Disruptions of Sustained Spatial Attention Can Be Resistant to the Distractor's Prior Reward Associations.

Attention can be involuntarily biased toward reward-associated distractors (value-driven attentional capture, VDAC). Yet past work has primarily demonstrated this distraction phenomenon during a particular set of circumstances: transient attentional orienting to potentially relevant stimuli occurring in our visual environment. Consequently, it is not well-understood if reward-based attentional capture can occur under other circumstances, such as during sustained visuospatial attention.

Improving Automatic IPSyn Coding.

Purpose The Computerized Language ANalysis-Index of Productive Syntax (CLAN-IPSyn) system is designed to facilitate automatic computation of the IPSyn measure of productive child syntax. Roberts et al. (2020) conducted a thorough comparison of hand-generated and automatic scores on the Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn) measure (Scarborough, 1990) and found a high level of error for CLAN-IPSyn.

Machine-Scored Syntax: Comparison of the CLAN Automatic Scoring Program to Manual Scoring.

Purpose The results of automatic machine scoring of the Index of Productive Syntax from the Computerized Language ANalysis (CLAN) tools of the Child Language Data Exchange System of TalkBank (MacWhinney, 2000) were compared to manual scoring to determine the accuracy of the machine-scored method. Method Twenty transcripts of 10 children from archival data of the Weismer Corpus from the Child Language Data Exchange System at 30 and 42 months were examined. Measures of absolute point difference and point-to-point accuracy were compared, as well as points erroneously given and missed.

Attempted use of PACE for riboswitch discovery generates three new translational theophylline riboswitch side products.

Objective: The purpose of this project was to use an in vivo method to discover riboswitches that are activated by new ligands. We employed phage-assisted continuous evolution (PACE) to evolve new riboswitches in vivo. We started with one translational riboswitch and one transcriptional riboswitch, both of which were activated by theophylline.

Circulating microRNAs as biomarkers in traumatic brain injury.

Preclinical and clinical studies can be greatly improved through the inclusion of diagnostic, prognostic, predictive or pharmacodynamics biomarkers. Circulating microRNAs (miRNAs) represent highly stable targets that respond to physiological and pathological changes. MicroRNA biomarkers can be detected by highly sensitive and absolutely quantitative methods currently available in most clinical laboratories.