Prospective analysis of early lapse to drinking and smoking among individuals in concurrent alcohol and tobacco treatment.

The aims of the current study were to examine, prospectively, (a) dynamic changes in affective state, self-efficacy, and urge in the hours before initial smoking and drinking lapses among individuals in concurrent alcohol and smoking treatment, and (b) the extent to which self-efficacy, urge to use, and/or the use of one substance predicted lapse to the other substance. Ninety-six men and women recruited for a clinical trial of concurrent alcohol and tobacco treatment were eligible for inclusion. Only data from those who experienced an initial lapse to drinking (n=29) or smoking (n=32) were included.

Predicting Native English-Like Performance by Native Japanese Speakers.

This study tested the predictions of the Speech Learning Model (SLM, Flege, 1988) on the case of native Japanese (NJ) speakers' perception and production of English /ɹ / and /l/. NJ speakers' degree of foreign accent, intelligibility of /ɹ -l/ productions, and ability to perceive natural speech /ɹ -l/ were assessed as a function of length of residency in North America, age of arrival in North America, years of student status in an English environment, and percentage of Japanese usage. Additionally, the extent to which NJ speakers' utilized the F3 onset cue when differentiating /ɹ -l/ in perception and production was assessed, this cue having previously been shown to be the most reliable indicator of category membership.

Word recognition reflects dimension-based statistical learning.

Speech processing requires sensitivity to long-term regularities of the native language yet demands listeners to flexibly adapt to perturbations that arise from talker idiosyncrasies such as nonnative accent. The present experiments investigate whether listeners exhibit dimension-based statistical learning of correlations between acoustic dimensions defining perceptual space for a given speech segment. While engaged in a word recognition task guided by a perceptually unambiguous voice-onset time (VOT) acoustics to signal beer, pier, deer, or tear, listeners were exposed incidentally to an artificial "accent" deviating from English norms in its correlation of the pitch onset of the following vowel (F0) to VOT.

Psychology of auditory perception.

Audition is often treated as a 'secondary' sensory system behind vision in the study of cognitive science. In this review, we focus on three seemingly simple perceptual tasks to demonstrate the complexity of perceptual-cognitive processing involved in everyday audition. After providing a short overview of the characteristics of sound and their neural encoding, we present a description of the perceptual task of segregating multiple sound events that are mixed together in the signal reaching the ears.

Learning foreign sounds in an alien world: videogame training improves non-native speech categorization.

Although speech categories are defined by multiple acoustic dimensions, some are perceptually weighted more than others and there are residual effects of native-language weightings in non-native speech perception. Recent research on nonlinguistic sound category learning suggests that the distribution characteristics of experienced sounds influence perceptual cue weights: Increasing variability across a dimension leads listeners to rely upon it less in subsequent category learning (Holt & Lotto, 2006). The present experiment investigated the implications of this among native Japanese learning English /r/-/l/ categories.

American Society of Clinical Oncology clinical practice guideline update on the use of chemotherapy sensitivity and resistance assays.

Purpose: To update the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Technology Assessment guidelines on chemotherapy sensitivity and resistance assays (CSRAs) published in 2004.

Methods: An Update Working Group reviewed data published between December 1, 2003, and May 31, 2010. MEDLINE and the Cochrane Library were searched.

A standard set of American-English voiced stop-consonant stimuli from morphed natural speech.

Linear predictive coding (LPC) analysis was used to create morphed natural tokens of English voiced stop consonants ranging from /b/ to /d/ and /d/ to /g/ in four vowel contexts (/i/, /æ/, /a/, /u/). Both vowel-consonant-vowel (VCV) and consonant-vowel (CV) stimuli were created. A total of 320 natural-sounding acoustic speech stimuli were created, comprising 16 stimulus series.

Evidence for the central origin of lexical tone normalization (L).

Huang and Holt [(2009). J. Acoust.

Learning to use an artificial visual cue in speech identification.

Visual information from a speaker's face profoundly influences auditory perception of speech. However, relatively little is known about the extent to which visual influences may depend on experience, and extent to which new sources of visual speech information can be incorporated in speech perception. In the current study, participants were trained on completely novel visual cues for phonetic categories.

Speech perception as categorization.

Speech perception (SP) most commonly refers to the perceptual mapping from the highly variable acoustic speech signal to a linguistic representation, whether it be phonemes, diphones, syllables, or words. This is an example of categorization, in that potentially discriminable speech sounds are assigned to functionally equivalent classes. In this tutorial, we present some of the main challenges to our understanding of the categorization of speech sounds and the conceptualization of SP that has resulted from these challenges.

Reducing the patient fall rate in a rural health system.

In healthcare facilities, patient falls have been a major contributing factor associated with patient injuries that result in increased costs and increased length of stay. Recent actions by the Department of Health and Human Services, enacted through the Department of Medicare and Medicaid Services, now hold healthcare facilities financially responsible for injury to patients that result from falls (CMS Hospital Acquired Conditions). Because of these rulings, costs associated with patient falls are now a greater threat to the survival of rural healthcare facilities.

Forensic kinesiology: foundations of an interdiscipline for accident/crime investigation.

Kinesiology is the study of human movement, and comprises several disciplines, each devoted to a specific aspect of human activity, each with its own set of principles and methods to assess and analyze movement. Forensic kinesiology is the application of kinesiological techniques to accident/crime investigation; specialists in this field can use various tools and procedures to measure, analyze, model, and determine the movement sequences involved in events under investigation. This article will highlight major subdisciplines of kinesiology most relevant to forensics, present the key assessment and analytical tools used by kinesiologists, and demonstrate how both the principles and the practices of kinesiology can be applied to accident/crime investigation.

