Last posts on research tools

Evidence for grid cells in a human memory network

2010-02-04T12:46:23+01:00

Evidence for grid cells in a human memory network.

Nature. 2010 Jan 20;

Authors: Doeller CF, Barry C, Burgess N

Grid cells in the entorhinal cortex of freely moving rats provide a strikingly periodic representation of self-location which is indicative of very specific computational mechanisms. However, the existence of grid cells in humans and their distribution throughout the brain are unknown. Here we show that the preferred firing directions of directionally modulated grid cells in rat entorhinal cortex are aligned with the grids, and that the spatial organization of grid-cell firing is more strongly apparent at faster than slower running speeds. Because the grids are also aligned with each other, we predicted a macroscopic signal visible to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in humans. We then looked for this signal as participants explored a virtual reality environment, mimicking the rats' foraging task: fMRI activation and adaptation showing a speed-modulated six-fold rotational symmetry in running direction. The signal was found in a network of entorhinal/subicular, posterior and medial parietal, lateral temporal and medial prefrontal areas. The effect was strongest in right entorhinal cortex, and the coherence of the directional signal across entorhinal cortex correlated with spatial memory performance. Our study illustrates the potential power of combining single-unit electrophysiology with fMRI in systems neuroscience. Our results provide evidence for grid-cell-like representations in humans, and implicate a specific type of neural representation in a network of regions which supports spatial cognition and also autobiographical memory.

Open Source Eye-Tracker

2009-05-06T18:46:17+02:00

Via Mauro Cherubini's blog

The Gaze Group at the IT University of Copenhagen is developing an open-source eye-tracking application that will provide a low-cost alternative to commercial gaze tracking systems. The ITU Gaze Tracker is video-based and works with any videocamera or a webcam equipped with infrared nightvision

More to explore: San Agustin, J., Skovsgaard, H., Hansen, J. P., and Hansen, D. W. 2009. Low-cost gaze interaction: ready to deliver the promises. In Proceedings of the 27th international Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, USA, April 04 - 09, 2009). CHI EA ‘09. ACM, New York, NY, 4453-4458.

New Science 2.0 group on Linkedin

2009-04-20T13:56:00+02:00

I have created a new group on Science 2.0 on Linkedin. The goal of the community is to connect researchers, consultants and companies and institutions interested in the impact of social media and web 2.0 tools on science and technology.

The community is growing beyond my expectations, with more than 50 professionals and researchers subscribed. I see it as a great opportunity to share news, opinions and tools in this exciting field.

If you are interested and already subscribed to Linkedin, you can join this group here

Nature Precedings

2008-03-29T13:08:22+01:00

Nature Precedings is a place for researchers to share pre-publication research, unpublished manuscripts, presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and other scientific documents. Submissions are screened by our professional curation team for relevance and quality, but are not subjected to peer review. Contributions range from biology and medicine (except clinical trials) to chemistry and the earth sciences.

Google: Free Database Storage for Scientists

2008-03-03T23:39:23+01:00

Via Medgadget

The storage will be free to scientists and access to the data will be free for all. The project, known as Palimpsest and first previewed to the scientific community at the Science Foo camp at the Googleplex last August, missed its original launch date this week, but will debut soon.

Building on the company's acquisition of the data visualization technology, Trendalyzer, from the oft-lauded, TED presenting Gapminder team, Google will also be offering algorithms for the examination and probing of the information. The new site will have YouTube-style annotating and commenting features.

The storage would fill a major need for scientists who want to openly share their data, and would allow citizen scientists access to an unprecedented amount of data to explore. For example, two planned datasets are all 120 terabytes of Hubble Space Telescope data and the images from the Archimedes Palimpsest, the 10th century manuscript that inspired the Google dataset storage project.

The neuroscience of collecting

2008-01-14T12:54:34+01:00

My friend and science journalist Pierangelo Garzia has written an interesting piece on the neuroscientific basis of collecting that will appear soon in the Cartier Art Magazine, "Collectors".

Here is the abstract:

Recent studies in neuroscience have demonstrated that collecting is a biological necessity even more than a psychological one. For early man collecting was a means of providing for his vital needs. For contemporary man is an important way of providing for psychological well-being.

