We report the development of highly chemically crosslinked, ultra low density (~0.015 g/cc) polyurethane shape memory foams synthesized from symmetrical, low molecular weight and branched hydroxyl monomers. Sharp single glass transitions (Tg) customizable in the functional range of 45-70 °C were achieved. Thermomechanical testing confirmed shape memory behavior with 97-98% ...

Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) may play an important role in immune system aging, due to its ability to modulate the host immune system. A significant age-related increase has been demonstrated for HCMV-specific serum antibody levels but so far, no information exists whether and to which extent the magnitude of the HCMV-specific ...

Besides the classically described subsets of memory CD8 T cells generated under infectious conditions, are T inflammatory memory cells generated under sterile priming conditions, such as sensitization to allergens. Although not fully differentiated as pathogen-induced memory cells, they display memory properties that distinguish them from naive CD8 T cells. Given ...

Vibrio cholerae O1 causes cholera, a dehydrating diarrheal disease. We have previously shown that V. cholerae specific memory B cell responses develop after cholera infection, and hypothesize that these mediate long-term protective immunity against cholera. We prospectively followed household contacts of cholera patients to determine whether the presence of circulating ...

Infection or successful vaccination results in the formation of long-lived memory CD8 T-cell populations. Despite their numerical stability, memory CD8 T-cell populations are thought to completely turn over through proliferation within a 2- to 3-mo period. Therefore, steady-state memory cell proliferation must be balanced by a precisely regulated and equivalent ...

B-cell memory describes the populations of cells that provide long-term humoral immunity: long-lived antibody-secreting plasma cells that reside mainly in the bone marrow and memory B cells. Interestingly, the memory B-cell population is heterogenous, although the importance of this heterogeneity has been unclear. Recent studies have investigated the formation and ...

In the companion article by Yang and colleagues [Yang Y, et al. (2012) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, 109, 10.1073/pnas.1121631109], we have shown that priming with glycolipid (FtL) from Francisella tularensis live-vaccine strain (i) induces FtL-specific B-1a to produce robust primary responses (IgM >IgG); (ii) establishes persistent long-term production of ...

There are important and sustained interindividual differences in cognition during aging. Here, we investigated hippocampal spatial representations in a rat model of cognitive aging characterized by individual differences in a mnemonic task. Individual cognitive capabilities in old rats were assessed in a delayed non-matching-to-position task. We recorded hippocampal CA1 place ...

Previous results indicated that damage and pharmacological inactivation of the basolateral amygdala (BLA) interfere with the attenuation of taste neophobia. A similar disruption of safe taste memories formation induced by the inhibition of protein synthesis in the perirhinal cortex (PRh) has been reported. Thus, we have assessed the effect of ...

The disaccharide motif fucose-α(1-2)-galactose (Fucα(1-2)Gal) is involved in many important physiological processes, such as learning and memory, inflammation, asthma, and tumorigenesis. However, the size and structural complexity of Fucα(1-2)Gal-containing glycans have posed a significant challenge to their detection. We report a new chemoenzymatic strategy for the rapid, sensitive detection of ...

Comparing two stimuli that occur at different times demands the coordination of bottom-up and top-down processes. It has been hypothesized that the dorsolateral prefrontal (PFC) cortex, the likely source of top-down cortical influences, plays a key role in such tasks, contributing to both maintenance and sensory comparisons. We examined this ...

The postsubiculum is a structure of interest because it projects to the hippocampal formation and contains head direction cells, grid cells, and border cells. The aim of the current experiment was to test whether the postsubiculum is necessary for homing by path integration. Rats were trained on a homing task ...

Biodegradable and biocompatible poly(p-dioxanone)-poly(tetramethylene oxide)glycol (PPDO-PTMEG) multiblock copolymers with excellent shape memory effect and mechanical properties were developed by coupling PPDO-diol and PTMEG-diol with 1, 6-hexamethylene diisocyanate (HDI). The influence of chain structure, microphase separating morphology on shape memory effect and biocompatibility were investigated systematically. The TEM observation of PPDO-PTMEG ...

Spatial learning and memory are important for navigation and formation of episodic memories. The hippocampus and medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) are key brain areas for spatial learning and memory. Place cells in hippocampus fire whenever an animal is located in a specific region in the environment. Grid cells in the ...

It is well established that immunologic memory generated early in life can be maintained into old age and mediate robust anamnestic antibody responses. Little is known, however, about the initiation of memory B cells in the elderly. We have conducted a prospective analysis of the quantities and functionalities of antigen-specific ...

