How children learn to understand language meanings: a neural model of adult-child multimodal interactions in real-time.

This article describes a biological neural network model that can be used to explain how children learn to understand language meanings about the perceptual and affective events that they consciously experience. This kind of learning often occurs when a child interacts with an adult teacher to learn language meanings about events that they experience together. Multiple types of self-organizing brain processes are involved in learning language meanings, including processes that control conscious visual perception, joint attention, object learning and conscious recognition, cognitive working memory, cognitive planning, emotion, cognitive-emotional interactions, volition, and goal-oriented actions.

Acute organophosphorus toxicity in a regional hospital in Johannesburg, South Africa: A retrospective chart review.

Introduction: Intentional and accidental organophosphorus exposures pose a significant healthcare-related burden on South African communities. This study will review the demographics, characteristics and clinical course of patients presenting with features of acute organophosphorus toxicity to a regional Emergency Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Methods: This was a retrospective chart review of all patients treated for possible acute organophosphorus toxicity from January 2020 to August 2021.

Toward Understanding the Brain Dynamics of Music: Learning and Conscious Performance of Lyrics and Melodies With Variable Rhythms and Beats.

A neural network architecture models how humans learn and consciously perform musical lyrics and melodies with variable rhythms and beats, using brain design principles and mechanisms that evolved earlier than human musical capabilities, and that have explained and predicted many kinds of psychological and neurobiological data. One principle is called : Working memories store sequential information in a rate-invariant and speaker-invariant way to avoid using excessive memory and to support learning of language, spatial, and motor skills. Stored invariant representations can be flexibly performed in a rate-dependent and speaker-dependent way under volitional control.

The negative appendicectomy rate at Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital - a 10-year review.

Background: The negative appendicectomy rate (NAR) is defined as the proportion of surgically removed appendices that are pathologically normal. The acceptable NAR has been a debated issue. Previously, a higher rate was accepted, whilst newer thinking favours a lower rate.

Rabies as a Potential Cause of Mass Mortality Events in North American Bat Species.

Rabies-association bat mortality events are rarely reported, suggesting that rabies is not a significant cause of bat mass mortality. Three bat die-offs in National Park Service units were attributed to rabies, highlighting the value of including rabies, and rabies virus strain spillover events, as a differential in mass mortality events.

A Neural Model of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Hippocampal Theta Rhythms: Anatomy, Neurophysiology, and Function.

This article describes a neural model of the anatomy, neurophysiology, and functions of intrinsic and extrinsic theta rhythms in the brains of multiple species. Topics include how theta rhythms were discovered; how theta rhythms organize brain information processing into temporal series of spatial patterns; how distinct theta rhythms occur within area CA1 of the hippocampus and between the septum and area CA3 of the hippocampus; what functions theta rhythms carry out in different brain regions, notably CA1-supported functions like learning, recognition, and memory that involve visual, cognitive, and emotional processes; how spatial navigation, adaptively timed learning, and category learning interact with hippocampal theta rhythms; how parallel cortical streams through the lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC) and the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) represent the end-points of the What cortical stream for perception and cognition and the Where cortical stream for spatial representation and action; how the neuromodulator acetylcholine interacts with the septo-hippocampal theta rhythm and modulates category learning; what functions are carried out by other brain rhythms, such as gamma and beta oscillations; and how gamma and beta oscillations interact with theta rhythms. Multiple experimental facts about theta rhythms are unified and functionally explained by this theoretical synthesis.

A Canonical Laminar Neocortical Circuit Whose Bottom-Up, Horizontal, and Top-Down Pathways Control Attention, Learning, and Prediction.

All perceptual and cognitive circuits in the human cerebral cortex are organized into layers. Specializations of a canonical laminar network of bottom-up, horizontal, and top-down pathways carry out multiple kinds of biological intelligence across different neocortical areas. This article describes what this canonical network is and notes that it can support processes as different as 3D vision and figure-ground perception; attentive category learning and decision-making; speech perception; and cognitive working memory (WM), planning, and prediction.

Attention: Multiple types, brain resonances, psychological functions, and conscious states.

This article describes neural models of attention. Since attention is not a disembodied process, the article explains how brain processes of consciousness, learning, expectation, attention, resonance, and synchrony interact. These processes show how attention plays a critical role in dynamically stabilizing perceptual and cognitive learning throughout our lives.

A Unified Neural Theory of Conscious Seeing, Hearing, Feeling, and Knowing.