Prehistoric man set aside the fundamental elements he needed for his survival and so do we. The refrigerator and the supermarket are the modern equivalents of cold cellars and food caches of earlier times.

Collecting is born of a basic need: survival, not only physical, but psychical well. There's not a great deal of difference between prehistoric man and urbanized third millennium beings like ourselves.

Cartier 19, 2008, Cartier Art Magazine, "Collectors" (monographic issue).

Novel brain-scanning technology invented

2007-07-23T18:50:00+02:00

Researchers from Siemens have developed a prototype MRI scanner that uses a lattice of small coils positioned around the head rather than large coils you lie inside. As noted in this Technology Review article, the device is likely to have important applications in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a variation of standard MRI that tracks blood flow in the brain as an indirect measure of activity.

The technique is often used to locate the parts of the brain that control specific functions, such as speech and movement. The first clinical application for the device will likely be fMRI for neurosurgery planning, says [Siemens MR vice president] Bundy. "Surgeons want to know where speech and motor areas are when they take a tumor out- the more precise, the better."

IQR simulator for large scale neural systems

2007-06-14T16:01:43+02:00

Via Neurobot

Ulysses Bernardet from the Institute of Neuroinformatics University ETH Zurich has developed IQR, an efficient graphical environment to design large-scale multi-level neuronal systems that can control real-world devices - robots in the broader sense - in real-time.

IQR has been released as open-source under GNU General Public License (GPL)

Scientists claim first in using brain scans to predict intentions

2007-03-10T20:13:58+01:00

Via kurzweilAI.net

Researchers at Berlin's Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience claim they have identified people's decisions about how they would later do a high-level mental activity - in this case, adding versus subtracting.

Read the full story

Action Video Games Sharpen Vision 20 Percent

2007-02-17T20:58:58+01:00

From Medgadget

According to researchers at University of Rochester, video games that contain high levels of action, such as Unreal Tournament, can actually improve your vision:

Researchers at the University of Rochester have shown that people who played action video games for a few hours a day over the course of a month improved by about 20 percent in their ability to identify letters presented in clutter--a visual acuity test similar to ones used in regular ophthalmology clinics.

In essence, playing video game improves your bottom line on a standard eye chart...

Bavelier [Daphne Bavelier is Professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester --ed.] and graduate student Shawn Green tested college students who had played few, if any, video games in the last year. "That alone was pretty tough," says Green. "Nearly everybody on a campus plays video games."

At the outset, the students were given a crowding test, which measured how well they could discern the orientation of a "T" within a crowd of other distracting symbols--a sort of electronic eye chart. Students were then divided into two groups. The experimental group played Unreal Tournament, a first-person shoot-'em-up action game, for roughly an hour a day. The control group played Tetris, a game equally demanding in terms of motor control, but visually less complex.

After about a month of near-daily gaming, the Tetris players showed no improvement on the test, but the Unreal Tournament players could tell which way the "T" was pointing much more easily than they had just a month earlier.

"When people play action games, they're changing the brain's pathway responsible for visual processing," says Bavelier. "These games push the human visual system to the limits and the brain adapts to it. That learning carries over into other activities and possibly everyday life."

The improvement was seen both in the part of the visual field where video game players typically play, but also beyond--the part of your vision beyond the monitor. The students' vision improved in the center and at the periphery where they had not been "trained." That suggests that people with visual deficits, such as amblyopic patients, may also be able to gain an increase in their visual acuity with special rehabilitation software that reproduces an action game's need to identify objects very quickly.

Brain Scan Mind Reading 70% Accurate

2007-02-17T20:23:47+01:00

Via NeuroGuy

Researchers are making progresses in predicting the intention of subjects with reasonable accuracy:

Now researchers have been able to decode these secret intentions from patterns of their brain activity. They let subjects freely and covertly choose between two possible tasks - to either add or subtract two numbers. They were then asked to hold in mind their intention for a while until the relevant numbers were presented on a screen. The researchers were able to recognize the subjects intentions with 70% accuracy based alone on their brain activity - even before the participants had seen the numbers and had started to perform the calculation.

