Social gaze provides a window into the interests and intentions of others and allows us to actively point out our own. It enables us to engage in triadic interactions involving human actors and ...physical objects and to build an indispensable basis for coordinated action and collaborative efforts. The object-related aspect of gaze in combination with the fact that any motor act of looking encompasses both input and output of the minds involved makes this non-verbal cue system particularly interesting for research in embodied social cognition. Social gaze comprises several core components, such as gaze-following or gaze aversion. Gaze-following can result in situations of either "joint attention" or "shared attention." The former describes situations in which the gaze-follower is aware of sharing a joint visual focus with the gazer. The latter refers to a situation in which gazer and gaze-follower focus on the same object and both are aware of their reciprocal awareness of this joint focus. Here, a novel interactive eye-tracking paradigm suited for studying triadic interactions was used to explore two aspects of social gaze. Experiments 1a and 1b assessed how the latency of another person's gaze reactions (i.e., gaze-following or gaze version) affected participants' sense of agency, which was measured by their experience of relatedness of these reactions. Results demonstrate that both timing and congruency of a gaze reaction as well as the other's action options influence the sense of agency. Experiment 2 explored differences in gaze dynamics when participants were asked to establish either joint or shared attention. Findings indicate that establishing shared attention takes longer and requires a larger number of gaze shifts as compared to joint attention, which more closely seems to resemble simple visual detection. Taken together, novel insights into the sense of agency and the awareness of others in gaze-based interaction are provided.
The medial prefrontal cortex is known to be crucially involved in the memory for fear extinction. It has been shown that the dopamine D4 receptor is abundantly localized in the medial prefrontal ...cortex of rodents and that this receptor subtype is involved in the mediation of fear-related behaviour. In the present study, we tested whether dopamine D4 receptors within the medial prefrontal cortex are involved in the learning and encoding of fear extinction. Infusions of the specific dopamine D4 receptor antagonist L-741,741 into the medial prefrontal cortex immediately before fear extinction did not affect fear extinction learning but attenuated the memory on fear extinction on the following day. These results suggest that medial prefrontal cortex dopamine D4 receptors are involved in the consolidation of fear extinction memory.
This article presents the experimental results of 17 MeV proton irradiation on a 60 GHz low power, half-duplex transceiver (TRX) chip implemented in 65 nm CMOS technology. It supports short range ...point-to-point data rate up to 6 Gbps by employing on-off keying (OOK). To investigate the irradiation hardness for high-energy physics (HEP) applications, two TRX chips were irradiated with total ionising doses (TID) of 74 and 42 kGy and fluence of $1.4 \times 10^{14}N_{{\rm eq}}/{\rm c}{\rm m}^2$1.4×1014Neq/cm2 and $0.8 \times 10^{14}N_{{\rm eq}}/{\rm c}{\rm m}^2$0.8×1014Neq/cm2 for RX and TX modes, respectively. The chips were characterised by pre- and post-irradiation analogue voltage measurements on different circuit blocks as well as through the analysis of wireless transmission parameters like bit error rate (BER), eye diagram, jitter etc. Post-irradiation measurements have shown certain reduction in performance but both TRX chips have been found operational through over the air measurements at 5 Gbps. Moreover, very small shift in the carrier frequency was observed after the irradiation.
The field of social neuroscience has made remarkable progress in elucidating the neural mechanisms of social cognition. More recently, the need for new experimental approaches has been highlighted ...that allow studying social encounters in a truly interactive manner by establishing 'online' reciprocity in social interaction. In this article, we present a newly developed adaptation of a method which uses eyetracking data obtained from participants in real time to control visual stimulation during functional magnetic resonance imaging, thus, providing an innovative tool to generate gaze-contingent stimuli in spite of the constraints of this experimental setting. We review results of two paradigms employing this technique and demonstrate how gaze data can be used to animate a virtual character whose behavior becomes 'responsive' to being looked at allowing the participant to engage in 'online' interaction with this virtual other in real-time. Possible applications of this setup are discussed highlighting the potential of this development as a new 'tool of the trade' in social cognitive and affective neuroscience.
