Actual Execution Research Articles

No Evidence for Cross-Modal fMRI Adaptation in Macaque Parieto-Premotor Mirror Neuron Regions.

To probe the presence of mirror neurons in the human brain, cross-modal fMRI adaptation has been suggested as a suitable technique. The rationale behind this suggestion is that this technique allows making more accurate inferences about neural response properties underlying fMRI voxel activations, beyond merely showing shared voxels that are active during both action observation and execution. However, the validity of using cross-modal fMRI adaptation to demonstrate the presence of mirror neurons in parietal and premotor brain regions has been questioned given the inconsistent and weak results obtained in human studies. A better understanding of cross-modal fMRI adaptation effects in the macaque brain is required as the rationale for using this approach is based on several assumptions related to macaque mirror neuron response properties that still need validation. Here, we conducted a cross-modal fMRI adaptation study in macaque monkeys, using the same action execution and action observation tasks that successfully yielded mirror neuron region cross-modal action decoding in a previous monkey MVPA study. We scanned two male rhesus monkeys while they first executed a sequence of either reach-and-grasp or reach-and-touch hand actions and then observed a video of a human actor performing these motor acts. Both whole-brain and region-of-interest analyses failed to demonstrate cross-modal fMRI adaptation effects in parietal and premotor mirror neuron regions. Our results, in line with previous findings in non-human primates, show that cross-modal motor-to-visual fMRI adaptation is not easily detected in monkey brain regions known to house mirror neurons. Thus, our results advocate caution in using cross-modal fMRI adaptation as a method to infer whether mirror neurons can be found in the primate brain.

Sensorimotor Uncertainty of Immersive Virtual Reality Environments for People in Pain: Scoping Review.

Decision making and action execution both rely on sensory information, and their primary objective is to minimise uncertainty. Virtual reality (VR) introduces uncertainty due to the imprecision of perceptual information. The concept of "sensorimotor uncertainty" is a pivotal element in the interplay between perception and action within the VR environment. The role of immersive VR in the four stages of motor behaviour decision making in people with pain has been previously discussed. These four processing levels are the basis to understand the uncertainty that a patient experiences when using VR: sensory information, current state, transition rules, and the outcome obtained. This review examines the different types of uncertainty that a patient may experience when they are immersed in a virtual reality environment in a context of pain. Randomised clinical trials, a secondary analysis of randomised clinical trials, and pilot randomised clinical trials related to the scope of Sensorimotor Uncertainty in Immersive Virtual Reality were included after searching. Fifty studies were included in this review. They were divided into four categories regarding the type of uncertainty the intervention created and the stage of the decision-making model. Immersive virtual reality makes it possible to alter sensorimotor uncertainty, but studies of higher methodological quality are needed on this topic, as well as an exploration into the patient profile for pain management using immersive VR.

Spatial transcriptomics reveals the distinct organization of mouse prefrontal cortex and neuronal subtypes regulating chronic pain

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is a complex brain region that regulates diverse functions ranging from cognition, emotion and executive action to even pain processing. To decode the cellular and circuit organization of such diverse functions, we employed spatially resolved single-cell transcriptome profiling of the adult mouse PFC. Results revealed that PFC has distinct cell-type composition and gene-expression patterns relative to neighboring cortical areas—with neuronal excitability-regulating genes differently expressed. These cellular and molecular features are further segregated within PFC subregions, alluding to the subregion-specificity of several PFC functions. PFC projects to major subcortical targets through combinations of neuronal subtypes, which emerge in a target-intrinsic fashion. Finally, based on these features, we identified distinct cell types and circuits in PFC underlying chronic pain, an escalating healthcare challenge with limited molecular understanding. Collectively, this comprehensive map will facilitate decoding of discrete molecular, cellular and circuit mechanisms underlying specific PFC functions in health and disease.

