Impaired filtering of irrelevant information in depression: an ERP study

Behavioural findings have led to proposals that difficulties in attention and concentration in depression may have their roots in fundamental inhibitory impairments for irrelevant information. These impairments may be associated with reduced capacity to actively maintain relevant information to facilitate goadirected behaviour. In light of mixed data from behavioural studies, the current study using direct neural measurement, examines whether dysphoric individuals show poor filtering of irrelevant information and reduced working memory (WM) capacity for relevant information. Consistent with previous research, a sustained evenrelated potential (ERP) asymmetry, termed contralateral delay activity (CDA), was observed to be sensitive to WM capacity and the efficient filtering of irrelevant information from visual WM. We found a strong positive correlation between the efficiency of filtering irrelevant items and visual WM capacity. Specifically, dysphoric participants were poor at filtering irrelevant information, and showed reduced WM capacity relative to high capacity non-dysphoric participants. Results support the hypothesis that impaired inhibition is a central feature of dysphoria and are discussed within the framework of cognitive and neurophysiological models of depression

The Lighthouse

Oh, the weak feeling I had in the pit of my stomach that first Sunday as my car came to a stop in front of Blue Lodge, a place I had rented for the purpose of a community church. Most of the dwellings in this section were given some sort of name; this one suggested the owner\u27s name

Continuum: designing timelines for hierarchies, relationships and scale

Temporal events, while often discrete, also have interesting relationships within and across times: larger events are often collections of smaller more discrete events (battles within wars; artists' works within a form); events at one point also have correlations with events at other points (a play written in one period is related to its performance, or lack of performance, over a period of time). Most temporal visualisations, however, only represent discrete data points or single data types along a single timeline: this event started here and ended there; this work was published at this time; this tag was popular for this period. In order to represent richer, faceted attributes of temporal events, we present Continuum. Continuum enables hierarchical relationships in temporal data to be represented and explored; it enables relationships between events across periods to be expressed, and in particular it enables user-determined control over the level of detail of any facet of interest so that the person using the system can determine a focus point, no matter the level of zoom over the temporal space. We present the factors motivating our approach, our evaluation and implementation of this new visualisation which makes it easy for anyone to apply this interface to rich, large-scale datasets with temporal data

Trait susceptibility to worry modulates the effects of cognitive load on cognitive control: an ERP study

According to the predictions of Attentional Control Theory of Anxiety (ACT; Eysenck, Derakshan, Santos, & Calvo, 2007) worry is a central feature of anxiety that interferes with the ability to inhibit distracting information necessary for successful task performance. However, it is unclear how such cognitive control deficits are modulated by task demands and by the emotionality of the distractors. A sample of 31 participants (25 female) completed a novel flanker task with emotional and neutral distractors under low and high cognitive load conditions. The negative going N2 event-related potential was measured to index participants’ level of top-down resource allocation in the inhibition of distractors under high and low load conditions. Results showed N2 amplitudes were larger under high compared to low load conditions. In addition, under high but not low load, trait worry was associated with greater N2 amplitudes. Our findings support ACT predictions that trait worry adversely affects goal-directed behaviour and is associated with greater recruitment of cognitive resources to inhibit the impact of distracting information under conditions where cognitive resources are taxed

Systemic infection of freshwater crayfish Cherax quadricarinatus by hymenostome ciliates of the Tetrahymena pyriformis complex

A survey of cultured freshwater crayfish Cherax quadricarinatus in north Queensland revealed systemic infections by hymenostome ciliates in moribund crayfish from one location. The ciliates were identified following protargol impregnation as belonging to the Tetrahymena pyriformis species complex on the basis of their somatic and oral ciliature and morphometric characteristics. Live ciliates were observed in the haemal sinuses of the gills browsing on tissue fragments. Histological examination revealed the ciliates to have invaded most organs and tissues, causing extensive necrosis particularly in the hepatopancreas and antennal gland. Lipid reserves were not depleted in the hepatopancreas, suggesting the rapid development of acute disease. This is the first record of systemic ciliate infections in freshwater decapods

Global Journalist: Did Facebook's "pivoted to video" cause publishers to face plant?

On this December 11, 2020 Global Journalist program, journalists discuss the media industry's "pivot to video." The trend was led by Facebook and lasted from 2015 to 2018. The journalists discuss the casualties of the failed trend and what lessons can be learned

Phonon engineering of atomic-scale defects in superconducting quantum circuits

Noise within solid-state systems at low temperatures, where many of the degrees of freedom of the host material are frozen out, can typically be traced back to material defects that support low-energy excitations. These defects can take a wide variety of microscopic forms, and for amorphous materials are broadly described using generic models such as the tunneling two-level systems (TLS) model. Although the details of TLS, and their impact on the low-temperature behavior of materials have been studied since the 1970s, these states have recently taken on further relevance in the field of quantum computing, where the limits to the coherence of superconducting microwave quantum circuits are dominated by TLS. Efforts to mitigate the impact of TLS have thus far focused on circuit design, material selection, and material surface treatment. In this work, we take a new approach that seeks to directly modify the properties of TLS through nanoscale-engineering. This is achieved by periodically structuring the host material, forming an acoustic bandgap that suppresses all microwave-frequency phonons in a GHz-wide frequency band around the operating frequency of a transmon qubit superconducting quantum circuit. For embedded TLS that are strongly coupled to the electric qubit, we measure a pronounced increase in relaxation time by two orders of magnitude when the TLS transition frequency lies within the acoustic bandgap, with the longest $T_1$ time exceeding $5$ milliseconds. Our work paves the way for in-depth investigation and coherent control of TLS, which is essential for deepening our understanding of noise in amorphous materials and advancing solid-state quantum devices.Comment: 11 + 25 pages, 4 + 22 figures, 6 tables; comments welcome

Brain Predictability toolbox: a Python library for neuroimaging based machine learning

Summary Brain Predictability toolbox (BPt) represents a unified framework of machine learning (ML) tools designed to work with both tabulated data (in particular brain, psychiatric, behavioral, and physiological variables) and neuroimaging specific derived data (e.g., brain volumes and surfaces). This package is suitable for investigating a wide range of different neuroimaging based ML questions, in particular, those queried from large human datasets. Availability and Implementation BPt has been developed as an open-source Python 3.6+ package hosted at https://github.com/sahahn/BPt under MIT License, with documentation provided at https://bpt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/, and continues to be actively developed. The project can be downloaded through the github link provided. A web GUI interface based on the same code is currently under development and can be set up through docker with instructions at https://github.com/sahahn/BPt_app. Contact Please contact Sage Hahn at [email protected]: 3 Page