Effects of grammatical gender and category repetition in true and false recognition memory

Five experiments were conducted to investigate the interference between grammatical gender and false memory in German. In Experiment 1 (N=42), the feminine grammatical gender category served as the grammatical gender of the targets and lures, while the masculine occurred only in the lure words. The occurrence of feminine gender in both the targets and lures resulted in lower proportions of correct rejections than when targets were feminine and lures were masculine. This indicates that grammatical gender was processed as a cue to reject the lures with two-gender condition in the recognition tasks. In Experiment 2 (N=90), a three-gender manipulation was introduced, in which two of the three grammatical genders in German served as the grammatical gender of the targets and lures, while the other one was used only as lures. Neither the combination of feminine and neuter, nor of feminine and masculine, resulted in higher proportions of correct rejections on the gender-unrelated lures in comparison with gender-related lures. By contrast, the combination of masculine and neuter caused more correct rejections on the feminine lures than both against the masculine and against the neuter lures. It is claimed that the similarity of grammatical gender between masculine and neuter did not facilitate identifying the masculine and the neuter items. This might be because of the likelihood that the masculine and the neuter words use the same indefinite articles (i.e. ein) or definite articles in, for example, dative (i.e. dem). Thus, Experiment 3 and 4 extended the design of Experiment 2 with determiners. In Experiment 3 (N=45), nouns were displayed with definite articles; by contrast, in Experiment 4 (N=45), pseudo articles, which had the same gender-marked endings as the indefinite articles used by different genders, were presented with nouns. It showed that the advantages of gender unrelated lures found in Experiment 2 disappeared in Experiment 3, but were found again in Experiment 4. The definite articles used in Experiment 3 resulted in a more difficult task; therefore, the grammatical gender effect was inhibited. However, the pseudo articles facilitated distinguishing the feminine noun phrases from both the masculine and neuter noun phrases. Grammatical genders were considered to be used as a memory cue, connected with appropriate articles that can be activated during recognition tasks. Using bare nouns and nouns with pseudo-article noun phrases, false memory caused by gender cues occurred in two conditions: (1) the targets and lures are of the same grammatical gender; (2) the masculine and the neuter words are used as the materials, when one of those acted as targets and the other as lures. In addition, Eye-tracking was used in Experiment 5 (N=30) and showed that feminine targets caused fewer hits than either masculine or neuter words in the recognition task in a forced choice paradigm. Longer fixation times were found for both feminine targets and lures, than for either masculine or neuter items. By contrast, hits of masculine targets were as frequent as those for neuter targets. Because of this it is assumed that feminine grammatical gender is more easily processed as a gender cue in the recognition task. In the cases of stimuli that included either masculine or neuter words, grammatical gender information was not as easy as a cue. Recognition tasks were influenced mainly by semantic category effect, so that lures, which were only grammatically gender related but semantically unrelated to the target, were more easily rejected. Targets were fixated for a shorter period of time and received more hits. In the case of stimuli that included feminine words, gender cue is more easily used during the recognition tasks. Lures were influenced by grammatical gender effect and therefore became difficult to be rejected. Targets were fixated on longer and were more frequently confused with lures. The proportion of hits became low for feminine targets. In other words, recent results indicated that feminine gender was more easily used as a memory cue when compared with masculine and neuter

HumanRecon: Neural Reconstruction of Dynamic Human Using Geometric Cues and Physical Priors

