Thinking eyes: visual thinking strategies and the social brain

The foundation of art processes in the social brain can guide the scientific study of how human beings perceive and interact with their environment. Here, we applied the theoretical frameworks of the social and artistic brain connectomes to an eye-tracking paradigm with the aim to elucidate how different viewing conditions and social cues influence gaze patterns and personal resonance with artworks and complex imagery in healthy adults. We compared two viewing conditions that encourage personal or social perspective taking-modeled on the well-known Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) method-to a viewing condition during which only contextual information about the image was provided. Our findings showed that the viewing conditions that used VTS techniques directed the gaze more toward highly salient social cues (Animate elements) in artworks and complex imagery, compared to when only contextual information was provided. We furthermore found that audio cues also directed visual attention, whereby listening to a personal reflection by another person (VTS) had a stronger effect than contextual information. However, we found no effect of viewing condition on the personal resonance with the artworks and complex images when taking the random effects of the image selection into account. Our study provides a neurobiological grounding of the VTS method in the social brain, revealing that this pedagogical method of engaging viewers with artworks measurably shapes people's visual exploration patterns. This is not only of relevance to (art) education but also has implications for art-based diagnostic and therapeutic applications

Optical Characterization and Distribution of Chromophoric Dissolved Organic Matter (CDOM) in Soil Porewater from a Salt Marsh Ecosystem

To characterize chromophoric dissolved organic matter (CDOM) in marsh porewaters and its contribution as a carbon source, optical properties (absorbance, fluorescence indices, 3-dimensional excitation-emission matrices [EEMs]) of soil porewater and surface water were measured in a southern Californian salt marsh. Absorption coefficients and fluorescence intensities were higher in porewater than in overlying surface waters, consistent with higher CDOM concentration at depth. Humic-type peaks A and C were observed in EEMs in all samples, and peak M was observed in surface waters and shallow porewater to -5 cm depth. Fluorescence:absorbance (flu:abs) ratios and spectral slopes (S) decreased across the surface interface, and emission peak maxima were red-shifted—changes that are consistent with increasing molecular weight (MW) and aromaticity in soil porewater due to humification, and lower-MW, less aromatic material in oxic surface waters from oxidative photochemical and biological processing. At lower depths, bands were observed where intensity, flu:abs ratios and S increased; absorption coefficients decreased; emission maxima for humic-type peaks were blue-shifted; and tryptophan-type protein peaks were observed. These changes are consistent with lower-MW and less aromatic material from enhanced microbial activity. Variations in iron concentrations and sulfate depletion with depth were consistent with these bands having different dominant anaerobic microbial metabolic pathways. Overall, optical property trends suggest that soil porewater is a reservoir of CDOM in the salt marsh, with organic material from terrestrial watershed inputs and in situ production from marsh vegetation stored and processed in sediments

Is there a correlation between infection control performance and other hospital quality measures?

Quality measures are increasingly reported by hospitals to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), yet there may be tradeoffs in performance between infection control (IC) and other quality measures. Hospitals that performed best on IC measures did not perform well on most CMS non–IC quality measures

Optical Characterization of Chromophoric Dissolved Organic Matter (CDOM) and Fe(II) Concentrations in Soil Porewaters Along a Channel-Bank Transect in a Salt Marsh

Chromophoric dissolved organic matter (CDOM) optical properties were measured in surface and porewaters as a function of depth and distance from the channel in a transect up the bank in a southern California salt marsh. Higher absorbance coefficients and fluorescence intensities in porewaters at depth vs. surface waters and shallower porewaters suggest soil porewater is a reservoir of CDOM in the marsh. Higher values were observed at the marsh sites compared to the channel site, suggesting increased production and storage in the marsh sites, and reduced leaching into overlying surface waters, is occurring. Spectral slope ratios decreased with depth, consistent with more aromatic, higher molecular weight material in the deeper porewaters, possibly due to different bacterial processing in the anaerobic vs. aerobic zones. Fe(II) concentrations, indicative of anaerobic bacterial processing, increased significantly at depth to values \u3e 1000 μM, consistent with active anaerobic microbial processing occurring at depth. The transitions to higher reduced iron concentrations correlated with increased absorbance and fluorescence, suggesting processing by anaerobic iron-reducing bacteria in these deeper zones may not mineralize as much carbon as in the shallower aerobic zones. Alternatively, this may be due to reduction of solid iron oxides coated with organic matter releasing both DOM and Fe(II). The ratio of humic-like fluorescence to the absorption coefficient decreased with increasing iron concentration, possibly due to optical interference by iron species. Taken together, the data indicate that marsh sites in the salt marsh act as a reservoir for higher molecular weight, more aromatic organic matter

More Than Meets the Eye: Art Engages the Social Brain

Here we present the viewpoint that art essentially engages the social brain, by demonstrating how art processing maps onto the social brain connectome-the most comprehensive diagram of the neural dynamics that regulate human social cognition to date. We start with a brief history of the rise of neuroaesthetics as the scientific study of art perception and appreciation, in relation to developments in contemporary art practice and theory during the same period. Building further on a growing awareness of the importance of social context in art production and appreciation, we then set out how art engages the social brain and outline candidate components of the "artistic brain connectome." We explain how our functional model for art as a social brain phenomenon may operate when engaging with artworks. We call for closer collaborations between the burgeoning field of neuroaesthetics and arts professionals, cultural institutions and diverse audiences in order to fully delineate and contextualize this model. Complementary to the unquestionable value of art for art's sake, we argue that its neural grounding in the social brain raises important practical implications for mental health, and the care of people living with dementia and other neurological conditions