Kinesthetic vs. visual focus: No evidence for effects of practice modality in representation types after action imagery practice and action execution practice

Action-imagery practice (AIP) is assumed to result in partly different action representations than action-execution practice (AEP). The present study investigated whether focusing on either kinesthetic or visual aspects of a task during practice amplifies or diminishes such differences between AIP and AEP. In ten sessions, four groups, using either AIP or AEP with either kinesthetic or visual focus, practiced a twelve-element sequence in a unimanual serial reaction time task. Tests involved the practice sequence, a mirror sequence, and a different sequence, each performed with the practice and transfer hand. In AIP and AEP, in both hands, reaction times (RTs) were shorter in the practice sequence than in the different sequence, indicating effector-independent visual-spatial sequence representations. Further, RTs were shorter in the practice hand than in the transfer hand in the practice sequence (but not in the different sequence), indicating effector-dependent representations in AEP and AIP. Although the representation types did not differ, learning effects were stronger in AEP than in AIP. Thus, although to a lower extent than in AEP, effector-dependent representations can be acquired using AIP. Contrary to the expectations, the focus manipulation did not have an impact on the acquired representation types. Hence, modality instructions in AIP may not have such a strong impact as commonly assumed, at least in implicit sequence learning.

Bursting with Potential: How Sensorimotor Beta Bursts Develop from Infancy to Adulthood.

Beta activity is thought to play a critical role in sensorimotor processes. However, little is known about how activity in this frequency band develops. Here, we investigated the developmental trajectory of sensorimotor beta activity from infancy to adulthood. We recorded EEG from 9-month-old, 12-month-old, and adult humans (male and female) while they observed and executed grasping movements. We analyzed "beta burst" activity using a novel method that combines time-frequency decomposition and principal component analysis. We then examined the changes in burst rate and waveform motifs along the selected principal components. Our results reveal systematic changes in beta activity during action execution across development. We found a decrease in beta burst rate during movement execution in all age groups, with the greatest decrease observed in adults. Additionally, we identified three principal components that defined waveform motifs that systematically changed throughout the trial. We found that bursts with waveform shapes closer to the median waveform were not rate-modulated, whereas those with waveform shapes further from the median were differentially rate-modulated. Interestingly, the decrease in the rate of certain burst motifs occurred earlier during movement and was more lateralized in adults than in infants, suggesting that the rate modulation of specific types of beta bursts becomes increasingly refined with age.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT We demonstrate that, like in adults, sensorimotor beta activity in infants during reaching and grasping movements occurs in bursts, not oscillations like thought traditionally. Furthermore, different beta waveform shapes were differentially modulated with age, including more lateralization in adults. Aberrant beta activity characterizes various developmental disorders and motor difficulties linked to early brain injury, so looking at burst waveform shape could provide more sensitivity for early identification and treatment of affected individuals before any behavioral symptoms emerge. More generally, comparison of beta burst activity in typical versus atypical motor development will also be instrumental in teasing apart the mechanistic functional roles of different types of beta bursts.

Action planning and execution cues influence economic partner choice

Prudently choosing who to interact with and who to avoid is an important ability to ensure that we benefit from a cooperative interaction. While the role of others' preferences, attributes, and values in partner choice have been established (Rossetti, Hilbe & Hauser, 2022), much less is known about whether the manner in which a potential partner plans and implements a decision provides helpful cues for partner choice. We used a partner choice paradigm in which participants chose who to interact with in the Prisoners’ Dilemma. Before choosing a cooperation partner, participants were presented with information about the potential partners’ decision-related actions in another round of the Prisoners’ Dilemma. They received either information about the potential partners’ planning during decision making (i.e., decision-time; Experiment 1) or action execution during decision implementation (i.e., movement directness; Experiment 2). Across both games, participants preferred to interact with those who planned actions quickly or executed actions with direct and smooth movements, indicating that they were cooperating confidently and without deliberation. This demonstrates that action cues present in either the planning or implementation of economic decisions influence partner choice. We discuss implications of this finding for human decision-making and perception-action coupling in action understanding.

