Positive Technology Journal

Neglect and prism adaptation: a new therapeutic tool for spatial cognition disorders.

Restor Neurol Neurosci. 2006;24(4-6):347-56

Authors: Rode G, Klos T, Courtois-Jacquin S, Rossetti Y, Pisella L

PURPOSE: A large proportion of right-hemisphere stroke patients show unilateral neglect, a neurological deficit of perception, attention, representation, and/or performing actions within their left-sided space, inducing many functional debilitating effects on everyday life, and responsible for poor functional recovery and ability to benefit from treatment. This spatial cognition disorder affects the orientation of behaviour with a shift of proprioceptive representations toward the lesion side. METHODS: This shift can be reduced after a prism adaptation period to a right lateral displacement of visual field (induced by a simple target-pointing task with base-left wedge prisms). The modification of visuo-motor or sensory-motor correspondences induced by prism adaptation involves improvement of different symptoms of neglect. RESULTS: Classical visuo-motor tests could be improved for at least 2h after adaptation, but also non-motor and non-visual tasks. In addition, cross-modal effects have been described (tactile extinction and dichotic listening), mental imagery tasks (geographic map, number bisection) and even visuo-constructive disorders. These cognitive effects are shown to result from indirect bottom-up effects of the deeper, adaptive realignment component of the reaction to prisms. Lesion studies and functional imaging data evoke a cerebello-cortical network in which each structure plays a specific role and not all structures are crucial for adaptation ability. CONCLUSIONS: These cognitive effects of prism adaptation suggest that prism adaptation does not act specifically on the ipsilesional bias characteristic of unilateral neglect but rehabilitates more generally the visuo-spatial functions attributed to the right cortical hemisphere. These results reinforce the idea that the process of prism adaptation may activate brain functions related to multisensory integration and higher spatial representations and show a generalization at a functional level. Prism adaptation therefore appears as a new powerful therapeutic tool for spatial cognition disorders.

Via the Neuronerd 

Diigo is a social annotation service that turns the web writable allowing users to privately or publicly annotate any website they visit, thereby making a “participatory and interactive media” for its users. When you highlight a word on any page a drop down menu automatically appears (see image below) that lets you:

• search for the highlighted words on the web with any of four search engines
• search for highlighted terms in four social bookmarking systems
• do a blog search for highlighted terms
• search for your terms in the entire site you are on (Google, Yahoo, Ask site: search)
• search for inbound links to the URL you are on in four different search engines (including Technorati and Google)
• search for your highlighted terms in seven different verticals from local to TV to stocks.

Via BPS Research Digest

Mel Slater at UCL and colleagues have recreated Milgram’s classic obediency psychology experiment using virtual reality. Back in the 1960s Stanley Milgram appeared to show that student participants would obey a researcher and administer lethal electric shocks to a stranger, but the studies have not been replicated because of ethical concerns. Now researchers have tested participants’ willingness to administer electric shocks to a computer animated woman in a virtual reality environment. The study was published a few days ago in PLOS online

Slater, M., Antley, M., Davison, A., Swapp, D., Guger, C., Barker, C., Pistrang, N. & Sanchez-Vives, M.V. (2006). A Virtual Reprise of the Stanley Milgram Obedience Experiments. PLOS ONE, 1, e39 (open access).

Via Medgadget

PLoS ONE - the newest journal of the Public Library of Science - is looking to completely shift the way peer-reviewed literature works:

Scope:

PLoS ONE features reports of primary research from all disciplines within science and medicine. By not excluding papers on the basis of subject area, PLoS ONE facilitates the discovery of the connections between papers whether within or between disciplines.

Peer Review:

Each submission will be assessed by a member of the PLoS ONE Editorial Board before publication. This pre-publication peer review will concentrate on technical rather than subjective concerns and may involve discussion with other members of the Editorial Board and/or the solicitation of formal reports from independent referees. If published, papers will be made available for community-based open peer review involving online annotation, discussion, and rating.

Open Access:

All works published in PLoS journals are open access, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. Everything is immediately available online without cost to anyone, anywhere--to read, download, redistribute, include in databases, and otherwise use--subject only to the condition that the original authorship is properly attributed. Copyright is retained by the author.

 

Read more

Via LADS 

According to technology predictions by analysts Gartner, the blogging phenomenon is set to peak in 2007. Gartner said that during the middle of next year the number of blogs will level out at about 100 million. The firm has said that 200 million people have already stopped writing their blogs.

via Langreiter

a commentary at the Journal of Neuroscience speculates on the future of research journals and peer-review:

Research studies appear on databases, not in journals

First, I don't think that it makes any sense to continue with paper copies of research articles. Instead of the "quasi-legal" document that is the current scientific article, we should be moving to full data being available on the web together with the software that might have been used to manipulate the data, as well as multimedia presentations to back up the data. Research papers are primarily of interest to other researchers in the same area, and they usually don't need the introduction and certainly not the discussion, which mostly degenerates to hype anyway
...
If an absence of peer review (or post-publication review, as I call it) is a step too far, then we should have an author (or rather funder) pays model. These fees could support a peer review mechanism, which should be open in that both authors and readers would know who was reviewing studies. It's ethically unacceptable that such important judgements should be made an unidentified judge. Like it or not, we live in a world where what is not transparent is deemed to be biased, corrupt, or incompetent until proved otherwise. Plus I believe that peer review should be a scientific discourse rather than an arbitrary judgment. This is far from radical: it's simply science returning to its roots when science was presented and discussed at meetings rather than published in journals.

