Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences最新文献

Eye movements have been extensively studied with respect to visual stimulation. However, we live in a multisensory world, and how the eyes are driven by other senses has been explored much less. Here, we review the evidence on how audition can trigger and drive different eye responses and which cortical and subcortical neural correlates are involved. We provide an overview on how different types of sounds, from simple tones and noise bursts to spatially localized sounds and complex linguistic stimuli, influence saccades, microsaccades, smooth pursuit, pupil dilation, and eye blinks. The reviewed evidence reveals how the auditory system interacts with the oculomotor system, both behaviorally and neurally, and how this differs from visually driven eye responses. Some evidence points to multisensory interaction, and potential multisensory integration, but the underlying computational and neural mechanisms are still unclear. While there are marked differences in how the eyes respond to auditory compared to visual stimuli, many aspects of auditory-evoked eye responses remain underexplored, and we summarize the key open questions for future research.

We consider the theory of a light conformally coupled scalar field, that is, one that is coupled directly to the Ricci scalar of the gravitational sector. This theory can be written equivalently as one of a light scalar that is coupled to the Standard Model of particle physics with a particular combination of Higgs-portal couplings. When the conformal coupling function contains terms that are linear and quadratic in the conformally coupled scalar, we find that the effective mass of the light propagating mode and its coupling to matter fields, obtained after expanding around a minimum of the classical potential, depend on the energy density of the background environment. This is despite the absence of nonlinear terms in the original equation of motion for the light conformally coupled field. Instead, we find that the nonlinearities of the prototype Higgs potential are communicated to the light mode. In this way, we present a novel realization of screening mechanisms, in which light degrees of freedom coupled to the Standard Model are able to avoid experimental constraints through environmental and thin-shell effects.

Many herbivorous insects have specific host–plant preferences, and it is unclear how these preferences evolved. Previously, we found that Bicyclus anynana larvae can learn to prefer novel food odors from eating leaves with those odors and transmit those learned preferences to the next generation. It is uncertain whether such acquired odor preferences can increase across generations of repeated odor feeding and be maintained even in the absence of odor. In this study, we fed larvae with novel banana odor-coated leaves (odor-fed larvae) for five consecutive generations, without selection on behavioral choices, and measured how larval innate preferences changed over time. Then, we removed the odor stimulus from a larval subgroup, while the other group continued to be odor-fed. Our results show that larvae learned to prefer the novel odor within a generation of odor feeding and transmitted the learned preference to the next generation, as previously found. Odor-fed larvae preferred odor significantly more compared to control larvae across five generations of repeated odor or control feeding. However, this led neither to increased odor preference, nor its stabilization. This suggests that when butterfly larvae feed on a new host, a preference for that novel food plant may develop and be transmitted to the next generation, but this preference lasts for a single generation and disappears once the odor stimulus is removed.

This study aimed to examine the impact of diabetes and hypertension on retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) thickness components. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) measurements do not consider blood vessel contribution, which this study addressed. We hypothesized that diabetes and/or hypertension would lead to thinner RNFL versus controls due to the vascular component. OCT angiography was used to measure the RNFL in 121 controls, 50 diabetes patients, 371 hypertension patients, and 177 diabetes patients with hypertension. A novel technique separated the RNFL thickness into original (vascular component) and corrected (no vascular component) measurements. Diabetes-only (98 ± 1.7 µm; p = 0.002) and diabetes with hypertension (99 ± 0.8 µm; p = 0.001) patients had thinner original RNFL versus controls (102 ± 0.8 µm). No difference was seen between hypertension-only patients (101 ± 0.5 µm; p = 0.083) and controls. After removing the blood vessel component, diabetes/hypertension groups had thinner corrected RNFL versus controls (p = 0.024). Discrepancies in diabetes/hypertension patients were due to thicker retinal blood vessels within the RNFL thickness (p = 0.002). Our findings suggest that diabetes and/or hypertension independently contribute to neurodegenerative thinning of the RNFL, even in the absence of retinopathy. The differentiation of neuronal and vascular components in RNFL thickness measurements provided by the novel technique highlights the importance of considering vascular changes in individuals with these conditions.

