The influence of a walk in nature on human resting brain activity: a randomized controlled trial.

Behavioral studies suggest that immersion in nature improves affect and executive attention. However, the neural mechanisms underlying these benefits remain unclear. This randomized controlled trial (N = 92) explored differences in self-reported affect and in frontal midline theta (FMθ), a neural oscillation linked to executive attention, between a 40-min, low-intensity nature walk and an urban walk of comparable time and distance-controlling for ambient temperature, humidity, elevation change, walking pace, heart rate, calories burned, and moving time between the two groups.

Reliable but multi-dimensional cognitive demand in operating partially automated vehicles: implications for real-world automation research.

The reliability of cognitive demand measures in controlled laboratory settings is well-documented; however, limited research has directly established their stability under real-life and high-stakes conditions, such as operating automated technology on actual highways. Partially automated vehicles have advanced to become an everyday mode of transportation, and research on driving these advanced vehicles requires reliable tools for evaluating the cognitive demand on motorists to sustain optimal engagement in the driving process. This study examined the reliability of five cognitive demand measures, while participants operated partially automated vehicles on real roads across four occasions.

Automated driving experiences, attention, and intentions following extensive on-road usage of a level 2 automation vehicle.

Introduction: An on-road study was conducted to examine the effects of level 2 automation on the stressfulness and enjoyment of driving and driving attention following prolonged usage. The study also examined the changes in the automated driving experience and attention over time as well as important predictors such as pre-driving trust in technology and attitudes toward automated systems.

Method: Motorists who had never used automated systems drove a level 2 automation vehicle for a 6-8 week period.

Bending the curve of global freshwater biodiversity loss: what are the prospects?

Freshwater biodiversity conservation has received substantial attention in the scientific literature and is finally being recognized in policy frameworks such as the Global Biodiversity Framework and its associated targets for 2030. This is important progress. Nonetheless, freshwater species continue to be confronted with high levels of imperilment and widespread ecosystem degradation.

Multitasking Induced Contextual Blindness.

Objective: To examine the impact of secondary task performance on contextual blindness arising from the suppression and masking of temporal and spatial sequence learning.

Background: Dual-task scenarios can lead to a diminished ability to use environmental cues to guide attention, a phenomenon that is related to multitasking-induced inattentional blindness. This research aims to extend the theoretical understanding of how secondary tasks can impair attention and memory processes in sequence learning and access.

Immersion in nature enhances neural indices of executive attention.

There is conjecture that our modern urban environments place high demand on our attentional resources, which can become depleted over time and cause mental fatigue. Natural environments, on the other hand, are thought to provide relief from this demand and allow our resources to be replenished. While these claims have been assessed with self-report and behavioral measures, there is limited understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying these attentional benefits.

Driver behavior while using Level 2 vehicle automation: a hybrid naturalistic study.

Vehicle automation is becoming more prevalent. Understanding how drivers use this technology and its safety implications is crucial. In a 6-8 week naturalistic study, we leveraged a hybrid naturalistic driving research design to evaluate driver behavior with Level 2 vehicle automation, incorporating unique naturalistic and experimental control conditions.

This Is Your Brain on Autopilot 2.0: The Influence of Practice on Driver Workload and Engagement During On-Road, Partially Automated Driving.

Objective: This on-road study employed behavioral and neurophysiological measurement techniques to assess the influence of six weeks of practice driving a Level 2 partially automated vehicle on driver workload and engagement.

Background: Level 2 partial automation requires a driver to maintain supervisory control of the vehicle to detect "edge cases" that the automation is not equipped to handle. There is mixed evidence regarding whether drivers can do so effectively.

Vigilance Decrement During On-Road Partially Automated Driving Across Four Systems.

Objective: This study uses a detection task to measure changes in driver vigilance when operating four different partially automated systems.

Background: Research show temporal declines in detection task performance during manual and fully automated driving, but the accuracy of using this approach for measuring changes in driver vigilance during on-road partially automated driving is yet unproven.

