Sleep spindling and fluid intelligence across adolescent development: sex matters.

Evidence supports the intricate relationship between sleep electroencephalogram (EEG) spindling and cognitive abilities in children and adults. Although sleep EEG changes during adolescence index fundamental brain reorganization, a detailed analysis of sleep spindling and the spindle-intelligence relationship was not yet provided for adolescents. Therefore, adolescent development of sleep spindle oscillations were studied in a home polysomnographic study focusing on the effects of chronological age and developmentally acquired overall mental efficiency (fluid IQ) with sex as a potential modulating factor. Subjects were 24 healthy adolescents (12 males) with an age range of 15–22 years (mean: 18 years) and fluid IQ of 91–126 (mean: 104.12, Raven Progressive Matrices Test). Slow spindles (SSs) and fast spindles (FSs) were analyzed in 21 EEG derivations by using the individual adjustment method (IAM). A significant age-dependent increase in average FS density (r = 0.57; p = 0.005) was found. Moreover, fluid IQ correlated with FS density (r = 0.43; p = 0.04) and amplitude (r = 0.41; p = 0.049). The latter effects were entirely driven by particularly reliable FS-IQ correlations in females [r = 0.80 (p = 0.002) and r = 0.67 (p = 0.012), for density and amplitude, respectively]. Region-specific analyses revealed that these correlations peak in the fronto-central regions. The control of the age-dependence of FS measures and IQ scores did not considerably reduce the spindle-IQ correlations with respect to FS density. The only positive spindle-index of fluid IQ in males turned out to be the frequency of FSs (r = 0.60, p = 0.04). Increases in FS density during adolescence may index reshaped structural connectivity related to white matter maturation in the late developing human brain. The continued development over this age range of cognitive functions is indexed by specific measures of sleep spindling unraveling gender differences in adolescent brain maturation and perhaps cognitive strategy

Synthesis of fast speech with interpolation of adapted HSMMs and its evaluation by blind and sighted listeners

In this paper we evaluate a method for generating synthetic speech at high speaking rates based on the interpolation of hidden semi-Markov models (HSMMs) trained on speech data recorded at normal and fast speaking rates. The subjective evaluation was carried out with both blind listeners, who are used to very fast speaking rates, and sighted listeners. We show that we can achieve a better intelligibility rate and higher voice quality with this method compared to standard HSMM-based duration modeling. We also evaluate duration modeling with the interpolation of all the acoustic features including not only duration but also spectral and F0 models. An analysis of the mean squared error (MSE) of standard HSMM-based duration modeling for fast speech identifies problematic linguistic contexts for duration modeling

Voluntary Clawback Adoption and the Use of Financial Measures in CFO Bonus Plans

Firms trade-off CFOs’ fiduciary duties against their decision-making duties when designing CFO bonus plans. Decreasing bonus incentives tied to financial measures benefits CFOs’ fiduciary responsibilities at the expense of motivating their decision making duties. As prior research indicates that clawbacks increase personal misreporting costs through the loss of previously awarded compensation, we examine whether clawbacks allow firms to increase incentives in CFO bonus contracts. Based on a sample of U.S. firms between 2007 and 2013, we find that clawbacks are associated with greater CFO bonus incentives. We also find the increase in incentives to be more pronounced for CFOs relative to other executives. Our results are moderated by firms’ susceptibility to misreporting. The relation between clawbacks and incentives is weaker when firms experienced internal control deficiencies, have larger abnormal accruals, when CFOs are more vulnerable to pressure from CEOs, and when audit committees have less financial expertise and prestige

Reply: Noisy but not placebo : defining metrics for effects of neurofeedback

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