Exploring the applicability of biological and socioeconomic tools in developing EAFM plans for data absent areas : Spinner dolphin EAFM for Kalpitiya, Sri Lanka

Acknowledgements University of Aberdeen, UK and Bay of Bengal Large Marine Ecosystems (BOBLME) project are acknowledged for partial funding of this research.Peer reviewedPostprin

Cauliflowers in Western Australia - an industry plan

The Western Australian cauliflower industry is largely centered around the south-west of the State which, with its cool winter climate and medium to heavy loam soils is well suited to year round cauliflower production and accounts for 77% of State’s output. The Shire of Manjimup alone accounts for about 60% of the State’s cauliflower production. The second most significant region is the Swan Coastal Plain which has lighter soils, and a warmer climate. The Swan Coastal Plain is also suitable for year round production. Market analysis indicates that West Australian cauliflower, whilst appearing more expensive than produce from the Eastern States or the USA and China, benefits from a quality advantage. This quality is in high demand in South East Asian markets

Is there a critical lesion site for unilateral spatial neglect? A meta-analysis using activation likelihood estimation

The critical lesion site responsible for the syndrome of unilateral spatial neglect has been debated for more than a decade. Here we performed an activation likelihood estimation (ALE) to provide for the first time an objective quantitative index of the consistency of lesion sites across anatomical group studies of spatial neglect. The analysis revealed several distinct regions in which damage has consistently been associated with spatial neglect symptoms. Lesioned clusters were located in several cortical and subcortical regions of the right hemisphere, including the middle and superior temporal gyrus, inferior parietal lobule, intraparietal sulcus, precuneus, middle occipital gyrus, caudate nucleus, and posterior insula, as well as in the white matter pathway corresponding to the posterior part of the superior longitudinal fasciculus. Further analyses suggested that separate lesion sites are associated with impairments in different behavioral tests, such as line bisection and target cancellation. Similarly, specific subcomponents of the heterogeneous neglect syndrome, such as extinction and allocentric and personal neglect, are associated with distinct lesion sites. Future progress in delineating the neuropathological correlates of spatial neglect will depend upon the development of more refined measures of perceptual and cognitive functions than those currently available in the clinical setting

Scaling of neural responses to visual and auditory motion in the human cerebellum

The human cerebellum contains approximately half of all the neurons within the cerebrum, yet most experimental work in human neuroscience over the last century has focused exclusively on the structure and functions of the forebrain. The cerebellum has an undisputed role in a range of motor functions (Thach et al., 1992), but its potential contributions to sensory and cognitive processes are widely debated (Stoodley and Schmahmann, 2009). Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to test the hypothesis that the human cerebellum is involved in the acquisition of auditory and visual sensory data. We monitored neural activity within the cerebellum while participants engaged in a task that required them to discriminate the direction of a visual or auditory motion signal in noise. We identified a distinct set of cerebellar regions that were differentially activated for visual stimuli (vermal lobule VI and right-hemispheric lobule X) and auditory stimuli (right-hemispheric lobules VIIIA and VIIIB and hemispheric lobule VI bilaterally). In addition, we identified a region in left crus I in which activity correlated significantly with increases in the perceptual demands of the task (i.e., with decreasing signal strength), for both auditory and visual stimuli. Our results support suggestions of a role for the cerebellum in the processing of auditory and visual motion and suggest that parts of cerebellar cortex are concerned with tracking movements of objects around the animal, rather than with controlling movements of the animal itself (Paulin, 1993)

