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Dissociating visuo-spatial and verbal working memory: It’s all in the features
Echoing many of the themes of the seminal work of Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968), this paper uses the Feature Model (Nairne, 1988, 1990; Neath & Nairne, 1995) to account for performance in working memory tasks. The Brooks verbal and visuo-spatial matrix tasks were performed alone, with articulatory suppression, or with a spatial suppression task; the results produced the expected dissociation. We used Approximate Bayesian Computation techniques to fit the Feature Model to the data and showed that the similarity-based interference process implemented in the model accounted for the data patterns well. We then fit the model to data from Guérard and Tremblay (2008); the latter study produced a double dissociation while calling upon more typical order reconstruction tasks. Again, the model performed well. The findings show that a double dissociation can be modelled without appealing to separate systems for verbal and visuo-spatial processing. The latter findings are significant as the Feature Model had not been used to model this type of dissociation before; importantly, this is also the first time the model is quantitatively fit to data. For the demonstration provided here, modularity was unnecessary if two assumptions were made: (1) the main difference between spatial and verbal working memory tasks is the features that are encoded; (2) secondary tasks selectively interfere with primary tasks to the extent that both tasks involve similar features. It is argued that a feature-based view is more parsimonious (see Morey, 2018) and offers flexibility in accounting for multiple benchmark effects in the field
3D polymer structures with variable permittivity at terahertz frequencies
Titanium dioxide (TiO2) powder has been blended with polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) to manufacture a composite polymer with variable permittivity. Vector network analyser measurements taken between 0.75-1.1 THz quantify the relationship between TiO2 concentration and complex permittivity of the resultant material. Complex 3D structures have been produced with a casting process. Applications for the tunable-permittivity polymer include dielectric regions in photonic and plasmonic devices operating at terahertz frequencies as well as single pixel imaging systems
Pattern recognition, attention, and information bottlenecks in the primate visual system
In its evolution, the primate visual system has developed impressive capabilities for recognizing complex patterns in natural images. This process involves many stages of analysis and a variety of information processing strategies. This paper concentrates on the importance of 'information bottlenecks,' which restrict the amount of information that can be handled at different stages of analysis. These steps are crucial for reducing the overwhelming computational complexity associated with recognizing countless objects from arbitrary viewing angles, distances, and perspectives. The process of directed visual attention is an especially important information bottleneck because of its flexibility in determining how information is routed to high-level pattern recognition centers
Highly charged ions in Penning traps, a new tool for resolving low lying isomeric states
The use of highly charged ions increases the precision and resolving power,
in particular for short-lived species produced at on-line radio-isotope beam
facilities, achievable with Penning trap mass spectrometers. This increase in
resolving power provides a new and unique access to resolving low-lying
long-lived ( ms) nuclear isomers. Recently, the keV
(determined from -ray spectroscopy) isomeric state in Rb has
been resolved from the ground state, in a charge state of with the TITAN
Penning trap at the TRIUMF-ISAC facility. The excitation energy of the isomer
was measured to be keV above the ground state. The extracted
masses for both the ground and isomeric states, and their difference, agree
with the AME2003 and Nuclear Data Sheet values. This proof of principle
measurement demonstrates the feasibility of using Penning trap mass
spectrometers coupled to charge breeders to study nuclear isomers and opens a
new route for isomer searches.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure
Particle acceleration at ultrarelativistic shocks: an eigenfunction method
We extend the eigenfunction method of computing the power-law spectrum of
particles accelerated at a relativistic shock fronts to apply to shocks of
arbitrarily high Lorentz factor. In agreement with the findings of Monte-Carlo
simulations, we find the index of the power-law distribution of accelerated
particles which undergo isotropic diffusion in angle at an ultrarelativistic,
unmagnetized shock is s=4.23 (where s=-d(ln f)/dp with f the Lorentz invariant
phase-space density and p the momentum). This corresponds to a synchrotron
index for uncooled electrons of a=0.62 (taking cooling into account a=1.12),
where a=-d(ln F)/dn, F is the radiation flux and n the frequency. We also
present an approximate analytic expression for the angular distribution of
accelerated particles, which displays the effect of particle trapping by the
shock: compared with the non-relativistic case the angular distribution is
weighted more towards the plane of the shock and away from its normal. We
investigate the sensitivity of our results to the transport properties of the
particles and the presence of a magnetic field. Shocks in which the ratio of
Poynting to kinetic energy flux upstream is not small are less compressive and
lead to larger values of .Comment: Minor additions on publicatio
Extinction of the N=20 neutron-shell closure for 32Mg examined by direct mass measurements
The 'island of inversion' around Mg is one of the most important
paradigm for studying the disappearance of the stabilizing 'magic' of a shell
closure. We present the first Penning-trap mass measurements of the exotic
nuclides Na and Mg, which allow a precise determination of
the empirical shell gap for Mg. The new value of 1.10(3) MeV is the
lowest observed shell gap for any nuclide with a canonical magic number.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Physical Review
Statistical Properties of Share Volume Traded in Financial Markets
We quantitatively investigate the ideas behind the often-expressed adage `it
takes volume to move stock prices', and study the statistical properties of the
number of shares traded for a given stock in a fixed time
interval . We analyze transaction data for the largest 1000 stocks
for the two-year period 1994-95, using a database that records every
transaction for all securities in three major US stock markets. We find that
the distribution displays a power-law decay, and that the
time correlations in display long-range persistence. Further, we
investigate the relation between and the number of transactions
in a time interval , and find that the long-range
correlations in are largely due to those of . Our
results are consistent with the interpretation that the large equal-time
correlation previously found between and the absolute value of
price change (related to volatility) are largely due to
.Comment: 4 pages, two-column format, four figure
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