Progressive associative phonagnosia: A neuropsychological analysis

AbstractThere are few detailed studies of impaired voice recognition, or phonagnosia. Here we describe two patients with progressive phonagnosia in the context of frontotemporal lobar degeneration. Patient QR presented with behavioural decline and increasing difficulty recognising familiar voices, while patient KL presented with progressive prosopagnosia. In a series of neuropsychological experiments we assessed the ability of QR and KL to recognise and judge the familiarity of voices, faces and proper names, to recognise vocal emotions, to perceive and discriminate voices, and to recognise environmental sounds and musical instruments. The patients were assessed in relation to a group of healthy age-matched control subjects. QR exhibited severe impairments of voice identification and familiarity judgments with relatively preserved recognition of difficulty-matched faces and environmental sounds; recognition of musical instruments was impaired, though better than recognition of voices. In contrast, patient KL exhibited severe impairments of both voice and face recognition, with relatively preserved recognition of musical instruments and environmental sounds. Both patients demonstrated preserved ability to analyse perceptual properties of voices and to recognise vocal emotions. The voice processing deficit in both patients could be characterised as associative phonagnosia: in the case of QR, this was relatively selective for voices, while in the case of KL, there was evidence for a multimodal impairment of person knowledge. The findings have implications for current cognitive models of voice recognition

Altered brain mechanisms of emotion processing in pre-manifest Huntington's disease

Huntington's disease is an inherited neurodegenerative disease that causes motor, cognitive and psychiatric impairment, including an early decline in ability to recognize emotional states in others. The pathophysiology underlying the earliest manifestations of the disease is not fully understood; the objective of our study was to clarify this. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate changes in brain mechanisms of emotion recognition in pre-manifest carriers of the abnormal Huntington's disease gene (subjects with pre-manifest Huntington's disease): 16 subjects with pre-manifest Huntington's disease and 14 control subjects underwent 1.5 tesla magnetic resonance scanning while viewing pictures of facial expressions from the Ekman and Friesen series. Disgust, anger and happiness were chosen as emotions of interest. Disgust is the emotion in which recognition deficits have most commonly been detected in Huntington's disease; anger is the emotion in which impaired recognition was detected in the largest behavioural study of emotion recognition in pre-manifest Huntington's disease to date; and happiness is a positive emotion to contrast with disgust and anger. Ekman facial expressions were also used to quantify emotion recognition accuracy outside the scanner and structural magnetic resonance imaging with voxel-based morphometry was used to assess the relationship between emotion recognition accuracy and regional grey matter volume. Emotion processing in pre-manifest Huntington's disease was associated with reduced neural activity for all three emotions in partially separable functional networks. Furthermore, the Huntington's disease-associated modulation of disgust and happiness processing was negatively correlated with genetic markers of pre-manifest disease progression in distributed, largely extrastriatal networks. The modulated disgust network included insulae, cingulate cortices, pre- and postcentral gyri, precunei, cunei, bilateral putamena, right pallidum, right thalamus, cerebellum, middle frontal, middle occipital, right superior and left inferior temporal gyri, and left superior parietal lobule. The modulated happiness network included postcentral gyri, left caudate, right cingulate cortex, right superior and inferior parietal lobules, and right superior frontal, middle temporal, middle occipital and precentral gyri. These effects were not driven merely by striatal dysfunction. We did not find equivalent associations between brain structure and emotion recognition, and the pre-manifest Huntington's disease cohort did not have a behavioural deficit in out-of-scanner emotion recognition relative to controls. In addition, we found increased neural activity in the pre-manifest subjects in response to all three emotions in frontal regions, predominantly in the middle frontal gyri. Overall, these findings suggest that pathophysiological effects of Huntington's disease may precede the development of overt clinical symptoms and detectable cerebral atroph

High-Throughput Screening of Shape Memory Alloy Thin-Film Spreads using Nanoindentation

We have demonstrated the utility of nanoindentation as a rapid characterization tool for mapping shape memoryalloy compositions in combinatorial thin-film libraries. Nanoindentation was performed on Ni–Mn–Al ternary composition spreads. The indentation hardness and the reduced elastic modulus were mapped across a large fraction of the ternary phase diagram. The large shape memoryalloy composition region, located around the Heusler composition (Ni2MnAl), was found to display significant departure in these mechanical properties from the rest of the composition spread. In particular, the modulus and the hardness values are lower for the martensite region than those of the rest of the phase diagram

Hierarchical Processing of Auditory Objects in Humans

This work examines the computational architecture used by the brain during the analysis of the spectral envelope of sounds, an important acoustic feature for defining auditory objects. Dynamic causal modelling and Bayesian model selection were used to evaluate a family of 16 network models explaining functional magnetic resonance imaging responses in the right temporal lobe during spectral envelope analysis. The models encode different hypotheses about the effective connectivity between Heschl's Gyrus (HG), containing the primary auditory cortex, planum temporale (PT), and superior temporal sulcus (STS), and the modulation of that coupling during spectral envelope analysis. In particular, we aimed to determine whether information processing during spectral envelope analysis takes place in a serial or parallel fashion. The analysis provides strong support for a serial architecture with connections from HG to PT and from PT to STS and an increase of the HG to PT connection during spectral envelope analysis. The work supports a computational model of auditory object processing, based on the abstraction of spectro-temporal “templates” in the PT before further analysis of the abstracted form in anterior temporal lobe areas

Structural neuroanatomy of tinnitus and hyperacusis in semantic dementia

Introduction Tinnitus and hyperacusis are common symptoms of excessive auditory perception in the general population; however, their anatomical substrates and disease associations continue to be defined. Patients with semantic dementia (SemD) frequently repor