Learning person-specific knowledge about new people.

Much progress has been made in the last twenty years or so on understanding the cognitive processes involved in familiar person recognition (see, for instance, Burton, Bruce, and Hancock, 1999). Indeed both Burton and colleagues (Burton et al., 1999) and Bredart and colleagues (Bredart, Valentine, Calder, Gassi, 1995) have proposed implemented models of several aspects of familiar person recognition. Yet models such as these presuppose the prior process of person familiarisation. A satisfactory theory of person processing needs to address not only familiar person processing but also unfamiliar person processing, and most critically, the familiarisation process which bridges the gap between these two categories. There is much evidence to suggest, moreover, that familiar and unfamiliar people are processed by the cognitive system in different ways. Yet studies investigating the gradual transition phase by which a person changes from being unfamiliar to being highly familiar are relatively rare. Some research has been carried out on the perceptual changes which accompany familiarisation (e.g. O’Donnell & Bruce, 2001). Perceptual change, however, is only one component of familiarisation. The other critical component is forming knowledge about the individual (i.e. semantic knowledge). There has hardly been any research on semantic familiarisation to date. The aim of this thesis is to obtain evidence pertaining to the issue of semantic familiarisation which should constrain future models of person processing. I review models of familiar person recognition in chapter one of the present thesis and further identify the gap existing in the literature with respect to semantic aspects of familiarisation. I also offer arguments as to the intrinsic importance of including familiarisation in any theory of person processing. The first experimental chapter investigates, by means of both verification and cued-recall tasks, whether a script-like representation of person-specific knowledge may prove more fruitful than current mechanisms of representing such knowledge in the course of learning about new people. I conclude that an explanation in terms of general memory theory best fits the results obtained in this chapter. The second experimental chapter moves away from the learning methodology used in first chapter to employ a much more ecologically valid learning paradigm. That is, as opposed to using one simple face image and a set of semantic properties I use an initially unfamiliar soap opera with which participants gradually become familiarised. I consider the structure of person-specific knowledge for both a set of famous people and further a set of characters from the soap opera. Results here suggest that occupations are the important category for famous persons but that, for a newly learned set of individuals, relational information is more important. I again examine these questions using both recall and verification tasks in this chapter. I argue that one critical factor in determining preferential representation of a given type of information in the representation of person-specific knowledge for some person is the co-occurrence frequency of encountering that person with that class of information. The final experimental chapter (Chapter 4) attempts to investigate the processes of semantic familiarisation in an on-line manner. I use a self-priming paradigm (see Calder & Young, 1996) to probe the development of participants’ semantic representations at regular intervals across a learning period. I report both within-domain and cross-domain experiments addressing this issue. Results indicate that after a relatively short interval newly learned persons behave comparably to famous persons in several important respects. Existing theories of general memory (e.g. Logan, 1988; McClelland & Chappell, 1998) account well for the perceptual familiarisation which occurs in the reported experiments. Further development is required, however, to account for the results on semantic familiarisation. I summarise and evaluate the experiments reported in the present thesis in the final chapter and also attempt some theoretical development which should provide useful for the creation of a unified theory of person processing

Identifying and detecting facial expressions of emotion in peripheral vision

Facial expressions of emotion are signals of high biological value. Whilst recognition of facial expressions has been much studied in central vision, the ability to perceive these signals in peripheral vision has only seen limited research to date, despite the potential adaptive advantages of such perception. In the present experiment, we investigate facial expression recognition and detection performance for each of the basic emotions (plus neutral) at up to 30 degrees of eccentricity. We demonstrate, as expected, a decrease in recognition and detection performance with increasing eccentricity, with happiness and surprised being the best recognized expressions in peripheral vision. In detection however, while happiness and surprised are still well detected, fear is also a well detected expression. We show that fear is a better detected than recognized expression. Our results demonstrate that task constraints shape the perception of expression in peripheral vision and provide novel evidence that detection and recognition rely on partially separate underlying mechanisms, with the latter more dependent on the higher spatial frequency content of the face stimulus

Effect of folic acid supplementation in pregnancy on preeclampsia: The folic acid clinical trial study

