Overlapping Prediction Errors in Dorsal Striatum During Instrumental Learning With Juice and Money Reward in the Human Brain

Prediction error signals have been reported in human imaging studies in target areas of dopamine neurons such as ventral and dorsal striatum during learning with many different types of reinforcers. However, a key question that has yet to be addressed is whether prediction error signals recruit distinct or overlapping regions of striatum and elsewhere during learning with different types of reward. To address this, we scanned 17 healthy subjects with functional magnetic resonance imaging while they chose actions to obtain either a pleasant juice reward (1 ml apple juice), or a monetary gain (5 cents) and applied a computational reinforcement learning model to subjects' behavioral and imaging data. Evidence for an overlapping prediction error signal during learning with juice and money rewards was found in a region of dorsal striatum (caudate nucleus), while prediction error signals in a subregion of ventral striatum were significantly stronger during learning with money but not juice reward. These results provide evidence for partially overlapping reward prediction signals for different types of appetitive reinforcers within the striatum, a finding with important implications for understanding the nature of associative encoding in the striatum as a function of reinforcer type

Graduate Student Interviews -- Vivian Delchamps and Disability and Medical Diagnosis in 19C American Lit

The editorial staff hopes you had a relaxing Thanksgiving. Today we start our Graduate Student Interview series back up with Vivian Delchamps, a Ph.D. Candidate in English at the University of California, Los Angeles. Delchamps studies and teaches 19th-century American literature and is interested in disability studies, bioethics, dance, and the medical/health humanities. Her dissertation, The Names of Sickness\u27: Disability and Medical Diagnosis in Nineteenth-Century American Literature,” draws upon key theories from disability studies and the health humanities to transport diagnosis out of a medical framework and assert its importance for literary scholarship. Her research has been partially supported by a 2020-2021 UCLA Graduate Division Dissertation Year Fellowship, a 2019-2020 English Department Dissertation Year Fellowship, a 2018 Emily Dickinson International Society Graduate Student Fellowship, a 2017 Andrew W. Mellon EPIC Fellowship in Teaching Excellence, and a 2017 UCLA Graduate Summer Research Mentorship. Delchamps is also the Disability Studies Advisor for the Disability Law Journal at UCLA and a member of the C19 Ad Hoc Committee on Disability and Accessibility. You can follow Vivian on Twitter (@VivianPhDancer

High precision GPS guidance of mobile robots

The use of GPS for guidance of mobile robots has been reported as achieved in a number of useful proximate scenarios such as stevadoring, formation movement or search and agricultural positioning. Standard DGPS can be used to get an accuracy of under one metre sometimes leaving fine motor adjustments by humans to complete a task. Pay a lot more, and the precision improves but the cost is high in any commercial terms for the mass market. We report high precision GPS-guided movement based on the use of readily available low-cost receivers. Accuracies of better than 5 cms maintained over minutes have been demonstrated and are being improved upon. The guidance algorithms were adjusted to allow for the retention of orientation when approaching close to a destination. The introduction of the Galileo system will improve the efficacy and usefulness of this method as we move from 24 to 30 satellites

A Comparative Analysis of the Determinants of State Reproductive Healthcare Policies

This paper is a state comparative analysis of the determinants of a state\u27s policies towards reproductive healthcare. While much of the literature focuses solely on abortion, our analysis employs a more comprehensive measure of access to reproductive healthcare. Three explanations -- religious, socioeconomic, and political -- are tested to see which has the most significant impact on a state\u27s likeliness to enact restrictive policies towards reproductive healthcare. We find that the political model is the best predictor of the level of state restrictiveness, and that the percent of women in the legislature is the most powerful variable. Combining the most significant variables from the three previous models into a single model, we find that the percent of women in the legislature, per capita income, and Democratic party control of the state House are the most influential predictors of variation in state restrictiveness towards abortion and reproductive healthcare policies. Lastly, we suggest several avenues for future research

Copper matting blast furnace run

The theory of the copper blast furnace run having been given us in the class room, we wishing to familiarize ourselves with the practical processes and the difficulties involved, selected it as the basis of an investigation of which the following is a correct report. The original ore was a high grade copper sulphide from the Ducktown, Tenn. district to which was added some heavy pyritic ore from various quarters. The latter was added to furnish the iron oxide necessary as a flux in the blast furnace and sulphur in sufficient amount to make the ore self roasting when charged into a previously heated stall --page 1