83 research outputs found
Tactile thermal oral stimulation increases the cortical representation of swallowing
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Dysphagia is a leading complication in stroke patients causing aspiration pneumonia, malnutrition and increased mortality. Current strategies of swallowing therapy involve on the one hand modification of eating behaviour or swallowing technique and on the other hand facilitation of swallowing with the use of pharyngeal sensory stimulation. Thermal tactile oral stimulation (TTOS) is an established method to treat patients with neurogenic dysphagia especially if caused by sensory deficits. Little is known about the possible mechanisms by which this interventional therapy may work. We employed whole-head MEG to study changes in cortical activation during self-paced volitional swallowing in fifteen healthy subjects with and without TTOS. Data were analyzed by means of synthetic aperture magnetometry (SAM) and the group analysis of individual SAM data was performed using a permutation test.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Compared to the normal swallowing task a significantly increased bilateral cortical activation was seen after oropharyngeal stimulation. Analysis of the chronological changes during swallowing suggests facilitation of both the oral and the pharyngeal phase of deglutition.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>In the present study functional cortical changes elicited by oral sensory stimulation could be demonstrated. We suggest that these results reflect short-term cortical plasticity of sensory swallowing areas. These findings facilitate our understanding of the role of cortical reorganization in dysphagia treatment and recovery.</p
Standing economy: does the heterogeneity in the energy cost of posture maintenance reside in differential patterns of spontaneous weight-shifting?
Triangular neuronal networks on microelectrode arrays: an approach to improve the properties of low-density networks for extracellular recording
Genome-wide investigation of mRNA lifetime determinants in Escherichia coli cells cultured at different growth rates
Student accounts of the Ontario Secondary School literacy Test: a case for validation
The Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT) is a cross-curricular literacy test issued to all secondary school students in the province of Ontario. The test consists of a reading and a writing component, both of which must be successfully completed for secondary school graduation in Ontario. This study elicited 16 first language and second language student accounts of their OSSLT test-taking processes immediately after the March 2006 test administration. The analysis of these students’ accounts provided valuable information about the validity of the inferences drawn from the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test. These accounts suggest the complexity of the processes that the students engaged as they attempted to demonstrate their reading and writing skills on the test. The study has implications for test developers and test users regarding the interpretation of student test performance on the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test
Harsanyi's utilitarian theorem : a simpler proof and some ethical connotations
Digitised version produced by the EUI Library and made available online in 2020
Generalized relations in linguistics and cognition
Categorical compositional models of natural language exploit
grammatical structure to calculate the meaning of sentences from
the meanings of individual words. This approach outperforms conventional
techniques for some standard NLP tasks. More recently, similar
compositional techniques have been applied to conceptual space models
of cognition.
Compact closed categories, particularly the category of finite dimensional
vector spaces, have been the most common setting for categorical compositional
models. When addressing a new problem domain, such as conceptual
space models of meaning, a key problem is finding a compact
closed category that captures the features of interest.
We propose categories of generalized relations as source of new, practical
models for cognition and NLP. We demonstrate using detailed examples
that phenomena such as fuzziness, metrics, convexity, semantic ambiguity
and meaning that varies with context can all be described by relational
models. Crucially, by exploiting a technical framework described in
previous work of the authors, we also show how we can combine multiple
features into a single model, providing a flexible family of new categories
for categorical compositional modelling
"Body-In-The-Loop": Optimizing Device Parameters Using Measures of Instantaneous Energetic Cost
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