scholarly journals Temporal integration for amplitude modulation in childhood: Interaction between internal noise and memory factors

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurianne Cabrera ◽  
Irene Lorenzini ◽  
Stuart Rosen ◽  
léo varnet ◽  
Lorenzi Christian

It is still unclear whether the gradual improvement in amplitude-modulation (AM) sensitivity typically found in children up to 10 years of age reflects an improvement in “processing efficiency” (the central ability to use information extracted by sensory mechanisms). This hypothesis was tested by evaluating temporal integration for AM, a capacity relying on memory and decision factors. This was achieved by measuring the effect of increasing the number of AM cycles (2 vs 8) on AM-detection thresholds for three groups of children aged from 5 to 11 years and a group of young adults. AM- detection thresholds were measured using a forced-choice procedure and sinusoidal AM (4 or 32 Hz rate) applied to a 1024-Hz pure-tone carrier. All age groups demonstrated temporal integration for AM at both rates, that is significant improvements in AM sensitivity with a higher number of AM cycles. However, both 5- 6 years and adults exhibited similar levels of temporal integration, while 7-8 and 10- 11 years showed less integration. This is because at both rates: (i) the youngest group (5-6 years) displayed the worst thresholds with 2 AM cycles but similar thresholds with 8 cycles compared to older children groups, and (ii) adults showed the best thresholds with 8 AM cycles but similar thresholds with 2 cycles compared to older children groups. Computational modelling indicated that higher levels of internal noise combined with poorer short-term memory capacities in children accounted for the developmental trends. Improvement in processing efficiency may therefore account for the development of AM detection in childhood.

Author(s):  
Chai Ping Woon ◽  
Ngee Thai Yap ◽  
Hui Woan Lim

The nonword repetition (NWR) task has been used to measure children’s expressive language skills, and it has been argued to have potential as an early language delay/ impairment detection tool as the NWR task can be conducted rather easily and quickly to obtain a quantitative as well as a qualitative measure of children’s attention to lexical and phonological information. This paper reports the performance of two NWR tasks among thirty bilingual Mandarin-English preschoolers between the age of four through six. The study indicated that performance in the NWR tasks showed a developmental trend with older children performing better than younger children. Word length also had a significant effect on performance, possibly an effect from better short-term memory capacity as the child grew older. The children also performed better in the Mandarin NWR task compared to the English NWR task. These findings suggest potential clinical applications for diagnosis of children with language impairment or at risk of language development delay. However, further studies should improve on the tasks to verify its efficacy and to obtain norms for performance with a larger sample of children at various age groups.


1997 ◽  
Vol 84 (3) ◽  
pp. 829-830 ◽  
Author(s):  
Filippo Speranza ◽  
Giampaolo Moraglia ◽  
Bruce A. Schneider

11 young ( M age = 24.3 yr.) and 11 old ( M age = 67.4 yr.) observers attempted to detect signals of limited bandwidth in visual noise. The older observers did not perform as well as the young ones. We considered whether, as suggested by a current hypothesis, these differences could be attributed to higher internal additive noise in the elderly observers. The results suggested that internal noise did not differ across the two age groups and that the lower performance of the older observers stemmed instead from reduced processing efficiency.


2021 ◽  
pp. 108403
Author(s):  
Laurianne Cabrera ◽  
Irene Lorenzini ◽  
Stuart Rosen ◽  
Léo Varnet ◽  
Christian Lorenzi

2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Reuterskiöld ◽  
Maria I. Grigos

This study examined how familiarity of word structures influenced articulatory control in children and adolescents during repetition of real words (RWs) and nonwords (NWs). A passive reflective marker system was used to track articulator movement. Measures of accuracy were obtained during repetition of RWs and NWs, and kinematic analysis of movement duration and variability was conducted. Participants showed greater consonant and vowel accuracy during RW than NW repetition. Jaw movement duration was longer in NWs compared to RWs across age groups, and younger children produced utterances with longer jaw movement duration compared to older children. Jaw movement variability was consistently greater during repetition of NWs than RWs in both groups of participants. The results indicate that increases in phonological short-term memory demands affect articulator movement. This effect is most pronounced in younger children. A range of skills may develop during childhood, which supports NW repetition skills.


2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (6) ◽  
pp. 533-537
Author(s):  
Lorenz von Seidlein ◽  
Borimas Hanboonkunupakarn ◽  
Podjanee Jittmala ◽  
Sasithon Pukrittayakamee

RTS,S/AS01 is the most advanced vaccine to prevent malaria. It is safe and moderately effective. A large pivotal phase III trial in over 15 000 young children in sub-Saharan Africa completed in 2014 showed that the vaccine could protect around one-third of children (aged 5–17 months) and one-fourth of infants (aged 6–12 weeks) from uncomplicated falciparum malaria. The European Medicines Agency approved licensing and programmatic roll-out of the RTSS vaccine in malaria endemic countries in sub-Saharan Africa. WHO is planning further studies in a large Malaria Vaccine Implementation Programme, in more than 400 000 young African children. With the changing malaria epidemiology in Africa resulting in older children at risk, alternative modes of employment are under evaluation, for example the use of RTS,S/AS01 in older children as part of seasonal malaria prophylaxis. Another strategy is combining mass drug administrations with mass vaccine campaigns for all age groups in regional malaria elimination campaigns. A phase II trial is ongoing to evaluate the safety and immunogenicity of the RTSS in combination with antimalarial drugs in Thailand. Such novel approaches aim to extract the maximum benefit from the well-documented, short-lasting protective efficacy of RTS,S/AS01.


