Introduction. The article is of relevance due to the need to develop models of regional development within the diversity of socio-economic, natural and geographical conditions of the constituent ...entities of the Russian Federation. The purpose of the paper is to review the problems and risks standing in the way of the development and implementation of the up-to-date strategy of regional development as well as to identify the models of development of the constituent entities, based on an analysis of a certain system of factors.
Materials and Methods. The methods of factor and systemic analysis of socio-economic, geographical and natural indicators were employed; content analysis was performed and an overview of the strengths and weaknesses of the country’s regions was given.
Results. An analysis of socio-economic indicators and of the dynamics of the development of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation has been performed as well as that of their natural and geographical conditions. A typology of regions has been developed, which includes eight classifications taking into account their strengths and weaknesses, geographical location and resources available. The reasons for the lack of an up-to-date model of development of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation and the risks associated with the adoption of this strategy have been identified.
Discussion and Conclusion. Due to the rather high difference between the regions in economic, social, natural and geographical conditions, it is necessary to take into account the identified features when devising a regional development strategy. This approach can make the best possible use of the competitive advantages of each of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation; it can help form a competent system of intra-regional relations and reduce the proportion of wrong decisions, measures and policies for regional development.
Introduction: This study examines the spatial abilities of middle school students with visual impairments (i.e., blindness and low vision) in the context of spatial visualization. The study also aims ...to examine the strategies used by such students in solving questions requiring spatial ability. Methods: Participants comprised eight students with visual impairments attending the 8th grade of a school in Ankara, Turkey, which teaches students with visual impairments. The data collection tool is composed of eight questions under the guidance of the definition for spatial visualization. Question types belonging to the spatial visualization subcomponent were organized in four topics: 2D rotation, 3D rotation, paper folding, and cube folding. Results: It was observed that students with visual impairments used mental rotation and key feature strategies for 2D rotation questions. They used the key feature strategy for 3D rotation questions and the mental manipulation strategy for cube folding and paper folding questions. Discussion: In this study, it was identified that strategies used by students with visual impairments show similarities with spatial strategies defined in the literature as used by students without visual impairments. Of all the other types of questions, the most successful question of students with visual impairments is the paper folding question. Implications for practitioners: The results of this article can help teachers become aware of the kind of difficulties that students with visual impairments encounter when they try to solve questions that require spatial ability.
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NUK, OILJ, SAZU, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VSZLJ
The so-called Buchanan report, commissioned by the Irish government and published in May 1969, comprised a set of proposals for regional industrial development in Ireland over the period 1966–86. The ...main thrust of the report was the concentration of the great bulk of new industrial employment creation in Dublin and eight proposed ‘growth centres’. The plan provided for the creation of powerful planning authorities to oversee development in the regions. The government rejected these proposals and opted instead to continue with the existing policy of widespread dispersal of new industry. While meeting with initial success, this policy proved unsustainable in the long term. The paper reviews the implications of the Buchanan report experience for the regional planning process in Ireland, arguing that failure to learn from this experience served to undermine the
, with a similar fate likely for the forthcoming
Males outperform females on some spatial tasks, and this may be partially due to the effects of sex steroids on spatial strategy preferences. Previous work with rodents indicates that low estradiol ...levels bias females toward a striatum-dependent response strategy, whereas high estradiol levels bias them toward a hippocampus-dependent place strategy. We tested whether testosterone influenced the strategy preferences in male rats. All subjects were castrated and assigned to one of three daily injection doses of testosterone (0.125, 0.250, or 0.500mg/rat) or a control group that received daily injections of the drug vehicle. Three different maze protocols were used to determine rats' strategy preferences. A low dose of testosterone (0.125mg) biased males toward a motor-response strategy on a T-maze task. In a water maze task in which the platform itself could be used intermittently as a visual cue, a low testosterone dose (0.125mg) caused a significant increase in the use of a cued-response strategy relative to control males. Results from this second experiment also indicated that males receiving a high dose of testosterone (0.500mg) were biased toward a place strategy. A third experiment indicated that testosterone dose did not have a strong influence on the ability of rats to use a nearby visual cue (floating ball) in the water maze. For this experiment, all groups seemed to use a combination of place and cued-response strategies. Overall, the results indicate that the effects of testosterone on spatial strategy preference are dose dependent and task dependent.