Medial parietal cortex encodes perceived heading direction in humans

The ability to encode and update representations of heading direction is crucial for successful navigation. In rats, head-direction cells located within the limbic system alter their firing rate in accordance with the animal's current heading. To date, however, the neural structures that underlie an allocentric or viewpoint-independent sense of direction in humans remain unknown. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure neural adaptation to distinctive landmarks associated with one of four heading directions in a virtual environment. Our experiment consisted of two phases: a "learning phase," in which participants actively navigated the virtual maze; and a "test phase," in which participants viewed pairs of images from the maze while undergoing fMRI. We found that activity within the medial parietal cortex—specifically, Brodmann area 31—was modulated by learned heading, suggesting that this region contains neural populations involved in the encoding and retrieval of allocentric heading information in humans. These results are consistent with clinical case reports of patients with acquired lesions of medial posterior brain regions, who exhibit deficits in forming and recalling links between landmarks and directional information. Our findings also help to explain why navigation disturbances are commonly observed in patients with Alzheimer's disease, whose pathology typically includes the cortical region we have identified as being crucial for maintaining representations of heading direction

Dissociable representations of environmental size and complexity in the human hippocampus

The hippocampus is widely assumed to play a central role in representing spatial layouts in the form of "cognitive maps." It remains unclear, however, which properties of the world are explicitly encoded in the hippocampus, and how these properties might contribute to the formation of cognitive maps. Here we investigated how physical size and complexity, two key properties of any environment, affect memory-related neural activity in the human hippocampus. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging and a virtual maze-learning task to examine retrieval-related activity for three previously learned virtual mazes that differed systematically in their physical size and complexity (here defined as the number of distinct paths within the maze). Before scanning, participants learned to navigate each of the three mazes; hippocampal activity was then measured during brief presentations of static images from within each maze. Activity within the posterior hippocampus scaled with maze size but not complexity, whereas activity in the anterior hippocampus scaled with maze complexity but not size. This double dissociation demonstrates that environmental size and complexity are explicitly represented in the human hippocampus, and reveals a functional specialization for these properties along its anterior-posterior axis

Functional topography of primary emotion processing in the human cerebellum

The cerebellum has an important role in the control and coordination of movement. It is now clear, however, that the cerebellum is also involved in neural processes underlying a wide variety of perceptual and cognitive functions, including the regulation of emotional responses. Contemporary neurobiological models of emotion assert that a small set of discrete emotions are mediated through distinct cortical and subcortical areas. Given the connectional specificity of neural pathways that link the cerebellum with these areas, we hypothesized that distinct sub-regions of the cerebellum might subserve the processing of different primary emotions. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify neural activity patterns within the cerebellum in 30 healthy human volunteers as they categorized images that elicited each of the five primary emotions: happiness, anger, disgust, fear and sadness. In support of our hypothesis, all five emotions evoked spatially distinct patterns of activity in the posterior lobe of the cerebellum. We also detected overlaps between cerebellar activations for particular emotion categories, implying the existence of shared neural networks. By providing a detailed map of the functional topography of emotion processing in the cerebellum, our study provides important clues to the diverse effects of cerebellar pathology on human affective function

Reference frames in allocentric representations are invariant across static and active encoding

An influential model of spatial memory the so-called reference systems account proposes that relationships between objects are biased by salient axes ("frames of reference") provided by environmental cues, such as the geometry of a room. In this study, we sought to examine the extent to which a salient environmental feature influences the formation of spatial memories when learning occurs via a single, static viewpoint and via active navigation, where information has to be integrated across multiple viewpoints. In our study, participants learned the spatial layout of an object array that was arranged with respect to a prominent environmental feature within a virtual arena. Location memory was tested using judgments of relative direction. Experiment 1A employed a design similar to previous studies whereby learning of object-location information occurred from a single, static viewpoint. Consistent with previous studies, spatial judgments were significantly more accurate when made from an orientation that was aligned, as opposed to misaligned, with the salient environmental feature. In Experiment 1B, a fresh group of participants learned the same object-location information through active exploration, which required integration of spatial information over time from a ground-level perspective. As in Experiment 1A, object-location information was organized around the salient environmental cue. Taken together, the findings suggest that the learning condition (static vs. active) does not affect the reference system employed to encode object-location information. Spatial reference systems appear to be a ubiquitous property of spatial representations, and might serve to reduce the cognitive demands of spatial processing