Event boundaries shape temporal organization of memory by resetting temporal context

In memory, our continuous experiences are broken up into discrete events. Boundaries between events are known to influence the temporal organization of memory. However, how and through which mechanism event boundaries shape temporal order memory (TOM) remains unknown. Across four experiments, we show that event boundaries exert a dual role: improving TOM for items within an event and impairing TOM for items across events. Decreasing event length in a list enhances TOM, but only for items at earlier local event positions, an effect we term the local primacy effect. A computational model, in which items are associated to a temporal context signal that drifts over time but resets at boundaries captures all behavioural results. Our findings provide a unified algorithmic mechanism for understanding how and why event boundaries affect TOM, reconciling a long-standing paradox of why both contextual similarity and dissimilarity promote TOM

Fidelity susceptibility and long-range correlation in the Kitaev honeycomb model

We study exactly both the ground-state fidelity susceptibility and bond-bond correlation function in the Kitaev honeycomb model. Our results show that the fidelity susceptibility can be used to identify the topological phase transition from a gapped A phase with Abelian anyon excitations to a gapless B phase with non-Abelian anyon excitations. We also find that the bond-bond correlation function decays exponentially in the gapped phase, but algebraically in the gapless phase. For the former case, the correlation length is found to be $1/\xi=2\sinh^{-1}[\sqrt{2J_z -1}/(1-J_z)]$, which diverges around the critical point $J_z=(1/2)^+$.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure

Transition Dependency: A Gene-Gene Interaction Measure for Times Series Microarray Data

Gene-Gene dependency plays a very important role in system biology as it pertains to the crucial understanding of different biological mechanisms. Time-course microarray data provides a new platform useful to reveal the dynamic mechanism of gene-gene dependencies. Existing interaction measures are mostly based on association measures, such as Pearson or Spearman correlations. However, it is well known that such interaction measures can only capture linear or monotonic dependency relationships but not for nonlinear combinatorial dependency relationships. With the invocation of hidden Markov models, we propose a new measure of pairwise dependency based on transition probabilities. The new dynamic interaction measure checks whether or not the joint transition kernel of the bivariate state variables is the product of two marginal transition kernels. This new measure enables us not only to evaluate the strength, but also to infer the details of gene dependencies. It reveals nonlinear combinatorial dependency structure in two aspects: between two genes and across adjacent time points. We conduct a bootstrap-based Ç2 test for presence/absence of the dependency between every pair of genes. Simulation studies and real biological data analysis demonstrate the application of the proposed method. The software package is available under request

A novel explicit-implicit coupled solution method of SWE for long-term river meandering process induced by dam break

YesLarge amount of sediment deposits in the reservoir area can cause dam break, which not only leads to an immeasurable loss to the society, but also the sediments from the reservoir can be transported to generate further problems in the downstream catchment. This study aims to investigate the short-to-long term sediment transport and channel meandering process under such a situation. A coupled explicit-implicit technique based on the Euler-Lagrangian method (ELM) is used to solve the hydrodynamic equations, in which both the small and large time steps are used separately for the fluid and sediment marching. The main feature of the model is the use of the Characteristic-Based Split (CBS) method for the local time step iteration to correct the ELM traced lines. Based on the solved flow field, a standard Total Variation Diminishing (TVD) finite volume scheme is applied to solve the sediment transportation equation. The proposed model is first validated by a benchmark dambreak water flow experiment to validate the efficiency and accuracy of ELM modelling capability. Then an idealized engineering dambreak flow is used to investigate the long-term downstream channel meandering process with nonuniform sediment transport. The results showed that both the hydrodynamic and morphologic features have been well predicted by the proposed coupled model.This research work is supported by Sichuan Science and Technology Support Plan (2014SZ0163), Start-up Grant for the Young Teachers of Sichuan University (2014SCU11056), and Open Research Fund of the State Key Laboratory of Hydraulics and Mountain River Engineering, Sichuan University (SKLH 1409; 1512)

Potential use of electrical somatosensory modality for BCI

INTRODUCTION: P300 is commonly used in noninvasive brain computer interface (BCI). Most P300 based BCIs were focus on visual and auditory stimulation [1]. Several previous reports present the potential use of vibrotactile stimulus for P300 BCI [2,3]. As an alternative, electrical somatosensory stimuli can be used for BCI ...published_or_final_versio

Heavy-tailed statistics in short-message communication

Short-message (SM) is one of the most frequently used communication channels in the modern society. In this Brief Report, based on the SM communication records provided by some volunteers, we investigate the statistics of SM communication pattern, including the interevent time distributions between two consecutive short messages and two conversations, and the distribution of message number contained by a complete conversation. In the individual level, the current empirical data raises a strong evidence that the human activity pattern, exhibiting a heavy-tailed interevent time distribution, is driven by a non-Poisson nature.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures and 1 tabl