The Continuing Leverage of Releasing Authorities: Findings from a National Survey

The Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice launched a national survey of releasing authorities in March 2015 to each state, and the U.S. Parole Commission. The importance of the survey was underscored by an endorsement from the Association of Paroling Authorities International (APAI). We are pleased to present the results from this important survey here. This is the first comprehensive survey of parole boards completed in nearly 10 years. Its findings provide a rich database for better understanding the policy and practice of paroling authorities. The last survey to be conducted of paroling authorities was in 2007/2008.The current report offers an expansion and update of previous surveys. The results summarized throughout the report offer a timely resource for paroling authorities, correctional policy-makers and practitioners, legislators, and those with a public policy interest in sentencing and criminal justice operations. It is our hope that the document and its findings provide key justice system and other stakeholders with an incisive snapshot of the work of paroling authorities across the country in a manner that contributes to a larger conversation about sound and effective parole release and revocation practices.The completion of this comprehensive survey and the reporting of its findings offers a timely and invaluable resource for releasing authorities. It provides them and other key justice system stakeholders with a comparative understanding of their colleagues' work across the nation, and contributes to a larger conversation pertaining to effective parole release and revocation practices

Multivoxel Patterns in Fusiform Face Area Differentiate Faces by Sex and Race

Although prior research suggests that fusiform gyrus represents the sex and race of faces, it remains unclear whether fusiform face area (FFA)–the portion of fusiform gyrus that is functionally-defined by its preferential response to faces–contains such representations. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to evaluate whether FFA represents faces by sex and race. Participants were scanned while they categorized the sex and race of unfamiliar Black men, Black women, White men, and White women. Multivariate pattern analysis revealed that multivoxel patterns in FFA–but not other face-selective brain regions, other category-selective brain regions, or early visual cortex–differentiated faces by sex and race. Specifically, patterns of voxel-based responses were more similar between individuals of the same sex than between men and women, and between individuals of the same race than between Black and White individuals. By showing that FFA represents the sex and race of faces, this research contributes to our emerging understanding of how the human brain perceives individuals from two fundamental social categories

Reading fiction and reading minds : the role of simulation in the default network

Research in psychology has suggested that reading fiction can improve individuals’ social-cognitive abilities. Findings from neuroscience show that reading and social cognition both recruit the default network, a network which is known to support our capacity to simulate hypothetical scenes, spaces and mental states. The current research tests the hypothesis that fiction reading enhances social cognition because it serves to exercise the default subnetwork involved in theory of mind. While undergoing functional neuroimaging, participants read literary passages that differed along two dimensions: (i) vivid vs abstract and (ii) social vs non-social. Analyses revealed distinct subnetworks of the default network respond to the two dimensions of interest: the medial temporal lobe subnetwork responded preferentially to vivid passages, with or without social content; the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) subnetwork responded preferentially to passages with social and abstract content. Analyses also demonstrated that participants who read fiction most often also showed the strongest social cognition performance. Finally, mediation analysis showed that activity in the dmPFC subnetwork in response to the social content mediated this relation, suggesting that the simulation of social content in fiction plays a role in fiction’s ability to enhance readers’ social cognition

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

Dissociable Neural Substrates for Agentic versus Conceptual Representations of Self

Although humans generally experience a coherent sense of selfhood, we can nevertheless articulate different aspects of self. Recent research has demonstrated that one such aspect of self—conceptual knowledge of one's own personality traits—is subserved by ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC). Here, we examined whether an alternative aspect of “self”—being an agent who acts to achieve one's own goals—relies on cognitive processes that overlap with or diverge from conceptual operationalizations of selfhood. While undergoing fMRI, participants completed tasks of both conceptual self-reference, in which they judged their own or another person's personality traits, and agentic self-reference, in which they freely chose an object or watched passively as one was chosen. The agentic task failed to modulate vMPFC, despite producing the same memory enhancement frequently observed during conceptual self-referential processing (the “self-reference” effect). Instead, agentic self-reference was associated with activation of the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), a region previously implicated in planning and executing actions. Experiment 2 further demonstrated that IPS activity correlated with later memory performance for the agentic, but not conceptual, task. These results support views of the “self” as a collection of distinct mental operations distributed throughout the brain, rather than a unitary cognitive system

