scholarly journals Heterogeneity of performances in several inhibitory control tasks: male rhesus macaques are more easily distracted than females

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (11) ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Loyant ◽  
Bridget M. Waller ◽  
Jérôme Micheletta ◽  
Marine Joly

Inhibitory control, the ability to override a dominant response, is crucial in many aspects of everyday life. In animal studies, striking individual variations are often largely ignored and their causes rarely considered. Hence, our aims were to systematically investigate individual variability in inhibitory control, to replicate the most common causes of individual variation (age, sex and rank) and to determine if these factors had a consistent effect on three main components of inhibitory control (inhibition of a distraction, inhibition of an action, inhibition of a cognitive set). We tested 21 rhesus macaques ( Macaca mulatta ) in a battery of validated touchscreen tasks. We first found individual variations in all inhibitory control performances. We then demonstrated that males had poorer performances to inhibit a distraction and that middle-aged individuals exhibited poorer performance in the inhibition of a cognitive set. Hence, the factors of age and sex were not consistently associated with the main components of inhibitory control, suggesting a multi-faceted structure. The rank of the subjects did not influence any inhibitory control performances. This study adopts a novel approach for animal behaviour studies and gives new insight into the individual variability of inhibitory control which is crucial to understand its evolutionary underpinnings.

Antibiotics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (8) ◽  
pp. 479
Author(s):  
Kirstin Vach ◽  
Ali Al-Ahmad ◽  
Annette Anderson ◽  
Johan Peter Woelber ◽  
Lamprini Karygianni ◽  
...  

The influence of a change in nutrition on the oral microbiota are discussed in literature, but usually only changes of population mean values are reported. This paper introduces simple methods to also analyse and report the variability of patients’ reactions considering data from the culture analysis of oral biofilm. The framework was illustrated by an experimental study exposing eleven participants to different nutrition schemes in five consecutive phases. Substantial inter-individual variations in the individual reactions were observed. A new coherence index made it possible to identify 14 instances where the direction of individual changes tended to coincide with the direction of the mean change with more than 95% probability. The heterogeneity in variability across different bacteria species was limited. This allowed us to develop recommendations for sample sizes in future studies. For studies measuring the concentration change of bacteria as a reaction to nutrition change, the use of replications and analysis of the variability is recommended. In order to detect moderate effects of a change in nutrition on the concentration of single bacterial taxa, 30 participants with three repetitions are often adequate. Insights into the relationship between nutrition and the microbial composition can be helpful for the development of dietary habits that promote the establishment of a healthy microbial flora and can therefore prevent the initiation of oral diseases such as caries and periodontitis.


2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (50) ◽  
pp. 31754-31759
Author(s):  
Sang Hyun Choi ◽  
Vikyath D. Rao ◽  
Tim Gernat ◽  
Adam R. Hamilton ◽  
Gene E. Robinson ◽  
...  

The duration of interaction events in a society is a fundamental measure of its collective nature and potentially reflects variability in individual behavior. Here we performed a high-throughput measurement of trophallaxis and face-to-face event durations experienced by a colony of honeybees over their entire lifetimes. The interaction time distribution is heavy-tailed, as previously reported for human face-to-face interactions. We developed a theory of pair interactions that takes into account individual variability and predicts the scaling behavior for both bee and extant human datasets. The individual variability of worker honeybees was nonzero but less than that of humans, possibly reflecting their greater genetic relatedness. Our work shows how individual differences can lead to universal patterns of behavior that transcend species and specific mechanisms for social interactions.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (9) ◽  
pp. 685
Author(s):  
Elena Vasechkina

