Levodopa does not affect expression of reinforcement learning in older adults

Dopamine has been implicated in learning from rewards and punishment, and in the expression of this learning. However, many studies do not fully separate retrieval and decision mechanisms from learning and consolidation. Here, we investigated the effects of levodopa (dopamine precursor) on choice performance (isolated from learning or consolidation). We gave 31 healthy older adults 150 mg of levodopa or placebo (double-blinded, randomised) 1 hour before testing them on stimuli they had learned the value of the previous day. We found that levodopa did not affect the overall accuracy of choices, nor the relative expression of positively or negatively reinforced values. This contradicts several studies and suggests that overall dopamine levels may not play a role in the choice performance for values learned through reinforcement learning in older adults

Justify your alpha

Benjamin et al. proposed changing the conventional “statistical significance” threshold (i.e.,the alpha level) from p ≤ .05 to p ≤ .005 for all novel claims with relatively low prior odds. They provided two arguments for why lowering the significance threshold would “immediately improve the reproducibility of scientific research.” First, a p-value near .05provides weak evidence for the alternative hypothesis. Second, under certain assumptions, an alpha of .05 leads to high false positive report probabilities (FPRP2 ; the probability that a significant finding is a false positive

Justify your alpha

In response to recommendations to redefine statistical significance to p ≤ .005, we propose that researchers should transparently report and justify all choices they make when designing a study, including the alpha level

Discussion on Bilingual Cognition in International Exchange Activities

Part 4: Language CognitionInternational audienceThis article aims to explore the features, mechanisms, and applications of bilingual cognition in international communication activities. Our main idea is: First, clarify the mother tongue of each international exchange activities (IEAs) and prepare some prerequisites which are related to the discussion. Then, make full use of the information and intelligent network tools to bring out the subjective initiative of both parties, while conducting the corresponding research on daily terms and professional terms, and generate the two series of bilingual phrase table. Finally, use the machine translation (MT) and translation memory tools to help them make the necessary preparations or exercises. Meanwhile, we propose the novel and efficient mixed transfer learning (MTL) approach. As a result, when the two parties communicate with each other, as well as via online or off-line communicate, the kind of tacit agreement would have been created between them. If so, it will have been leveraged among them repeatedly rather than just one time and will have targeted multiple times. Its significance lies in: This process and habit of human-computer interaction will better reveal the characteristics of bilingual cognition based on this article. Experiments on low-resource datasets show that our approach is effective, significantly outperform the state-of-the-art methods and yield improvements of up to 4.13 BLEU points

Finnish-Chinese intercultural negotiation : power positioning and search for common ground

‘Rising China’ is a term that has come to refer to China’s march to being number one, the speed of its economic growth, and its investment around the world during last two decades. In Finland, government agencies have been established to promote investment, trade, and co-operation with China, while regional and local governments are also actively involved. Meanwhile, much of the world is now competing for the attention of China, so the power dynamic is tending to shift in favour of the Chinese. This developing context has been examined in previous studies primarily from the perspectives of politics, economics, and management studies. The overarching aim of this study is to investigate emerging power relations between Finns as sellers of investment opportunities and products and Chinese as investors, buyers, and partners. The study predominantly builds on Positioning Theory (Harré, 1991). It uses methodological tools of ethnographically framed in terviewing and observation. The study comprises five articles - empirical research reports exploring the major themes in data collected – adjustment of Finns to the Chinese, search of common ground with Chinese representatives, guest-host positioning during delegation visits, humor in negotiations, and the language aspect in co-operation. Five styles of positioning regarding power and common ground were found – adjustment, use of existing common ground, autonomy, ‘soft’ power, and pressure / hedging; the character this typology was found to correspond to phases of the five Chinese elements (Wu Xing). While the data suggest that both Finnish and Chinese representatives use all of these strategies, Finnish representatives tended to rely on active responses such as adjustment and pressure/hedging, while Chinese representatives more often resorted to a stance of autonomy. The dynamic among these phases is illustrated using the model of a rope, which suggests the integral nature of change from one style into another, as well as the ways power, common ground, and culture are all intertwined. A variety of external and internal factors that influence the positioning of Finnish and Chinese representatives could also be traced from the articles, such as organizational roles, meeting places, discourses about national characteristics, and considerations of ‘face’. This further reveals the complexity of positioning regarding power and common ground