Investigating the balance between goal-directed and habitual control in experimental and real-life settings

Do people differ in their propensity to form habits? The current study related individual differences in habitual performance on the slips-of-action task to habit formation in real life. To this end, we developed a novel key-cover procedure that controls for the amount of repetition and motivation within a naturalistic setting. Participants received a key cover for the key to their home, which after several weeks was switched with a key cover that was previously attached to a dummy key. Participants recorded effort, time, attention, and mistakes in the key-selection process. Results were in line with established properties of habits, as attention decreased in the learning phase, yet effort, time, and mistakes increased after the key-cover switch. Performance on the slips-of-action task correlated negatively with changes in attention in the real-life key-cover task. This negative correlation may reflect that flexible behavioral adjustment requires more attention in people with a relatively weak goal-directed system

Helping your partner with chronic pain: the importance of helping motivation, received social support, and its timeliness

Objective Like all intentional acts, social support provision varies with respect to its underlying motives. Greater autonomous or volitional motives (e.g., enjoyment, full commitment) to help individuals with chronic pain (ICPs) are associated with greater well-being benefits for the latter, as indexed by improved satisfaction of their psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The present study investigates the processes explaining why partners’ autonomous or volitional helping motivation yields these benefits. Methods A total of 134 couples, where at least one partner had chronic pain, completed a 14-day diary. Partners reported on their daily helping motives, whereas ICPs reported on their daily received support, timing of help, need-based experiences, and pain. Results On days when partners provided help for volitional motives, ICPs indicated receiving more help, which partially accounted for the effect of autonomous helping motivation on ICP need-based experiences. Timing of help moderated the effects of daily received support on ICP need-based experiences. Conclusions Findings highlight the importance of ICPs of receiving support in general and the role of timing in particular, which especially matters when there is little support being received.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Rapid analytical methods for the microalgal and cyanobacterial biorefinery: application on strains of industrial importance.

To realise the potential of microalgae in the biorefinery context, exploitation of multiple products is necessary for profitability and for bioproduct valorisation. Appropriate analytical tools are required for growth optimisation, culture monitoring and quality control purposes, with safe, low-tech and low-cost solutions favourable. Rapid, high-throughput and user-friendly methodologies were devised for a) determination phycobiliproteins, chlorophylls, carotenoids, proteins, carbohydrates and lipids and b) qualitative and quantitative carotenoid profiling using UPLC-PDA-MSE. The complimentary methods were applied on 11 commercially important microalgal strains including Prasinophytes, Haptophytes and cyanobacteria, highlighting the suitability of some strains for coproduct exploitation and the methods utility for research and industrial biotechnology applications. The UPLC method allowed separation of 41 different carotenoid compounds in < 15 minutes. Simple techniques are described for further quantification and comparison of pigment profiles, allowing for easy strain selection and optimisation for pigment production, with suitability for biotechnological or biomedical applications

The genomic signature of trait-associated variants

BACKGROUND: Genome-wide association studies have identified thousands of SNP variants associated with hundreds of phenotypes. For most associations the causal variants and the molecular mechanisms underlying pathogenesis remain unknown. Exploration of the underlying functional annotations of trait-associated loci has thrown some light on their potential roles in pathogenesis. However, there are some shortcomings of the methods used to date, which may undermine efforts to prioritize variants for further analyses. Here, we introduce and apply novel methods to rigorously identify annotation classes showing enrichment or depletion of trait-associated variants taking into account the underlying associations due to co-location of different functional annotations and linkage disequilibrium. RESULTS: We assessed enrichment and depletion of variants in publicly available annotation classes such as genic regions, regulatory features, measures of conservation, and patterns of histone modifications. We used logistic regression to build a multivariate model that identified the most influential functional annotations for trait-association status of genome-wide significant variants. SNPs associated with all of the enriched annotations were 8 times more likely to be trait-associated variants than SNPs annotated with none of them. Annotations associated with chromatin state together with prior knowledge of the existence of a local expression QTL (eQTL) were the most important factors in the final logistic regression model. Surprisingly, despite the widespread use of evolutionary conservation to prioritize variants for study we find only modest enrichment of trait-associated SNPs in conserved regions. CONCLUSION: We established odds ratios of functional annotations that are more likely to contain significantly trait-associated SNPs, for the purpose of prioritizing GWAS hits for further studies. Additionally, we estimated the relative and combined influence of the different genomic annotations, which may facilitate future prioritization methods by adding substantial information