•Low dose testosterone biased males toward a motor-response strategy in a T-maze.•High dose testosterone caused no strategy bias in a T-maze.•Low dose testosterone increased use of a cued-response strategy in the water maze.•High dose testosterone biased males toward a place strategy in the water maze.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK
Emerging technologies offer the potential to expand the domain of the future workforce to extreme environments, such as outer space and alien terrains. To understand how humans navigate in such ...environments that lack familiar spatial cues this study examined spatial perception in three types of environments. The environments were simulated using virtual reality. We examined participants’ ability to estimate the size and distance of stimuli under conditions of minimal, moderate, or maximum visual cues, corresponding to an environment simulating outer space, an alien terrain, or a typical cityscape, respectively. The findings show underestimation of distance in both the maximum and the minimum visual cue environment but a tendency for overestimation of distance in the moderate environment. We further observed that depth estimation was substantially better in the minimum environment than in the other two environments. However, estimation of height was more accurate in the environment with maximum cues (cityscape) than the environment with minimum cues (outer space). More generally, our results suggest that familiar visual cues facilitated better estimation of size and distance than unfamiliar cues. In fact, the presence of unfamiliar, and perhaps misleading visual cues (characterizing the alien terrain environment), was more disruptive than an environment with a total absence of visual cues for distance and size perception. The findings have implications for training workers to better adapt to extreme environments.
•GluN2 B antagonist impairs spatial reveal learning.•A water maze-based set-shifting task is described.•GluN2 B antagonist does not impair set-shifting.•GluN2 B subunits participate in some, but not ...all forms of behavioral flexibility.
Recent evidence has implicated N-methyl-d-aspartate receptors (NMDARs) in several aspects of learning and behavioral flexibility in rodents. Here, we examined the effects of treatment with Ro 25-6981, a selective antagonist of NMDARs containing GluN2B subunits, on two types of behavioral flexibility in rats, spatial reversal learning and set-shifting (spatial vs. motor strategy). To examine spatial reversal learning, rats were trained to swim to a hidden platform in a water maze over four days. On the following day, the platform was moved to a new location in the maze. Administration of Ro 25-6981 (10mg/kg) selectively impaired the early phase of reversal learning, but all rats learned to navigate to the new platform location over 12 trials. To examine set-shifting, independent groups of rats were trained to either swim to a fixed location (spatial strategy) or use a motor response (e.g., “turn left”; motor strategy) to find a hidden escape platform in a cross-shaped water maze apparatus; after task acquisition, rats were trained on the second, novel strategy (set-shift) following treatment with either Ro 25-6981 (10mg/kg) or saline. Administration of Ro 25-6981 had no effect on the ability of rats to perform the set-shift and use the new strategy to locate the escape platform. These results suggest that, in rats, spatial reversal learning, but not set-shifting, is sensitive to Ro-25-6981 treatment. Thus, NMDARs-GluN2B signaling may play a selective role in some forms of behavioral plasticity, particularly for situations involving the updating of information in the spatial domain.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZRSKP
: The transition from Fordism to post‐Fordism has been accompanied by profound changes in the spatiality of west European states. The hierarchical, top‐down and redistributive structures that ...typified the Fordist welfare state have been replaced by more complex spatial configurations as elements of economic and political power have shifted both downwards to subnational territorial levels and upwards to the supranational level. A major debate has developed around the nature of these emerging forms of state spatiality and of the processes underpinning their formation. This paper examines how these processes have operated in the particular case of the Republic of Ireland. Here, the spatiality of the state was founded on a peculiar post‐colonial combination of a localised populist politics and a centralised state bureaucracy. While this arrangement was quite suited to the spatial dispersal of industrial branch plants which underpinned regional policy in the 1960s and 1970s, it has become increasingly problematic with the more recent emergence of new trends in the nature and locational preferences of inward investment. This is reflected in the profound conflicts that have attended the formulation and implementation of the National Spatial Strategy, introduced in 2002. The result is a national space economy whose increasing dysfunctionality may now be compromising the very development model upon which Ireland's recent spectacular economic growth has been built.
