhance perceptual and executive control processes to achieve more efficient goal-directed behavior. Specifically, in the context of cognitive tasks offering monetary gains, improved behavioral performance has been repeatedly observed in conjunction with elevated neural activations in task-relevant perceptual, cognitive and reward-related regions. We address the neural basis of motivation-cognition interactions by suggesting various modes of communication between relevant neural networks: (1) global hub regions may integrate information from multiple inputs providing a communicative link between specialized networks; (2) point-to-point interactions allow for more specific cross-network communication; and (3) diffuse neuromodulatory systems can relay motivational signals to cortex and enhance signal processing. Together, these modes of communication allow information regarding motivational significance to reach relevant brain regions and shape behavior

Approximate Dynamic Programming with Feasibility Guarantees

Safe and economic operation of networked systems is often challenging. Optimization-based schemes are frequently considered, since they achieve near-optimality while ensuring safety via the explicit consideration of constraints. In applications, these schemes, however, often require solving large-scale optimization problems. Iterative techniques from distributed optimization are frequently proposed for complexity reduction. Yet, they achieve feasibility only asymptotically, which induces a substantial computational burden. This work presents an approximate dynamic programming scheme, which is guaranteed to deliver a feasible solution in "one shot", i.e., in one backward-forward iteration over all subproblems provided they are coupled by a tree structure. Our proposed scheme generalizes methods from seemingly disconnected domains such as power systems and optimal control. We demonstrate its efficacy for problems with nonconvex constraints via numerical examples from both domains

Quantitative assessment of pinning forces and the superconducting gap in NbN thin films from complementary magnetic force microscopy and transport measurements

Epitaxial niobium-nitride thin films with a critical temperature of Tc=16K and a thickness of 100nm were fabricated on MgO(100) substrates by pulsed laser deposition. Low-temperature magnetic force microscopy (MFM) images of the supercurrent vortices were measured after field cooling in a magnetic field of 3mT at various temperatures. Temperature dependence of the penetration depth has been evaluated by a two-dimensional fitting of the vortex profiles in the monopole-monopole model. Its subsequent fit to a single s-wave gap function results in the superconducting gap amplitude Delta(0) = 2.9 meV = 2.1*kB*Tc, in perfect agreement with previous reports. The pinning force has been independently estimated from local depinning of individual vortices by lateral forces exerted by the MFM tip and from transport measurements. A good quantitative agreement between the two techniques shows that for low fields, B << Hc2, MFM is a powerful and reliable technique to probe the local variations of the pinning landscape. We also demonstrate that the monopole model can be successfully applied even for thin films with a thickness comparable to the penetration depth.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, 2 table

Combined Effects of Attention and Motivation on Visual Task Performance: Transient and Sustained Motivational Effects

We investigated how the brain integrates motivational and attentional signals by using a neuroimaging paradigm that provided separate estimates for transient cue- and target-related signals, in addition to sustained block-related responses. Participants performed a Posner-type task in which an endogenous cue predicted target location on 70% of trials, while motivation was manipulated by varying magnitude and valence of a cash incentive linked to task performance. Our findings revealed increased detection performance (d′) as a function of incentive value. In parallel, brain signals revealed that increases in absolute incentive magnitude led to cue- and target-specific response modulations that were independent of sustained state effects across visual cortex, fronto-parietal regions, and subcortical regions. Interestingly, state-like effects of incentive were observed in several of these brain regions, too, suggesting that both transient and sustained fMRI signals may contribute to task performance. For both cue and block periods, the effects of administering incentives were correlated with individual trait measures of reward sensitivity. Taken together, our findings support the notion that motivation improves behavioral performance in a demanding attention task by enhancing evoked responses across a distributed set of anatomical sites, many of which have been previously implicated in attentional processing. However, the effect of motivation was not simply additive as the impact of absolute incentive was greater during invalid than valid trials in several brain regions, possibly because motivation had a larger effect on reorienting than orienting attentional mechanisms at these sites