BACKGROUND
To increase blood safety, various procedures are currently implemented, including donor selection, optimized donor arm disinfection, and diversion. In addition, pathogen inactivation (PI) ...techniques can be used for platelets (PLTs) and plasma concentrates.
STUDY DESIGN AND METHODS
This study investigated the clinical efficacy of an inactivation technique for different blood components at two time points (12 and 35.5 hr). Eight transfusion‐relevant bacterial strains were spiked at two different concentrations (100 and 1000 colony‐forming units CFUs/bag) into whole blood (WB), apheresis PLTs (APs), and buffy coat (BC)‐derived minipool PLTs.
RESULTS
The bacterial concentrations were higher than 106 CFUs/mL within 24 hours after spiking depending on the particular bacterial strain. PI was absolute for all of the APs performed 12 hours after inoculation, but the bacterial strains of Klebsiella pneumoniae and Bacillus cereus were not completely inactivated in WB or BC PLTs, performed 35.5 and 12 hours after inoculation, respectively.
CONCLUSION
The INTERCEPT PI system was not 100% effective for high concentrations of certain K. pneumoniae strains or spore‐forming B. cereus. A critical observation was that the period between blood donation and inactivation needs to be minimal to enable efficient PI. In the case where PI cannot be performed immediately after preparation, a combination of a PI technology after the production of blood components with a rapid bacterial screen test on Day 4 or 5 after donation may offer a solution to further prevent the risk of bacterial transmission by transfusion.
A compact green laser of 1.3 W output at 534.7 nm is generated by intracavity frequency doubling (ICFD) of a 49 edge-emitter laser bar using a MgO-doped (PPLN) bulk crystal. The measured M(2) values ...of green beam are 12.1 and 2.9 along the slow and fast axes, respectively. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of the ICFD of multi-edge-emitters laser bar.
Thermal noise, including hypothermia and short-term variations in body temperature, has been reported to influence the accuracy and reproducibility of thermodilution measurements. This variation ...might theoretically limit the usefulness of this technique in patients with acute burns. We therefore sought to determine the reproducibility of hemodynamic parameters derived from arterial thermal dilution in patients with acute burns and hypothermia. This was a prospective, clinical study of 50 mechanically ventilated patients with burns involving more than 25% of the body surface area that were treated at an eight-bed intensive care burn unit in a university-affiliated hospital. A total of 750 arterial thermodilution measurements were analyzed using the COLD system. Triplicate measurements of the intrathoracic blood volume, cardiac output, total blood volume, and extravascular lung water were performed at regular intervals during the first 48 hours after the thermal injury. Reproducibility was assessed by the coefficient of variation of the triplicate measurements. The correlation of variation was less than 10% at all measurement times for cardiac output, intrathoracic blood volume, and total blood volume. For the extravascular lung water, the coefficient of variation ranged from 9.5% to 12.9%. A maximum of 12.9% was found at 48 hours after burn. No correlation was found between body core temperature and the reproducibility of intrathoracic blood volume index (r = 0.145), cardiac index (r = 0.217), or extravascular lung water index (r = 0.167). The parameters derived from arterial thermodilution show a clinically sufficient reproducibility in patients with acute burns associated with thermal instability.
We demonstrate for the first time to our knowledge intra-cavity frequency doubling (ICFD) of an edge-emitter diode laser using a 10 mm-long 5.0 microm periodically poled LiNbO(3) (PPLN) crystal. An ...optical output power of 33 mW second harmonic blue light at 490.5 nm is generated at 1.0 A injection current, equivalent to an overall wall-plug efficiency of 1.8%. The measured M(2) values of blue beam are 1.7 and 2.4 along the fast and slow axis.