Denotational and operational semantics for interaction languages: Application to trace analysis

Graphical depictions of distributed systems' behaviors in the form of Sequence Diagrams (SD) are widely used, with formalisms such as Message Sequence Charts (MSC) or UML-SD. Yet, only restricted subsets of these languages are associated to formal semantics, most of which are given by translation towards other formalisms. These translational approaches are the only ones enabling formal verification thanks to the ecosystem and tools associated to the target formalism. However, traceability of SD concepts is lost and the translation of some operators, in particular the weakly sequential loop, is problematic.In this paper, we define an Interaction Language to encode SD and ground it formally by associating it to three different semantics which we prove to be equivalent. A “denotational” semantics, relying on composing operators over sets of traces (sequences of atomic actions) allows one to reason on algebraic properties of SD. A structural “operational” semantics apprehends SD as executable objects which can express traces one action after the other. It also bridges the gap between the two other semantics and enables proving their equivalence. A functional style “execution” semantics separates two concerns intertwined in the operational semantics that is: identifying immediately executable actions (frontier actions) and computing follow-up SD which specify continuations of behaviors. The use of positions to identify frontier actions resolves non-determinism as every distinct occurrence of these actions have unique positions and are associated to a unique follow-up SD. Additionally, this enables visualizing frontier actions in SD as well as the execution of SD.These three semantics constitute a framework which enable using SD directly for formal verification. Traceability of SD concepts and executed actions is preserved and the weakly sequential loops are treated as any other operator.

The March on Washington Movement, the Fair Employment Practices Committee, and the Long Quest for Racial Justice

Abstract In the summer of 1941, the March on Washington Movement (MOWM), led by the civil rights and labor leader A. Philip Randolph, planned to march tens of thousands of African Americans on Washington, DC, to pressure President Franklin Roosevelt to abolish discrimination in the federal government and defense industries. After intensive negotiations, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, banning those forms of discrimination and creating a federal agency to oversee this work: the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC). Randolph and his allies use of pioneering pressure tactics coincided with a critical period of institutionalization of the modern presidency, ultimately resulting in executive action that significantly advanced civil rights and economic opportunity for Black Americans. Many scholars, focusing only on civil rights activists’ fraught relationship with Roosevelt and the Southern Democrats’ stubborn defense of Jim Crow in Congress and the states, have seen the highly contentious battles over the authority and policies of the FEPC as constituting a major defeat for MOWM’s state-centered civil rights strategy. Yet Randolph and his allies continued to believe that the most practical path to reform ran through the executive branch. In this article, we draw a contrast between the actions first taken by President Roosevelt with his wavering commitment to the FEPC and the stronger and more definitive actions taken by President Truman to desegregate the military and civil service, which broke open public-sector employment for African Americans. Beyond strategic considerations, the New Deal expansion of jobs in the national service and military made the modern executive an essential target of Randolph’s campaign to join the battles for civil rights with economic freedoms. Randolph’s decision to focus on employment in the rapidly expanding defense industries, federal workforce, and military thus marked a critical episode in the fight for the economic rights of Black Americans.