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BFBNIB, DOBA, FZAB, GIS, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Rationally designed behavioral tests are important tools to assess the function of specific brain regions. The hippocampus is a crucial neural substrate for spatial cognition, and many studies have ...linked hippocampal dysfunction with defects on spatial learning and memory in neurological conditions ranging from Alzheimer's disease to autoimmune syndromes, such as neuropsychiatric lupus. While our understanding of hippocampal function, from the molecular to the system levels, has increased dramatically over the last decades, this effort has not yet translated into efficacious therapies for cognitive impairment. We think that the availability of highly validated behavioral paradigms to measure cognition in mouse models is likely to enhance the potential success of preclinical therapeutic modalities. Here, we present an extensive study of the paddling pool task (PPT), first reported by Deacon and Rawlins, in which mice learn to escape from shallow water through a peripheral exit in a circular arena dubbed the clockmaze. We show that the PPT provides highly reliable results when assaying spatial cognition in C57/BL6 mice (120 males, 40 females) and BALB/c mice (40 males, 90 females). Additionally, we develop a robust algorithm for the assessment of escape strategies with clearly quantifiable readouts, enabling fine-granular phenotyping. Notably, the use of spatial strategy increases linearly across trials in the PPT. In a separate cohort of mice, we apply muscimol injections to silence the dorsal CA1 region of the hippocampus and show that the use of the spatial strategy in the PPT relies on the integrity of the dorsal hippocampus. Additionally, we compare directly the PPT and the Morris water maze (MWM) task in C57/BL6 mice (20 males, 20 females) and BALB/c mice (20 males, 20 females) and we find that the PPT induces significantly lower anxiety, exhaustion and hypothermia than the MWM. We conclude that the PPT provides a robust assessment of spatial cognition in mice, which can be applied in conjunction with other tests, to facilitate hypothesis testing and drug development to combat cognitive impairment.
A considerable amount of research has demonstrated that animals can use different strategies when learning about, and navigating within, their environment. Since the influential research of Packard ...and McGaugh (1996), it has been widely accepted that, early in learning, rats use a flexible dorsal hippocampal−dependent place strategy. As learning progresses, they switch to a less effortful and more automatic dorsolateral caudate−dependent response strategy. However, supporting literature is dominated by the use of appetitively motivated tasks, using food reward. Because motivation often plays a crucial role in guiding learning, memory, and behavior, we examined spatial learning strategies of rats in an escape-motivated submerged T-maze. In Experiment 1, we observed rapid learning and the opposite pattern as that reported in appetitively motivated tasks. Rats exhibited a response strategy early in learning before switching to a place strategy, which persisted over extensive training. In Experiment 2, we replicated Packard and McGaugh's (1996) observations, using the apparatus and procedures as in Experiment 1, but with food reward instead of water escape. Mechanisms for, and implications of, this motivational modulation of spatial learning strategy are considered.
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CEKLJ, FFLJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PEFLJ, UPUK
This study investigates possible combinatory spatial strategies of home-based enterprises (HBE) in a high-density marginal settlement in North Jakarta. Although HBE has been discussed academically ...since the 1980s, most literature covers its economic and environmental implications rather than spatial issues. Despite its numerous benefits, HBE is sometimes prohibited due to the dominant mono-functional house paradigm in housing policy, urban planning and architecture. Here in a case study using the snowball sampling technique and descriptive analysis, we confirm the pivotal role of HBE in increasing monthly income as shown in previous studies. However, HBE is not merely a primary but also an additional source of monthly income for the underprivileged; thus there are more types of HBE than previously thought. Although housing density determines HBE types, it does not necessarily determine spatial strategies. Therefore, each workable spatial strategy must overcome limited house size in order to accommodate not only domestic and economic activity but also social activity, as HBE owners enjoy company. Furthermore, we also reveal the creative combinatory spatial strategies used by HBE owners to orchestrate the complex arrangements of domestic, economic and social activities in houses of limited size.
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