Macrophages come to mind as keys to cognitive decline

Cognitive impairment, an underappreciated consequence of hypertension, is linked to cerebral arteriolar disease through poorly defined mechanisms. A study by Faraco et al. in this issue of the JCI points to perturbations of neurovascular unit coupling caused by perivascular macrophages (PVMs) as a cause of hypertension-related cognitive impairment. Angiotensin II (Ang II) was shown to activate PVMs, causing them to produce superoxide and thereby alter the proper functioning of the adjacent arterioles. Faraco and colleagues also show that disruption of the blood-brain barrier occurs in hypertension, allowing circulating Ang II to access PVMs. This study provides important new insight into the role of inflammatory cells in the genesis of vascular dementia

Beliefs about others' intentions determine whether cooperation is the faster choice

Is collaboration the fast choice for humans? Past studies proposed that cooperation is a behavioural default, based on Response Times (RT) findings. Here we contend that the individual’s reckoning of the immediate social environment shapes her predisposition to cooperate and, hence, response latencies. In a social dilemma game, we manipulate the beliefs about the partner’s intentions to cooperate and show that they act as a switch that determines cooperation and defection RTs; when the partner’s intention to cooperate is perceived as high, cooperation choices are speeded up, while defection is slowed down. Importantly, this social context effect holds across varying expected payoffs, indicating that it modulates behaviour regardless of choices’ similarity in monetary terms. Moreover, this pattern is moderated by individual variability in social preferences: Among conditional cooperators, high cooperation beliefs speed up cooperation responses and slow down defection. Among free-riders, defection is always faster and more likely than cooperation, while high cooperation beliefs slow down all decisions. These results shed new light on the conflict of choices account of response latencies, as well as on the intuitive cooperation hypothesis, and can help to correctly interpret and reconcile previous, apparently contradictory results, by considering the role of context in social dilemmas

¿Quién manda en las escuelas portuguesas? Reformas democráticas y prácticas de gobiernos en los establecimientos escolares de Portugal

El objetivo de este artículo es describir y analizar críticamente la situación actual del gobierno de las escuelas portuguesas tras las últimas reformas políticas y educativas. Se ha tratado de confrontar las distintas informaciones obtenidas a partir de diversas vías, para determinar las disonancias entre lo estipulado por los documentos normativos y lo que sucede en la realidad escolar. Todo apunta a que los objetivos y planteamientos de las normas que rigen el gobierno y administración del Sistema Educativo Portugués se ven habitual y sensiblemente alterados o desnaturalizados al ser llevados a la práctica. Esta discordancia es más intensa, o al menos más patente, a escala local, es decir, en las Escuelas o en los Agrupamientos de Escuelas.________________________________The object of this article is to describe and analyze critically the present situation of the government of the Portuguese Schools after recent political and educational reforms. We have attempted to scrutinize the data obtained from three sources in order to determine the dissonance between what is stipulated by the normative documents and what actually occurs in the schools. Everything points to the following conclusion: the objectives and the planning norms mandated by the government and the administration of the Portuguese Educational System are habitually and noticeably altered or distorted in their actual implementation. This discordance is most intense, or at least most blatant, at the local level, that is, in the Schools and in the Groupings of Schools

Lack of uniqueness for weak solutions of the incompressible porous media equation

In this work we consider weak solutions of the incompressible 2-D porous media equation. By using the approach of De Lellis-Sz\'ekelyhidi we prove non-uniqueness for solutions in $L^\infty$ in space and time.Comment: 23 pages, 2 fugure

Las yeguas marismeñas de Doñana: naturaleza, tradición e identidades sociales en un espacio protegido

The breeding of Andalusia's feral marsh horses stands out among other examples of Doñana National Park's extraordinary legacy of social and cultural traditions. This is so not only because of its importance as a venerable livestock management system, unique and vibrant still despite being surprisingly little known and scarecly studied, but also because it constitutes a notable example of the contributions that Andalusian culture has made to the rest of the world. Marsh animal husbandry is, without a doubt, the cultural matrix out of which developed the livestock traditions of the Americas. By situating this cultural complex within an International comparative framework, we argue that the human involvement with Doñana's feral horses may be distinguished from other similar cases in the world because their care and maintenance has been converted, to an extraordinary degree, into a central element of the local culture. Highly emotional social processes are involved in the construction and maintenance of a collective social identity that expresses itself in perennial conflicts with the authorities of the Park over its feral horses.Entre el extraordinario legado de tradiciones sociales y culturales del Parque Nacional de Doñana (Suroeste de Andalucía) sobresale la cría de caballos marismeños asilvestrados, no sólo por su importancia como práctica ganadera ancestral, viva e insólita, sorprendentemente poco conocida y apenas estudiada, sino también porque constituye un ejemplo eminente de las contribuciones de la cultura andaluza al resto del mundo. La ganadería marismeña es, sin duda, la matriz cultural de las tradiciones ganaderas de América. En este artículo se aborda su análisis dentro de un marco comparativo internacional del que se deduce que lo que verdaderamente distingue la cría de los caballos marismeños de otros casos paralelos en el mundo es haberse convertido en un elemento central de la cultura local, mediante emotivos procesos sociales de construcción y mantenimiento de la identidad comunitaria, en medio de reiterados conflictos con las autoridades oficiales del Parque