Copyright © 2013 Shi Wu Wen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Preeclampsia (PE) is hypertension with proteinuria that develops during pregnancy and affects at least 5% of pregnancies. The Effect of Folic Acid Supplementation in Pregnancy on Preeclampsia: the Folic Acid Clinical Trial (FACT) aims to recruit 3,656 high risk women to evaluate a new prevention strategy for PE: supplementation of folic acid throughout pregnancy. Pregnant women with increased risk of developing PE presenting to a trial participating center between 80/7 and 166/7 weeks of gestation are randomized in a 1: 1 ratio to folic acid 4.0 mg or placebo after written consent is obtained. Intent-to-treat population will be analyzed. The FACT study was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research in 2009, and regulatory approval from Health Canada was obtained in 2010. A web-based randomization system and electronic data collection system provide the platform for participating centers to randomize their eligible participants and enter data in real time. To date we have twenty participating Canadian centers, of which eighteen are actively recruiting, and seven participating Australian centers, of which two are actively recruiting. Recruitment in Argentina, UK, Netherlands, Brazil, West Indies, and United States is expected to begin by the second or third quarter of 2013. This trial is registered with NCT01355159. © 2013 Shi Wu Wen et al.The Canadian Institutes of Healt

Community experiences of organised crime in Scotland

The research explored community experiences of serious organised crime in Scotland (SOC). The report provides information on the nature and extent of the impact of SOC on everyday life in the community, as well as offering suggestions for policy development. The study sought to answer the following questions: 1)What are the relationships that exist between SOC and communities in Scotland? 2)What are the experiences and perceptions of residents, stakeholders and organisations of the scope and nature of SOC within their local area? and 3)How does SOC impact on community wellbeing, and to what extent can the harms associated with SOC be mitigated

Spatially generalizable representations of facial expressions: Decoding across partial face samples

A network of cortical and sub-cortical regions is known to be important in the processing of facial expression. However, to date no study has investigated whether representations of facial expressions present in this network permit generalization across independent samples of face information (e.g. eye region Vs mouth region). We presented participants with partial face samples of five expression categories in a rapid event-related fMRI experiment. We reveal a network of face sensitive regions that contain information about facial expression categories regardless of which part of the face is presented. We further reveal that the neural information present in a subset of these regions: dorsal prefrontal cortex (dPFC), superior temporal sulcus (STS), lateral occipital and ventral temporal cortex, and even early visual cortex, enables reliable generalization across independent visual inputs (faces depicting the 'eyes only' versus 'eyes removed'). Furthermore, classification performance was correlated to behavioral performance in STS and dPFC. Our results demonstrate that both higher (e.g. STS, dPFC) and lower level cortical regions contain information useful for facial expression decoding that go beyond the visual information presented, and implicate a key role for contextual mechanisms such as cortical feedback in facial expression perception under challenging conditions of visual occlusion

A Single Tri-Epitopic Antibody Virtually Recapitulates the Potency of a Combination of Three Monoclonal Antibodies in Neutralization of Botulinum Neurotoxin Serotype A.

The standard of treatment for botulism, equine antitoxin, is a foreign protein with associated safety issues and a short serum half-life which excludes its use as a prophylactic antitoxin and makes it a less-than-optimal therapeutic. Due to these limitations, a recombinant monoclonal antibody (mAb) product is preferable. It has been shown that combining three mAbs that bind non-overlapping epitopes leads to highly potent botulinum neurotoxin (BoNT) neutralization. Recently, a triple human antibody combination for BoNT/A has demonstrated potent toxin neutralization in mouse models with no serious adverse events when tested in a Phase I clinical trial. However, a triple antibody therapeutic poses unique development and manufacturing challenges. Thus, potentially to streamline development of BoNT antitoxins, we sought to achieve the potency of multiple mAb combinations in a single IgG-based molecule that has a long serum half-life. The design, production, and testing of a single tri-epitopic IgG1-based mAb (TeAb) containing the binding sites of each of the three parental BoNT/A mAbs yielded an antibody of nearly equal potency to the combination. The approach taken here could be applied to the design and creation of other multivalent antibodies that could be used for a variety of applications, including toxin elimination

Decoding familiar visual object categories in the mu rhythm oscillatory response

Whilst previous research has linked attenuation of the mu rhythm to the observation of specific visual categories, and even to a potential role in action observation via a putative mirror neuron system, much of this work has not considered what specific type of information might be coded in this oscillatory response when triggered via vision. Here, we sought to determine whether the mu rhythm contains content-specific information about the identity of familiar (and also unfamiliar) graspable objects. In the present study, right-handed participants (N=27) viewed images of both familiar (apple, wine glass) and unfamiliar (cubie, smoothie) graspable objects, whilst performing an orthogonal task at fixation. Multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) revealed significant decoding of familiar, but not unfamiliar, visual object categories in the mu rhythm response. Thus, simply viewing familiar graspable objects may automatically trigger activation of associated tactile and/or motor properties in sensorimotor areas, reflected in the mu rhythm. In addition, we report significant attenuation in the central beta band for both familiar and unfamiliar visual objects, but not in the mu rhythm. Our findings highlight how analysing two different aspects of the oscillatory response – either attenuation or the representation of information content – provide complementary views on the role of the mu rhythm in response to viewing graspable object categories