Method: Participants drove four different vehicles (Tesla Model 3, Cadillac CT6, Volvo XC90, and Nissan Rogue) equipped with level-2 systems in manual and partially automated modes.

To err is human- to understand error-processing is divine: Contributions of working memory and anxiety to error-related brain and pupil responses.

Both anxiety and working memory capacity appear to predict increased (more negative) error-related negativity (ERN) amplitudes, despite being inversely related to one another. Until the interactive effects of these variables on the ERN are clarified, there may be challenges posed to our ability to use the ERN as an endophenotype for anxiety, as some have suggested. The compensatory error monitoring hypothesis suggests that high trait-anxiety individuals have larger ERN amplitudes because they must employ extra, compensatory efforts to override the working memory demands of their anxiety.

Updating the relationship of the Ne/ERN to task-related behavior: A brief review and suggestions for future research.

The error negativity/error-related negativity (Ne/ERN) is one of the most well-studied event-related potential (ERP) components in the electroencephalography (EEG) literature. Peaking about 50 ms after the commission of an error, the Ne/ERN is a negative deflection in the ERP waveform that is thought to reflect error processing in the brain. While its relationships to trait constructs such as anxiety are well-documented, there is still little known about how the Ne/ERN may subsequently influence task-related behavior.

Measuring affect and complex working memory in natural and urban environments.

Introduction: Research suggests that spending time in natural environments is associated with cognitive and affective benefits, while increased use of technology and time spent in urban environments are associated with depletion of cognitive resources and an increasing prevalence of mental illness. Attention Restoration Theory suggests that exposure to natural environments can restore depleted attentional resources and thereby improve cognitive functioning and mood. Specifically, recent meta-analyses have revealed that the most improved cognitive abilities after nature exposure include selective attention, working memory, and cognitive flexibility.

Ebola virus disease: In vivo protection provided by the PAMP restricted TLR3 agonist rintatolimod and its mechanism of action.

Ebola virus (EBOV) is a highly infectious and lethal pathogen responsible for sporadic self-limiting clusters of Ebola virus disease (EVD) in Central Africa capable of reaching epidemic status. 100% protection from lethal EBOV-Zaire in Balb/c mice was achieved by rintatolimod (Ampligen) at the well tolerated human clinical dose of 6 mg/kg. The data indicate that the mechanism of action is rintatolimod's dual ability to act as both a competitive decoy for the IID domain of VP35 blocking viral dsRNA sequestration and as a pathogen-associated molecular pattern (PAMP) restricted agonist for direct TLR3 activation but lacking RIG-1-like cytosolic helicase agonist properties.

Freshwater mussel conservation: A global horizon scan of emerging threats and opportunities.

We identified 14 emerging and poorly understood threats and opportunities for addressing the global conservation of freshwater mussels over the next decade. A panel of 17 researchers and stakeholders from six continents submitted a total of 56 topics that were ranked and prioritized using a consensus-building Delphi technique. Our 14 priority topics fell into five broad themes (autecology, population dynamics, global stressors, global diversity, and ecosystem services) and included understanding diets throughout mussel life history; identifying the drivers of population declines; defining metrics for quantifying mussel health; assessing the role of predators, parasites, and disease; informed guidance on the risks and opportunities for captive breeding and translocations; the loss of mussel-fish co-evolutionary relationships; assessing the effects of increasing surface water changes; understanding the effects of sand and aggregate mining; understanding the effects of drug pollution and other emerging contaminants such as nanomaterials; appreciating the threats and opportunities arising from river restoration; conserving understudied hotspots by building local capacity through the principles of decolonization; identifying appropriate taxonomic units for conservation; improved quantification of the ecosystem services provided by mussels; and understanding how many mussels are enough to provide these services.

Dynamic workload measurement and modeling: Driving and conversing.

Tillman et al. (2017) used evidence-accumulation modeling to ascertain the effects of a conversation (either with a passenger or on a hands-free cell phone) on a drivers' mental workload. They found that a concurrent conversation increased the response threshold but did not alter the rate of evidence accumulation.

