The temporal dynamic of response inhibition in early childhood: An ERP study of partial and successful inhibition

Event-related potentials were recorded while five-year-old children completed a Go/No-Go task that distinguished between partial inhibition (i.e., response is initiated but cancelled before completion) and successful inhibition (i.e., response is inhibited before it is initiated). Partial inhibition trials were characterized by faster response initiation and later latency of the lateral frontal negativity (LFN) than successful Go and successful inhibition trials. The speed of response initiation was influenced by the response speed on previous trials and influenced the response speed on subsequent trials. Response initiation and action decision dynamically influenced each other, and their temporal interplay determined response inhibition success

Neuropsychologic function in toddlers exposed to cocaine in utero: A preliminary study

Patterns of neuropsychological performance on A-not-B, inhibition, motor, cognitive, language, and behavior tasks were examined in 34 toddlers--17 cocaine-exposed (CE) and 17 nonexposed (NE) controls. CE toddlers exhibited greater perseveration, less inhibition, poorer emotional regulation, and less task orientation relative to NE toddlers. Overall cognitive and language skills and motor impairment status were comparable among CE and NE toddlers. Differences in perseveration, emotional regulation, and task orientation between CE and NE toddlers remained significant after statistically controlling for overall cognitive skill. Prenatal cocaine exposure may impart selective vulnerability for deficits in executive function, inhibition, and emotional regulation in toddlers, perhaps related to the concurrent rapid frontal lobe maturation and the neurobiology of cocaine. Furthermore, these findings suggest that performance can be broken down into meaningful neuropsychological components in very young children

Prenatal cocaine exposure and prematurity: Neurodevelopmental growth

The consequences of prematurity and prenatal cocaine exposure on early neurobehavior and physical growth were examined longitudinally in a sample of 20 cocaine-exposed and 20 nonexposed preterm neonates. The magnitude of the difference in physical growth acceleration related to prenatal cocaine exposure increased with increasing birth gestational age, whereas growth rate differences in irritability decreased. In contrast, prenatal cocaine exposure, independent of prematurity, was related to reduced attention skills at 36 wks conceptional age and increased rates of neurobehavioral change. The effects of prenatal cocaine exposure differed with respect to the degree of prematurity, depending on the nature of the outcome examined, suggesting differing windows of vulnerability for different outcome domains. The usefulness of a developmental growth perspective was demonstrated

Improving Speech Inversion Through Self-Supervised Embeddings and Enhanced Tract Variables

The performance of deep learning models depends significantly on their capacity to encode input features efficiently and decode them into meaningful outputs. Better input and output representation has the potential to boost models' performance and generalization. In the context of acoustic-to-articulatory speech inversion (SI) systems, we study the impact of utilizing speech representations acquired via self-supervised learning (SSL) models, such as HuBERT compared to conventional acoustic features. Additionally, we investigate the incorporation of novel tract variables (TVs) through an improved geometric transformation model. By combining these two approaches, we improve the Pearson product-moment correlation (PPMC) scores which evaluate the accuracy of TV estimation of the SI system from 0.7452 to 0.8141, a 6.9% increase. Our findings underscore the profound influence of rich feature representations from SSL models and improved geometric transformations with target TVs on the enhanced functionality of SI systems

Дослідження проблеми здимання гірських порід із застосуванням апарату теорії стійкості механічних систем: постановка задачі

Описаны возможные направления развития исследований явлений, сопровождающихся большими пластическими деформациями (исследование геодинамических явлений, явлений потери устойчивости почвы выработки (пучения) и т.п.).Possible directions of development of researches of the effects, attended with large plastic strains are described (research of the geodynamics effects, effects of losses of roadway floor sustainability (rock heaving) etc.)

