Maternal mind-mindedness and children’s school readiness: A longitudinal study of developmental processes

This study aimed to test a five-wave sequential mediation model linking maternal mind-mindedness during infancy to children’s school readiness in kindergarten through a serial mediation involving child language and effortful control in toddlerhood and the preschool years. Among a sample of 204 mother-child dyads, we assessed maternal mind-mindedness when children were aged 1 year, child expressive vocabulary at age 2, effortful control at ages 3 and 4, and finally cognitive school readiness in kindergarten. The results corroborated the model, suggesting that the prospective association between early mind-mindedness and later cognitive school readiness was entirely mediated by the proposed sequence of mediators, all of which were necessary to account for this longitudinal association. These findings suggest that the potential of parental mind-mindedness to support children’s cognitive development may have been under-estimated, and that its putative positive influence may take the form of a developmental cascade unfolding during the preschool years and entailing the acquisition of basic skills that serve as building blocks for further learning and development

The Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform—An open science framework for the neuroscience community

ABSTRACT: The Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform (CONP) takes a multifaceted approach to enabling open neuroscience, aiming to make research, data, and tools accessible to everyone, with the ultimate objective of accelerating discovery. Its core infrastructure is the CONP Portal, a repository with a decentralized design, where datasets and analysis tools across disparate platforms can be browsed, searched, accessed, and shared in accordance with FAIR principles. Another key piece of CONP infrastructure is NeuroLibre, a preprint server capable of creating and hosting executable and fully reproducible scientific publications that embed text, figures, and code. As part of its holistic approach, the CONP has also constructed frameworks and guidance for ethics and data governance, provided support and developed resources to help train the next generation of neuroscientists, and has fostered and grown an engaged community through outreach and communications. In this manuscript, we provide a high-level overview of this multipronged platform and its vision of lowering the barriers to the practice of open neuroscience and yielding the associated benefits for both individual researchers and the wider community

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Action semantic deficits are associated with impaired motor skills in autistic adults without intellectual impairment

Several studies indicate the functional importance of the motor cortex for higher cognition, language 24 and semantic processing, and place the neural substrate of these processes in sensorimotor action25 perception circuits linking motor, sensory and perisylvian language regions. Interestingly, in 26 individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), semantic processing of action and emotion words 27 seems to be impaired and is associated with hypoactivity of the motor cortex during semantic 28 processing. In this study, the relationship between semantic processing, fine motor skills and clinical 29 symptoms was investigated in 19 individuals with ASD and 22 typically-developing matched 30 controls. Participants completed two semantic decision tasks involving words from different semantic 31 categories, a test of alexithymia (the Toronto Alexithymia Scale), and a test of fine motor skills (the 32 Purdue Pegboard Test). A significant Group x Word Category interaction in accuracy (p < .05) 33 demonstrated impaired semantic processing for action words, but not object words in the autistic 34 group. There was no significant group difference when processing abstract emotional words or 35 abstract neutral words. Moreover, our study revealed deficits in fine motor skills as well as evidence 36 for alexithymia in the ASD group, but not in neurotypical controls. However, these motor deficits 37 did not correlate significantly with impairments in action-semantic processing. We interpret the 38 data in terms of an underlying dysfunction of the action-perception system in ASD and its specific 39 impact on semantic language processing

Les dimensions de l'inegalite salariale chez les Autochtones

En plus de confirmer l'existence d'un ecart salarial entre l'ensemble des travailleurs canadiens et ceux d'origine autochtone, notre recherche nous a conduit a des resultats inedits: les salaires sont plus inegalement distribues chez les Autochtones que chez l'ensemble des travailleurs canadiens et ce, meme apres avoir tenu compte des differences demographiques. La ne s'arrete pas notre analyse. En effet, cette analyse peut masquer des differences salariales considerables entre les groupes autochtones puisque nous avons observe des ecarts salariaux appreciables entre ces groupes. Etant donne cela, il est probable que la dispersion salariale soit plus importante chez certains groupes autochtones. Comme cela n'a jamais ete etudie auparavant, le but de cette etude est de documenter les differences dans la dispersion salariale pour les quatre principaux groupes autochtones. En effet, nos resultats montrent que les Indiens d'Amerique du Nord vivant dans une reserve sont le groupe autochtone le plus en difficulte car leurs gains salaires sont nettement inferieurs a ceux des autres groupes.Aboriginal peoples, Equity and inclusion, Labour, Occupations, Society and community, Wages, salaries and other earnings, Work, income and spending