Throughout the history of occupational health risk control, ventilation has been implemented widely as a tried-and-true method to reduce exposure intensity to airborne contaminants. Proper determination of the ventilation rate merits careful consideration when addressing concerns directed toward occupational health and indoor air quality in commercial buildings, albeit this does not translate well among the current engineering and scientific community. This article aims to facilitate a better understanding and proper determination of ventilation rates as a countermeasure for occupational health risk control. To that end, guidance is provided to select the appropriate ventilation rate for nonpandemic versus pandemic scenarios in terms of pertinent regulatory/professional codes and mathematical modeling tools. Limitations and assumptions of the models are summarized to facilitate proper application. Furthermore, the emerging DNA-based aerosol tracing technology, which helps to verify ventilation efficacy, is discussed.

We consider issues related to the effect of climate change on the persistence of (trend-corrected) temperatures using global gridded data for both land and oceans. We first discuss how the presence of trends and additive noise affects inference about persistence. Ignoring a trend induces an upward bias, while not accounting for noise induces a downward bias. We show that the increase in persistence in the commonly used Warm Spell Duration Index is simply an artifact of increasing temperatures. To purge the impact of both trends and noise, we adopt a simple state-space model. Of separate interest, we document a much larger noise component for land than for oceans. The estimates of the persistence are much larger for oceans than for land. Inspection of the estimates across various subsamples and the application of tests for structural changes suggest the same pattern of persistence for both land and oceans across time, with few minor exceptions. Hence, our results show that surface temperature persistence has remained constant during the observed period.

Occam's razor—the principle of simplicity—has recently been attacked as a cultural bias without rational foundation. Increasingly, belief in pseudoscience and mysticism is growing. I argue that inclusion of Occam's razor is an essential factor that distinguishes science from superstition and pseudoscience. I also describe how the razor is embedded in Bayesian inference and argue that science is primarily the means to discover the simplest descriptions of our world.

Music and psychedelics have been intertwined throughout the existence of Homo sapiens, from the early shamanic rituals of the Americas and Africa to the modern use of psychedelic-assisted therapy for a variety of mental health conditions. Across such settings, music has been highly prized for its ability to guide the psychedelic experience. Here, we examine the interplay between music and psychedelics, starting by describing their association with the brain's functional hierarchy that is relied upon for music perception and its psychedelic-induced manipulation, as well as an exploration of the limited research on their mechanistic neural overlap. We explore music's role in Western psychedelic therapy and the use of music in indigenous psychedelic rituals, with a specific focus on ayahuasca and the Santo Daime Church. Furthermore, we explore work relating to the evolution and onset of music and psychedelic use. Finally, we consider music's potential to lead to altered states of consciousness in the absence of psychedelics as well as the development of psychedelic music. Here, we provide an overview of several perspectives on the interaction between psychedelic use and music—a topic with growing interest given increasing excitement relating to the therapeutic efficacy of psychedelic interventions.

Why is the empirical evidence for birth-order effects on human psychology so inconsistent? In contrast to the influential view that competitive dynamics among siblings permanently shape a person's personality, we find evidence that these effects are limited to the family environment. We tested this context-specific learning hypothesis in the domain of risk taking, using two large survey datasets from Germany (SOEP, n = 19,994) and the United States (NLSCYA, n = 29,627) to examine birth-order effects on risk-taking propensity across a wide age range. Specification-curve analyses of a sample of 49,621 observations showed that birth-order effects are prevalent in children aged 10–13 years, but that they decline with age and disappear by middle adulthood. The methodological approach shows the effect is robust. We thus replicate and extend previous work in which we showed no birth-order effects on adult risk taking. We conclude that family dynamics cause birth-order effects on risk taking but that these effects fade as siblings transition out of the home.

Faces are among the most important visual stimuli that humans perceive in everyday life. While extensive literature has examined emotional processing and social evaluations of faces, most studies have examined either topic using unimodal approaches. In this review, we promote the use of multimodal cognitive neuroscience approaches to study these processes, using two lines of research as examples: ambiguity in facial expressions of emotion and social trait judgment of faces. In the first set of studies, we identified an event-related potential that signals emotion ambiguity using electroencephalography and we found convergent neural responses to emotion ambiguity using functional neuroimaging and single-neuron recordings. In the second set of studies, we discuss how different neuroimaging and personality-dimensional approaches together provide new insights into social trait judgments of faces. In both sets of studies, we provide an in-depth comparison between neurotypicals and people with autism spectrum disorder. We offer a computational account for the behavioral and neural markers of the different facial processing between the two groups. Finally, we suggest new practices for studying the emotional processing and social evaluations of faces. All data discussed in the case studies of this review are publicly available.