That quote is from a press release from the Max Planck Institute, Revealing secret intentions in the brain

The mystery of consciousness

2007-01-22T21:55:11+01:00

Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard University, has an article in Time magazine about the current state of understanding of consciousness.

From the article:

So neuroscientists are well on the way to identifying the neural correlates of consciousness, a part of the Easy Problem. But what about explaining how these events actually cause consciousness in the sense of inner experience--the Hard Problem?
TO APPRECIATE THE HARDNESS OF THE HARD PROBLEM, CONSIDER how you could ever know whether you see colors the same way that I do. Sure, you and I both call grass green, but perhaps you see grass as having the color that I would describe, if I were in your shoes, as purple. Or ponder whether there could be a true zombie--a being who acts just like you or me but in whom there is no self actually feeling anything. This was the crux of a Star Trek plot in which officials wanted to reverse-engineer Lieut. Commander Data, and a furious debate erupted as to whether this was merely dismantling a machine or snuffing out a sentient life.

No one knows what to do with the Hard Problem. Some people may see it as an opening to sneak the soul back in, but this just relabels the mystery of "consciousness" as the mystery of "the soul"--a word game that provides no insight.

Many philosophers, like Daniel Dennett, deny that the Hard Problem exists at all. Speculating about zombies and inverted colors is a waste of time, they say, because nothing could ever settle the issue one way or another. Anything you could do to understand consciousness--like finding out what wavelengths make people see green or how similar they say it is to blue, or what emotions they associate with it--boils down to information processing in the brain and thus gets sucked back into the Easy Problem, leaving nothing else to explain. Most people react to this argument with incredulity because it seems to deny the ultimate undeniable fact: our own experience.

The most popular attitude to the Hard Problem among neuroscientists is that it remains unsolved for now but will eventually succumb to research that chips away at the Easy Problem. Others are skeptical about this cheery optimism because none of the inroads into the Easy Problem brings a solution to the Hard Problem even a bit closer. Identifying awareness with brain physiology, they say, is a kind of "meat chauvinism" that would dogmatically deny consciousness to Lieut. Commander Data just because he doesn't have the soft tissue of a human brain. Identifying it with information processing would go too far in the other direction and grant a simple consciousness to thermostats and calculators--a leap that most people find hard to stomach. Some mavericks, like the mathematician Roger Penrose, suggest the answer might someday be found in quantum mechanics. But to my ear, this amounts to the feeling that quantum mechanics sure is weird, and consciousness sure is weird, so maybe quantum mechanics can explain consciousness.

And then there is the theory put forward by philosopher Colin McGinn that our vertigo when pondering the Hard Problem is itself a quirk of our brains. The brain is a product of evolution, and just as animal brains have their limitations, we have ours. Our brains can't hold a hundred numbers in memory, can't visualize seven-dimensional space and perhaps can't intuitively grasp why neural information processing observed from the outside should give rise to subjective experience on the inside. This is where I place my bet, though I admit that the theory could be demolished when an unborn genius--a Darwin or Einstein of consciousness--comes up with a flabbergasting new idea that suddenly makes it all clear to us.

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

2007-01-15T22:55:45+01:00

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.

The euCognition network

2007-01-11T19:55:00+01:00

thx to Giuseppe Riva

The principal goal of the euCognition network is to leverage added-value from existing work through interaction and to use this to encourage further contributions from new participants. A key objective of the network is to foster interaction between all the many different scientific sectors involved in this multi-disciplinary area and to help create truly inter-disciplinary perspectives. The network activities will cover the four key issues of:

Outreach
Scientific Outlook
Education
On-line Resources for the Community

You can get a good idea of the goals of the network and the way it works from the euCognition website

Diigo

2006-12-28T19:48:52+01:00

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.

The future of research journals and peer-review

2006-12-23T13:45:52+01:00

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.

The future of research journals and peer-review

2006-12-15T00:25:48+01:00

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.

3D - Computer Based Pain Visualisation Tool

2006-11-29T22:07:28+01:00

Via Medgadget

Researchers from Brunel University in the UK have developed a PDA-based pain recording and monitoring system:

Brunel University today unveils the World's first computer based, three-dimensional (3D) solution for pain visualisation. The tool will help patients record their own pain, as well as providing practitioners with a way to collect information on patient experience of pain and allows greater insight into the way pain travels around the body...