BMJ Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. e039243
Author(s):  
Adam Gyedu ◽  
Barclay T Stewart ◽  
Easmon Otupiri ◽  
Kajal Mehta ◽  
Peter Donkor ◽  
...  

ObjectiveWe aimed to describe the incidence of childhood household injuries and prevalence of modifiable household risk factors in rural Ghana to inform prevention initiatives.Setting357 randomly selected households in rural Ghana.ParticipantsCaregivers of children aged <5 years.Primary and secondary outcome measuresChildhood injuries that occurred within 6 months and 200 metres of the home that resulted in missed school/work, hospitalisation and/or death. Sampling weights were applied, injuries were described and multilevel regression was used to identify risk factors.ResultsCaregivers from 357 households had a mean age of 35 years (SD 12.8) and often supervised ≥2 children (51%). Households typically used biomass fuels (84%) on a cookstove outside the home (79%). Cookstoves were commonly <1 metre of the ground (95%). Weighted incidence of childhood injury was 542 per 1000 child-years. Falls (37%), lacerations (24%), burns (12%) and violence (12%) were common mechanisms. There were differences in mechanism across age groups (p<0.01), but no gender differences (p=0.25). Presence of older children in the home (OR 0.15, 95% CI 0.09 to 0.24; adjusted OR (aOR) 0.26, 95% CI 0.13 to 0.54) and cooking outside the home (OR 0.28, 95% CI 0.19 to 0.42; aOR 0.25, 95% CI 0.13 to 0.49) were protective against injury, but other common modifiable risk factors (eg, stove height, fuel type, secured cabinets) were not.ConclusionsChildhood injuries occurred frequently in rural Ghana. Several common modifiable household risk factors were not associated with an increase in household injuries. Presence of older children was a protective factor, suggesting that efforts to improve supervision of younger children might be effective prevention strategies.


Electronics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 374 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sudhanshu Kumar ◽  
Monika Gahalawat ◽  
Partha Pratim Roy ◽  
Debi Prosad Dogra ◽  
Byung-Gyu Kim

Sentiment analysis is a rapidly growing field of research due to the explosive growth in digital information. In the modern world of artificial intelligence, sentiment analysis is one of the essential tools to extract emotion information from massive data. Sentiment analysis is applied to a variety of user data from customer reviews to social network posts. To the best of our knowledge, there is less work on sentiment analysis based on the categorization of users by demographics. Demographics play an important role in deciding the marketing strategies for different products. In this study, we explore the impact of age and gender in sentiment analysis, as this can help e-commerce retailers to market their products based on specific demographics. The dataset is created by collecting reviews on books from Facebook users by asking them to answer a questionnaire containing questions about their preferences in books, along with their age groups and gender information. Next, the paper analyzes the segmented data for sentiments based on each age group and gender. Finally, sentiment analysis is done using different Machine Learning (ML) approaches including maximum entropy, support vector machine, convolutional neural network, and long short term memory to study the impact of age and gender on user reviews. Experiments have been conducted to identify new insights into the effect of age and gender for sentiment analysis.


1991 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 433-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Loraine K. Obler ◽  
Deborah Fein ◽  
Marjorie Nicholas ◽  
Martin L. Albert

ABSTRACTComprehension of six syntactic structures was tested across four age groups. Each structure was presented with both plausible and implausible content. The contribution of cognitive nonlinguistic factors important for comprehension (attention, short-term memory, and mental control) was tested via standard neuropsychological tasks. Sixty-six women aged 30–79 were tested. Both errors and reaction times increased with age, especially for more complex syntactic types and implausible sentences. The neuropsychological factors tested contributed minimally to an age-related decline in comprehension, suggesting that the subtle breakdown seen in syntactic processing may be a language-specific impairment.


1978 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-148
Author(s):  
Mary Anne Herndon

In a model of the functioning of short term memory, the encoding of information for subsequent storage in long term memory is simulated. In the encoding process, semantically equivalent paragraphs are detected for recombination into a macro information unit. This recombination process can be used to relieve the limited storage capacity constraint of short term memory and subsequently increase processing efficiency. The results of the simulation give a favorable indication of the success for the use of cluster analysis as a tool to simulate the encoding function in the detection of semantically similar paragraphs.


Cancers ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 777
Author(s):  
Charlotte Calvo ◽  
Odile Fenneteau ◽  
Guy Leverger ◽  
Arnaud Petit ◽  
André Baruchel ◽  
...  

Infant acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a rare subgroup of AML of children <2 years of age. It is as frequent as infant acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) but not clearly distinguished by study groups. However, infant AML demonstrates peculiar clinical and biological characteristics, and its prognosis differs from AML in older children. Acute megakaryoblastic leukemia (AMKL) is very frequent in this age group and has raised growing interest. Thus, AMKL is a dominant topic in this review. Recent genomic sequencing has contributed to our understanding of infant AML. These data demonstrated striking features of infant AML: fusion genes are able to induce AML transformation without additional cooperation, and unlike AML in older age groups there is a paucity of associated mutations. Mice modeling of these fusions showed the essential role of ontogeny in the infant leukemia phenotype compared to older children and adults. Understanding leukemogenesis may help in developing new targeted treatments to improve outcomes that are often very poor in this age group. A specific diagnostic and therapeutic approach for this age group should be investigated.


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