Kompiuteryje atliekamų pasikartojančių veiksmų automatizavimo sistemos kūrimas

As technology advances and time saves time, more and more tasks are being automated, reducing the need for manual work. The process of automation is beneficial in computer-based work as well. This article analyzes automation systems for mouse clicks, their benefits, and their applications in various fields. Project problem. The automated click systems do not provide flexible, reliable, and convenient algorithmic functions for the use of complex marketing systems, mobile games, or a broader market segment. The objective of this work is to create a system that simulates mouse clicks, swipes, and text input, allowing for repetitive actions, creating and saving action execution algorithms. The theoretical part discusses similar automated systems, their advantages and disadvantages, text and image recognition algorithms, and popular libraries. The compliance of the systems with the ISO/IEC 9126 standard is analyzed. The programming language chosen for development is C++, Qt framework, the Tesseract library is used for text recognition, while the OpenCV library is used for graphic objects. The practical part presents the project of the created automated action system, the development process, the system itself, and the system's application possibilities. The system includes 10 control tools: text, color, and image recognition systems, mouse click, text input, and swipe simulation systems, automated action deletion, algorithm execution/stop, settings selection, menu collapse/expand, and system shutdown. The system allows for the creation of mouse click, swipe, and text input algorithms, defining conditions, creating action instructions, and sharing instructions on a forum. The system recognizes texts, colors, and images. Keywords: automating click operations, automatic actions system, automated optical character recognition, automatic clicker.

Sense of agency in social hierarchies.

Distributing complex actions across agents is commonplace in human society. The objective efficiency of joint actions comes with critical challenges for the sense of agency of individual agents, complicating an accurate formation of these agents' perceived control over actions and action outcomes. Here we report a new experimental paradigm to investigate sense of agency for supervisors and subordinates in hierarchical settings. Results indicate profound differences in the sense of agency between both roles, while also indicating additional contributions of such situational factors as degrees of freedom, action decision versus action execution, outcome valence, and veto options. We further observed a tight coupling of sense of agency and sense of responsibility, with only weak links to affective responses to the action outcome. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Ventrolateral prefrontal neurons of the monkey encode instructions in the 'pragmatic' format of the associated behavioral outcomes.

The prefrontal cortex plays an important role in coding rules and producing context-appropriate behaviors. These processes necessarily require the generation of goals based on current context. Indeed, instructing stimuli are prospectively encoded in prefrontal cortex in relation to behavioral demands, but the coding format of this neural representation is, to date, largely unknown. In order to study how instructions and behaviors are encoded in prefrontal cortex, we recorded the activity of monkeys (Macaca mulatta) ventrolateral prefrontal neurons in a task requiring to perform (Action condition) or withhold (Inaction condition) grasping actions performed on real objects. Our data show that there are neurons responding in different task phases, and that the neuronal population discharge is stronger in the Inaction condition when the instructing cue is presented, and in the Action condition in the subsequent phases, from object presentation to action execution. Decoding analyses performed on neuronal populations showed that the neural activity recorded during the initial phases of the task shares the same type of format with that recorded during the final phases. We propose that this format has a pragmatic nature, that is instructions and goals are encoded by prefrontal neurons as predictions of the behavioral outcome.

Goal-directed recruitment of Pavlovian biases through selective visual attention.

Prospective outcomes bias behavior in a "Pavlovian" manner: Reward prospect invigorates action, while punishment prospect suppresses it. Theories have posited Pavlovian biases as global action "priors" in unfamiliar or uncontrollable environments. However, this account fails to explain the strength of these biases-causing frequent action slips-even in well-known environments. We propose that Pavlovian control is additionally useful if flexibly recruited by instrumental control. Specifically, instrumental action plans might shape selective attention to reward/punishment information and thus the input to Pavlovian control. In two eye-tracking samples (N = 35/64), we observed that Go/NoGo action plans influenced when and for how long participants attended to reward/punishment information, which in turn biased their responses in a Pavlovian manner. Participants with stronger attentional effects showed higher performance. Thus, humans appear to align Pavlovian control with their instrumental action plans, extending its role beyond action defaults to a powerful tool ensuring robust action execution. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Analysis of Judicial Review: The Role of Higher Courts in Assessing Legislative and Executive Actions in the Context of Pakistan

In Pakistan higher courts are responsible for evaluating legislative and executive decisions through the process of judicial review. However this study investigates the role that higher courts of Pakistan play significant role in the judicial review process. This study examined through the doctrinal legal research method to study statutes, legal frameworks, commentaries books and relevant cases decided by the higher courts of Pakistan under the authority of the judicial review and an investigated that their judgments have had on the legal landscape of the country are the goals of this exercise. The purpose of this study is to provide light on the growing jurisprudence surrounding judicial review in Pakistan by conducting a thorough analysis of pertinent case law, laws and academic publications. The investigation reveals that the higher courts in Pakistan play a significant part in ensuring that the Constitution remains supreme. In conclusion the examination of the activities of the legislative and executive branches to determine whether or not they are in accordance with constitutional principles and basic rights.