The aim of this work is to simulate the dissolved oxygen deficiency in the coastal zone that sometimes occurs during the summer water stagnation. We consider the main components of the marine ecosystem that play a major role in such processes—concentrations of nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur compounds in water, dissolved and particular organic matter, oxygen, biomass of phytoplankton and macroalgae. We use the object-based modeling technique to simulate the spatio-temporal variability of the ecosystem in a 2D domain. In comparison with the traditional approach, it gives several advantages: more precise parametrizations of the biological components’ functionality; higher spatial resolution; possibility to account for the individual variability of hydrobionts; easy inclusion of an arbitrary number of species in the model. Our model included three species of phytoplankton and seven macroalgae. Individual-based modules control their functionality. Species of phytoplankton and seaweeds chosen for simulations are typical for the coastal zone of Crimea. In the simulations, we study the contribution of micro- and macroalgae to the processes of self-purification of a semi-enclosed basin in case of a sharp increase in nutrient concentration in water.


Author(s):  
O.V. Mareev ◽  
◽  
G.O. Mareev ◽  
M.E. Gutynina ◽  
D.A. Maksimova ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Duncan

Abstract Advances in sociophonetic research resulted in features once sorted into discrete bins now being measured continuously. This has implied a shift in what sociolinguists view as the abstract representation of the sociolinguistic variable. When measured discretely, variation is variation in selection: one variant is selected for production, and factors influencing language variation and change are influencing the frequency at which variants are selected. Measured continuously, variation is variation in execution: speakers have a single target for production, which they approximate with varying success. This paper suggests that both approaches can and should be considered in sociophonetic analysis. To that end, I offer the use of hidden Markov models (HMMs) as a novel approach to find speakers’ multiple targets within continuous data. Using the lot vowel among whites in Greater St. Louis as a case study, I compare 2-state and 1-state HMMs constructed at the individual speaker level. Ten of fifty-two speakers’ production is shown to involve the regular use of distinct fronted and backed variants of the vowel. This finding illustrates HMMs’ capacity to allow us to consider variation as both variant selection and execution, making them a useful tool in the analysis of sociophonetic data.


Molecules ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (15) ◽  
pp. 4393
Author(s):  
Cesar Auguste Badji ◽  
Jean Dorland ◽  
Lynda Kheloul ◽  
Dimitri Bréard ◽  
Pascal Richomme ◽  
...  

Essential oils of aromatic plants represent an alternative to classical pest control with synthetic chemicals. They are especially promising for the alternative control of stored product pest insects. Here, we tested behavioral and electrophysiological responses of the stored product pest Tribolium confusum, to the essential oil of a Brazilian indigenous plant, Varronia globosa, collected in the Caatinga ecosystem. We analyzed the essential oil by GC-MS, tested the effects of the entire oil and its major components on the behavior of individual beetles in a four-way olfactometer, and investigated responses to these stimuli in electroantennogram recordings (EAG). We could identify 25 constituents in the essential oil of V. globosa, with anethole, caryophyllene and spathulenole as main components. The oil and its main component anethole had repellent effects already at low doses, whereas caryophyllene had only a repellent effect at a high dose. In addition, the essential oil abolished the attractive effect of the T. confusum aggregation pheromone. EAG recordings revealed dose-dependent responses to the individual components and increasing responses to the blend and even more to the entire oil. Our study reveals the potential of anethole and the essential oil of V. globosa in the management of stored product pests.


Foods ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 382
Author(s):  
Laura Arru ◽  
Francesca Mussi ◽  
Luca Forti ◽  
Annamaria Buschini

The Mediterranean-style diet is rich in fruit and vegetables and has a great impact on the prevention of major chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases and cancer. In this work we investigated the ability of spinach extracts obtained by different extraction methods and of the single main components of the phytocomplex, alone or mixed, to modulate proliferation, antioxidant defense, and genotoxicity of HT29 human colorectal cells. Spinach extracts show dose-dependent activity, increasing the level of intracellular endogenous reactive oxygen species (ROS) when tested at higher doses. In the presence of oxidative stress, the activity is related to the oxidizing agent involved (H2O2 or menadione) and by the extraction method. The single components of the phytocomplex, alone or mixed, do not alter the intracellular endogenous level of ROS but again, in the presence of an oxidative insult, the modulation of antioxidant defense depends on the oxidizing agent used. The application of the phytocomplex extracts seem to be more effective than the application of the single phytocomplex components.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Sonia Setia ◽  
Verma Jyoti ◽  
Neelam Duhan

