Separation of multiple motor memories through implicit and explicit processes

Acquisition of multiple motor skills without interference is a remarkable ability in daily life. During adaptation to opposing perturbations, a common paradigm to study this ability, each perturbation can be successfully learned when a contextual follow-through movement is associated with the direction of the perturbation. It is still unclear, however, to what extent this learning engages the cognitive explicit process and the implicit process. Here, we untangled the individual contributions of the explicit and implicit components while participants learned opposing visuomotor perturbations, with a second unperturbed follow-through movement. In Exp. 1 we replicated previous adaptation results and showed that follow-through movements also allow learning for opposing visuomotor rotations. For one group of participants in Exp. 2 we isolated strategic explicit learning, while for another group we isolated the implicit component. Our data showed that opposing perturbations could be fully learned by explicit strategies; but when strategy was restricted, distinct implicit processes contributed to learning. In Exp.3, we examined whether learning is influenced by the disparity between the follow-through contexts. We found that the location of follow-through targets had little effect on total learning, yet it led to more instances in which participants failed to learn the task. In Exp. 4, we explored the generalization capability to untrained targets. Participants showed near-flat generalization of the implicit and explicit processes. Overall, our results indicate that follow-through contextual cues might activate, in part, top-down cognitive factors that influence not only the dynamics of the explicit learning, but also the implicit process.

Testing the Performance of Some Competition Indices against Experimental Data and Outputs of Spatially Explicit Simulation Models

Three competition indices were tested against experimental data on the growth of individual trees in mapped forest stands and outputs of spatially explicit, process-based models of competition. The comparison showed the fundamental importance of taking into account the spatial structure of stands and, particularly, the relative spatial locations of individual trees (spatial asymmetry) when calculating the competition between trees. Although none of the competition indices are able to take into account the specific processes affecting the development of individual trees, these indices can be used in forest dynamics modeling as a simplified representation of competition between trees for resources.

Financial solution for balancing global economy, poverty and hunger differences through blockchain secured real time traceability system

The grave challenges of inequality, hunger and poverty are escalating in most of developing countries including India, thereby jeopardizing the overall growth of our country as well as the global economy. Under such crippling situations of poverty and inequality, the magnitude of inefficient and unsystematic lending practices, lack of monitoring by lenders and related fraudulent activities are on the rise, thereby causing a substantial build-up of non-performing assets as one of the emerging risks for the financial sector. The available finance management tools, in fact, lack the capability of real-time execution, fund deployment, credit risk assessment and project viability monitoring. This manuscript describes how a combination of process modeling, execution and measurement can be deployed for assessing financial traceability with accounting, billing, inventory & real-time project tracking and monitoring updates. The explicit process accounts primarily for due diligence framework; controls financial traceability; as well as geo-mapping, fencing & tagging based tangible process assessment of projects prior to lending, during and post implementation. Ultimately, the proposed blockchain secured finance solution (B-Bank™) will cause optimization of credit risk capital at both stages of pre-sanction, pre-disbursement and post implementation of projects, thereby balancing and strengthening the financial institutions and ultimately the global economy.

ENERGY OPTIMIZATION DURING WALKING CAN BE A PRIMARILY IMPLICIT PROCESS

Gait adaptations, in response to novel environments, devices or changes to the body, can be driven by the continuous optimization of energy expenditure. However, whether energy optimization is primarily an implicit process—occurring automatically and with minimal cognitive attention—or an explicit process—occurring as a result of a conscious, attention-demanding, strategy—remains unclear. Here, we use a dual-task paradigm to test whether energy optimization during walking is primarily an implicit or explicit process. To create our primary energy optimization task, we used lower-limb exoskeletons to shift people’s energetically optimal step frequency to frequencies lower than normally preferred. Our secondary task, designed to draw explicit attention from the optimization task, was an auditory tone discrimination task. We found that adding this secondary task did not disrupt energy optimization during walking; participants in our dual-task experiment adapted their step frequency toward the optima by an amount similar to participants in our previous single-task experiment. We also found that performance on the tone discrimination task did not worsen when participants were optimizing for energetic cost; accuracy scores and reaction times remained unchanged when the exoskeleton altered the energy optimal gaits. Survey responses suggest that dual-task participants were largely unaware of the changes they made to their gait to optimize energy, whereas single-task participants were more aware of their gait changes yet did not leverage this explicit awareness to improve gait optimization. Collectively, our results suggest that energy optimization is primarily an implicit process, allowing attentional resources to be directed toward other cognitive and motor objectives during walking.Summary statementPeople can adapt to energy optimal walking patterns without being consciously aware they are doing so. This allows people to discover energetically efficient gaits while preserving attentional resources for other tasks.