A model-free optimal operation strategy of diversified demands-park integrated energy system considering energy cascade utilization

In order to improve the energy efficiency of park integrated energy system, this work proposes a model-free optimal operation strategy of diversified demands-park integrated energy system considering energy cascade utilization. First, by considering diversified demands of various users for energy, an energy cascade utilization mode and its corresponding multi-dimensional energy supply and demand balance equation is developed. Moreover, in view of the above structure, a model-free DD-PIES optimal operation strategy is further proposed. Among them, the model-free approach is realized on the basis of the interaction between agent and environment, combined with sufficient exploration and consequences learning of its behavior through experience. Compared to the previous works, this proposed strategy has good self-learning ability for multiple uncertainties of renewable energy and energy demand, and cuts down on inefficient exploration during the training process, while guarantee the security during the execution of actions by the agent. Finally, the rationality and validity of the proposed strategy in reducing operating cost and improving energy efficiency of the system are verified by a case study.

Are there dedicated neural mechanisms for imitation? A study of grist and mills.

Are there brain regions that are specialized for the execution of imitative actions? We compared two hypotheses of imitation: the mirror neuron system (MNS) hypothesis predicts frontal and parietal engagement which is specific to imitation, while the Grist-Mills hypothesis predicts no difference in brain activation between imitative and matched non-imitative actions. Our delayed imitation fMRI paradigm included two tasks, one where correct performance was defined by a spatial rule and another where it was defined by an item-based rule. For each task, participants could learn a sequence from a video of a human hand performing the task, from a matched "Ghost" condition, or from text instructions. When participants executed actions after seeing the Hand demonstration (compared to Ghost and Text demonstrations), no activation differences occurred in frontal or parietal regions; rather, activation was localized primarily to occipital cortex. This adds to a growing body of evidence which indicates that imitation-specific responses during action execution do not occur in canonical mirror regions, contradicting the mirror neuron system hypothesis. However, activation differences did occur between action execution in the Hand and Ghost conditions outside MNS regions, which runs counter to the Grist-Mills hypothesis. We conclude that researchers should look beyond these hypotheses as well as classical MNS regions to describe the ways in which imitative actions are implemented by the brain.

Pattern-based action engine: Generating process management actions using temporal patterns of process-centric problems

As business environments become more competitive, organizations strive to improve their business processes to reduce costs and increase quality and productivity. As process improvement traditionally embraces manual creative tasks that are time-consuming and labor-intensive, the need for automating it arises. Action-Oriented Process Mining (AOPM) aims to support automated process improvement by leveraging various process mining techniques. To that end, AOPM first monitors the presence of operational constraints, i.e., operational problems, in business processes, e.g., a high waiting time for patients to register. Next, it produces interim management actions designed to address these transient problems by analyzing the monitoring results. For instance, if an excessive waiting time persists for more than a week, the system might recommend dispatching additional resources for the upcoming week. Contrary to the mature process mining support for monitoring operational constraints, the action part is typically missing in today’s process mining tools. In this work, we propose an action engine to support the automatic generation of actions. It analyzes temporal patterns of monitoring results and produces action plans that describe the execution of management actions. We have demonstrated a use case using the data of a Dutch financial institute to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed action engine and conducted experiments to evaluate its effectiveness.