Recent methods for dynamic human reconstruction have attained promising reconstruction results. Most of these methods rely only on RGB color supervision without considering explicit geometric constraints. This leads to existing human reconstruction techniques being more prone to overfitting to color and causes geometrically inherent ambiguities, especially in the sparse multi-view setup. Motivated by recent advances in the field of monocular geometry prediction, we consider the geometric constraints of estimated depth and normals in the learning of neural implicit representation for dynamic human reconstruction. As a geometric regularization, this provides reliable yet explicit supervision information, and improves reconstruction quality. We also exploit several beneficial physical priors, such as adding noise into view direction and maximizing the density on the human surface. These priors ensure the color rendered along rays to be robust to view direction and reduce the inherent ambiguities of density estimated along rays. Experimental results demonstrate that depth and normal cues, predicted by human-specific monocular estimators, can provide effective supervision signals and render more accurate images. Finally, we also show that the proposed physical priors significantly reduce overfitting and improve the overall quality of novel view synthesis. Our code is available at:~\href{https://github.com/PRIS-CV/HumanRecon}{https://github.com/PRIS-CV/HumanRecon}

Proteomic and metabolomic analysis of GH deficiency-induced NAFLD in hypopituitarism: insights into oxidative stress

ObjectiveIndividuals with hypopituitarism (HPs) have an increased risk of developing non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD)/non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) due to growth hormone deficiency (GHD). We aimed to investigate the possible mechanisms underlying the relationship between GHD and NAFLD using proteomic and metabolomic insights.MethodsSerum metabolic alternations were assessed in male HPs using untargeted metabolomics. A rat model of HP was established through hypophysectomy, followed by recombinant human growth hormone (rhGH) intervention. The mechanisms underlying GHD-mediated NAFLD were elucidated through the application of label-free proteomics and phosphorylation proteomics.ResultsMetabolomic analysis revealed that biomarkers of mitochondrial dysfunction and oxidative stress, such as alanine, lactate, and creatine, were significantly elevated in HPs compared to age-matched controls. In rats, hypophysectomy led to marked hepatic steatosis, lipid peroxidation, and reduced glutathione (GSH), which were subsequently modulated by rhGH replacement. Proteomic analysis identified cytochrome P450s, mitochondrial translation elongation, and PPARA activating genes as the major distinguishing pathways in hypophysectomized rats. The processes of fatty acid transport, synthesis, oxidation, and NADP metabolism were tightly described. An enhanced regulation of peroxisome β-oxidation and ω-oxidation, together with a decreased NADPH regeneration, may exacerbate oxidative stress. Phosphoproteome data showed downregulation of JAK2-STAT5B and upregulation of mTOR signaling pathway.ConclusionsThis study identified proteo-metabolomic signatures associated with the development of NAFLD in pituitary GHD. Evidence was found of oxidative stress imbalance resulting from abnormal fatty acid oxidation and NADPH regeneration, highlighting the role of GH deficiency in the development of NAFLD

An improved system for competent cell preparation and high efficiency plasmid transformation using different Escherichia coli strains

This paper describes an efficient bacterial transformation system that was established for the preparation of competent cells, plasmid preparation, and for the storage in bacterial stocks in our laboratory. Using this method, a number of different plasmids have been amplified for further experiments. Competent cells for bacterial transformation were prepared by the calcium chloride method with an optimum concentration of 75 mM. Three different strains of Escherichia coli that were tested are DH5\u3b1, TG1 and XL1 blue, and the most efficient strain being XL1 blue. The optimal optical density (OD600) range for competent cell preparation varied for each of the strains investigated, and for XL1 blue it was 0.15-0.45; for TG1 it was 0.2-0.5; and for DH5\u3b1 it was 0.145-0.45. The storage time of competent cells and its correlation to transformation efficiency has been studied, and the result showed that competent cells can be stored at -20\ub0C for 7 days and at -70\ub0C for 15 days. Three critical alterations to previous methods have been made, which are the changing of the normal CaCl2 solution to TB solution, the changing of the medium from LB to S.O.C., and addition of DMSO or PEG8000 during transformation of competent cells with plasmids. Changing the medium from LB to S.O.C., resulted in much faster growth of transformants, and the transformation efficiency was increased. Addition of DMSO or PEG8000 raised transformation efficiencies by 100-300 fold. Our improved bacterial transformation system can raise the transformation efficiency about 103 times, making it becoming a highly efficient bacterial transformation system

