Dissociating visuo-spatial and verbal working memory: It’s all in the features

Echoing many of the themes of the seminal work of Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968), this paper uses the Feature Model (Nairne, 1988, 1990; Neath & Nairne, 1995) to account for performance in working memory tasks. The Brooks verbal and visuo-spatial matrix tasks were performed alone, with articulatory suppression, or with a spatial suppression task; the results produced the expected dissociation. We used Approximate Bayesian Computation techniques to fit the Feature Model to the data and showed that the similarity-based interference process implemented in the model accounted for the data patterns well. We then fit the model to data from Guérard and Tremblay (2008); the latter study produced a double dissociation while calling upon more typical order reconstruction tasks. Again, the model performed well. The findings show that a double dissociation can be modelled without appealing to separate systems for verbal and visuo-spatial processing. The latter findings are significant as the Feature Model had not been used to model this type of dissociation before; importantly, this is also the first time the model is quantitatively fit to data. For the demonstration provided here, modularity was unnecessary if two assumptions were made: (1) the main difference between spatial and verbal working memory tasks is the features that are encoded; (2) secondary tasks selectively interfere with primary tasks to the extent that both tasks involve similar features. It is argued that a feature-based view is more parsimonious (see Morey, 2018) and offers flexibility in accounting for multiple benchmark effects in the field

Assessing the Influence of Letter Position in Reading Normal and Transposed Texts Using a Letter Detection Task

During word recognition, some letters appear to play a more important role than others. Although some studies have suggested that the first and last letters of a word have a privileged status, there is no consensus with regards to the importance of the different letter positions when reading connected text. In the current experiments, we used a simple letter search task to examine the impact of letter position on word identification in connected text using a classic paper and pencil procedure (Experiment 1) and an eye movement monitoring procedure (Experiment 2). In Experiments 3 and 4, a condition with transposed letters was included. Our results show that the first letter of a word is detected more easily than the other letters, and transposing letters in a word revealed the importance of the final letter. It is concluded that both the initial and final letters play a special role in word identification during reading but that the underlying processes might differ

High-cycle electromechanical aging of dielectric elastomer actuators with carbon-based electrodes

We present high-cycle aging tests of dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) based on silicone elastomers, reporting on the time-evolution of actuation strain and of electrode resistance over millions of cycles. We compare several types of carbon-based electrodes, and for the first time show how the choice of electrode has a dramatic influence on DEA aging. An expanding circle DEA configuration is used, consisting of a commercial silicone membrane with the following electrodes: commercial carbon grease applied manually, solvent-diluted carbon grease applied by stamping (pad printing), loose carbon black powder applied manually, carbon black powder suspension applied by inkjet-printing, and conductive silicone-carbon composite applied by stamping. The silicone-based DEAs with manually applied carbon grease electrodes show the shortest lifetime of less than 105 cycles at 5% strain, while the inkjet-printed carbon powder and the stamped silicone-carbon composite make for the most reliable devices, with lifetimes greater than 107 cycles at 5% strain. These results are valid for the specific dielectric and electrode configurations that were tested: using other dielectrics or electrode formulations would lead to different lifetimes and failure modes. We find that aging (as seen in the change in resistance and in actuation strain versus cycle number) is independent of the actuation frequency from 10 Hz to 200 Hz, and depends on the total accumulated time the DEA spends in an actuated state

Rapid determination of HLA B*07 ligands from the West Nile virus NY99 genome.

Defined T cell epitopes for West Nile (WN) virus may be useful for developing subunit vaccines against WN virus infection and diagnostic reagents to detect WN virus-specific immune response. We applied a bioinformatics (EpiMatrix) approach to search the WN virus NY99 genome for HLA B*07 restricted cytotoxic T cell (CTL) epitopes. Ninety-five of 3,433 WN virus peptides scored above a predetermined cutoff, suggesting that these would be likely to bind to HLA B*07 and would also be likely candidate CTL epitopes. Compared with other methods for genome mapping, derivation of these ligands was rapid and inexpensive. Major histocompatibility complex ligands identified by this method may be used to screen T cells from WN virus-exposed persons for cell-mediated response to WN virus or to develop diagnostic reagents for immunopathogenesis studies and epidemiologic surveillance

Order recall in verbal short-term memory: The role of semantic networks

In their recent article, Acheson, MacDonald, and Postle (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 37:44-59, 2011) made an important but controversial suggestion: They hypothesized that (a) semantic information has an effect on order information in short-term memory (STM) and (b) order recall in STM is based on the level of activation of items within the relevant lexico-semantic long-term memory (LTM) network. However, verbal STM research has typically led to the conclusion that factors such as semantic category have a large effect on the number of correctly recalled items, but little or no impact on order recall (Poirier & Saint-Aubin, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 48A:384-404, 1995; Saint-Aubin, Ouellette, & Poirier, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 12:171-177, 2005; Tse, Memory 17:874-891, 2009). Moreover, most formal models of short-term order memory currently suggest a separate mechanism for order coding-that is, one that is separate from item representation and not associated with LTM lexico-semantic networks. Both of the experiments reported here tested the predictions that we derived from Acheson et al. The findings show that, as predicted, manipulations aiming to affect the activation of item representations significantly impacted order memory

Statistical properties of the low-temperature conductance peak-heights for Corbino discs in the quantum Hall regime

A recent theory has provided a possible explanation for the ``non-universal scaling'' of the low-temperature conductance (and conductivity) peak-heights of two-dimensional electron systems in the integer and fractional quantum Hall regimes. This explanation is based on the hypothesis that samples which show this behavior contain density inhomogeneities. Theory then relates the non-universal conductance peak-heights to the ``number of alternating percolation clusters'' of a continuum percolation model defined on the spatially-varying local carrier density. We discuss the statistical properties of the number of alternating percolation clusters for Corbino disc samples characterized by random density fluctuations which have a correlation length small compared to the sample size. This allows a determination of the statistical properties of the low-temperature conductance peak-heights of such samples. We focus on a range of filling fraction at the center of the plateau transition for which the percolation model may be considered to be critical. We appeal to conformal invariance of critical percolation and argue that the properties of interest are directly related to the corresponding quantities calculated numerically for bond-percolation on a cylinder. Our results allow a lower bound to be placed on the non-universal conductance peak-heights, and we compare these results with recent experimental measurements.Comment: 7 pages, 4 postscript figures included. Revtex with epsf.tex and multicol.sty. The revised version contains some additional discussion of the theory and slightly improved numerical result

Deformed strings in the Heisenberg model

We investigate solutions to the Bethe equations for the isotropic S = 1/2 Heisenberg chain involving complex, string-like rapidity configurations of arbitrary length. Going beyond the traditional string hypothesis of undeformed strings, we describe a general procedure to construct eigenstates including strings with generic deformations, discuss general features of these solutions, and provide a number of explicit examples including complete solutions for all wavefunctions of short chains. We finally investigate some singular cases and show from simple symmetry arguments that their contribution to zero-temperature correlation functions vanishes.Comment: 34 pages, 13 figure