Sensorimotor feedback loops are selectively sensitive to reward

While it is well established that motivational factors such as earning more money for performing well improve motor performance, how the motor system implements this improvement remains unclear. For instance, feedback-based control, which uses sensory feedback from the body to correct for errors in movement, improves with greater reward. But feedback control encompasses many feedback loops with diverse characteristics such as the brain regions involved and their response time. Which specific loops drive these performance improvements with reward is unknown, even though their diversity makes it unlikely that they are contributing uniformly. This lack of mechanistic insight leads to practical limitations in applications using reward, such as clinical rehabilitation, athletic coaching, and brain-inspired robotics. We systematically tested the effect of reward on the latency (how long for a corrective response to arise?) and gain (how large is the corrective response?) of eight distinct sensorimotor feedback loops in humans. Only the feedback responses known to rely on prefrontal associative cortices showed sensitivity to reward, while feedback responses that relied mainly on premotor and sensorimotor cortex did not show sensitivity to reward. Our results may have implications regarding feedback control performance in pathologies showing a cognitive decline, or on athletic coaching. For instance, coaching methodologies that rely on reinforcement or "reward shaping" may need to specifically target aspects of movement that rely on reward-sensitive feedback responses.

CSAO-1. Interrogative Biology: Unraveling insights into causal disease drivers by use of a dynamic systems biology and Bayesian AI to identify the intersect of disease and healthy signatures

The past decade has been witness to an explosive proliferation of data analytics modalities, all seeking to unravel insight into large-scale data sets. Machine learning and AI methodologies now occupy a central role in analyses of data sets that range in nature from genomics, “omics”, clinical, real-world evidence, and demographic data. Despite advances in data analytics/machine learning, access to complex population level clinical and related datasets, translating information into actionable guidance in human health and disease remains a challenge. Interrogative Biology, a systems biology/AI platform generates an unbiased, data-informed network for identifying targets (disease drivers) and biomarkers for disease interception at the point of transition to dysregulation, preceding clinical phenotype. The data topology is enabled by a systematic acquisition and interrogation of longitudinal bio-samples of clinically annotated human matrices (e.g. blood, urine, saliva, tissues) subjected to comprehensive multi-omic (genomic, proteomics, lipidomics and metabolomics) profiling over time. The molecular profiles are integrated with clinical health information using Bayesian artificial intelligence analytics, bAIcis, to generate causal network maps of overall health. Differentials between “health” and “disease” network maps identifies drivers (targets and biomarkers) of disease and are rapidly validated in orthogonal wet-lab disease specific perturbed model systems. Target information imputed into the bAIcis framework can define therapeutic strategies including identification of existing drugs and bio-actives for corrective response. Using a combination of clinic based sampling and dried blood spot analysis for longitudinal dynamic monitoring of markers of health-disease status provides opportunity for proactive clinical management and intervention for corrective response in advance of major deterioration of health status. Taken together, the approach herein allows for health surveillance based on in-depth biological profiling of alterations in the patient narrative to guide treatment modalities and strategies in a longitudinal and dynamic manner to identify, track, intercept, and arrest human disease.

Citation Patterns Following a Strongly Contradictory Replication Result: Four Case Studies From Psychology

Replication studies that contradict prior findings may facilitate scientific self-correction by triggering a reappraisal of the original studies; however, the research community’s response to replication results has not been studied systematically. One approach for gauging responses to replication results is to examine how they affect citations to original studies. In this study, we explored postreplication citation patterns in the context of four prominent multilaboratory replication attempts published in the field of psychology that strongly contradicted and outweighed prior findings. Generally, we observed a small postreplication decline in the number of favorable citations and a small increase in unfavorable citations. This indicates only modest corrective effects and implies considerable perpetuation of belief in the original findings. Replication results that strongly contradict an original finding do not necessarily nullify its credibility; however, one might at least expect the replication results to be acknowledged and explicitly debated in subsequent literature. By contrast, we found substantial citation bias: The majority of articles citing the original studies neglected to cite relevant replication results. Of those articles that did cite the replication but continued to cite the original study favorably, approximately half offered an explicit defense of the original study. Our findings suggest that even replication results that strongly contradict original findings do not necessarily prompt a corrective response from the research community.

