The Human Connectome Project's neuroimaging approach

Noninvasive human neuroimaging has yielded many discoveries about the brain. Numerous methodological advances have also occurred, though inertia has slowed their adoption. This paper presents an integrated approach to data acquisition, analysis and sharing that builds upon recent advances, particularly from the Human Connectome Project (HCP). The 'HCP-style' paradigm has seven core tenets: (i) collect multimodal imaging data from many subjects; (ii) acquire data at high spatial and temporal resolution; (iii) preprocess data to minimize distortions, blurring and temporal artifacts; (iv) represent data using the natural geometry of cortical and subcortical structures; (v) accurately align corresponding brain areas across subjects and studies; (vi) analyze data using neurobiologically accurate brain parcellations; and (vii) share published data via user-friendly databases. We illustrate the HCP-style paradigm using existing HCP data sets and provide guidance for future research. Widespread adoption of this paradigm should accelerate progress in understanding the brain in health and disease

Retained capacity for perceptual learning of degraded speech in primary progressive aphasia and Alzheimer's disease

This work was supported by the Alzheimer’s Society (AS-PG-16-007), the National Institute for Health Research University College London Hospitals Biomedical Research Centre, the UCL Leonard Wolfson Experimental Neurology Centre (PR/ylr/18575) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ES/K006711/1). Individual authors were supported by the Medical Research Council (PhD Studentship to CJDH and RLB; MRC Clinician Scientist Fellowship to JDR), the Wolfson Foundation (Clinical Research Fellowship to CRM), Alzheimer’s Research UK (ART-SRF2010-3 to SJC) and the Wellcome Trust (091673/Z/10/Z to JDW)

Dynamic Time Sharing: A New Approach For Congestion Management

A new approach for bandwidth allocation and congestion control is reported in this paper, which is of the Rate Controlled admission with Priority Scheduling service type. It is called Dynamic Time Sharing (DTS), because of the dynamic nature of the procedure for resource partitioning to allocate and guarantee a required bandwidth for every traffic class. This approach is based on guaranteeing specific traffic parameters (bandwidth requirements) through a policing unit, and then optimizing the bandwidth assignment within the network for specific parameters of interest (like delay or jitter, and loss). The optimization process is based on the parameters guaranteed by the policing unit. A batch admission policy is used at the edges of the network according to a specific framing strategy to follow the traffic characteristics (e.g., the traffic constraint function) of different traffic classes. On the other hand, another framing (congestion control) strategy is used within the network, which is based on different (delay/loss) requirements of the traffic classes. Proper management of bandwidth and buffer resources is provided in every (switch) node of the network, such as to guarantee the diverse performance of interest

What happened (and what didn't): prominence promotes representation of salient alternatives in discourse

In five experiments, I investigated how readers and listeners generate relevant contrasts in comprehending and remembering discourse. Past work has suggested that prominent words promote encoding of salient alternatives and that this benefits later memory, but it is unclear exactly which alternatives are considered or how consistent these benefits are across modalities and across individuals. Participants read or listened to discourses containing salient alternatives (e.g., Malaysia when the discourse also mentioned Indonesia). In Experiments 1 and 2, font emphasis in the initial presentation facilitated participants’ ability to later reject the salient alternatives but not unmentioned items (e.g., Portuguese scientists), generalizing past effects of contrastive pitch accents. In Experiment 3, font emphasis facilitated rejections of salient alternatives but not less plausible alternatives that were nevertheless mentioned in the discourse. Online reading time measures in Experiment 2 indicated that emphasized words did not improve performance on all trials and only benefited memory to the extent that participants devoted extra time to them, although no such relation was observed in Experiment 3. The relationship of online reading time to later memory is consistent with views of language processing in which some aspects of linguistic representations may be left underspecified because they are time- or resource-consuming to generate. Further, the effortful processing of an alternative impaired memory for the rest of the discourse in populations with more restricted online processing abilities: older adults (Experiment 4) and younger adults who have lower scores on complex span scores (Experiment 5)