Confirmation bias (CB) is a cognitive bias that allows us to fool ourselves by selectively filtering data and distorting analyses to support favored beliefs or hypotheses. In this article, I will briefly review some classic experiments from cognitive psychology that illustrate what a powerful, pernicious, and insidious force CB is. I will then discuss how to recognize CB in our own thinking and behavior and describe specific elements of good experimental design that can mitigate its effects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPostural control circuitry performs the essential function of maintaining balance and body position in response to perturbations that are either self-generated (e.g. reaching to pick up an object) or externally delivered (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA central goal of systems neuroscience is to understand how populations of sensory neurons encode and relay information to the rest of the brain. Three key quantities of interest are ) how mean neural activity depends on the stimulus (sensitivity), ) how neural activity (co)varies around the mean (noise correlations), and ) how predictive these variations are of the subject's behavior (choice probability). Previous empirical work suggests that both choice probability and noise correlations are affected by task training, with decision-related information fed back to sensory areas and aligned to neural sensitivity on a task-by-task basis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFActive zones consist of protein scaffolds that are tightly attached to the presynaptic plasma membrane. They dock and prime synaptic vesicles, couple them to voltage-gated Ca channels, and direct neurotransmitter release toward postsynaptic receptor domains. Simultaneous RIM + ELKS ablation disrupts these scaffolds, abolishes vesicle docking, and removes active zone-targeted Munc13, but some vesicles remain releasable.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCurrent treatment for Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) utilizes Disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs or its combination, to decrease joint inflammation. In the present study, naproxen (NAP) and sulfapyridine (SULF) ethosomes were prepared by a thin-film hydration technique using PL90G and cholesterol, later crosslinked with carbopol®934. The ethosomes and ethosomal hydrogel were evaluated for rheological properties, physico-chemical analysis, and study.
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