“Two Minds Don’t Blink Alike”: The Attentional Blink Does Not Occur in a Joint Context

Typically, when two individuals perform a task together, each partner monitors the other partners' responses and goals to ensure that the task is completed efficiently. This monitoring is thought to involve a co-representation of the joint goals and task, as well as a simulation of the partners' performance. Evidence for such "co-representation" of goals and task, and "simulation" of responses has come from numerous visual attention studies in which two participants complete different components of the same task. In the present research, an adaptation of the attentional blink task was used to determine if co-representation could exert an influence over the associated attentional mechanisms. Participants completed a rapid serial visual presentation task in which they first identified a target letter (T1) and then detected the presence of the letter X (T2) presented one to seven letters after T1. In the individual condition, the participant identified T1 and then detected T2. In the joint condition, one participant identified T1 and the other participant detected T2. Across two experiments, an attentional blink (decreased accuracy in detecting T2 when presented three letters after T1) was observed in the individual condition, but not in joint conditions. A joint attentional blink may not emerge because the co-representation mechanisms that enable joint action exert a stronger influence at information processing stages that do not overlap with those that lead to the attentional blink

Hydrogeologic Conditions Controlling Contaminant Migration from Storage Tanks Overlying Mississippi River Alluvium

Delta Store #3033 in Indianola, MS is suspected of having had a release of petroleum, which may have contaminated the underlying soil and shallow groundwater. Exploratory boring/monitoring wells were drilled on-site noting all soil formations and groundwater encountered. The soil facies encountered show a fining upward sequence, representative of a fluvial depositional environment. Soil contamination is mostly confined to the surficial soil; however, evaluation of lab data, boring logs, and cross sections suggests it is likely the contamination migrated through the surficial confining layer into the underlying strata. The hydraulic conductivity of 1.2 x 10-5 cm/sec, surficial geology consisting mostly of low and some high plasticity clays (CL and CH), a hydraulic gradient of 0.01 to 0.02 ft/ft, and the presence of an overlying concrete pavement suggests that any recent release of hydrocarbons should be confined to the immediate vicinity under the site

Hydrogeologic Conditions Controlling Contaminant Migration from Storage Tanks Overlying Mississippi River Alluvium

Delta Store #3033 in Indianola, MS is suspected of having had a release of petroleum, which may have contaminated the underlying soil and shallow groundwater. Exploratory boring/monitoring wells were drilled on-site noting all soil formations and groundwater encountered. The soil facies encountered show a fining upward sequence, representative of a fluvial depositional environment. Soil contamination is mostly confined to the surficial soil; however, evaluation of lab data, boring logs, and cross sections suggests it is likely the contamination migrated through the surficial confining layer into the underlying strata. The hydraulic conductivity of 1.2 x 10-5 cm/sec, surficial geology consisting mostly of low and some high plasticity clays (CL and CH), a hydraulic gradient of 0.01 to 0.02 ft/ft, and the presence of an overlying concrete pavement suggests that any recent release of hydrocarbons should be confined to the immediate vicinity under the site

Purcell effect with microwave drive: Suppression of qubit relaxation rate

We analyze the Purcell relaxation rate of a superconducting qubit coupled to a resonator, which is coupled to a transmission line and pumped by an external microwave drive. Considering the typical regime of the qubit measurement, we focus on the case when the qubit frequency is significantly detuned from the resonator frequency. Surprisingly, the Purcell rate decreases when the strength of the microwave drive is increased. This suppression becomes significant in the nonlinear regime. In the presence of the microwave drive, the loss of photons to the transmission line also causes excitation of the qubit; however, the excitation rate is typically much smaller than the relaxation rate. Our analysis also applies to a more general case of a two-level quantum system coupled to a cavity.Comment: Published versio

Do you see what I see? Co-actor posture modulates visual processing in joint tasks

Interacting with other people is a ubiquitous part of daily life. A complex set of processes enable our successful interactions with others. The present research was conducted to investigate how the processing of visual stimuli may be affected by the presence and the hand posture of a co-actor. Experiments conducted with participants acting alone have revealed that the distance from the stimulus to the hand of a participant can alter visual processing. In the main experiment of the present paper, we asked whether this posture-related source of visual bias persists when participants share the task with another person. The effect of personal and co-actor hand-proximity on visual processing was assessed through object-specific benefits to visual recognition in a task performed by two co-actors. Pairs of participants completed a joint visual recognition task and, across different blocks of trials, the position of their own hands and of their partner's hands varied relative to the stimuli. In contrast to control studies conducted with participants acting alone, an object-specific recognition benefit was found across all hand location conditions. These data suggest that visual processing is, in some cases, sensitive to the posture of a co-actor

Entanglement between the future and past in the quantum vacuum

We note that massless fields within the future and past light cone may be quantized as independent systems. We show that the vacuum is an entangled state of these systems, exactly mirroring the known entanglement between the spacelike separated Rindler wedges. We describe a detector which exhibits a thermal response to the vacuum when switched on at t=0. The feasibility of experimentally detecting this effect is discussed.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figur