Silver Chimes Lancers : Band

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-me/1727/thumbnail.jp

Natural language processing

Beginning with the basic issues of NLP, this chapter aims to chart the major research activities in this area since the last ARIST Chapter in 1996 (Haas, 1996), including: (i) natural language text processing systems - text summarization, information extraction, information retrieval, etc., including domain-specific applications; (ii) natural language interfaces; (iii) NLP in the context of www and digital libraries ; and (iv) evaluation of NLP systems

Audience effects on the neural correlates of relational reasoning in adolescence

Adolescents are particularly sensitive to peer influence. This may partly be due to an increased salience of peers during adolescence. We investigated the effect of being observed by a peer on a cognitively challenging task, relational reasoning, which requires the evaluation and integration of multiple mental representations. Relational reasoning tasks engage a fronto-parietal network including the inferior parietal cortex, pre-supplementary motor area, dorsolateral and rostrolateral prefrontal cortices. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), peer audience effects on activation in this fronto-parietal network were compared in a group of 19 female mid-adolescents (aged 14-16 years) and 14 female adults (aged 23-28 years). Adolescent and adult relational reasoning accuracy was influenced by a peer audience as a function of task difficulty: the presence of a peer audience led to decreased accuracy in the complex, relational integration condition in both groups of participants. The fMRI results demonstrated that a peer audience differentially modulated activation in regions of the fronto-parietal network in adolescents and adults. Activation was increased in adolescents in the presence of a peer audience, while this was not the case in adults

Is it all in the reward?:Peers influence risk-taking behaviour in young adulthood

The presence of peers is suggested to increase risk-taking behaviour by heightening response to reward. The current study investigated this using a computerized financial risk-taking task which was performed twice by a group of young adults (n = 201, median age 19.8 years): once alone and once while in the presence of two peers. An overall increase in risk-taking was observed when with peers compared to when alone (CHANGE). CHANGE was positively associated with self-reported levels of reward responsiveness and fun seeking while older age and lack of perseverance were associated with reduced CHANGE. The association between risk-taking when with peers and both resistance to the influence of peers and age was indirect through reward responsiveness. Reward responsiveness was positively associated with impulsiveness. Only in those who showed a peer-related decrease in risk-taking (1/3 of participants), risk-taking in the presence of peers was associated with increased impulsiveness. The current findings suggest an important role for reward responsiveness in risk-taking behaviour and demonstrate the influence of peers. Increased understanding of these processes has direct implications for prevention and intervention efforts. Placing risk-taking behaviour within varying (social) contexts with an eye for differences in personality, development, and emotions provides ample scope for future research

A cognitive process modeling framework for the ABCD study stop-signal task

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study is a longitudinal neuroimaging study of unprecedented scale that is in the process of following over 11,000 youth from middle childhood though age 20. However, a design feature of the study's stop-signal task violates "context independence", an assumption critical to current non-parametric methods for estimating stop-signal reaction time (SSRT), a key measure of inhibitory ability in the study. This has led some experts to call for the task to be changed and for previously collected data to be used with caution. We present a cognitive process modeling framework, the RDEX-ABCD model, that provides a parsimonious explanation for the impact of this design feature on “go” stimulus processing and successfully accounts for key behavioral trends in the ABCD data. Simulation studies using this model suggest that failing to account for the context independence violations in the ABCD design can lead to erroneous inferences in several realistic scenarios. However, we demonstrate that RDEX-ABCD effectively addresses these violations and can be used to accurately measure SSRT along with an array of additional mechanistic parameters of interest (e.g., attention to the stop signal, cognitive efficiency), advancing investigators’ ability to draw valid and nuanced inferences from ABCD data. Availability of data and materials: Data from the ABCD Study are available through the NIH Data Archive (NDA): nda.nih.gov/abcd. Code for all analyses featured in this study is openly available on the Open Science Framework (OSF): osf.io/2h8a7/

A cognitive process modeling framework for the ABCD study stop-signal task

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study is a longitudinal neuroimaging study of unprecedented scale that is in the process of following over 11,000 youth from middle childhood though age 20. However, a design feature of the study's stop-signal task violates ''context independence'', an assumption critical to current non-parametric methods for estimating stop-signal reaction time (SSRT), a key measure of inhibitory ability in the study. This has led some experts to call for the task to be changed and for previously collected data to be used with caution. We present a cognitive process modeling framework, the RDEX-ABCD model, that provides a parsimonious explanation for the impact of this design feature on “go” stimulus processing and successfully accounts for key behavioral trends in the ABCD data. Simulation studies using this model suggest that failing to account for the context independence violations in the ABCD design can lead to erroneous inferences in several realistic scenarios. However, we demonstrate that RDEX-ABCD effectively addresses these violations and can be used to accurately measure SSRT along with an array of additional mechanistic parameters of interest (e.g., attention to the stop signal, cognitive efficiency), advancing investigators’ ability to draw valid and nuanced inferences from ABCD data. Availability of data and materials: Data from the ABCD Study are available through the NIH Data Archive (NDA): nda.nih.gov/abcd. Code for all analyses featured in this study is openly available on the Open Science Framework (OSF): osf.io/2h8a7/