The response of perennial and temporary headwater stream invertebrate communities to hydrological extremes

The headwaters of karst rivers experience considerable hydrological variability, including spates and streambed drying. Extreme summer flooding on the River Lathkill (Derbyshire, UK) provided the opportunity to examine the invertebrate community response to unseasonal spate flows, flow recession and, at temporary sites, streambed drying. Invertebrates were sampled at sites with differing flow permanence regimes during and after the spates. Following streambed drying at temporary sites, dewatered surface sediments were investigated as a refugium for aquatic invertebrates. Experimental rehydration of these dewatered sediments was conducted to promote development of desiccation-tolerant life stages. At perennial sites, spate flows reduced invertebrate abundance and diversity, whilst at temporary sites, flow reactivation facilitated rapid colonisation of the surface channel by a limited number of invertebrate taxa. Following streambed drying, 38 taxa were recorded from the dewatered and rehydrated sediments, with Oligochaeta being the most abundant taxon and Chironomidae (Diptera) the most diverse. Experimental rehydration of dewatered sediments revealed the presence of additional taxa, including Stenophylax sp. (Trichoptera: Limnephilidae) and Nemoura sp. (Plecoptera: Nemouridae). The influence of flow permanence on invertebrate community composition was apparent despite the aseasonal high-magnitude flood events

The Search for Invariance: Repeated Positive Testing Serves the Goals of Causal Learning

Positive testing is characteristic of exploratory behavior, yet it seems to be at odds with the aim of information seeking. After all, repeated demonstrations of one’s current hypothesis often produce the same evidence and fail to distinguish it from potential alternatives. Research on the development of scientific reasoning and adult rule learning have both documented and attempted to explain this behavior. The current chapter reviews this prior work and introduces a novel theoretical account—the Search for Invariance (SI) hypothesis—which suggests that producing multiple positive examples serves the goals of causal learning. This hypothesis draws on the interventionist framework of causal reasoning, which suggests that causal learners are concerned with the invariance of candidate hypotheses. In a probabilistic and interdependent causal world, our primary goal is to determine whether, and in what contexts, our causal hypotheses provide accurate foundations for inference and intervention—not to disconfirm their alternatives. By recognizing the central role of invariance in causal learning, the phenomenon of positive testing may be reinterpreted as a rational information-seeking strategy

Effect of soft-copy display supported by CAD on mammography screening performance.

Contains fulltext : 50237.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)Diagnostic performance and reading speed for conventional mammography film reading is compared to reading digitized mammograms on a dedicated workstation. A series of mammograms judged negative at screening and corresponding priors were collected. Half were diagnosed as cancer at the next screening, or earlier for interval cancers. The others were normal. Original films were read by fifteen experienced screening radiologists. The readers annotated potential abnormalities and estimated their likelihood of malignancy. More than 1 year later, five radiologists reread a subset of 271 cases (88 cancer cases having visible signs in retrospect and 183 normals) on a mammography workstation after film digitization. Markers from a computer-aided detection (CAD) system for microcalcifications were available to the readers. Performance was evaluated by comparison of A(z)-scores based on ROC and multiple-Reader multiple-case (MRMC) analysis, and localized receiver operating characteristic (LROC) analysis for the 271 cases. Reading speed was also determined. No significant difference in diagnostic performance was observed between conventional and soft-copy reading. Average A(z)-scores were 0.83 and 0.84 respectively. Soft-copy reading was only slightly slower than conventional reading. Using a mammography workstation including CAD for detection of microcalcifications, soft-copy reading is possible without loss of quality or efficiency

Contrast class cues and performance facilitation in a hypothesis-testing task: Evidence for an iterative counterfactual model

Hypothesis-testing performance on Wason's (Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 12:129-140, 1960) 2-4-6 task is typically poor, with only around 20% of participants announcing the to-be-discovered "ascending numbers" rule on their first attempt. Enhanced solution rates can, however, readily be observed with dual-goal (DG) task variants requiring the discovery of two complementary rules, one labeled "DAX" (the standard "ascending numbers" rule) and the other labeled "MED" ("any other number triples"). Two DG experiments are reported in which we manipulated the usefulness of a presented MED exemplar, where usefulness denotes cues that can establish a helpful "contrast class" that can stand in opposition to the presented 2-4-6 DAX exemplar. The usefulness of MED exemplars had a striking facilitatory effect on DAX rule discovery, which supports the importance of contrast-class information in hypothesis testing. A third experiment ruled out the possibility that the useful MED triple seeded the correct rule from the outset and obviated any need for hypothesis testing. We propose that an extension of Oaksford and Chater's (European Journal of Cognitive Psychology 6:149-169, 1994) iterative counterfactual model can neatly capture the mechanisms by which DG facilitation arises

Mosaic Turner syndrome shows reduced penetrance in an adult population study.

Many women with X chromosome aneuploidy undergo lifetime clinical monitoring for possible complications. However, ascertainment of cases in the clinic may mean that the penetrance has been overestimated