Optimal Spindle Detection Parameters for Predicting Cognitive Performance

Study Objectives Alterations in sleep spindles have been linked to cognitive impairment. This finding has contributed to a growing interest in identifying sleep-based biomarkers of cognition and neurodegeneration, including sleep spindles. However, flexibility surrounding spindle definitions and algorithm parameter settings present a methodological challenge. The aim of this study was to characterize how spindle detection parameter settings influence the association between spindle features and cognition and to identify parameters with the strongest association with cognition. Methods Adult patients (n=167, 49 ± 18 years) completed the NIH Toolbox Cognition Battery after undergoing overnight diagnostic polysomnography recordings for suspected sleep disorders. We explored 1000 combinations across seven parameters in Luna, an open-source spindle detector, and used four features of detected spindles (amplitude, density, duration, and peak frequency) to fit linear multiple regression models to predict cognitive scores. Results Spindle features (amplitude, density, duration, and mean frequency) were associated with the ability to predict raw fluid cognition scores (r=0.503) and age-adjusted fluid cognition scores (r=0.315) with the best spindle parameters. Fast spindle features generally showed better performance relative to slow spindle features. Spindle features weakly predicted total cognition and poorly predicted crystallized cognition regardless of parameter settings. Conclusion Our exploration of spindle detection parameters identified optimal parameters for studies of fluid cognition and revealed the role of parameter interactions for both slow and fast spindles. Our findings support sleep spindles as a sleep-based biomarker of fluid cognition.

Using Photographs in Mixed Methods Research: An Illustration Integrating Quantitative and Qualitative Analyses from Consumer Research

Photograph analysis poses a novel methodological challenge for mixed methods researchers. In this paper, we argue that photographs are a valid data source that are not outside of the quantitative–qualitative binary and, hence, can be analyzed and used for integration, applying mixed methods principles. We summarize photograph analysis methods from different scientific fields and contribute to the field of mixed methods by proposing a mixed methods framework for analyzing visual data that allows the flexible application and integration of different quantitative and qualitative photograph analysis methods by focusing on data transformation. We use an illustrative example from consumer research.

The Impact of Geopolitical Influence on Regional Cooperation and Integration in East Asia

Recent developments in regional studies argue that geopolitical influence is one factor affecting the regional order. However, studies on geopolitical influence have yet to cover East Asia to explain East Asia's regional order. The quantitative approach to geopolitical influence studies still faces a methodological challenge because it uses an arbitrary weighting of geopolitical influence in developing an index. In order to address those challenges, this research deploys factor analysis as a non-arbitrary weighting system to measure the geopolitical influence of China, Japan, Russia, and the US in East Asia during the period from 2005 to 2018. Additionally, this research explores how the geopolitical influence of those countries affects East Asia's regional cooperation and integration. The research shows that: (1) China has been able to compete with the US for geopolitical influence in East Asia since 2014, and (2) Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and US geopolitical influence positively contributes to regional cooperation and integration in East Asia, with the US and China as the main contributors. The research highlights three possible causes to explain the results: China's regional infrastructure initiatives, rejuvenation of China's view on globalization, and the relative decline of US relations with the allies in the region.

Cognitive reality of constructions as a theoretical and methodological challenge in historical linguistics

This squib discusses empirical challenges incurred by assuming cognitive reality as a defining feature of constructions and the constructional network, as done in most usage-based, cognitive construction grammar approaches. Specifically, it zooms in on the methodological challenges in identifying cognitively plausible constructions in historical data, in particular when taking a highly exploratory, bottom-up approach with very little pre-selection or pre-analysis. I illustrate this issue with the example of a current project on PPs in the history of English, and the various functions these have in combination with verbs (from prototypical adjuncts to complements). I argue that the constraints of historical data make it necessary to find different, new ways to determine which abstractions and distinctions are likely to have been represented in minds of historical language users, and to furthermore identify changes in constructional networks over time.

‘Covid-19 has caused a dramatic change to prison life’. Analysing the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on the pains of imprisonment in the Scottish Prison Estate

The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into the impact of COVID-19 in the Scottish Prison Estate. During the 2020 lockdown in prison in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, all face-to-face research was paused. In response to this methodological challenge, a participatory correspondence methodology was designed, enabling project participants to influence the direction of this project through suggesting research questions. The main project findings relate to the analysis of ways in which the COVID-19 enhanced the pains of imprisonment for participants, exploring the challenges that the participants faced in relation to communication, feelings of heightened isolation and detachment from family, friends and the normal rhythms of life in prison. Analysis of the letters received as part of this study provides unique insights into the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic in custody has added an additional layer or enhancement to pre-pandemic pains of imprisonment, increasing the ‘tightness’ ‘depth’ and ‘weight’ of participants time in custody.

Criticism of language and analysis of law. A pragmatics of normativity and social (de)ontology

One important methodological challenge to normative disciplines like political or legal theory is if the method in question is purely descriptive or can be used to justify norms. Secondly, trying to incorporate ordinary language in the analysis of political concepts, this part utilizes arguments employed in the global justice debate. So, I will divide the paper into three parts: 1. Is the feasibility interpreted as a requirement of normative political theories? Firstly, I clarify the relation between experience and normativity; then I take a look at how the proto-normative and normative structures gained from experience become norms with a “critical” function. Finally, I will (re-)consider the normative feasibility criteria suggested by Hahn and by Räikkä. 2. After building a connection between the epistemic conception of criticism and the conception of politics within Kantian work, I first present Michelle Kosch’s Fichte, but then criticizing Fichte’s argument. Then, as Dworkin’s account of participation in coercion is challenged, I briefly elaborate on a roughly Dworkinian account of political equality. Lastly, I want to look into the relation between technical and ordinary definitions for political concepts, using elements taken by semantic and pragmatic old models, using populism as a case study. 3. In the concluding appendix, the connections between law and linguistic analysis of normative sentences will be examined, under the perspective of the Genoa Legal Realism.

Ambivalent Affines: Law Like Literature

This short essay will dwell upon the ‘law of literature and the literature of law’, as illuminated in the enduring scholarship and intellectual legacy of Peter Fitzpatrick. Reading with Fitzpatrick, we must grapple with a law that is both constituted and subverted by recourse to the supplement of fiction. These ambivalent ‘affines’, law and literature, share in an oscillatory rhythm: each is constituted and enlivened by an unbounded exteriority, yet each must be rendered normatively determinate. I reflect upon the ways in which Fitzpatrick’s account of ‘law like literature’ grasps and hones the methodological challenge implicit in this reading: to read law as literature and literature as law. Yet further, I extend a reading of Fitzpatrick’s scholarship that acknowledges this fictive law as not merely susceptible to but constituted by decoloniality.

Improving the Quality of Survey Data on College Campus Woman Abuse: The Contribution of a Supplementary Open-Ended Question

Obtaining accurate survey data on the prevalence of woman abuse in institutions of higher education continues to be a major methodological challenge. Underreporting is difficult to overcome; yet, there may be effective ways of minimizing this problem. One is adding a supplementary open-ended question to a primarily quantitative questionnaire. Using data derived from the Campus Quality of Life Survey (CQLS), this article examines whether asking respondents to complete such a question increases the prevalence rates of four types of woman abuse and provides information on behaviors that are not included in widely used and validated measures of these harms.