Working Memory and the Suppression of Reflexive Saccades

Conscious behavioral intentions can frequently fail under conditions of attentional depletion. In attempting to trace the cognitive origin of this effect, we hypothesized that failures of action control—specifically, oculomotor movement—can result from the imposition of fronto-executive load. To evaluate this prediction, participants performed an antisaccade task while simultaneously completing a working-memory task that is known to make variable demands on prefrontal processes (n-back task, see Jonides et al., 1997). The results of two experiments are reported. As expected, antisaccade error rates were increased in accordance with the fronto-executive demands of the n-back task (Experiment 1). In addition, the debilitating effects of working-memory load were restricted to the inhibitory component of the antisaccade task (Experiment 2). These findings corroborate the view that working memory operations play a critical role in the suppression of prepotent behavioral responses.Psycholog

It\u27s About Communities: the Commitment to Promoting a Culturally Competent Environmental Health Workforce.

Environmental health and public health are profoundly local. The Association of Environmental Health Academic Programs (AEHAP) firmly agrees and for this reason, it is important to have local environmental health experts who know the pulse of their communities. AEHAP believes in supporting the advanced scientific education of environmental health in these communities through people from these communities. Accordingly, AEHAP has sought to promote and support accredited environmental health programs among a diverse cross-section of the U.S. higher education landscape. AEHAP’s students are diverse in many ways, including socioeconomically, racially, ethnically, and culturally. The value of this approach enhances the overall education of both the students and the faculty, while better positioning students and alumni to serve their own communities where they are better equipped to aid in the development and implementation of local public health programs and responses. Summarizing the annual undergraduate and 3-year graduate program survey data provided by the National Environmental Health Science & Protection Accreditation Council (EHAC), racially and/or ethnically diverse students represent 37% and 48% of enrolled undergraduate and graduate students, respectively. For the 2017–2018 enrollment year, 39% of undergraduates were described as contributing to diversity. In addition, 56% of the student population from the undergraduate and graduate programs is female. Female students have been the majority since 2008. The demographics of EHAC-accredited program graduates are closely aligned with the current U.S. population; however, demographics will change as our nation becomes pluralistic. AEHAP and EHAC will continue to promote cultural competency of graduates and assist accredited environmental health programs in producing cohorts reflective of the needs of their local communities

The Inferred Cardiogenic Gene Regulatory Network in the Mammalian Heart

Cardiac development is a complex, multiscale process encompassing cell fate adoption, differentiation and morphogenesis. To elucidate pathways underlying this process, a recently developed algorithm to reverse engineer gene regulatory networks was applied to time-course microarray data obtained from the developing mouse heart. Approximately 200 genes of interest were input into the algorithm to generate putative network topologies that are capable of explaining the experimental data via model simulation. To cull specious network interactions, thousands of putative networks are merged and filtered to generate scale-free, hierarchical networks that are statistically significant and biologically relevant. The networks are validated with known gene interactions and used to predict regulatory pathways important for the developing mammalian heart. Area under the precision-recall curve and receiver operator characteristic curve are 9% and 58%, respectively. Of the top 10 ranked predicted interactions, 4 have already been validated. The algorithm is further tested using a network enriched with known interactions and another depleted of them. The inferred networks contained more interactions for the enriched network versus the depleted network. In all test cases, maximum performance of the algorithm was achieved when the purely data-driven method of network inference was combined with a data-independent, functional-based association method. Lastly, the network generated from the list of approximately 200 genes of interest was expanded using gene-profile uniqueness metrics to include approximately 900 additional known mouse genes and to form the most likely cardiogenic gene regulatory network. The resultant network supports known regulatory interactions and contains several novel cardiogenic regulatory interactions. The method outlined herein provides an informative approach to network inference and leads to clear testable hypotheses related to gene regulation

Symmetric Assembly Puzzles are Hard, Beyond a Few Pieces

We study the complexity of symmetric assembly puzzles: given a collection of simple polygons, can we translate, rotate, and possibly flip them so that their interior-disjoint union is line symmetric? On the negative side, we show that the problem is strongly NP-complete even if the pieces are all polyominos. On the positive side, we show that the problem can be solved in polynomial time if the number of pieces is a fixed constant