In two experiments, we examined the ability of task-irrelevant changes in luminance to capture attention in an irrelevant singleton search. By using uniform increment and decrement arrays, we were able to create changes of the same absolute magnitude, but resulting in a singleton with either higher or lower contrast magnitude, ...

Background: The objective of this study was to experimentally investigate whether a new visual intervention with optical and binocular vergence demands prevents accommodative insufficiency and asthenopia after sustained periods of visual task. Methods: Fourteen female students were given the intervention with optical and binocular vergence demands for 1.5 min immediately ...

SUMMARY: Life science ontologies substantially change over time to meet the requirements of their users and to include the newest domain knowledge. Thus, an important task is to know what has been modified between two versions of an ontology (diff). This diff should contain all performed changes as compact and ...

Animals in the natural world continuously encounter learning experiences of varying degrees of novelty. New neurons in the hippocampus are especially responsive to learning associations between novel events and more cells survive if a novel and challenging task is learned. One might wonder whether new neurons would be rescued from ...

Previous studies in humans have shown that bilateral loss of vestibular function is associated with a significant bilateral atrophy of the hippocampus, which correlated with the patients' spatial memory deficits. More recently, patients who had recovered from unilateral vestibular neuritis have been reported to exhibit a significant atrophy of the ...

Suppression of cholinergic receptors and inactivation of the septum impair short-term memory, and disrupt place cell and grid cell activity in the medial temporal lobe (MTL). Location-dependent hippocampal place cell firing during active waking, when the acetylcholine level is high, switches to time-compressed replay activity during quiet waking and slow-wave-sleep ...

Our understanding of memory T cell function in mice and men is to date in large part restricted to the behavior of circulating memory T cells. Emerging evidence, however, suggests that in addition to such systemic memory T cell populations, a separate population of locally confined memory T cells is ...

Adaptive immunity in both mouse and man results in the generation of immunological memory. Memory T cells are both friend and foe to transplant recipients, as they are intimately involved and in many cases absolutely required for the maintenance of protective immunity in the face immunosuppression, yet from the evidence ...

Economic development involves a structural transformation in the way people are allocated to tasks. There is a shift from self-provision to market exchange, facilitating specialization. There is also a shift from self-employment to wage employment in large firms and organizations, driven by innovation and increasing returns to scale. Changes in ...

This study tested the longitudinal measurement invariance and developmental changes of a newly developed battery of executive function (EF) tasks for use in early childhood. The battery was administered in the Family Life Project-a prospective longitudinal study (N = 1,292) of families who were oversampled from low-income and African American ...

We examined effects of significance of task irrelevant changes in the location of tones on the mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3a event related brain potentials. The participants were to discriminate between two frequency modulated tones differing from each other in the direction of frequency glide. Each tone was delivered through ...

Purpose:  In this longitudinal study, a group of school children with Down syndrome (DS) and reduced accommodation were prescribed bifocals and followed to investigate the impact of bifocal spectacles on early literacy and visual perceptual skills. The natural progression of early literacy skills in this population along with the changes ...

In 1989, Wynn and McGrew published an explicit comparison between Oldowan technology and what was then known of chimpanzee technology.1 They compared the range and variety of tools, adaptive role of tools, carrying distances, spatial cognition, manufacturing procedures, and modes of learning. They concluded that everything archeologists had reconstructed about ...

ObjectiveDisparity cues can be a major drive to accommodation via the convergence accommodation to convergence (CA/C) linkage, but, on decompensation of exotropia, disparity cues are extinguished by suppression so this drive is lost. This study investigated accommodation and vergence responses to disparity, blur and proximal cues in a group of ...

Using a machine-learning classification algorithm applied to near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) signals, we classify a success (change detection) or a failure (change blindness) in detecting visual changes for a change-detection task. Five subjects perform a change-detection task, and their brain activities are continuously monitored. A support-vector-machine algorithm is applied to classify ...

The ability to detect a change, to accurately assess the magnitude of the change, and to react to that change in a commensurate fashion are of critical importance in many decision domains. Thus, it is important to understand the factors that systematically affect people's reactions to change. In this article ...

Change detection requires perceptual comparison and decision processes on different features of multiattribute objects. How relative salience between two feature-changes influences the processes has not been addressed. This study used the systems factorial technology to investigate the processes when detecting changes in a Gabor patch with visual inputs from orientation ...

Researchers of working memory currently debate capacity limits of the focus of attention, the proposed mental faculty in which items are most easily accessed. Cowan (1999) suggested that its capacity is about 4 chunks, whereas others have suggested that its capacity is only 1 chunk. Recently, Oberauer and Bialkova (2009) ...

