Visual cognition during real social interaction

Copyright @ 2012 The Authors. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and 85 reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The article was made available through the Brunel University Open Access Publishing Fund.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Laboratory studies of social visual cognition often simulate the critical aspects of joint attention by having participants interact with a computer-generated avatar. Recently, there has been a movement toward examining these processes during authentic social interaction. In this review, we will focus on attention to faces, attentional misdirection, and a phenomenon we have termed social inhibition of return (Social IOR), that have revealed aspects of social cognition that were hitherto unknown. We attribute these discoveries to the use of paradigms that allow for more realistic social interactions to take place. We also point to an area that has begun to attract a considerable amount of interest—that of Theory of Mind (ToM) and automatic perspective taking—and suggest that this too might benefit from adopting a similar approach

Influence of perineural invasion in predicting overall survival and disease-free survival in patients With locally advanced gastric cancer

Background The aim of the present study was to evaluate the prognostic significance of perineural invasion (PNI) in locally advanced gastric cancer patients who underwent D2 gastrectomy and adjuvant chemotherapy. Methods The records of a series of 103 patients undergoing D2 gastrectomy with curative intent combined with adjuvant chemotherapy from January 2004 to December 2014 were retrospectively reviewed. Results PNI was positive in 47 (45.6%) specimens. The 1-, 3-, and 5-year overall survival rates were 81%, 55%, and 42%, respectively. The 1-, 3-, and 5-year disease-free survival (DFS) rates were 76%, 57%, and 49%, respectively. A multivariate analysis showed that age number of positive lymph nodes, T stage, and PNI were independently associated with overall survival. Regarding DFS, the multivariate analysis showed that only PNI was independently associated with DFS. Conclusions PNI and T stage and positive lymph nodes are independent markers of poor prognosis in patients with gastric cancer. PNI should be incorporated in the postoperative staging system for planning follow-up after surgery and in our opinion to propose more aggressive postoperative therapies in PNI-positive patients

Nuclear effects in dAu collisions from recent RHIC data

Neutral pion (pi(0)) production is calculated in a leading order (LO) perturbative QCD-based model in pp and dAu collisions at root s = 200 AGeV at midrapidity. The model includes transverse component of the initial parton distribution. We compare our results for pp collision to experimental data at RHIC energy. We repeat our calculation for the dAu collision and investigate the interplay between shadowing and multiple scattering. In central dAu collisions the influence of possible jet energy loss in cold nuclear matter in discussed and numerical results are presented

The nuclear modification factor at large rapidities

RHIC data on high-pT hadron production display strong suppression in a wide rapidity region, indicating strong induced energy loss for both transversally and longitudinally traveling partons. We investigate the interplay of energy loss and rapidity dependence in a perturbative QCD improved parton model, and estimate the opacity of the produced hot matter in AuAu collisions at energies sqrt(s) = 200 A GeV and 63 AGeV at different rapidity values. Direction-dependent suppression offers the possibility to study the geometry of the hot matter. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Delay-induced rebounds in CO_{2} emissions and critical time-scales to meet global warming targets

While climate science debates are focused on the attainment of peak anthropogenic CO2 emissions and policy tools to reduce peak temperatures, the human‐energy‐climate system can hold “rebound” surprises beyond this peak. Following the second industrial revolution, global per capita CO_{2} emissions (c_{c}) experienced a punctuated growth of about 100% every 60 years, mainly attributable to technological development and its global spread. A model of the human‐energy‐climate system capable of reproducing past punctuated dynamics shows that rebounds in global CO_{2} emissions emerge due to delays intrinsic to the diffusion of innovations. Such intrinsic delays in the adoption and spread of low‐carbon emitting technologies, together with projected population growth, upset the warming target set by the Paris Agreement. To avoid rebounds and their negative climate effects, model calculations show that the diffusion of climate‐friendly technologies must occur with lags one‐order of magnitude shorter (i.e., ∼6 years) than the characteristic timescale of past punctuated growth in c_{c}. Radically new strategies to globally implement the technological advances at unprecedented rates are needed if the current emission goals are to be achieved

Stability of PEDOT:PSS-Coated Gold Electrodes in Cell Culture Conditions

Poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) doped with polystyrene sulfonate (PEDOT:PSS) is widely used as a coating on microelectrode arrays in order to reduce impedance for both in vitro and in vivo electrophysiology. In many applications, electrode performance of months to years is desired; yet, there are few studies to date that examine the long-term stability of conducting polymers and their devices. Here, the stability of PEDOT:PSS microelectrodes is examined over a period of four months in cell culture media enriched with fetal bovine serum. The electrochemical impedance remains constant for most electrodes throughout the study, and only small changes in the structure of functional electrodes are observed at the end of the test. The results demonstrate that PEDOT:PSS electrodes show adequate stability for a variety of in vitro electrophysiology applications in toxicology, drug development, tissue engineering, and fundamental studies of electrically active cells and tissues.A.L.R. acknowledges support from the Whitaker International Scholars Program and the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship BRAIN CAMO (No. 797506). G.D. acknowledges support from the European Commission through the project of OrgBIO-ITN 607896