Dissociating Neural Correlates of Action Monitoring and Metacognition of Agency

Judgments of agency refer to people's self-reflective assessments concerning their own control: their assessments of the extent to which they themselves are responsible for an action. These self-reflective metacognitive judgments can be distinguished from action monitoring, which involves the detection of the divergence (or lack of divergence) between observed states and expected states. Presumably, people form judgments of agency by metacognitively reflecting on the output of their action monitoring and then consciously inferring the extent to which they caused the action in question. Although a number of previous imaging studies have been directed at action monitoring, none have assessed judgments of agency as a potentially separate process. The present fMRI study used an agency paradigm that not only allowed us to examine the brain activity associated with action monitoring but that also enabled us to investigate those regions associated with metacognition of agency. Regarding action monitoring, we found that being “out of control” during the task (i.e., detection of a discrepancy between observed and expected states) was associated with increased brain activity in the right TPJ, whereas being “in control” was associated with increased activity in the pre-SMA, rostral cingulate zone, and dorsal striatum (regions linked to self-initiated action). In contrast, when participants made self-reflective metacognitive judgments about the extent of their own control (i.e., judgments of agency) compared with when they made judgments that were not about control (i.e., judgments of performance), increased activity was observed in the anterior PFC, a region associated with self-reflective processing. These results indicate that action monitoring is dissociable from people's conscious self-attributions of control

LunaNet: a Flexible and Extensible Lunar Exploration Communications and Navigation Infrastructure

NASA has set the ambitious goal of establishing a sustainable human presence on the Moon. Diverse commercial and international partners are engaged in this effort to catalyze scientific discovery, lunar resource utilization and economic development on both the Earth and at the Moon. Lunar development will serve as a critical proving ground for deeper exploration into the solar system. Space communications and navigation infrastructure will play an integral part in realizing this goal. This paper provides a high-level description of an extensible and scalable lunar communications and navigation architecture, known as LunaNet. LunaNet is a services network to enable lunar operations. Three LunaNet service types are defined: networking services, position, navigation and timing services, and science utilization services. The LunaNet architecture encompasses a wide variety of topology implementations, including surface and orbiting provider nodes. In this paper several systems engineering considerations within the service architecture are highlighted. Additionally, several alternative LunaNet instantiations are presented. Extensibility of the LunaNet architecture to the solar system internet is discussed

AACP Basic Resources for Pharmacy Education

The AACP Basic Resources for Pharmacy Education is produced as a guide for those developing or maintaining the library collections that serve colleges and schools of pharmacy. The goal of the Basic Resources list is to make recommendations of books and other works to be included in pharmacy libraries, but not all titles are required to be purchased. Each pharmacy college has its own mission and its own program(s), and so each college’s library collection must reflect that mission and support the college’s program(s). Excellent library collections are built by knowledgeable librarians and drug information specialists using their professional judgment along with the expertise of the college’s faculty. The Basic Resources list should not be used as a benchmark and is not prescriptive but is instead a starting place for librarians who are building a new collection or maintaining an established one

Exploring the Neural Correlates of Social Stereotyping

Judging people on the basis of cultural stereotypes is a ubiquitous facet of daily life, yet little is known about how this fundamental inferential strategy is implemented in the brain. Using fMRI, we measured neural activity while participants made judgments about the likely actor (i.e., person-focus) and location (i.e., place-focus) of a series of activities, some of which were associated with prevailing gender stereotypes. Results revealed that stereotyping was underpinned by activity in areas associated with evaluative processing (e.g., ventral medial prefrontal cortex, amygdala) and the representation of action knowledge (e.g., supramarginal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus). In addition, activity accompanying stereotypic judgments was correlated with the strength of participants' explicit and implicit gender stereotypes. These findings elucidate how stereotyping fits within the neuroscience of person understanding.Psycholog