The continuous growth of the World Wide Web has led to the problem of long access delays. To reduce this delay, prefetching techniques have been used to predict the users’ browsing behavior to fetch the web pages before the user explicitly demands that web page. To make near accurate predictions for users’ search behavior is a complex task faced by researchers for many years. For this, various web mining techniques have been used. However, it is observed that either of the methods has its own set of drawbacks. In this paper, a novel approach has been proposed to make a hybrid prediction model that integrates usage mining and content mining techniques to tackle the individual challenges of both these approaches. The proposed method uses N-gram parsing along with the click count of the queries to capture more contextual information as an effort to improve the prediction of web pages. Evaluation of the proposed hybrid approach has been done by using AOL search logs, which shows a 26% increase in precision of prediction and a 10% increase in hit ratio on average as compared to other mining techniques.


Blood ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 128 (8) ◽  
pp. 1043-1049 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald Chang ◽  
Jessica C. Cardenas ◽  
Charles E. Wade ◽  
John B. Holcomb

Abstract Ten percent of deaths worldwide are due to trauma, and it is the third most common cause of death in the United States. Despite a profound upregulation in procoagulant mechanisms, one-quarter of trauma patients present with laboratory-based evidence of trauma-induced coagulopathy (TIC), which is associated with poorer outcomes including increased mortality. The most common causes of death after trauma are hemorrhage and traumatic brain injury (TBI). The management of TIC has significant implications in both because many hemorrhagic deaths could be preventable, and TIC is associated with progression of intracranial injury after TBI. This review covers the most recent evidence and advances in our understanding of TIC, including the role of platelet dysfunction, endothelial activation, and fibrinolysis. Trauma induces a plethora of biochemical and physiologic changes, and despite numerous studies reporting differences in coagulation parameters between trauma patients and uninjured controls, it is unclear whether some of these differences may be “normal” after trauma. Comparisons between trauma patients with differing outcomes and use of animal studies have shed some light on this issue, but much of the data continue to be correlative with causative links lacking. In particular, there are little data linking the laboratory-based abnormalities with true clinically evident coagulopathic bleeding. For these reasons, TIC continues to be a significant diagnostic and therapeutic challenge.


2021 ◽  
Vol 92 (2) ◽  
pp. 10-20
Author(s):  
A. V Kiriakova ◽  
◽  
V.V. Moroz ◽  

Interest in creativity as a subject of research has been growing exponentially since the second half of the 20th century in all areas of human history. A wide range of both domestic and foreign studies allows authors to assert that creativity is a personality trait, inherent to one degree or another. Whereas the development of such trait becomes an urgent necessity in the new reality. The entire evolutionary process of the social development illustrates its dependence on personal and collective creativity. The aim of this research is to study the phenomenon of creativity through the perspective of axiology, i.e. the science of values. Axiology allows us to consider the realities of the modern world from the perspective of not only external factors, circumstances and situations, but also of deep value foundations. Creativity has been studied quite deeply from the point of view of psychology: the special characteristics of a creative person, stages of the creative process, the relationship between creative and critical thinking, creativity and intelligence. Some psychologists emphasize motivation, creative skills, interdisciplinary knowledge, and the creative environment as the main components that contribute to the development of creativity. The authors of the article argue that values and value orientations towards cognition, creativity, self-realization and self-expression are the drivers of creativity. In a broad sense, values as a matrix of culture determine the attitude of society to creativity, to the development of creativity of the individual and the creative class, and to how economically successful a given society will be. Since innovation and entrepreneurship are embodied creativity. Thus, the study of creativity from the perspective of axiology combines the need for a deep study of this phenomenon and the subjective significance of creativity in the context of new realities


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