The innovative pain visualisation tool is displayed via a web browser as a 3D body. Users can log pain data on an easy-to-use PDA monitor at regular intervals. Pain can be classified as: burning, aching, stabbing, pins and needles and numbness with each pain type allocated a colour, which is represented on the 3D rotating tool.

The data is collected and the pain entries can be stored and replayed over an extended period as a rotating multimedia image, providing physicians with more detailed understanding of surface pain journeys.

Brunel University today unveils the World's first computer based, three-dimensional (3D) solution for pain visualisation. The tool will help patients record their own pain, as well as providing practitioners with a way to collect information on patient experience of pain and allows greater insight into the way pain travels around the body...

The innovative pain visualisation tool is displayed via a web browser as a 3D body. Users can log pain data on an easy-to-use PDA monitor at regular intervals. Pain can be classified as: burning, aching, stabbing, pins and needles and numbness with each pain type allocated a colour, which is represented on the 3D rotating tool.

The data is collected and the pain entries can be stored and replayed over an extended period as a rotating multimedia image, providing physicians with more detailed understanding of surface pain journeys.

Link

Test yourself for synaesthesia

2006-11-22T09:26:20+01:00

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.

Artificial gut

2006-11-11T14:15:00+01:00

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

State of the Blogosphere

2006-11-10T20:16:34+01:00

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. ...

fMRI lie detection test raises ethical issues

2006-11-08T23:35:00+01:00

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.

New test superior to Mini Mental Status Examination

2006-11-06T23:00:00+01:00

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.

New Scientist tech: Web pioneers call for new 'web science' discipline

2006-11-05T22:07:25+01:00

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

The First Standardized IQ Tests Available Free on the Internet

2006-11-01T23:10:00+01:00

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 :-(

Spatio-Temporal Video Warping

2006-10-30T22:25:00+01:00

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

How many megapixels equivalent does the eye have?

2006-10-27T22:06:20+02:00

Via Cognitive Daily

Clarkvision does the calculations.

The answer: 576 megapixels!

An experimental study of the emergence of human communication systems

2006-10-26T22:10:30+02:00

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.

Web Journals Take On Peer Review

2006-10-02T17:03:48+02:00

Via Wired (Associated Press 11:47 AM Oct, 01, 2006)

LOS ANGELES - Scientists frustrated by the iron grip that academic journals hold over their research can now pursue another path to fame by taking their research straight to the public online.

Instead of having a group of hand-picked scholars review research in secret before publication, a growing number of internet-based journals are publishing studies with little or no scrutiny by the authors' peers. It's then up to rank-and-file researchers to debate the value of the work in cyberspace.

The web journals are threatening to turn the traditional peer-review system on its head. Peer review for decades has been the established way to pick apart research before it's made public.

Next month, the San Francisco-based nonprofit Public Library of Science will launch its first open peer-reviewed journal called PLoS ONE, focusing on science and medicine. Like its sister publications, it will make research articles available for free online by charging authors to publish.

Read the full story

Relevant psychology journals in new media/communication technology

2006-09-18T12:54:51+02:00

The website of University of Twente (faculty of Behavioral Sciences) has a list of relevant journals in HC/ergonomics; ISI impact factors is also provided for most of them.

The complete list can be accessed here

Portable MRI

2006-09-10T21:35:00+02:00

Via the Neurophilosopher's blog

Alexander Pines and his colleagues at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are working on a new laser-based MRI technique which may lead to the development of a cheap and compact scanning device.

The experimental technique is based on a method called atomic magnetometry, which allows to detect the magnetic signals produced by water molecules without the large magnets or complex cooling systems used in conventional fMRI.

From the LBNL website:

Alexander Pines and colleagues at Berkeley Lab have developed a method to improve NMR/MRI resolution either inside of poorly shimmed magnets or outside of portable one-sided magnet systems, which accommodate arbitrarily sized samples. This technique will enable for the first time the collection of multidimensional NMR/ MRI information in cases where on-the-spot medical diagnosis is critical, where samples cannot be moved to or placed inside of a superconducting magnet, or where inexpensive, highly inhomogeneous magnets are being used. Other ex situ systems give relaxation data and sometimes slice-selective images, but not spectra and true 3D images.

