Assessing emergence from a prolonged disorder of consciousness: Current opinion and practice in the UK

BACKGROUND: A patient in PDOC must demonstrate functional object use or functional communication to confirm they have emerged from this state. A range of tasks and stimuli are used and patients must achieve 100% accuracy. As consciousness occurs along a continuum, determining emergence is not straightforward. OBJECTIVE: To establish the opinions of expert clinicians on how emergence is determined in practice. METHODS: An online survey was completed by clinicians working in specialist rehabilitation settings across the UK. Questions were asked about diagnosis and confidence, informal assessment, formal assessment, and family involvement. Descriptive statistics were used to analyse responses to closed questions. Responses to open questions were analysed using thematic analysis. RESULTS: Seventy-five surveys were analysed. Approximately a third (30.4 %) used tasks other than those recommended to determine emergence. A lack of confidence in tasks to detect the return of functional communication was reported by 46.4%. The majority (78.6%) reported they worked with patients who they felt had emerged, but could not demonstrate it based on the current criteria. A range of stimuli were employed, but 30.6% of respondents were not confident they could choose stimuli appropriately. Respondents reported a range of benefits and challenges when involving family in assessment

Word frequency predicts translation asymmetry

Bilingualism studies report asymmetries in word processing across languages. Access to L2 words is slower and sensitive to semantic blocking. These observations inform influential models of bilingual processing, which propose autonomous lexicons with different processing routes. In a series of experiments, we explored an alternative hypothesis that the asymmetries are due to frequency of use. Using a within-language ‘translation’ task, involving high/low frequency (HF/LF) synonyms, we obtained parallel results to bilingual studies. Experiment 1 revealed that HF synonyms were accessed faster than LF ones. Experiment 2 showed that semantic blocking slowed retrieval only of LF synonyms, while form blocking produced powerful interference of both HF and LF words. Experiment 3 examined translation speed and sensitivity to blocking in two groups of Russian-English bilinguals who differed in frequency of use of their languages. Translation asymmetries were modulated by frequency of use. The results support an integrated lexicon model of bilingual processing

The role of iconic gestures and mouth movements in face-to-face communication

Human face-to-face communication is multimodal: it comprises speech as well as visual cues, such as articulatory and limb gestures. In the current study, we assess how iconic gestures and mouth movements influence audiovisual word recognition. We presented video clips of an actress uttering single words accompanied, or not, by more or less informative iconic gestures. For each word we also measured the informativeness of the mouth movements from a separate lipreading task. We manipulated whether gestures were congruent or incongruent with the speech, and whether the words were audible or noise vocoded. The task was to decide whether the speech from the video matched a previously seen picture. We found that congruent iconic gestures aided word recognition, especially in the noise-vocoded condition, and the effect was larger (in terms of reaction times) for more informative gestures. Moreover, more informative mouth movements facilitated performance in challenging listening conditions when the speech was accompanied by gestures (either congruent or incongruent) suggesting an enhancement when both cues are present relative to just one. We also observed (a trend) that more informative mouth movements speeded up word recognition across clarity conditions, but only when the gestures were absent. We conclude that listeners use and dynamically weight the informativeness of gestures and mouth movements available during face-to-face communication

A new approach to analysing HST spatial scans: the transmission spectrum of HD 209458 b

The Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) on Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is currently one of the most widely used instruments for observing exoplanetary atmospheres, especially with the use of the spatial scanning technique. An increasing number of exoplanets have been studied using this technique as it enables the observation of bright targets without saturating the sensitive detectors. In this work we present a new pipeline for analyzing the data obtained with the spatial scanning technique, starting from the raw data provided by the instrument. In addition to commonly used correction techniques, we take into account the geometric distortions of the instrument, whose impact may become important when combined to the scanning process. Our approach can improve the photometric precision for existing data and also push further the limits of the spatial scanning technique, as it allows the analysis of even longer spatial scans. As an application of our method and pipeline, we present the results from a reanalysis of the spatially scanned transit spectrum of HD 209458 b. We calculate the transit depth per wavelength channel with an average relative uncertainty of 40 ppm. We interpret the final spectrum with T-Rex, our fully Bayesian spectral retrieval code, which confirms the presence of water vapor and clouds in the atmosphere of HD 209458 b. The narrow wavelength range limits our ability to disentangle the degeneracies between the fitted atmospheric parameters. Additional data over a broader spectral range are needed to address this issue.Comment: 13 pages, 15 figures, 7 tables, Accepted for publication in Ap

Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric Model Higgs Scenarios for Partially Universal GUT Scale Boundary Conditions

We examine the extent to which it is possible to realize the NMSSM "ideal Higgs" models espoused in several papers by Gunion et al in the context of partially universal GUT scale boundary conditions. To this end we use the powerful methodology of nested sampling. We pay particular attention to whether ideal-Higgs-like points not only pass LEP constraints but are also acceptable in terms of the numerous constraints now available, including those from the Tevatron and $B$-factory data, $(g-2)_\mu$ and the relic density $\Omega h^2$. In general for this particular methodology and range of parameters chosen, very few points corresponding to said previous studies were found, and those that were found were at best $2\sigma$ away from the preferred relic density value. Instead, there exist a class of points, which combine a mostly singlet-like Higgs with a mostly singlino-like neutralino coannihilating with the lightest stau, that are able to effectively pass all implemented constraints in the region $80<m_h<100$. It seems that the spin-independent direct detection cross section acts as a key discriminator between ideal Higgs points and the hard to detect singlino-like points.Comment: 22 pages, 15 figure

An evaluation of immunoreactivity for c-erbB-2 protein as a marker of poor short-term prognosis in breast cancer.

Eighty-five breast carcinomas from the same number of patients have been assessed immunohistochemically using the antiserum 21N for the presence of the c-erbB-2 protein. Twenty-two of the patients had evidence of advanced disease (tumour fixation or distant metastases) at presentation. Follow-up was for a median of 24 months. c-erbB-2 protein was detected in the majority of cells in 14 (16.5%) carcinomas, and to a lesser extent in a further six (7%) tumours. There was no relationship between staining and stage, node status or size but more poorly differentiated carcinomas had evidence of staining (36%) than well (17%) or moderately (14%) differentiated carcinomas (P = 0.02). There was a significant association between staining and mortality (P = 0.009) and recurrence (P = 0.0002). The relative risk of death for staining compared to no staining (after adjusting for node status, stage and grade) was 2.97 (95% confidence interval 1.29, 6.84) and the relative risk of recurrence for staining compared to no staining after similar adjustment was 3.85 (95% confidence interval 1.86-7.97). In this particular group of patients immunoreactivity for c-erbB-2 protein is an independent indicator of poor short-term prognosis

Agrammatic but numerate

A central question in cognitive neuroscience concerns the extent to which language enables other higher cognitive functions. In the case of mathematics, the resources of the language faculty, both lexical and syntactic, have been claimed to be important for exact calculation, and some functional brain imaging studies have shown that calculation is associated with activation of a network of left-hemisphere language regions, such as the angular gyrus and the banks of the intraparietal sulcus. We investigate the integrity of mathematical calculations in three men with large left-hemisphere perisylvian lesions. Despite severe grammatical impairment and some difficulty in processing phonological and orthographic number words, all basic computational procedures were intact across patients. All three patients solved mathematical problems involving recursiveness and structure-dependent operations (for example, in generating solutions to bracket equations). To our knowledge, these results demonstrate for the first time the remarkable independence of mathematical calculations from language grammar in the mature cognitive system

Detection of an atmosphere around the super-Earth 55 Cancri e

We report the analysis of two new spectroscopic observations of the super-Earth 55 Cancri e, in the near infrared, obtained with the WFC3 camera onboard the HST. 55 Cancri e orbits so close to its parent star, that temperatures much higher than 2000 K are expected on its surface. Given the brightness of 55 Cancri, the observations were obtained in scanning mode, adopting a very long scanning length and a very high scanning speed. We use our specialized pipeline to take into account systematics introduced by these observational parameters when coupled with the geometrical distortions of the instrument. We measure the transit depth per wavelength channel with an average relative uncertainty of 22 ppm per visit and find modulations that depart from a straight line model with a 6$\sigma$ confidence level. These results suggest that 55 Cancri e is surrounded by an atmosphere, which is probably hydrogen-rich. Our fully Bayesian spectral retrieval code, T-REx, has identified HCN to be the most likely molecular candidate able to explain the features at 1.42 and 1.54 $\mu$m. While additional spectroscopic observations in a broader wavelength range in the infrared will be needed to confirm the HCN detection, we discuss here the implications of such result. Our chemical model, developed with combustion specialists, indicates that relatively high mixing ratios of HCN may be caused by a high C/O ratio. This result suggests this super-Earth is a carbon-rich environment even more exotic than previously thought.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures, 4 tables, Accepted for publication in Ap