“Do this instead” – Robots that Adequately Respond to Corrected Instructions

Natural language instructions are effective at tasking autonomous robots and for teaching them new knowledge quickly. Yet, human instructors are not perfect and are likely to make mistakes at times, and will correct themselves when they notice errors in their own instructions. In this paper, we introduce a complete system for robot behaviors to handle such corrections, during both task instruction and action execution. We then demonstrate its operation in an integrated cognitive robotic architecture through spoken language in two tasks: a navigation and retrieval task and a meal assembly task. Verbal corrections occur before, during, and after verbally taught sequences of tasks, demonstrating that the proposed methods enable fast corrections not only of the semantics generated from the instructions, but also of overt robot behavior in a manner shown to be reasonable when compared to human behavior and expectations.

Chronic stress promotes basal ganglia disinhibition by increasing the excitatory drive of direct-pathway neurons

Chronic stress (CS) is a well-recognized triggering factor in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and Tourette's syndrome (TS), two neuropsychiatric disorders characterized by the presence of stereotypic motor symptoms. Planning and execution of motor actions are controlled by the dorsal striatum, a brain region that promotes or suppresses motor movement by activating striatal neurons from the direct- or indirect-pathway, respectively. Despite the dorsal striatum being affected in motor disorders and by CS exposure, how CS affects the two opposing pathways is not fully understood. Here, we report that CS in mice selectively potentiates the direct-pathway, while sparing the indirect-pathway. Specifically, we show that CS both increases excitation and reduces inhibition over direct-pathway neurons in the dorsomedial striatum (DMS). Furthermore, inhibitory interneurons located in the DMS also display reduced excitatory drive after chronic stress, thus amplifying striatal disinhibition. Altogether, we propose a model where both increased excitatory drive and decreased inhibitory drive in the striatum causes disinhibition of basal ganglia's motor direct pathway - a mechanism that might explain the emergence of motor stereotypies and tic disorders under stress.

Analysing human error contribution to ship collision risk in congested waters under the evidential reasoning SPAR-H extended fault tree analysis

Human error plays a crucial role in maritime transportation risk analysis, as a significant percentage of accidents, including collisions, groundings, capsizing, fires, and explosions, can be attributed to human errors. However, obtaining a dataset that quantifies human error probabilities for maritime risk analysis is challenging due to commercial constraints. To address this issue, this paper proposes a conceptual framework that integrates evidential reasoning (ER) and the standardized plant analysis risk-human reliability analysis (SPAR-H) method to quantify human errors, while employing fault tree analysis (FTA) to predict risk. The specific focus of this study is ship collision risk in congested waters, which serves as a demonstration case to showcase the proposed method and illustrate a detailed analysis of collision risk. The findings reveal that “inadequate watchkeeping due to sole lookout”, “improper RADAR monitoring”, and “ineffective execution of COLREG-related actions” are the most significant human errors contributing to collision risk in congested waters. The outcomes of this research provide valuable insights for ship owners, safety professionals, ship masters, inspectors, and researchers in the maritime industry. The findings can assist in minimizing collision risk and improving navigational safety in congested waters.

THE LONG PATH FORWARD FOR STUDENT LOAN FORGIVENESS

Less than a year after the Biden administration proposed forgiving up to $10,000 in federal student loan debt for most borrowers, the Supreme Court ruled the policy unconstitutional. At the core of the case was whether the HEROES Act of 2003 granted the Secretary of Education the authority to “waive or modify” federal student loan terms, up to and including forgiving those loans. The Court ruled in a 6-3 decision that broad forgiveness was beyond the scope of what Congress intended when passing the HEROES Act, further arguing in the majority decision that policies with such a large economic and political impact should be decided through Congress, and not executive action. In the wake of that decision, the Biden administration has shifted policy toward improving the borrowing process as well as the repayment process. Political attention has focused on repayment (from the Biden administration’s attempts at loan forgiveness to Republican-sponsored legislation proposing new repayment structures) but must also turn to reforming how students decide whether and how much to borrow to ensure future students do not face unmanageable student loan debt.