Seizure Detection Algorithm

2006-06-18T18:30:42+02:00

Via Medgadget

A New Zealand based medical device company is seeking FDA approval for their seizure detection algorithm. According to the company's press release:

The data supporting the seizure detection algorithm has been presented at multiple international medical conferences over the past 18 months. The data presented indicated that the BrainZ seizure detection algorithm had higher sensitivity, higher positive predictive value, higher correlation, and a lower level of false positive detection than two other recognized seizure detection algorithms. The latest presentation was made to the Pediatric Academic Societies' meeting in San Francisco in May 2006.

Company's technology in a nutshell:

The BRM2 Brain Monitor provides bilateral aEEG (amplitude-integrated EEG) displays to allow easy recognition of background EEG patterns, and EEG Waveform displays to show the raw EEG signal from each hemisphere.

Amplitude-integrated EEG (aEEG) provides a compressed display of the level (amplitude) of EEG activity.

It is useful for continuous monitoring of background EEG activity and for discriminating between normal and abnormal EEG traces.

Abnormal aEEG traces can be used to identify patients who require further neurological workup and investigations. Normal traces may be used to reassure families of the likelihood of good long term neurological outcome for their infant.

Studies show marked changes in the level and frequency of EEG activity after ischemic injury. These changes can be predictive of the extent of neurological deficit. The pathophysiologic EEG changes associated with brain injury evolve through latent and delayed phases, over several days. Prolonged monitoring over the first week after birth can be valuable, as normalization of aEEG recording is associated with an improved outcome compared to a persistently abnormal recording. The longer the period of monitoring the more accurately the severity of brain injury can be assessed.

Seizure activity has often been monitored by clinical assessment alone, however a large proportion of seizure activity is either difficult to assess by examination or has no clinical manifestation. Bedside monitoring with aEEG traces can be used to identify seizure-like events in real time, with review of the raw EEG trace recommended for event validation. EEG monitoring can be used to guide the affect of anticonvulsant therapy.

aEEg can also be used to help identify those patients who are most likely to benefit from new hypothermia therapies. These therapies may improve outcomes in infants exposed to hypoxic ischaemic encephalopathies.

Connotea

2006-01-09T20:15:00+01:00

Connotea is a free online reference management service for scientists. It allows storing reference list online, making them accessible from every pc, and sharing them with colleagues. Researchers with similar scientific interests can be discovered by connecting to the collections of those with similar interests

More about Connotea...

Interdisciplines

2006-01-09T20:10:00+01:00

Interdisciplines is a website for research in the social sciences, merging contributions from different fields in the humanities. One interesting feature of this site is that it allows to organize virtual conferences. The current conference is on Causality

Past conferences include very interesting topics, as mirror neurons, art and cognition, language and evolution.

Hubmed

2006-01-04T16:05:00+01:00

Hubmed is an alternative interface to the PubMed medical literature database, with some powerful features, which include:

- Daily updates of search results via web feeds.

- Quick access to searches with a Firefox search plugin or a HubMed bookmarklet (drag to your browser's bookmarks toolbar).

- Export citations in RIS, BibTeX, RDF and MODS formats, or directly to RefWorks.

- Unzip HubMed's import filter into Endnote's Filters folder for direct import into Endnote, or install the RIS Export plugin for direct import into ProCite, RefMan and older versions of Endnote.

- Use the Citation Finder to convert reference lists from PDFs into search results.

- Create lists of closely related papers using Rank Relations, then visualise and browse clusters of related papers using TouchGraph (requires Java).

- Graph occurrences of keywords in published papers over time

I have tested the service and it is really useful. The user interface is essential and very easy to use; I think it is a great way for keeping up with medical literature

Science shows streaming video presentation on this year's main breakthrough

2005-12-23T13:40:00+01:00

Science mag offers a streaming video presentation on this year's main breakthrough - it's amazing, don't miss it!