Executive functioning in preschool children: Performance on A-Not-B and other delayed response format tasks

The A-not-B (AB) task has been hypothesized to measure executive/frontal lobe function; however, the developmental and measurement characteristics of this task have not been investigated. The present study examined performance on AB and comparison tasks adapted from developmental and neuroscience literature in 117 1.9-5.5 yr old preschool children. Age significantly predicted performance on AB, Delayed Alternation, Spatial Reversal, Color Reversal, and Self-Control tasks. A 4-factor analytic model best fit task performance data. AB task indices loaded on 2 factors with measures from the Self-Control and Delayed Alternation tasks, respectively. AB indices did not load with those from the reversal tasks despite similarities in task administration and presumed cognitive demand (working memory). These results indicate that AB is sensitive to individual differences in age-related performance in preschool children and suggest that AB performance is related to both working memory and inhibition processes in this age range

Atmospheric effects of radiation belt precipitation over Antarctica

第3回極域科学シンポジウム　横断セッション「中層大気・熱圏」 11月26日（月） 国立極地研究所 ２階大会議

Audio Data Augmentation for Acoustic-to-articulatory Speech Inversion using Bidirectional Gated RNNs

Data augmentation has proven to be a promising prospect in improving the performance of deep learning models by adding variability to training data. In previous work with developing a noise robust acoustic-to-articulatory speech inversion system, we have shown the importance of noise augmentation to improve the performance of speech inversion in noisy speech. In this work, we compare and contrast different ways of doing data augmentation and show how this technique improves the performance of articulatory speech inversion not only on noisy speech, but also on clean speech data. We also propose a Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Neural Network as the speech inversion system instead of the previously used feed forward neural network. The inversion system uses mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) as the input acoustic features and six vocal tract-variables (TVs) as the output articulatory features. The Performance of the system was measured by computing the correlation between estimated and actual TVs on the U. Wisc. X-ray Microbeam database. The proposed speech inversion system shows a 5% relative improvement in correlation over the baseline noise robust system for clean speech data. The pre-trained model, when adapted to each unseen speaker in the test set, improves the average correlation by another 6%.Comment: EUSIPCO 202

Multimodal Approach for Assessing Neuromotor Coordination in Schizophrenia Using Convolutional Neural Networks

This study investigates the speech articulatory coordination in schizophrenia subjects exhibiting strong positive symptoms (e.g. hallucinations and delusions), using two distinct channel-delay correlation methods. We show that the schizophrenic subjects with strong positive symptoms and who are markedly ill pose complex articulatory coordination pattern in facial and speech gestures than what is observed in healthy subjects. This distinction in speech coordination pattern is used to train a multimodal convolutional neural network (CNN) which uses video and audio data during speech to distinguish schizophrenic patients with strong positive symptoms from healthy subjects. We also show that the vocal tract variables (TVs) which correspond to place of articulation and glottal source outperform the Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) when fused with Facial Action Units (FAUs) in the proposed multimodal network. For the clinical dataset we collected, our best performing multimodal network improves the mean F1 score for detecting schizophrenia by around 18% with respect to the full vocal tract coordination (FVTC) baseline method implemented with fusing FAUs and MFCCs.Comment: 5 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2102.0705

Characteristics and sources of gravity waves observed in noctilucent cloud over Norway

Four years of noctilucent cloud (NLC) images from an automated digital camera in Trondheim and results from a ray-tracing model are used to extend the climatology of gravity waves to higher latitudes and to identify their sources during summertime. The climatology of the summertime gravity waves detected in NLC between 64 and 74° N is similar to that observed between 60 and 64° N by Pautet et al. (2011). The direction of propagation of gravity waves observed in the NLC north of 64° N is a continuation of the north and northeast propagation as observed in south of 64° N. However, a unique population of fast, short wavelength waves propagating towards the SW is observed in the NLC, which is consistent with transverse instabilities generated in situ by breaking gravity waves (Fritts and Alexander, 2003). The relative amplitude of the waves observed in the NLC Mie scatter have been combined with ray-tracing results to show that waves propagating from near the tropopause, rather than those resulting from secondary generation in the stratosphere or mesosphere, are more likely to be the sources of the prominent wave structures observed in the NLC. The coastal region of Norway along the latitude of 70° N is identified as the primary source region of the waves generated near the tropopause