Flexible planning of corrective responses for double-step reduction in the number of potential targets

Humans are often required to plan/execute movements in the presence of multiple motor targets simultaneously. Under such situations, it is widely confirmed that humans frequently initiate movements towards the weighted average direction of distinct motor plans toward each potential target. However, in situations where the potential targets change in a step-by-step manner, the strategy to proceed towards the weighted average direction at each time could be sub-optimal in light of the costs of the corrective response. Herein, we tested the sensorimotor strategy followed during a step-by-step reduction of potential goals. To test the hypothesis, we compared the corrective responses when the number of targets went from three to two, and when the number of targets went from three to one at the same time. As the results, weak corrections were confirmed when the number of targets was reduced from three to two. Moreover, the corrective responses when the number of targets went from three to two was smaller than the average behavior estimated from the corrective responses when the number of targets went from three to one at the same time. This pattern of corrective responses reflects the suppression of unnecessary corrections that generate noise and cost to the control system. These results suggest that the corrective responses are flexibly modulated depending on the necessity, and cannot be explained by weighted average behavior.

Post-replication citation patterns in psychology: Four case studies

Replication studies that contradict prior findings may facilitate scientific self-correction by triggering a reappraisal of the original studies; however, the research community's response to replication results has not been studied systematically. One approach for gauging responses to replication results is to examine how they impact citations to original studies. In this study, we explored post-replication citation patterns in the context of four prominent multi-laboratory replication attempts published in the field of psychology that strongly contradicted and outweighed prior findings. Generally, we observed a small post-replication decline in the number of favourable citations and a small increase in unfavourable citations. This indicates only modest corrective effects and implies considerable perpetuation of belief in the original findings. Replication results that strongly contradict an original finding do not necessarily nullify its credibility; however, one might at least expect the replication results to be acknowledged and explicitly debated in subsequent literature. By contrast, we found substantial citation bias: the majority of articles citing the original studies neglected to cite relevant replication results. Of those articles that did cite the replication, but continued to cite the original study favourably, approximately half offered an explicit defence of the original study. Our findings suggest that even replication results that strongly contradict original findings do not necessarily prompt a corrective response from the research community.

How Well Does the Cleveland Fed’s Systemic Risk Indicator Predict Stress?

A number of financial stress measures were developed after the financial crisis of 2007–2009 in the hope that they could provide regulators with advance warning of conditions that might warrant a corrective response. The Cleveland Fed’s systemic risk indicator is one such measure. This Commentary provides a review of the SRI’s performance from 2001 to 2020 and finds that it has performed well, providing a reliable, valid, and timely signal of elevated levels of financial system stress.

Deviant in Residence

Journalism following 9/11 became fiercely protective of American innocence, and while the Colorado social drama demonstrates the prowess of proximate media in punishment of intellectual dissent, the case also offers an opportunity to observe resistance at the epicenter of redress. The drama illustrates idea rendering and repair as a dynamic in which news prompts a corrective response. Content analysis focuses on de-contextualization as the rendering practice in newspaper coverage. Idea repair is explored in how contributors to Front Range opinion pages bypassed news to engage directly with Churchill’s polemic. Journalists, for their part, are not simply enlisted in suppression of ideas. When confronted with evidence of de-contextualization, reporters and editors responded across a range of denial, ambivalence, regret, and resistance. A concluding section contemplates the role of parochial media in regulation of ideas across time and place.

Paracomedy and Relative Chronology

This chapter presents paracomedy as a tool that can help establish a relative chronology between plays in cases where we can detect an allusive relationship between a tragedy and a comedy but we do not know which play was performed first. Using examples from Sophocles’s Chryses, Euripides’s Cyclops, Euripides’s Heracles, and Euripides’s Ion, it lays out different interpretations for the possible chronologies in an attempt to unpack their implications and to clarify their underlying scholarly assumptions. The chapter analyzes Euripides’s Antiope as a corrective response to Aristophanes’s Women at the Thesmophoria that reverses Aristophanes’s critique that intellectual musicians are useless by making Amphion an intellectual musician who is politically efficacious. The chapter also proposes a new way to interpret the metrical evidence for dating Antiope and suggests that Euripides may have used old-fashioned metrics as an archaizing throwback to support the musical and political goals of his play.