A new interactive gazetteer of Perczel’s globe

As a result of the Perczel Project outlined by Mátyás Márton in 2007 at the Department of Cartography and Geoinformatics of Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), the complete digital restoration and then reconstruction of the 127.5 cm diameter manuscript globe was completed in 2019. The final cartographic completion of the ongoing task at the department by 2013 – led by Mátyás Márton, the project manager, who carried out this work with the help of Judit Paksi –, which included the work of many lecturers and students, aimed at saving the globe.Using this augmented digital processing, it was also possible to create three artistic copies of Perczel’s globe, which was originally made in 1862. This unique work of art, which has suffered irreparable damage due to the ordeals of the 20th century, is of great cultural value and also very important for our cartographic heritage, has been reborn.Following the digital reconstruction, there was a good opportunity to revive another related project. The website, “The interactive gazetteer of Perczel’s globe”, which was born as a result of the work of Zsuzsanna Ungvári and Tibor Tokai earlier, was also created with a new, expanded content. The present study presents the antecedents of gazetteer creation and describes the most important steps of current processing.

Hidden temporal structure of the ongoing task impacts detection strategy and is reflected in pupillary dynamics

Estimating temporal regularities in incoming sensory inputs supports optimal decisions in noisy environments. In particular, inferred temporal structure can ease the detection of likely target events. Here we postulated that timely urgency signals can adapt subjects' decision-making to the ongoing task temporal structure, possibly through neuromodulatory tone. To test this hypothesis, we used an auditory change detection task in which targets followed a block-based temporal contingency, unbeknownst to participants. False alarm occurrences were driven by the distribution of target timings, indicating that participants adapted their behavior to the ongoing temporal structure. Task-evoked pupillary responses were larger for blocks with earliest target timings, and correlated with individual subjects' behavioral adaptation. Individual pupil responses matched an urgency signal extracted from a decision model fitted to behavior. This work demonstrates that internal temporal expectation can be tracked through pupillary dynamics, suggesting a role of neuromodulatory systems in context-dependent modulation of decision variable dynamics.

Sleep spectral power correlates of prospective memory maintenance

Prospective memory involves setting an intention to act that is maintained over time and executed when appropriate. Slow wave sleep (SWS) has been implicated in maintaining prospective memories, although which SWS oscillations most benefit this memory type remains unclear. Here, we investigated SWS spectral power correlates of prospective memory. Healthy young adult participants completed three ongoing tasks in the morning or evening. They were then given the prospective memory instruction to remember to press “Q” when viewing the words “horse” or “table” when repeating the ongoing task after a 12-h delay including overnight, polysomnographically recorded sleep or continued daytime wakefulness. Spectral power analysis was performed on recorded sleep EEG. Two additional groups were tested in the morning or evening only, serving as time-of-day controls. Participants who slept demonstrated superior prospective memory compared with those who remained awake, an effect not attributable to time-of-day of testing. Contrary to prior work, prospective memory was negatively associated with SWS. Furthermore, significant increases in spectral power in the delta-theta frequency range (1.56 Hz–6.84 Hz) during SWS was observed in participants who failed to execute the prospective memory instructions. Although sleep benefits prospective memory maintenance, this benefit may be compromised if SWS is enriched with delta–theta activity.

Disrupting self-evaluative processing with electrostimulation mapping during awake brain surgery

Brain awake surgery with cognitive monitoring for tumor removal has become a standard of treatment for functional purpose. Yet, little attention has been given to patients’ interpretation and awareness of their own responses to selected cognitive tasks during direct electrostimulation (DES). We aim to report disruptions of self-evaluative processing evoked by DES during awake surgery. We further investigate cortico-subcortical structures involved in self-assessment process and report the use of an intraoperative self-assessment tool, the self-confidence index (SCI). Seventy-two patients who had undergone awake brain tumor resections were selected. Inclusion criteria were the occurrence of a DES-induced disruption of an ongoing task followed by patient’s failure to remember or criticize these impairments, or a dissociation between patient’s responses to an ongoing task and patient’s SCI. Disruptions of self-evaluation were frequently associated with semantic disorders and critical sites were mostly found along the left/right ventral semantic streams. Disconnectome analyses generated from a tractography-based atlas confirmed the high probability of the inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus to be transitory ‘disconnected’. These findings suggest that white matters pathways belonging to the ventral semantic stream may be critically involved in human self-evaluative processing. Finally, the authors discuss the implementation of the SCI task during multimodal intraoperative monitoring.