Perhaps we will invent new forms of peer review by learning from innovations like Wikipedia. It is in some ways a form of peer review, only reviewers make changes directly rather than simply commenting.
...
Another worry from the conservative about such a system is to wonder how credit would be allocated. At present credit comes from publishing in prestigious journals. Often the impact factor of the journal (a dubious and manipulated statistic) is allocated to the paper, which is wholly unscientific because there is little correlation between the citations to studies and the impact factor of the journals in which they are published, because the impact factor of a journal is driven by a small number of highly cited studies (Seglen, 1997). In the new world I'm imagining, credit would come from the buzz from researchers and hits on the study. These hits can be disclosed in real time, unlike citations, which come years after studies are published.

Via Mind Hacks

Synesthete.org is a website where you can test yourself for synaesthesia - the condition where senses are crossed so, for example, you might be able to taste shapes or see colours associated with specific numbers. The site is run by the Eagleman Lab at the Baylor College of Medicine.

Via Frontal Cortex

The New York Times reports that British scientists have built an apparatus that simulates human digestion.

From the article:

Constructed from sophisticated plastics and metals able to withstand the corrosive acids and enzymes found in the human gut, the device may ultimately help in the development of super-nutrients, such as obesity-fighting foods that could fool the stomach into thinking it is full.

''There have been lots of jam-jar models of digestion before,'' said Dr. Martin Wickham of Norwich's Institute of Food Research, the artificial gut's chief designer, referring to the beakers of enzymes typically used to approximate the chemical reactions in the stomach.

Wickham's patented artificial gut is a two-part model that is slightly larger than a desktop computer. The top half consists of a funnel in which food, stomach acids and digestive enzymes are mixed. Once this hydration process is finished, the food gets ground down in a silver metal tube encased in a dark, transparent box.

Software sets the parameters of the artificial gut - how long food remains in a particular part of the stomach, predicted hormone responses at various stages, and whether it is an infant or adult gut.

(...)

With a capacity about half the size of an actual stomach, the artificial gut can ''eat'' roughly 24 ounces of food. To date, the most substantial meal it's enjoyed is vegetable soup.

''It's so realistic that it can even vomit,'' adds Wickham.

 

Read the full story here

Re-blogged from Smart Mobs

Technnorati has posted the State of the Blogosphere, October, 2006. [via Joi Ito]

As of October 2006, about 100,000 new weblogs were created each day, which means that on average, there was a slight decrease quarter-over-quarter in the number of new blogs created each day.

...The total posting volume of the blogosphere has leveled off somewhat, showing about 1.3 million postings per day, which is a little lower than what we were seeing last quarter but still about double the volume of this time last year. ...

Via Mind Hacks 

Ogi Ogas, a doctoral student in cognitive neuroscience at Cognitive and Neural Systems at Boston University, has applied techniques from cognitive psychology to win $500,000 on the show 'Who wants to be a Millionaire?'. 

These techniques take advantage of well-studied psychological processes such as such as priming and the structure of associations in memory.

Read how he describes his method in an article appeared on Seed Magazine:

The first technique I drew upon was priming. The priming of a memory occurs because of the peculiar "connectionist" neural dynamics of our cortex, where memories are distributed across many regions and neurons. If we can recall any fragment of a pattern, our brains tend to automatically fill in the rest....

I used priming on my $16,000 question: "This past spring, which country first published inflammatory cartoons of the prophet Mohammed?" I did not know the answer. But I did know I had a long conversation with my friend Gena about the cartoons. So I chatted with [quiz show host] Meredith about Gena. I tried to remember where we discussed the cartoons and the way Gena flutters his hands. As I pictured how he rolls his eyes to express disdain, Gena's remark popped into my mind: "What else would you expect from Denmark?"

Via Mind Hacks 

A recent article published in The Washington Post focuses on the socio-ethical implications of the emerging neuroscience of lying. The article reports about a company called No Lie MRI Ltd that claims to use "the first and only direct measure of truth verification and lie detection in human history".

From the article:

No Lie MRI's Web site has proclaimed that the company hopes to revolutionize truth telling in America, offering "objective, scientific, mental evidence, similar to the role in which DNA biological identification is used," to everyone from the FBI, CIA and NSA to the Department of Homeland Security.