Adaptive Resonance Theory does more than satisfy 'hard criteria' for ToCs.

Colchicine overdose: A South African experience, a case report.

Introduction: Colchicine overdose is uncommon but is associated with a high mortality rate. It has a narrow therapeutic index and has been described to have a 100% mortality with ingestion of >0.8 mg/kg (Finkelstein et al.

A Path Toward Explainable AI and Autonomous Adaptive Intelligence: Deep Learning, Adaptive Resonance, and Models of Perception, Emotion, and Action.

Biological neural network models whereby brains make minds help to understand autonomous adaptive intelligence. This article summarizes why the dynamics and emergent properties of such models for perception, cognition, emotion, and action are explainable, and thus amenable to being confidently implemented in large-scale applications. Key to their explainability is how these models combine fast activations, or short-term memory (STM) traces, and learned weights, or long-term memory (LTM) traces.

Use of the OVESCO OTSC Proctology Clip for closure of fistula-in-ano at Wits Donald Gordon Medical Centre - a single centre experience.

Background: Definitive closure of fistula-in-ano poses an ongoing surgical challenge. The OVESCO OTSC Proctology Clip (proctology clip) purports to offer improved preservation of the anal sphincter whilst at the same time curing the fistula by closure.

Methods: A retrospective record review was conducted for patients who received the proctology clip as part of the management of fistula-in-ano in the Colorectal Unit at Wits Donald Gordon Medical Centre (WDGMC).

Developmental Designs and Adult Functions of Cortical Maps in Multiple Modalities: Perception, Attention, Navigation, Numbers, Streaming, Speech, and Cognition.

This article unifies neural modeling results that illustrate several basic design principles and mechanisms that are used by advanced brains to develop cortical maps with multiple psychological functions. One principle concerns how brains use a that simultaneously enables one feature to be represented throughout its extent, as well as an ordered array of another feature at different positions of the strip. Strip maps include circuits to represent ocular dominance and orientation columns, place-value numbers, auditory streams, speaker-normalized speech, and cognitive working memories that can code repeated items.

The Embodied Brain of SOVEREIGN2: From Space-Variant Conscious Percepts During Visual Search and Navigation to Learning Invariant Object Categories and Cognitive-Emotional Plans for Acquiring Valued Goals.

This article develops a model of how reactive and planned behaviors interact in real time. Controllers for both animals and animats need reactive mechanisms for exploration, and learned plans to efficiently reach goal objects once an environment becomes familiar. The SOVEREIGN model embodied these capabilities, and was tested in a 3D virtual reality environment.

The resonant brain: How attentive conscious seeing regulates action sequences that interact with attentive cognitive learning, recognition, and prediction.

This article describes mechanistic links that exist in advanced brains between processes that regulate conscious attention, seeing, and knowing, and those that regulate looking and reaching. These mechanistic links arise from basic properties of brain design principles such as complementary computing, hierarchical resolution of uncertainty, and adaptive resonance. These principles require conscious states to mark perceptual and cognitive representations that are complete, context sensitive, and stable enough to control effective actions.

Desirability, availability, credit assignment, category learning, and attention: Cognitive-emotional and working memory dynamics of orbitofrontal, ventrolateral, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices.

Background: The prefrontal cortices play an essential role in cognitive-emotional and working memory processes through interactions with multiple brain regions.

Methods: This article further develops a unified neural architecture that explains many recent and classical data about prefrontal function and makes testable predictions.

Results: Prefrontal properties of desirability, availability, credit assignment, category learning, and feature-based attention are explained.

Neural Dynamics of Autistic Repetitive Behaviors and Fragile X Syndrome: Basal Ganglia Movement Gating and mGluR-Modulated Adaptively Timed Learning.

This article develops the iSTART neural model that proposes how specific imbalances in cognitive, emotional, timing, and motor processes that involve brain regions like prefrontal cortex, temporal cortex, amygdala, hypothalamus, hippocampus, and cerebellum may interact together to cause behavioral symptoms of autism. These imbalances include underaroused emotional depression in the amygdala/hypothalamus, learning of hyperspecific recognition categories that help to cause narrowly focused attention in temporal and prefrontal cortices, and breakdowns of adaptively timed motivated attention and motor circuits in the hippocampus and cerebellum. The article expands the model's explanatory range by, first, explaining recent data about Fragile X syndrome (FXS), mGluR, and trace conditioning; and, second, by explaining distinct causes of stereotyped behaviors in individuals with autism.

