From upright to upside-down presentation: A spatio-temporal ERP study of the parametric effect of rotation on face and house processing

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>While there is a general agreement that picture-plane inversion is more detrimental to face processing than to other seemingly complex visual objects, the origin of this effect is still largely debatable. Here, we address the question of whether face inversion reflects a quantitative or a qualitative change in processing mode by investigating the pattern of event-related potential (ERP) response changes with picture plane rotation of face and house pictures. Thorough analyses of topographical (Scalp Current Density maps, SCD) and dipole source modeling were also conducted.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We find that whilst stimulus orientation affected in a similar fashion participants' response latencies to make face and house decisions, only the ERPs in the N170 latency range were modulated by picture plane rotation of faces. The pattern of N170 amplitude and latency enhancement to misrotated faces displayed a curvilinear shape with an almost linear increase for rotations from 0° to 90° and a dip at 112.5° up to 180° rotations. A similar discontinuity function was also described for SCD occipito-temporal and temporal current foci with no topographic distribution changes, suggesting that upright and misrotated faces activated similar brain sources. This was confirmed by dipole source analyses showing the involvement of bilateral sources in the fusiform and middle occipital gyri, the activity of which was differentially affected by face rotation.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our N170 findings provide support for both the quantitative and qualitative accounts for face rotation effects. Although the qualitative explanation predicted the curvilinear shape of N170 modulations by face misrotations, topographical and source modeling findings suggest that the same brain regions, and thus the same mechanisms, are probably at work when processing upright and rotated faces. Taken collectively, our results indicate that the same processing mechanisms may be involved across the whole range of face orientations, but would operate in a non-linear fashion. Finally, the response tuning of the N170 to rotated faces extends previous reports and further demonstrates that face inversion affects perceptual analyses of faces, which is reflected within the time range of the N170 component.</p

Relatório de estágio em farmácia comunitária

Relatório de estágio realizado no âmbito do Mestrado Integrado em Ciências Farmacêuticas, apresentado à Faculdade de Farmácia da Universidade de Coimbr

Synthesis of flutamide-d(7) and its main metabolite-d(6)

With the main objective of examining the pharmacokinetics of flutamide, flutamide-d(7) and its main metabolite-d(6) have been prepared. By carboxylation of Grignard-derivative (IV), deuterocarboxylic acid (V) was prepared from which acyl chloride (VI) was obtained by reaction with (COCl)(2). Subsequent reaction of (VI) with 4-nitro-3-trifluoromethylaniline afforded (I). Compound (X) was obtained starting from hydroxyacid (IX), through reaction with TMSCI, (COCl)(2) and subsequent condensation with 4-nitro-3-trifluoromethylaniline. Desilylation of(X) by tetrabutylammonium fluoride, gave (II)

Antibacterial quinolones. Part 1. Synthesis

Fluoroquinolones, fully synthetic antibacterial compounds, have been used therapeutically for over 30 years and represent a major class of antibacterial with a great therapeutic potential. In this first part of the review we examine the main synthetic approaches for the preparation of antibacterial quinolones, including their aza analogues (4-oxonaphtyridine and 4-oxocinnoline derivatives). Condensed polycyclic analogues (tricyclic and tetracyclic compounds) are, also, examined

Cleaning up and standardizing a folktale corpus for humanities research

Recordings in the field of folk narrative have been made around the world for many decades. By digitizing and annotating these texts, they are frozen in time and are better suited for searching, sorting and performing research on. This paper describes the first steps of the process of standardization and preparation of digital folktale metadata for scientific use and improving availability of the data for humanities and, more specifically, folktale research. The Dutch Folktale Database has been used as case study but, since these problems are common in all corpora with manually created metadata, the explanation of the process is kept as general as possible

An English dependency treebank à la Tesnière

During the last decade, the Computational Linguistics community has shown an increased interest in Dependency Treebanks. Several groups have developed new annotated corpora using dependency representation, while other people have proposed several automatic conversion algorithms to transform available Phrase Structure (PS) treebanks into Dependency Structure (DS) notation. Such projects typically refer to Tesnière as the father of dependency syntax, but little attempt has been made to explain how the chosen representation relates to the original work. A careful comparison reveals substantial differences: modern DS annotations discard some relevant features characterizing Tesnière’s model. This paper is presenting our attempt to go back to the roots of dependency theory, and show how it is possible to transform a PS English treebank to a DS notation that is closer to the one proposed by Tesnière, which we will refer to as TDS. We will show how this representation can incorporate all main advantages of modern DS, while avoiding well known problems concerning the choice of heads, and better representing common linguistic phenomena such as coordination

Reduced Functional Connectivity of Prefrontal Regions and Amygdala Within Affect and Working Memory Networks in Pediatric Bipolar Disorder

This study examined whether adolescents with pediatric bipolar disorder (PBD) have abnormal regional functional connectivity in distributed brain networks during an affective working memory task. Adolescents with PBD (n=41) and healthy controls (HC; n=16) performed a two-back functional magnetic resonance imaging working memory task with blocks of either angry or neutral faces. Independent component analysis methodology identified two temporally independent and functionally connected brain networks that showed differential functional connectivity in PBD and HC. Within a network for “affect evaluation and regulation,” PBD showed decreased functional connectivity relative to HC in regions involved in emotion processing such as the right amygdala, and in emotion regulation regions such as the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), while functional connectivity was increased in emotion evaluation regions such as the bilateral medial PFC. Furthermore, in an “Affective Working Memory Network,” PBD exhibited greater connectivity relative to HC in left dorsolateral PFC (DLPFC), caudate, and right VLPFC; and simultaneously reduced connectivity in emotion processing regions, such as the right amygdala, bilateral temporal regions, and the junction of DLPFC/VLPFC, which interfaces affective and cognitive processes. Dysfunction in network engagement in PBD patients illustrates that they are expending greater effort in face emotion evaluation, while being less able to engage affect regulation regions