The persistence of distraction: The hidden costs of intermittent multitasking.

We examined the hidden costs of intermittent multitasking. Participants performed a pursuit-tracking task (Experiment 1) or drove in a high-fidelity driving simulator (Experiment 2) by itself or while concurrently performing an easy or difficult backwards counting task that periodically started and stopped, creating on-task and off-task multitasking epochs. A novel application of the Detection Response Task (DRT), a standardized protocol for measuring cognitive workload (ISO 17488, 2016), was used to measure performance in the on-task and off-task intervals.

A cognitive model of response omissions in distraction paradigms.

The effects of distraction on responses manifest in three ways: prolonged reaction times, and increased error and response omission rates. However, the latter effect is often ignored or assumed to be due to a separate cognitive process. We investigated omissions occurring in two paradigms that manipulated distraction.

This Is Your Brain on Autopilot: Neural Indices of Driver Workload and Engagement During Partial Vehicle Automation.

Objective: This research explores the effect of partial vehicle automation on neural indices of mental workload and visual engagement during on-road driving.

Background: There is concern that the introduction of automated technology in vehicles may lead to low driver stimulation and subsequent disengagement from the driving environment. Simulator-based studies have examined the effect of automation on a driver's cognitive state, but it is unknown how the conclusions translate to on-road driving.

No Difference in Arousal or Cognitive Demands Between Manual and Partially Automated Driving: A Multi-Method On-Road Study.

Introduction: Partial driving automation is not always reliable and requires that drivers maintain readiness to take over control and manually operate the vehicle. Little is known about differences in drivers' arousal and cognitive demands under partial automation and how it may make it difficult for drivers to transition from automated to manual modes. This research examined whether there are differences in drivers' arousal and cognitive demands during manual versus partial automation driving.

Real-time prediction of short-timescale fluctuations in cognitive workload.

Human operators often experience large fluctuations in cognitive workload over seconds timescales that can lead to sub-optimal performance, ranging from overload to neglect. Adaptive automation could potentially address this issue, but to do so it needs to be aware of real-time changes in operators' spare cognitive capacity, so it can provide help in times of peak demand and take advantage of troughs to elicit operator engagement. However, it is unclear whether rapid changes in task demands are reflected in similarly rapid fluctuations in spare capacity, and if so what aspects of responses to those demands are predictive of the current level of spare capacity.

Effect of disease duration in a randomized Phase III trial of rintatolimod, an immune modulator for Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

Background: Rintatolimod is a selective TLR3 agonist, which has demonstrated clinical activity for ME/CFS in Phase II and Phase III double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized, multi-site clinical trials.

Methods And Findings: A hypothesis-based post-hoc analysis of the Intent to Treat (ITT) population diagnosed with ME/CFS from 12 independent clinical sites of a Phase III trial was performed to evaluate the effect of rintatolimod therapy based on disease duration. The clinical activity of rintatolimod was evaluated by exercise treadmill tolerance (ETT) using a modified Bruce protocol.

Resting-state posterior alpha power changes with prolonged exposure in a natural environment.

Exposure to environments that contain natural features can benefit mood, cognition, and physiological responses. Previous research proposed exposure to nature restores voluntary attention - attention that is directed towards a task through top down control. Voluntary attention is limited in capacity and depletes with use.

The autonomic nervous system in its natural environment: Immersion in nature is associated with changes in heart rate and heart rate variability.

Stress Recovery Theory (SRT) suggests that time spent in nature reduces stress. While many studies have examined changes in stress physiology after exposure to nature imagery, nature virtual reality, or nature walks, this study is the first to examine changes in heart rate (HR) and vagally mediated HR variability, as assessed by Respiratory Sinus Arrythmia (RSA), after a longer duration of nature exposure. Consistent with SRT, we hypothesized that immersion in nature would promote stress recovery, as indexed by an increase in RSA and a decrease in HR.