Acetylcholine Neuromodulation in Normal and Abnormal Learning and Memory: Vigilance Control in Waking, Sleep, Autism, Amnesia and Alzheimer's Disease.

Adaptive Resonance Theory, or ART, is a neural model that explains how normal and abnormal brains may learn to categorize and recognize objects and events in a changing world, and how these learned categories may be remembered for a long time. This article uses ART to propose and unify the explanation of diverse data about normal and abnormal modulation of learning and memory by acetylcholine (ACh). In ART, determines whether learned categories will be general and abstract, or specific and concrete.

Towards solving the hard problem of consciousness: The varieties of brain resonances and the conscious experiences that they support.

The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining how we experience qualia or phenomenal experiences, such as seeing, hearing, and feeling, and knowing what they are. To solve this problem, a theory of consciousness needs to link brain to mind by modeling how emergent properties of several brain mechanisms interacting together embody detailed properties of individual conscious psychological experiences. This article summarizes evidence that Adaptive Resonance Theory, or ART, accomplishes this goal.

A neural model of normal and abnormal learning and memory consolidation: adaptively timed conditioning, hippocampus, amnesia, neurotrophins, and consciousness.

How do the hippocampus and amygdala interact with thalamocortical systems to regulate cognitive and cognitive-emotional learning? Why do lesions of thalamus, amygdala, hippocampus, and cortex have differential effects depending on the phase of learning when they occur? In particular, why is the hippocampus typically needed for trace conditioning, but not delay conditioning, and what do the exceptions reveal? Why do amygdala lesions made before or immediately after training decelerate conditioning while those made later do not? Why do thalamic or sensory cortical lesions degrade trace conditioning more than delay conditioning? Why do hippocampal lesions during trace conditioning experiments degrade recent but not temporally remote learning? Why do orbitofrontal cortical lesions degrade temporally remote but not recent or post-lesion learning? How is temporally graded amnesia caused by ablation of prefrontal cortex after memory consolidation? How are attention and consciousness linked during conditioning? How do neurotrophins, notably brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), influence memory formation and consolidation? Is there a common output path for learned performance? A neural model proposes a unified answer to these questions that overcome problems of alternative memory models.

Phoneme restoration and empirical coverage of Interactive Activation and Adaptive Resonance models of human speech processing.

Magnuson [J. Acoust. Soc.

Realizing the Now-or-Never bottleneck and Chunk-and-Pass processing with Item-Order-Rank working memories and masking field chunking networks.

Christiansen & Chater's (C&C's) key goals for a language system have been realized by neural models for short-term storage of linguistic items in an Item-Order-Rank working memory, which inputs to Masking Fields that rapidly learn to categorize, or chunk, variable-length linguistic sequences, and choose the contextually most predictive list chunks while linguistic inputs are stored in the working memory.

Neural Computation of Surface Border Ownership and Relative Surface Depth from Ambiguous Contrast Inputs.

The segregation of image parts into foreground and background is an important aspect of the neural computation of 3D scene perception. To achieve such segregation, the brain needs information about border ownership; that is, the belongingness of a contour to a specific surface represented in the image. This article presents psychophysical data derived from 3D percepts of figure and ground that were generated by presenting 2D images composed of spatially disjoint shapes that pointed inward or outward relative to the continuous boundaries that they induced along their collinear edges.

Cortical Dynamics of Figure-Ground Separation in Response to 2D Pictures and 3D Scenes: How V2 Combines Border Ownership, Stereoscopic Cues, and Gestalt Grouping Rules.

The FACADE model, and its laminar cortical realization and extension in the 3D LAMINART model, have explained, simulated, and predicted many perceptual and neurobiological data about how the visual cortex carries out 3D vision and figure-ground perception, and how these cortical mechanisms enable 2D pictures to generate 3D percepts of occluding and occluded objects. In particular, these models have proposed how border ownership occurs, but have not yet explicitly explained the correlation between multiple properties of border ownership neurons in cortical area V2 that were reported in a remarkable series of neurophysiological experiments by von der Heydt and his colleagues; namely, border ownership, contrast preference, binocular stereoscopic information, selectivity for side-of-figure, Gestalt rules, and strength of attentional modulation, as well as the time course during which such properties arise. This article shows how, by combining 3D LAMINART properties that were discovered in two parallel streams of research, a unified explanation of these properties emerges.