Structure-informed functional connectivity driven by identifiable and state-specific control regions

Describing how the brain anatomical wiring contributes to the emergence of coordinated neural activity underlying complex behavior remains challenging. Indeed, patterns of remote coactivations that adjust with the ongoing task-demand do not systematically match direct, static anatomical links. Here, we propose that observed coactivation patterns, known as Functional Connectivity (FC), can be explained by a controllable linear diffusion dynamics defined on the brain architecture. Our model, termed structure-informed FC, is based on the hypothesis that different sets of brain regions controlling the information flow on the anatomical wiring produce state-specific functional patterns. We thus introduce a principled framework for the identification of potential control centers in the brain. We find that well-defined, sparse and robust sets of control regions, partially overlapping across several tasks and resting-state, produce FC patterns comparable to empirical ones. Our findings suggest that controllability is a fundamental feature allowing the brain to reach different states.

Differential Benefits of Prospective Memory Reminders Depending on Cognitive Load

Prospective memory (PM) refers to the ability to remember to complete a task at the appropriate moment in the future. Past research has found reminders can improve PM performance in both laboratory and naturalistic settings, but few projects have examined the circumstances when reminders are most beneficial. Three experiments in the present study tested the effect of reminders in an event-based PM task under different cognitive loads. In Experiments 1 (specific targets) and 2 (nonspecific targets), load was manipulated by having participants respond to a single (low load) or multiple (high load) targets. In Experiment 3, the association between pairs was manipulated by presenting strongly associated pairs (low load) or weakly associated pairs (high load). Half of the participants in each experiment received reminders whereby PM target information was placed at the top of the computer screen. Across all three experiments, it was found that the benefit of reminders was greater under high load than low load conditions. Importantly, the improvements in PM from reminders generally occurred without any additional cost to ongoing task performance and without any reduction of retrospective memory for the targets at the end of the experiment. Together these results suggest that reminders can be beneficial for reducing PM failures, particularly under high load, without the potential downside of increased effort expenditure.

Checklists

In July 2019, almost two weeks of protest led to the ousting of Puerto Rico's Governor Ricardo “Ricky” Rosselló. The diversity and creativity of the protests were nationally and internationally celebrated. Asambleas de pueblo, people's assemblies, continued political participation beyond the protests. This article attends to a feature of the protests that has yet to be explored. Throughout the protests, checklists appeared on signs, on walls in Old San Juan, and on Facebook and Twitter. These index a modality of power explicit in the protests and in reserve in the asambleas. The checklists, I suggest, record the power of removal that established the protests as successful irrespective of the institutional impact that Rosselló's resignation purportedly had on the indebted colony. The checklists inscribe the ongoing task of interruption, to the point of removal, that seeks to render coloniality inoperative in the everyday.

Investigating the effects of ongoing-task bias on prospective memory

Event-based prospective memory (PM) refers to the cognitive processes required to perform a planned action upon encountering a future event. Event-based PM studies engage participants in an ongoing task (e.g., lexical decision-making) with an instruction to make an alternative PM response to certain items (e.g., items containing “tor”). The Prospective Memory Decision Control (PMDC) model, which provides a quantitative process account of ongoing-task and PM decisions, proposes that PM and ongoing-task processes compete in a race to threshold. We use PMDC to test whether, as proposed by the Delay Theory of PM costs, PM can be improved by biasing decision-making against a specific ongoing-task choice, so that the PM process is more likely to win the race. We manipulated bias in a lexical decision task with an accompanying PM intention. In one condition, a bias was induced against deciding items were words, and in another, a bias was induced against deciding items were non-words. The bias manipulation had little effect on PM accuracy but did affect the types of ongoing-task responses made on missed PM trials. PMDC fit the observed data well and verified that the bias manipulation had the intended effect on ongoing-task processes. Furthermore, although simulations from PMDC could produce an improvement in PM accuracy due to ongoing-task bias, this required implausible parameter values. These results illustrate the importance of understanding event-based PM in terms of a comprehensive model of the processes that interact to determine all aspects of task performance.

Locating and leaving Babylon: A missional reading of Revelation 17 and 18 in light of ancient and contemporary political contexts

This article explores a missional reading of Revelation 17 and 18, focusing on the significance of “Babylon” for John’s audience in Roman Asia and for Christian communities today. John uses the symbol of Babylon to shape missional communities, inviting them to reimagine their world. In John’s 1st-century context, Revelation 17 and 18 expose the idolatry, economic exploitation, and dehumanization of the empire. The symbol of Babylon, however, does not lie frozen in a 1st-century past; it continues to speak loudly into contemporary political and economic realities. The contextual reading in this article particularly describes Babylon’s presence within the civil religion, economic practices, arrogance, and violence of the current North American context. The article then asks, What does it mean to “come out” of Babylon (Rev 18:4), both for Christians in John’s world and today? Finally, the article reflects on nine implications that emerge from John’s treatment of Babylon in Revelation 17 and 18 for the ongoing task of missional hermeneutics.