No Lie is not alone. Its Massachusetts competitor, Cephos Corp., has licensed competing fMRI lie detection technology from the Medical University of South Carolina.

The boundless desire for a way to dig through deception is why political consultant John Zogby, president of Zogby International, expects the new brain scanning devices to be in widespread use in the 2008 presidential election. He can clearly see a demand to discover what voters really think of candidates - and their commercials.

 

Brain-scan lie detection is now reliable enough that it is starting to be admissible in court.

Via Medline

Geriatricians from Saint Louis University have developed a new test for diagnosing dementia - the Saint Louis University Mental Status Examination (SLUMS) - which appears to be more effective than the widely-used Mini Mental Status Examination (MMSE). 

The study has been published in the current issue of the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry (14:900-910, November 2006)

From the news release

"This early detection of mild neurocognitive disorder by the SLUMS offers the opportunity for the clinicians to begin early treatment as it becomes available," says Syed Tariq, M.D., lead author and associate professor of geriatric medicine at Saint Louis University.

John Morley, M.D., director of the division of geriatric medicine at Saint Louis University, created the SLUMS to screen more educated patients and to detect early cognitive problems.

"There are potential treatments available and they slow down the progression of the disease," says Morley, who is a coinvestigator. "The earlier you treat, the better people seem to do. But families go through denial and sometimes miss diagnosing dementia until its symptoms are no longer mild."

The researchers found the new screening tool developed by SLU detects early cognitive problems missed by the MMSE.

"The Mini Mental Status Examination has limitations, especially with regard to its use in more educated patients and as a screen for mild neurocognitive disorder," Tariq says.

It takes a clinician about seven minutes to administer the SLUMS, which supplements the Mini Mental Status Examination by asking patients to perform tasks such as doing simple math computations, naming animals, recalling facts and drawing the hands on a clock.

From New Scientist tech

The social interactions that glue the World Wide Web together are now so complex it has outgrown the relatively narrow field of computer science..

read the full story here

Via Mindware Forum

Do the test here

I did the test and got 102, which corresponds to "average intelligence".

A score of 124 or higher is required to qualify for membership in the International High IQ Society. This means that I cannot become a member of this society :-(

From A VR Geek Blog

Evolving time fronts is a new approach for spatio-temporal warping of video developed by Alex Rav-Acha, Yael Pritch,  Dani Lischinski, Shmuel Peleg

The framework allows to set different playing speeds to different parts of the same movie.

Look at this demolition video

Clarkvision does the calculations.

The answer: 576 megapixels!

Via Mauro Cherbini's moleskin 

An experimental study of the emergence of human communication systems [pdf]

Author: B. Galantucci

Cognitive Science, (29):737–767, 2005.

The emergence of human communication systems is typically investigated via 2 approaches with complementary strengths and weaknesses: naturalistic studies and computer simulations. This study was conducted with a method that combines these approaches. Pairs of participants playedvideogames requiring communication. Members of a pair were physically separated but exchanged graphic signals through a medium that prevented the use of standard symbols (e.g., letters). Communication systems emerged and developed rapidly during the games, integrating the use of explicit signs with information implicitly available to players and silent behavior-coordinating procedures. The systems that emerged suggest 3 conclusions: (a)signs originate from different mappings;(b)sign systems developp arsimoniously; (c) sign forms are perceptually distinct, easy to produce, and tolerant to variations.

Detection of Differential Viewing Patterns to Erotic and Non-Erotic Stimuli Using Eye-Tracking Methodology.

Arch Sex Behav. 2006 Oct 10;

Authors: Lykins AD, Meana M, Kambe G

As a first step in the investigation of the role of visual attention in the processing of erotic stimuli, eye-tracking methodology was employed to measure eye movements during erotic scene presentation. Because eye-tracking is a novel methodology in sexuality research, we attempted to determine whether the eye-tracker could detect differences (should they exist) in visual attention to erotic and non-erotic scenes. A total of 20 men and 20 women were presented with a series of erotic and non-erotic images and tracked their eye movements during image presentation. Comparisons between erotic and non-erotic image groups showed significant differences on two of three dependent measures of visual attention (number of fixations and total time) in both men and women. As hypothesized, there was a significant Stimulus x Scene Region interaction, indicating that participants visually attended to the body more in the erotic stimuli than in the non-erotic stimuli, as evidenced by a greater number of fixations and longer total time devoted to that region. These findings provide support for the application of eye-tracking methodology as a measure of visual attentional capture in sexuality research. Future applications of this methodology to expand our knowledge of the role of cognition in sexuality are suggested.

fMRI-compatible rehabilitation hand device

Journal of Neuroengineering and Rehabilitation (October 2006)  

Authors: Azadeh Khanicheh, Andrew Muto, Christina Triantafyllou, Brian Weinberg, Loukas Astrakas, Aria Tzika and Constantinos Mavroidis