Contribution of Cerebellar Sensorimotor Adaptation to Hippocampal Spatial Memory

Complementing its primary role in motor control, cerebellar learning has also a bottom-up influence on cognitive functions, where high-level representations build up from elementary sensorimotor memories. In this paper we examine the cerebellar contribution to both procedural and declarative components of spatial cognition. To do so, we model a functional interplay between the cerebellum and the hippocampal formation during goal-oriented navigation. We reinterpret and complete existing genetic behavioural observations by means of quantitative accounts that cross-link synaptic plasticity mechanisms, single cell and population coding properties, and behavioural responses. In contrast to earlier hypotheses positing only a purely procedural impact of cerebellar adaptation deficits, our results suggest a cerebellar involvement in high-level aspects of behaviour. In particular, we propose that cerebellar learning mechanisms may influence hippocampal place fields, by contributing to the path integration process. Our simulations predict differences in place-cell discharge properties between normal mice and L7-PKCI mutant mice lacking long-term depression at cerebellar parallel fibre-Purkinje cell synapses. On the behavioural level, these results suggest that, by influencing the accuracy of hippocampal spatial codes, cerebellar deficits may impact the exploration-exploitation balance during spatial navigation

The Logos of the Blogosphere: Flooding the Zone, Invention, and Attention in the Lott Imbroglio

This essay examines the significance of a particular metaphor, flooding the zone, which gained prominence as an account of bloggers\u27 argumentative prowess in the wake of Senator Trent Lott\u27s toast at Strom Thurmond\u27s centennial birthday party. I situate the growth of the blogosphere in the context of the political economy of the institutional mass media at the time and argue that the blogosphere is an alternative site for the invention of public argument. By providing an account of how the blogosphere serves as a site of invention by flooding the zone with densely interlinked coverage of a controversy, this essay theorizes how the networked public sphere facilitates invention with speed, agonism, and copiousness. The essay then identifies how flooding the zone has been adopted by corporations and the state in order to blunt spontaneous argumentation emerging from the periphery of communication networks

The Next Generation of Knowledge Management: Mapping-Based Assessment Models

Understanding how to capture value from KM is relevant, today more than ever. The current dynamic and unpredictable social and economic scenario struggles organisations to know how optimising the use and the development of their resources, included knowledge resources, to create value. Managers and decision makers need approaches and models able to drive them in the complex decisions regarding how actively managing knowledge resources and assessing the achieved outcomes. This chapter provides a contribution to the emerging discussion concerning the definition of new KM models specifically aimed to a better understanding of KM outcomes and value. Based on some previous works of the authors, the chapter analyses how to elicit the mechanisms of conversion of knowledge resources into value through the use of visual techniques and presents an AHP based mapping model that allows to identify the knowledge asset value drivers on which management attention should be focused as well as to highlight and assess the network of relationships between and among knowledge assets, and between knowledge assets and organisational performance