The University of New Hampshire Engaged Scholars Academy: Instilling in Faculty Principles of Effective Partnership

Over the last decade, the University of New Hampshire (UNH) has promoted mutually beneficial partnerships between faculty and community partners vis-à-vis the Engaged Scholars Academy (ESA), a faculty development program aimed at enhancing faculty understanding of the principles of partnership and engaged scholarship. This research seeks to determine whether and how the ESA has impacted faculty-community partnerships around engaged scholarship. Findings suggest that Engaged Scholar Academy participants – as compared to non-participants – have a deeper understanding of the principles of partnership, are more likely to feel their scholarship is enhanced, spend more time with partners, engage their partners throughout the process of inquiry, and focus more on sustaining partnership outcomes

Behavioral and Electrophysiological Effects of Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation of the Parietal Cortex in a Visuo-Spatial Working Memory Task

Impairments of working memory (WM) performance are frequent concomitant symptoms in several psychiatric and neurologic diseases. Despite the great advance in treating the reduced WM abilities in patients suffering from, e.g., Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease by means of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), the exact neurophysiological underpinning subserving these therapeutic tDCS-effects are still unknown. In the present study we investigated the impact of tDCS on performance in a visuo-spatial WM task and its underlying neural activity. In three experimental sessions, participants performed a delayed matching-to-sample WM task after sham, anodal, and cathodal tDCS over the right parietal cortex. The results showed that tDCS modulated WM performance and its underlying electrophysiological brain activity in a polarity-specific way. Parietal tDCS altered event-related potentials and oscillatory power in the alpha band at posterior electrode sites. The present study demonstrates that posterior tDCS can alter visuo-spatial WM performance by modulating the underlying neural activity. This result can be considered an important step toward a better understanding of the mechanisms involved in tDCS-induced modulations of cognitive processing. This is of particular importance for the application of electrical brain stimulation as a therapeutic treatment of neuropsychiatric deficits in clinical populations

Electrophysiological differences and similarities in audiovisual speech processing in CI users with unilateral and bilateral hearing loss.

Hearing with a cochlear implant (CI) is limited compared to natural hearing. Although CI users may develop compensatory strategies, it is currently unknown whether these extend from auditory to visual functions, and whether compensatory strategies vary between different CI user groups. To better understand the experience-dependent contributions to multisensory plasticity in audiovisual speech perception, the current event-related potential (ERP) study presented syllables in auditory, visual, and audiovisual conditions to CI users with unilateral or bilateral hearing loss, as well as to normal-hearing (NH) controls. Behavioural results revealed shorter audiovisual response times compared to unisensory conditions for all groups. Multisensory integration was confirmed by electrical neuroimaging, including topographic and ERP source analysis, showing a visual modulation of the auditory-cortex response at N1 and P2 latency. However, CI users with bilateral hearing loss showed a distinct pattern of N1 topography, indicating a stronger visual impact on auditory speech processing compared to CI users with unilateral hearing loss and NH listeners. Furthermore, both CI user groups showed a delayed auditory-cortex activation and an additional recruitment of the visual cortex, and a better lip-reading ability compared to NH listeners. In sum, these results extend previous findings by showing distinct multisensory processes not only between NH listeners and CI users in general, but even between CI users with unilateral and bilateral hearing loss. However, the comparably enhanced lip-reading ability and visual-cortex activation in both CI user groups suggest that these visual improvements are evident regardless of the hearing status of the contralateral ear

The timecourse of multisensory speech processing in unilaterally stimulated cochlear implant users revealed by ERPs.

A cochlear implant (CI) is an auditory prosthesis which can partially restore the auditory function in patients with severe to profound hearing loss. However, this bionic device provides only limited auditory information, and CI patients may compensate for this limitation by means of a stronger interaction between the auditory and visual system. To better understand the electrophysiological correlates of audiovisual speech perception, the present study used electroencephalography (EEG) and a redundant target paradigm. Postlingually deafened CI users and normal-hearing (NH) listeners were compared in auditory, visual and audiovisual speech conditions. The behavioural results revealed multisensory integration for both groups, as indicated by shortened response times for the audiovisual as compared to the two unisensory conditions. The analysis of the N1 and P2 event-related potentials (ERPs), including topographic and source analyses, confirmed a multisensory effect for both groups and showed a cortical auditory response which was modulated by the simultaneous processing of the visual stimulus. Nevertheless, the CI users in particular revealed a distinct pattern of N1 topography, pointing to a strong visual impact on auditory speech processing. Apart from these condition effects, the results revealed ERP differences between CI users and NH listeners, not only in N1/P2 ERP topographies, but also in the cortical source configuration. When compared to the NH listeners, the CI users showed an additional activation in the visual cortex at N1 latency, which was positively correlated with CI experience, and a delayed auditory-cortex activation with a reversed, rightward functional lateralisation. In sum, our behavioural and ERP findings demonstrate a clear audiovisual benefit for both groups, and a CI-specific alteration in cortical activation at N1 latency when auditory and visual input is combined. These cortical alterations may reflect a compensatory strategy to overcome the limited CI input, which allows the CI users to improve the lip-reading skills and to approximate the behavioural performance of NH listeners in audiovisual speech conditions. Our results are clinically relevant, as they highlight the importance of assessing the CI outcome not only in auditory-only, but also in audiovisual speech conditions

Exploiting the Internet Resources for Autonomous Robots in Agriculture

Autonomous robots in the agri-food sector are increasing yearly, promoting the application of precision agriculture techniques. The same applies to online services and techniques implemented over the Internet, such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing, which make big data, edge computing, and digital twins technologies possible. Developers of autonomous vehicles understand that autonomous robots for agriculture must take advantage of these techniques on the Internet to strengthen their usability. This integration can be achieved using different strategies, but existing tools can facilitate integration by providing benefits for developers and users. This study presents an architecture to integrate the different components of an autonomous robot that provides access to the cloud, taking advantage of the services provided regarding data storage, scalability, accessibility, data sharing, and data analytics. In addition, the study reveals the advantages of integrating new technologies into autonomous robots that can bring significant benefits to farmers. The architecture is based on the Robot Operating System (ROS), a collection of software applications for communication among subsystems, and FIWARE (Future Internet WARE), a framework of open-source components that accelerates the development of intelligent solutions. To validate and assess the proposed architecture, this study focuses on a specific example of an innovative weeding application with laser technology in agriculture. The robot controller is distributed into the robot hardware, which provides real-time functions, and the cloud, which provides access to online resources. Analyzing the resulting characteristics, such as transfer speed, latency, response and processing time, and response status based on requests, enabled positive assessment of the use of ROS and FIWARE for integrating autonomous robots and the Internet