Nature focuses on computation and systems neuroscience

2005-12-07T14:05:00+01:00

Via Action Potential

The December issue of Nature Neuroscience includes a special focus on computational and systems neuroscience highlighting research presented at the Cosyne meeting held this past March in Salt Lake City.

Here is the list of contributions included in the special focus:

A natural approach to studying vision pp1643 - 1646 Gidon Felsen & Yang Dan Published online: 23 November 2005 \| doi:10.1038/nn1608 Abstract \| Full text \| PDF (108K)



In praise of artifice pp1647 - 1650 Nicole C Rust & J Anthony Movshon Published online: 23 November 2005 \| doi:10.1038/nn1606 Abstract \| Full text \| PDF (159K)



Analyzing receptive fields, classification images and functional images: challenges with opportunities for synergy pp1651 - 1656 Jonathan D Victor Published online: 23 November 2005 \| doi:10.1038/nn1607 Abstract \| Full text \| PDF (514K)

Simulating the size of the entire human brain

2005-12-06T21:30:00+01:00

Via Neurodudes

From Eugene Izhikevich’s website

On October 27, 2005 I finished simulation of a model that has the size of the human brain. The model has 100,000,000,000 neurons (hundred billion or 10^11) and almost 1,000,000,000,000,000 (one quadrillion or 10^15) synapses. It represents 300×300 mm^2 of mammalian thalamo-cortical surface, specific, non-specific, and reticular thalamic nuclei, and spiking neurons with firing properties corresponding to those recorded in the mammalian brain. The model exhibited alpha and gamma rhythms, moving clusters of neurons in up- and down-states, and other interesting phenomena (watch a 25M .avi or .mov movie). One second of simulation took 50 days on a beowulf cluster of 27 processors (3GHz each). Why did I do that?...

BrainML project

2005-11-30T23:30:00+01:00

BrainML is a developing initiative to provide a standard XML metaformat for exchanging neuroscience data. It focuses on layered definitions built over a common core in order to support community-driven extension.

One such extension is provided by the new NIH-supported neuroinformatics initiative of the Society for Neuroscience, which supports the development of expert-derived terminology sets for several areas of neuroscience. Under a cooperative agreement, these term lists will be made available Open Source.

This site provides a complete description of BrainML, and it also serves as a public repository of BrainML models.

Deliver PubMed search results with an RSS feed

2005-10-26T18:30:00+02:00

Pubmed, the service provided by the National Library of medicine that gives access to MEDLINE database and other life science journals now offers RSS feed to allow users to deliver database search results directly to their computer and retrieve new items from PubMed as soon as they are published.

To add PubMed searches to your collection of RSS feeds, just follow these steps:

(1) Run your search in PubMed.
(2) Select RSS Feed from the Send to menu.
(3) Click Create Feed and copy the XML icon into your RSS Reader.

Knowledge management software for neuroscientists

2005-10-19T15:20:00+02:00

Via Neurodudes

Neuroscholar is a KM software application for neuroscientists, which allows to store and annotate primary research data in conjunction with information from the literature (below a preview of the program's graphical user interface).

More to explore

The Neuroscholar demo can be accessed here.

The Neuroscholar source code can be downloaded from here.

Burns, G. A. (2001). Knowledge management of the neuroscientific literature: the data model and underlying strategy of the NeuroScholar system. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 356(1412): 1187-208.

Burns, G., K. Stephan, B. Ludäscher, A. Gupta and R. Kötter (2001). Towards a federated neuroscientific knowledge management system using brain atlases. Neurocomputing 38-40: 1633-1641.

The Whole Brain Atlas

2005-10-11T17:25:00+02:00

The Whole Brain Atlas has been awarded the Scientific American Science and Technology Web Awards 2005

The site is an information resource for central nervous system imaging which integrates clinical information with magnetic resonance (MR), x-ray computed tomography (CT), and nuclear medicine images. The site presents high-resolution images of various types of strokes, tumors, degenerative disorders and infectious diseases as they affect the brain over time.

Another award has gone to Mind Hacks, a blog that reports on the latest developments in neuroscience, taking a fun approach to dissemination.