Countering information leakage in the Concealed Information Test: The effects of item detailedness

Concealed Information Tests (CIT) are administered to verify whether suspects recognize certain features from a crime. Whenever it is presumed that innocent suspects were contaminated with critical information (e.g., the perpetrator had a knife), the examiner may ask more detailed questions (e.g., specific types of knives) to prevent false positives. However, this may increase the number of false negatives if the true perpetrator fails to discern specific details from its plausible irrelevant controls, or because detailed crime‐scene information may be forgotten. We examined whether presenting items at the exemplar level protects against contamination, and whether it compromises the sensitivity in a physiological CIT. Participants (N = 142) planned a mock‐robbery, with critical items encoded either at the category or at the exemplar level. The CIT was administered immediately or after a 1‐week‐delay, with questions phrased at the categorical or exemplar level. There were no effects of time delay. Results revealed that when item detailedness was congruent at encoding and testing, the SCR, HR, and RLL showed larger differential responses, as compared with incongruent conditions. Participants contaminated with crime knowledge at the categorical level did not show a CIT‐effect for crime details at the exemplar level, suggesting detailed questions may counter the leakage problem. Asking questions at the exemplar level did not reduce the CIT detection efficiency as compared to asking questions at the categorical level. The importance of congruency between encoding and testing provides examiners with a challenge, as it is difficult to estimate how details are naturally encoded

Episodic memory enhancement versus impairment is determined by contextual similarity across events

For over a century, stability of spatial context across related episodes has been considered a source of memory interference, impairing memory retrieval. However, contemporary memory integration theory generates a diametrically opposite prediction. Here, we aimed to resolve this discrepancy by manipulating local context similarity across temporally disparate but related episodes and testing the direction and underlying mechanisms of memory change. A series of experiments show that contextual stability produces memory integration and marked reciprocal strengthening. Variable context, conversely, seemed to result in competition such that new memories become enhanced at the expense of original memories. Interestingly, these patterns were virtually inverted in an additional experiment where context was reinstated during recall. These observations 1) identify contextual similarity across original and new memories as an important determinant in the volatility of memory, 2) present a challenge to classic and modern theories on episodic memory change, and 3) indicate that the sensitivity of context-induced memory changes to retrieval conditions may reconcile paradoxical predictions of interference and integration theory

Transmission Disrupted: Modeling Auditory Synaptopathy in Zebrafish

Sensorineural hearing loss is the most common form of hearing loss in humans, and results from either dysfunction in hair cells, the sensory receptors of sound, or the neurons that innervate hair cells. A specific type of sensorineural hearing loss, referred to as auditory synaptopathy, occurs when hair cells are able to detect sound but fail to transmit sound stimuli at the hair-cell synapse. Auditory synaptopathy can originate from genetic alterations that specifically disrupt hair-cell synapse function. Additionally, environmental factors such as noise exposure can leave hair cells intact but result in loss of hair-cell synapses, and represent an acquired form of auditory synaptopathy. The zebrafish model has emerged as a valuable system for studies of hair-cell function, and specifically hair-cell synaptopathy. In this review, we describe the experimental tools that have been developed to study hair-cell synapses in zebrafish. We discuss how zebrafish genetics has helped identify and define the roles of hair-cell synaptic proteins crucial for hearing in humans, and highlight how studies in zebrafish have contributed to our understanding of hair-cell synapse formation and function. In addition, we also discuss work that has used noise exposure or pharmacological mimic of noise-induced excitotoxicity in zebrafish to define cellular mechanisms underlying noise-induced hair-cell damage and synapse loss. Lastly, we highlight how future studies in zebrafish could enhance our understanding of the pathological processes underlying synapse loss in both genetic and acquired auditory synaptopathy. This knowledge is critical in order to develop therapies that protect or repair auditory synaptic contacts