The present study examined the relationship between entorhinal cortex and hippocampal volume with fMRI activation during episodic memory function in elderly controls with no cognitive impairment and individuals with amnesic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI). Both groups displayed limited evidence for a relationship between hippocampal volume and fMRI activation. Smaller right ...

Implicit in many informal and formal principles of psychological change is the understudied assumption that change requires either an active approach or an inactive approach. This issue was systematically investigated by comparing the effects of general action goals and general inaction goals on attitude change. As prior attitudes facilitate preparation ...

We propose a theory-neutral, computational and data-driven method for assessing changes in semantic content of object representations following long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy. Young adults in psychotherapy are compared with an age-matched, non-clinical sample at three time points. Verbatim transcripts of descriptions of the self and parents were quantified in a semantic ...

We studied whether a multifeature mismatch negativity (MMN) paradigm using naturally produced speech stimuli is feasible for studies of auditory discrimination accuracy of adult participants. A naturally produced trisyllabic pseudoword was used in the paradigm, and MMNs were recorded to changes that were acoustic (changes in fundamental frequency or intensity) ...

Working memory decay in advanced age has been attributed to a concurrent decrease in the ability to control interference. The present study contrasted a form of interference control in selective attention that acts upon the perception of external stimuli (access) with another form that operates on internal representations in working ...

OBJECTIVE: The present study aimed at investigating whether theta activity within medio-frontal cortex (MFC) serves as a marker for increased cognitive control demands such as performance monitoring. METHODS: We confronted participants with at least two incompatible sources of information in a Simon task, a flanker task, and a NoGo task ...

The objective of the present study was to investigate the ability of adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) to direct their attention and exert cognitive control in a forced instruction dichotic listening (DL) task. The performance of 29 adults with ADHD was compared with 58 matched controls from the Bergen Dichotic ...

Previous findings suggest that religion has a specific impact on attentional processes. Here we show that religion also affects action control. Experiment 1 compared Dutch Calvinists and Dutch atheists, matched for age, sex, intelligence, education, and cultural and socio-economic background, and Experiment 2 compared Italian Catholics with matched Italian seculars. ...

We have previously used the real-time change of muscle thickness detected using ultrasound, namely sonomyography (SMG), for prosthesis motor control purposes. In the present study, we further compared subjects' performance using SMG and surface electromyography (EMG) in a series of discrete tracking tasks, both with and without a concurrent auditory ...

Chunking is a powerful encoding strategy that significantly improves working memory performance in normal young people. To investigate chunking in patients with mild Alzheimer's disease and in a control group of elderly people without cognitive impairment. People with mild Alzheimer's disease (n = 28) were recruited and divided according to ...

Six pigeons responded in a visual category learning task in which the stimuli were dimensionally separable Gabor patches that varied in frequency and orientation. We compared performance in two conditions which varied in terms of whether accurate performance required that responding be controlled jointly by frequency and orientation, or selectively ...

This paper reports use of sample stimulus control shaping procedures to teach arbitrary matching-to-sample to 2 capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella). The procedures started with identity matching-to-sample. During shaping, stimulus features of the sample were altered gradually, rendering samples and comparisons increasingly physically dissimilar. The objective was to transform identity matching ...

In previous research, a driver support system that uses continuous haptic feedback on the gas pedal to inform drivers of the separation to the lead vehicle was developed. Although haptic feedback has been previously shown to be beneficial, the influence of the underlying biomechanical properties of the driver on the ...

Brain dopamine (DA) has long been implicated in cognitive control processes, including working memory. However, the precise role of DA in cognition is not well-understood, partly because there is large variability in the response to dopaminergic drugs both across different behaviors and across different individuals. We review evidence from a ...

Ballet dancers have heightened balance skills, but previous studies that compared dancers to non-dancers have not quantified patterns of multi-joint postural coordination. This study utilized a visual tracking task that required professional ballet dancers and untrained control participants to sway with the fore-aft motion of a target while standing on ...

Hypothesized top-down and bottom-up mechanisms of control within conflict-rich environments were examined by presenting participants with a Stroop task in which specific words were usually presented in either congruent or incongruent colors. Incongruent colors were either frequently (high contingency) or infrequently (low contingency) paired with the word. These items were ...

This experiment examined the effects of two discrete negative emotions, fear and anger, on selective attention. A within-subjects design was used, and all participants (N = 98) experienced the control, anger, and fear conditions. During each condition, participants viewed a film clip eliciting the target emotion and subsequently completed a ...