Open-Source Context-Aware Experience Sampling Tool

2005-09-24T10:00:00+02:00

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) systems can be viewed as environments in which people will increasingly live their lives. Ubiquitous AmI technologies and systems like personal digital assistants, wearable sensors, mobile phones challenge traditional usability evaluation methods, because use context can be difficult to recreate in a laboratory setting. This view suggests that the evaluation of user’s experience with AmI systems should take place in realistic contexts, such the workplace, the home, etc. Another issue has to do with the content of the evaluation. Performance-based approaches are not suitable for AmI systems, because it is difficult to specify tasks that capture the complexity of real world activities. Moreover, experience is idiosyncratic, in that it is related to the specific bio-cultural configuration of each individual, and it can undergo changes throughout individual life and daily situations.

The Experience Sampling Method (ESM) offers a new perspective in the analysis of these issues. ESM is based on the online repeated assessment of individual behavior and experience in the daily context. Participants describe themselves and their environment while interacting with it. They carry with them for one week an electronic beeper and a booklet of self-report forms. Whenever they receive an acoustic signal, they are expected to fill out a form. The form contains open-ended questions about situational variables such as place, activities carried out, social context, and subjective variables such as the content of thought, perceived goals, and physical conditions. The form also contains 0-12 Likert-type scales investigating the quality of experience in its various components: affect, motivation, activation, and cognitive efficiency.

Intille and colleagues at MIT have recently developed a Personal Digital Assistant-based version of the ESM which can be used for user-interface development and assessment of ubiquitous computing applications. This approach, called Context-Aware Experience Sampling, includes the possibility to assess user’s experience not only through the standard time-based protocol, but also according to the participant’s location, by means of information provided by a GPS plug-in. Thus, researchers can design experiments collecting self-reports only when the participant is near a location of interest. Moreover, users can answers via audio recording or by taking a picture with a camera.

More to explore

S. S. Intille, J. Rondoni, C. Kukla, I. Ancona, L. Bao, A context-aware experience sampling tool, CHI Extended Abstracts 2003, 972-973.

Gaggioli, A., Optimal Experience in Ambient Intelligence (2005), in Ambient Intelligence, Riva, G., Vatalaro, F., Davide, F., Alcañiz, M. (Eds.), Amsterdam: IOS Press. PDF

International Journal of Human-Computer Studies - Special issue on computer support for creativity

2005-09-09T11:15:00+02:00

October issues (4-5, Pages 363-536) of the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies focus on the different ways that computers can be involved in creative work.

The journal covers research in computing, artificial intelligence, psychology, linguistics, communication, design, engineering, and social organization, which is relevant to the design, analysis, evaluation and application of innovative interactive systems.

The Blue Brain Project

2005-09-07T10:55:00+02:00

The “Blue Brain” project, a collaboration between IBM and the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), aims to create the first computer simulation of the circuitry in the neocortex, which is the largest and most complex part of the human brain, down to the molecular level.

For the project, IBM will use the latest installation of IBM's BlueGene/L system running on Linux. EPFL's supercomputer uses 8.000 CPUs and has a peak speed of 22.8 teraflops (22.8 trillion calculations every second) putting it among the the world's top 15 supercomputers. The simulation code will be based on NeoCortical Simulator, an open source software running on Linux developed by Dr. Philip Goodman's.

Using the digital model generated by Blue Brain, scientists hope to shed light on complex cognitive processes such as thought, perception and memory, and to understand more about mechanisms responsible of brain malfunction.

More to explore

IBM Research Blue Gene Project Page

Faculty psychologist job position at Emory using VR

2005-07-26T17:10:00+02:00

Via VRPsych list

Faculty Psychologist - Emory University School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences announces a full time assistant professor position. Job duties include working on an NIMH-funded study exploring medication and virtual reality exposure therapy, administering CBT, program development, and supervision. Requirements: doctoral degree, APA approved internship, CBT experience, supervised postdoctoral year, and Georgia licensed or license eligible.

Application deadline 9/1/05 or until filled.

Send CV, letter of interest, publications, and 4 letters of recommendation to Barbara O. Rothbaum, Ph.D., ABPP, Psychiatry, The Emory Clinic, 1365 Clifton Rd, Atlanta, GA 30322.