Identification and Validation of Ifit1 as an Important Innate Immune Bottleneck

The innate immune system plays important roles in a number of disparate processes. Foremost, innate immunity is a first responder to invasion by pathogens and triggers early defensive responses and recruits the adaptive immune system. The innate immune system also responds to endogenous damage signals that arise from tissue injury. Recently it has been found that innate immunity plays an important role in neuroprotection against ischemic stroke through the activation of the primary innate immune receptors, Toll-like receptors (TLRs). Using several large-scale transcriptomic data sets from mouse and mouse macrophage studies we identified targets predicted to be important in controlling innate immune processes initiated by TLR activation. Targets were identified as genes with high betweenness centrality, so-called bottlenecks, in networks inferred from statistical associations between gene expression patterns. A small set of putative bottlenecks were identified in each of the data sets investigated including interferon-stimulated genes (Ifit1, Ifi47, Tgtp and Oasl2) as well as genes uncharacterized in immune responses (Axud1 and Ppp1r15a). We further validated one of these targets, Ifit1, in mouse macrophages by showing that silencing it suppresses induction of predicted downstream genes by lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-mediated TLR4 activation through an unknown direct or indirect mechanism. Our study demonstrates the utility of network analysis for identification of interesting targets related to innate immune function, and highlights that Ifit1 can exert a positive regulatory effect on downstream genes

Toward open sharing of task-based fMRI data: the OpenfMRI project

The large-scale sharing of task-based functional neuroimaging data has the potential to allow novel insights into the organization of mental function in the brain, but the field of neuroimaging has lagged behind other areas of bioscience in the development of data sharing resources. This paper describes the OpenFMRI project (accessible online at http://www.openfmri.org), which aims to provide the neuroimaging community with a resource to support open sharing of task-based fMRI studies. We describe the motivation behind the project, focusing particularly on how this project addresses some of the well-known challenges to sharing of task-based fMRI data. Results from a preliminary analysis of the current database are presented, which demonstrate the ability to classify between task contrasts with high generalization accuracy across subjects, and the ability to identify individual subjects from their activation maps with moderately high accuracy. Clustering analyses show that the similarity relations between statistical maps have a somewhat orderly relation to the mental functions engaged by the relevant tasks. These results highlight the potential of the project to support large-scale multivariate analyses of the relation between mental processes and brain function

Dissecting a complex chemical stress: chemogenomic profiling of plant hydrolysates.

The efficient production of biofuels from cellulosic feedstocks will require the efficient fermentation of the sugars in hydrolyzed plant material. Unfortunately, plant hydrolysates also contain many compounds that inhibit microbial growth and fermentation. We used DNA-barcoded mutant libraries to identify genes that are important for hydrolysate tolerance in both Zymomonas mobilis (44 genes) and Saccharomyces cerevisiae (99 genes). Overexpression of a Z. mobilis tolerance gene of unknown function (ZMO1875) improved its specific ethanol productivity 2.4-fold in the presence of miscanthus hydrolysate. However, a mixture of 37 hydrolysate-derived inhibitors was not sufficient to explain the fitness profile of plant hydrolysate. To deconstruct the fitness profile of hydrolysate, we profiled the 37 inhibitors against a library of Z. mobilis mutants and we modeled fitness in hydrolysate as a mixture of fitness in its components. By examining outliers in this model, we identified methylglyoxal as a previously unknown component of hydrolysate. Our work provides a general strategy to dissect how microbes respond to a complex chemical stress and should enable further engineering of hydrolysate tolerance

Weeds in Cover Crops: Context and Management Considerations

Cover crops are increasingly being adopted to provide multiple ecosystem services such as improving soil health, managing nutrients, and decreasing soil erosion. It is not uncommon for weeds to emerge in and become a part of a cover crop plant community. Since the role of cover cropping is to supplement ecosystem service provisioning, we were interested in assessing the impacts of weeds on such provisioning. To our knowledge, no research has examined how weeds in cover crops may impact the provision of ecosystem services and disservices. Here, we review services and disservices associated with weeds in annual agroecosystems and present two case studies from the United States to illustrate how weeds growing in fall-planted cover crops can provide ground cover, decrease potential soil losses, and effectively manage nitrogen. We argue that in certain circumstances, weeds in cover crops can enhance ecosystem service provisioning. In other circumstances, such as in the case of herbicide-resistant weeds, cover crops should be managed to limit weed biomass and fecundity. Based on our case studies and review of the current literature, we conclude that the extent to which weeds should be allowed to grow in a cover crop is largely context-dependent.This work was supported by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Organic Research and Extension Initiative under Project PENW-2015-07433 (Grant No. 2015-51300-24156, Accession No. 1007156) and the National Science Foundation (Grant No. DGE1255832)