An improved system for competent cell preparation and high efficiency plasmid transformation using different Escherichia coli strains

This paper describes an efficient bacterial transformation system that was established for the preparation of competent cells, plasmid preparation, and for the storage in bacterial stocks in our laboratory. Using this method, a number of different plasmids have been amplified for further experiments. Competent cells for bacterial transformation were prepared by the calcium chloride method with an optimum concentration of 75 mM. Three different strains of Escherichia coli that were tested are DH5α, TG1 and XL1 blue, and the most efficient strain being XL1 blue. The optimal optical density (OD600) range for competent cell preparation varied for each of the strains investigated, and for XL1 blue it was 0.15-0.45; for TG1 it was 0.2-0.5; and for DH5α it was 0.145-0.45. The storage time of competent cells and its correlation to transformation efficiency has been studied, and the result showed that competent cells can be stored at -20ºC for 7 days and at -70ºC for 15 days. Three critical alterations to previous methods have been made, which are the changing of the normal CaCl2 solution to TB solution, the changing of the medium from LB to S.O.C., and addition of DMSO or PEG8000 during transformation of competent cells with plasmids. Changing the medium from LB to S.O.C., resulted in much faster growth of transformants, and the transformation efficiency was increased. Addition of DMSO or PEG8000 raised transformation efficiencies by 100-300 fold. Our improved bacterial transformation system can raise the transformation efficiency about 10³ times, making it becoming a highly efficient bacterial transformation system

Integration of World Knowledge and Temporary Information about Changes in an Object's Environmental Location during Different Stages of Sentence Comprehension

Recent findings have shown that information about changes in an object's environmental location in the context of discourse is stored in working memory during sentence comprehension. However, in these studies, changes in the object's location were always consistent with world knowledge (e.g., in “The writer picked up the pen from the floor and moved it to the desk,” the floor and the desk are both common locations for a pen). How do people accomplish comprehension when the object-location information in working memory is inconsistent with world knowledge (e.g., a pen being moved from the floor to the bathtub)? In two visual world experiments, with a “look-and-listen” task, we used eye-tracking data to investigate comprehension of sentences that described location changes under different conditions of appropriateness (i.e., the object and its location were typically vs. unusually coexistent, based on world knowledge) and antecedent context (i.e., contextual information that did vs. did not temporarily normalize unusual coexistence between object and location). Results showed that listeners' retrieval of the critical location was affected by both world knowledge and working memory, and the effect of world knowledge was reduced when the antecedent context normalized unusual coexistence of object and location. More importantly, activation of world knowledge and working memory seemed to change during the comprehension process. These results are important because they demonstrate that interference between world knowledge and information in working memory, appears to be activated dynamically during sentence comprehension

The common element effect of abstract-to-abstract mapping in language processing

Since the 1990s, there has been much discussion about how concepts are learned and processed. Many researchers believe that the experienced bodily states (i.e., embodied experiences) should be an important factor that affects concepts’ learning and use, and metaphorical mappings between abstract concepts, such as TIME and POWER, and concrete concepts, such as SPATIAL ORIENTATION, STRUCTURED EXPERIENCEs, etc., suggest the abstract-concrete concepts’ connections. In most of the recent literature, we can find common elements (e.g., concrete concepts) shared by different abstract-concrete metaphorical expressions. Therefore, we assumed that mappings might also be found between two abstract concepts that share common elements, though they have no symbolic connections. In the present study, two lexical decision tasks were arranged and the priming effect between TIME and ABSTRACT ACTIONs was used as an index to test our hypothesis. Results showed a robust priming effect when a target verb and its prime belonged to the same duration type (TIME consistent condition). These findings suggest that mapping between concepts was affected by common elements. We propose a dynamic model in which mappings between concepts are influenced by common elements, including symbolic or embodied information. What kind of elements (linguistic or embodied) can be used would depend on how difficult it is for a concept to be learned or accessed