Anti-serum albumin domain antibodies in the development of highly potent, efficacious and long-acting interferon.

Serum albumin-binding domain antibodies (AlbudAbs) have previously been shown to greatly extend the serum half-life of the interleukin-1 receptor antagonist IL-1ra. We have subsequently extended this approach to look at the in vitro activity, in vivo efficacy and pharmacokinetics of an agonist molecule, interferon (IFN)-alpha2b, fused to an AlbudAb. Here we describe this molecule and show that in this format AlbudAb half-life extension technology displays significant advantages in comparison with other methods of half-life extension, in particular genetic fusion to serum albumin.

Does the inclusion criterion of women's aggression as opposed to their victimization result in samples that differ on key dimensions of intimate partner violence?

This study is among the first attempts to address a frequently articulated, yet unsubstantiated claim that sample inclusion criteria based on women's physical aggression or victimization will yield different distributions of severity and type of partner violence and injury. Independent samples of African American women participated in separate studies based on either inclusion criterion of women's physical aggression or victimization. Between-groups comparisons showed that samples did not differ in physical, sexual, or psychological aggression; physical, sexual, or psychological victimization; inflicted or sustained injury.

Neural changes associated with nonspeech auditory category learning parallel those of speech category acquisition.

Native language experience plays a critical role in shaping speech categorization, but the exact mechanisms by which it does so are not well understood. Investigating category learning of nonspeech sounds with which listeners have no prior experience allows their experience to be systematically controlled in a way that is impossible to achieve by studying natural speech acquisition, and it provides a means of probing the boundaries and constraints that general auditory perception and cognition bring to the task of speech category learning. In this study, we used a multimodal, video-game-based implicit learning paradigm to train participants to categorize acoustically complex, nonlinguistic sounds.

Global analysis of Cdk1 substrate phosphorylation sites provides insights into evolution.

To explore the mechanisms and evolution of cell-cycle control, we analyzed the position and conservation of large numbers of phosphorylation sites for the cyclin-dependent kinase Cdk1 in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. We combined specific chemical inhibition of Cdk1 with quantitative mass spectrometry to identify the positions of 547 phosphorylation sites on 308 Cdk1 substrates in vivo. Comparisons of these substrates with orthologs throughout the ascomycete lineage revealed that the position of most phosphorylation sites is not conserved in evolution; instead, clusters of sites shift position in rapidly evolving disordered regions.

Efficient coding in human auditory perception.

Natural sounds possess characteristic statistical regularities. Recent research suggests that mammalian auditory processing maximizes information about these regularities in its internal representation while minimizing encoding cost [Smith, E. C.

Genetic susceptibility to VTE: a primary care approach.

Genetic thrombophilic disorders are variably common and primary care clinicians must be aware of them because of the increased risk of VTE. A physical examination will not be able to determine if a given VTE resulted from a genetic predisposition or not. In some instances, a patient's personal and family history will alert a clinician to the existence of a thrombophilic disorder, but diagnosis of the specific thrombophilia will require laboratory evaluation and referral to a specialist.

Dual ablation of Grb10 and Grb14 in mice reveals their combined role in regulation of insulin signaling and glucose homeostasis.

Growth factor receptor bound (Grb)10 and Grb14 are closely related adaptor proteins that bind directly to the insulin receptor (IR) and regulate insulin-induced IR tyrosine phosphorylation and signaling to IRS-1 and Akt. Grb10- and Grb14-deficient mice both exhibit improved whole-body glucose homeostasis as a consequence of enhanced insulin signaling and, in the case of the former, altered body composition. However, the combined physiological role of these adaptors has remained undefined.

General perceptual contributions to lexical tone normalization.

Within tone languages that use pitch variations to contrast meaning, large variability exists in the pitches produced by different speakers. Context-dependent perception may help to resolve this perceptual challenge. However, whether speakers rely on context in contour tone perception is unclear; previous studies have produced inconsistent results.

Depressive symptoms, drinking consequences, and motivation to change in first time DWI offenders.

Background: Psychological disorders are common among driving-while-intoxicated (DWI) offenders; thus, a DWI arrest may serve as an important opportunity for further screening and subsequent treatment.

Objectives: The current study examined the extent to which mild to moderate pretreatment depressive symptoms, as measured by the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), could predict intervention outcomes in 284 first-time DWI offenders.

Methods: Participants were given drinking-related and psychosocial assessments at the beginning and end of a 10-week intervention and at 6- and 12-month follow-ups.

Growth factor receptor-bound protein 14 undergoes light-dependent intracellular translocation in rod photoreceptors: functional role in retinal insulin receptor activation.

Growth factor receptor-bound protein 14 (Grb14) is involved in growth factor receptor tyrosine kinase signaling. Here we report that light causes a major redistribution of Grb14 among the individual subcellular compartments of the retinal rod photoreceptor. Grb14 is localized predominantly to the inner segment, nuclear layer, and synapse in dark-adapted rods, whereas in the light-adapted rods, Grb14 redistributed throughout the entire cell, including the outer segment.

Expertise with artificial nonspeech sounds recruits speech-sensitive cortical regions.

Regions of the human temporal lobe show greater activation for speech than for other sounds. These differences may reflect intrinsically specialized domain-specific adaptations for processing speech, or they may be driven by the significant expertise we have in listening to the speech signal. To test the expertise hypothesis, we used a video-game-based paradigm that tacitly trained listeners to categorize acoustically complex, artificial nonlinguistic sounds.