Appropriateness of emergency care use: a retrospective observational study based on professional versus patients’ perspectives in Taiwan

ObjectiveThe objectives of this study are to refine the measurement of appropriate emergency department (ED) use and to provide a natural observation of appropriate ED use rates based on professional versus patient perspectives.SettingTaiwan has a population of 23 million, with one single-payer universal health insurance scheme. Taiwan has no limitations on ED use, and a low barrier to ED use may be a surrogate for natural observation of users’ perspectives in ED use.ParticipantsIn 7 years, there were 1 835 860 ED visits from one million random samples of the National Health Insurance Database.MeasuresAppropriate ED use was determined according to professional standards, measured by the modified Billings New York University Emergency Department (NYU-ED) algorithm, and further analysed after the addition of prudent patient standards, measured by explicit process-based and outcome-based criteria.Statistical analysesThe area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) was used to reflect the performance of appropriate ED use measures, and sensitivity analyses were conducted using different thresholds to determine the appropriateness of ED use. The generalised estimating equation model was used to measure the associations between appropriate ED use based on process and outcome criteria and covariates including sex, age, occupation, health status, place of residence, medical resources area, date and income level.ResultsAppropriate ED use based on professional criteria was 33.5%, which increased to 63.1% when patient criteria were added. The AUC, which combines both professional and patient criteria, was high (0.85).ConclusionsThe appropriate ED use rate nearly doubled when patient criteria were added to professional criteria. Explicit process-based and outcome-based criteria may be used as a supplementary measure to the implicit modified Billings NYU-ED algorithm when determining appropriate ED use.

The Effect of Explicit and Implicit Instructions and Sleep on Consolidation of the Accuracy of Elements of a Fine Motor Skill

Two processes are suggested for intervention in the learning of motor skills. These include explicit process in which the performer consciously knows the acquisition of the skill and the other one is an implicit process in which the performer has no conscious knowledge of acquiring the skill. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of explicit and implicit instructions and sleep on the performance of the fine motor skill. Participants in this study included 30 right-handed volunteer students with a good sleep quality, aged between 18-25 years old. They were randomly divided into two homogeneous explicit (N = 15) and implicit (N = 15) groups based on Purdue Fine Motor Skill Test and Simple Reaction Time. Each group participated in a three-time round at six in the afternoon, 12 midday on the same day, and at eight o'clock next morning in a Timed Motor Sequences Task. The data was analyzed by ANOVA with repeated measures. The results showed that in the accuracy of the short elements, stabilization was done but promotion was not observed but there was no change in the accuracy of the long elements and there was no significant difference between groups.

Equilibrium attainment vs. equilibrium necessities

This chapter is about Kenneth Arrow’s 1959 article about price adjustment. This chapter uses that article to explain the logical requirements of any equilibrium model that purports to explain, say, equilibrium prices. Arrow explains why just assuming maximization on the part of both demanders and supplier in a market is not enough to assure equilibrium attainment. Arrow rejects the usual textbooks’ addition of an additional assumption that the markets are already at equilibrium. He instead argues that explicitly assumptions about the dynamics of equilibrium attainment must be included in any equilibrium model. The chapter thus discusses price adjustment in formal models; equilibrium attainment as an explicit process. It recognizes that Arrow equilibrium attainment also need something like imperfect competition to deal with any disequilibrium state that would necessarily exist prior to equilibrium attainment.

Audience Segmentation Techniques

A premise in health promotion and disease prevention is that exposure to and consequences of illness and injury can be minimized through people’s actions. Health campaigns, broadly defined as communication strategies intentionally designed to encourage people to engage in the actions that prevent illness and injury and promote wellbeing, typically try to inspire more than one person to change. No two people are exactly alike with respect to their risk for illness and injury or their reactions to a campaign attempting to lower their risk. These variations between people are important for health messaging. Effective campaigns provide a target audience with the right persuasive strategy to inspire change based on their initial state and psychosocial predictors for change. It is often financially and logistically unreasonable to create campaigns for each individual within a population; it is even unnecessary to the extent to which people exist in similar states and share psychosocial predictors for change. A challenging problem for health campaigns is to define those who need to be reached, and then intelligently group people based on a complex set of variables in order to identify groups with similar needs who will respond similarly to a particular persuasive strategy. The premise of this chapter is that segmentation at its best is a systematic and explicit process of research to make informed decisions about how many audiences to consider, why the audience is doing what they are doing, and how to reach that audience effectively.