Interaction of perceptual grouping and crossmodal temporal capture in tactile apparent-motion

Previous studies have shown that in tasks requiring participants to report the direction of apparent motion, task-irrelevant mono-beeps can "capture'' visual motion perception when the beeps occur temporally close to the visual stimuli. However, the contributions of the relative timing of multimodal events and the event structure, modulating uni- and/or crossmodal perceptual grouping, remain unclear. To examine this question and extend the investigation to the tactile modality, the current experiments presented tactile two-tap apparent-motion streams, with an SOA of 400 ms between successive, left-/right-hand middle-finger taps, accompanied by task-irrelevant, non-spatial auditory stimuli. The streams were shown for 90 seconds, and participants' task was to continuously report the perceived (left-or rightward) direction of tactile motion. In Experiment 1, each tactile stimulus was paired with an auditory beep, though odd-numbered taps were paired with an asynchronous beep, with audiotactile SOAs ranging from -75 ms to 75 ms. Perceived direction of tactile motion varied systematically with audiotactile SOA, indicative of a temporal-capture effect. In Experiment 2, two audiotactile SOAs-one short (75 ms), one long (325 ms)-were compared. The long-SOA condition preserved the crossmodal event structure (so the temporal-capture dynamics should have been similar to that in Experiment 1), but both beeps now occurred temporally close to the taps on one side (even-numbered taps). The two SOAs were found to produce opposite modulations of apparent motion, indicative of an influence of crossmodal grouping. In Experiment 3, only odd-numbered, but not even-numbered, taps were paired with auditory beeps. This abolished the temporal-capture effect and, instead, a dominant percept of apparent motion from the audiotactile side to the tactile-only side was observed independently of the SOA variation. These findings suggest that asymmetric crossmodal grouping leads to an attentional modulation of apparent motion, which inhibits crossmodal temporal-capture effects

Auditory Motion Information Drives Visual Motion Perception

BACKGROUND: Vision provides the most salient information with regard to the stimulus motion. However, it has recently been demonstrated that static visual stimuli are perceived as moving laterally by alternating left-right sound sources. The underlying mechanism of this phenomenon remains unclear; it has not yet been determined whether auditory motion signals, rather than auditory positional signals, can directly contribute to visual motion perception. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Static visual flashes were presented at retinal locations outside the fovea together with a lateral auditory motion provided by a virtual stereo noise source smoothly shifting in the horizontal plane. The flash appeared to move by means of the auditory motion when the spatiotemporal position of the flashes was in the middle of the auditory motion trajectory. Furthermore, the lateral auditory motion altered visual motion perception in a global motion display where different localized motion signals of multiple visual stimuli were combined to produce a coherent visual motion perception. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: These findings suggest there exist direct interactions between auditory and visual motion signals, and that there might be common neural substrates for auditory and visual motion processing

Sound-contingent visual motion aftereffect

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>After a prolonged exposure to a paired presentation of different types of signals (e.g., color and motion), one of the signals (color) becomes a driver for the other signal (motion). This phenomenon, which is known as contingent motion aftereffect, indicates that the brain can establish new neural representations even in the adult's brain. However, contingent motion aftereffect has been reported only in visual or auditory domain. Here, we demonstrate that a visual motion aftereffect can be contingent on a specific sound.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Dynamic random dots moving in an alternating right or left direction were presented to the participants. Each direction of motion was accompanied by an auditory tone of a unique and specific frequency. After a 3-minutes exposure, the tones began to exert marked influence on the visual motion perception, and the percentage of dots required to trigger motion perception systematically changed depending on the tones. Furthermore, this effect lasted for at least 2 days.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>These results indicate that a new neural representation can be rapidly established between auditory and visual modalities.</p

Neural correlates of audiovisual motion capture

Visual motion can affect the perceived direction of auditory motion (i.e., audiovisual motion capture). It is debated, though, whether this effect occurs at perceptual or decisional stages. Here, we examined the neural consequences of audiovisual motion capture using the mismatch negativity (MMN), an event-related brain potential reflecting pre-attentive auditory deviance detection. In an auditory-only condition occasional changes in the direction of a moving sound (deviant) elicited an MMN starting around 150 ms. In an audiovisual condition, auditory standards and deviants were synchronized with a visual stimulus that moved in the same direction as the auditory standards. These audiovisual deviants did not evoke an MMN, indicating that visual motion reduced the perceptual difference between sound motion of standards and deviants. The inhibition of the MMN by visual motion provides evidence that auditory and visual motion signals are integrated at early sensory processing stages