Salient Events Research Articles

Representation of ethological events by basolateral amygdala neurons.

The accurate interpretation of ethologically relevant stimuli is crucial for survival. While basolateral amygdala (BLA) neuronal responses during fear conditioning are well studied, little is known about how BLA neurons respond during naturalistic events. We recorded from the rat BLA during interaction with ethological stimuli: male or female rats, a moving toy, and rice. Forty-two percent of the cells reliably respond to at least one stimulus, with over half of these exclusively identifying one of the four stimulus classes. In addition to activation during interaction with their preferred stimulus, these cells signal micro-behavioral interactions like social contact. After stimulus removal, firing activity persists in 30% of responsive cells for several minutes. At the micro-circuit level, information flows from highly tuned event-specific neurons to less specific neurons, and connection strength increases after the event. We propose that individual BLA neurons identify specific ethological events, with event-specific neurons driving circuit-wide activity during and after salient events.

Attempt to Replicate Bem's Precognitive Avoidance Task And Detect Relationships With Trait Anxiety

Previous research suggests anxious individuals demonstrate hypervigilance for threatening stimuli. Recent controversial studies suggested people's bodies (presentiment) and brain (precognition, Bem, 2011; Bem et al., 2015) can 'predict' biologically salient events, such as threatening stimuli, milliseconds to seconds before they occur. If true, this suggests a possible mechanism for hypervigilance towards threatening stimuli in anxious individuals. We sought to replicate Bem's precognitive avoidance experiment in an independent cohort of adolescents (n = 144), tested whether performance ability is associated with state or trait anxiety, and examined sex-differences in these variables. We hypothesized that trait anxiety would correlate positively with precognitive avoidance performance. We were unable to replicate the 2011 Bem findings in our sample (precognitive avoidance hit rate = 48.95%, p = 0.825), and neither trait nor state anxiety was correlated with precognitive avoidance. We did not detect a sex difference in precognitive avoidance (females > males: t = 1.36, p = 0.175, two sample t-test). We found higher levels of trait anxiety in females in line with previous research. Contrary to our hypotheses, we failed to detect evidence for precognitive avoidance in our sample, possibly because our study was underpowered. Implications are discussed with respect to related literature.

A Twitter-Based Economic Policy Uncertainty Index: Expert Opinion and Financial Market Dynamics in an Emerging Market Economy

In this paper, we construct a Twitter-based high-frequency Economic Policy Uncertainty (TEPU) index built on a select set of Twitter user accounts whose tweets are considered to reflect expert opinion on the topic. We study the relationship between the TEPU index and a set of key financial indicators for tracking financial developments in Turkey over the sample period 2013–2021. Based on the results from a vector autoregressive analysis, we find evidence that changes in expert opinion described by fluctuations in the TEPU index interact with fluctuations in financial indicators such as the exchange rate and the stock market index to capture information about high frequency events during our sample period. Second, fluctuations in the TEPU index emerge as a key indicator that helps to predict the country risk premium measured by the CDS spread. We also find evidence that the conditional volatility of the different series reflects salient events that occurred over our sample period.

Selective Control: The Political Economy of Censorship

ABSTRACT Alongside democratic backsliding and security threats, censorship is increasingly used by governments and other societal actors to control the media. Who is likely to be affected by it and why? We argue that censors are more likely to target outlets and journalists that provide information to politically consequential audiences, while allowing media that caters to non-pivotal audiences to report more freely. In order to test our hypotheses, we built a new dataset of around 9,000 salient censorship events and their characteristics across 196 countries between 2001 and 2015. We find strong empirical support for media market segmentation. Outlets and journalists with wide audiences, collective action coverage and domestic ownership are significantly more at risk of severe censorship actions. We also find that audience pivotality matters more than the number and diversity of outlets for censors’ strategic calculus. Our results hold across democracies and non-democracies, for government and third-party censors alike.

Inventory control under different forms of uncertainty: Ambiguity and stochastic variability

AbstractInventory decision makers routinely face ambiguity due to the psychological awareness that there is unknown information about salient events that is knowable in principle. Researchers on inventory control behavior in the face of uncertainty have primarily focused on uncertainty due to stochastic variability. However, most decision situations in the naturally occurring world involve both forms of uncertainty—ambiguity and stochastic variability. We report the results of two experiments that partial out the effects of ambiguity and stochastic variability by orthogonal manipulation of these two forms of uncertainty in a newsvendor task. Contrary to established mathematical models of decision making under uncertainty, increased ambiguity results in increased mean absolute percentage error, and a corresponding decrease in profit. We also find a systematic bias toward underordering associated with increased ambiguity, which is over and above the bias associated with increased stochastic variability. We do not see evidence for learning with repeated play, so that the effects of induced ambiguity appear to persist. Finally, based on our findings, we suggest measures that managers can use to ameliorate the effects of ambiguity.

Cerebellum encodes and influences the initiation, performance, and termination of discontinuous movements in mice.

The cerebellum is hypothesized to represent timing information important for organizing salient motor events during periodically performed discontinuous movements. To provide functional evidence validating this idea, we measured and manipulated Purkinje cell (PC) activity in the lateral cerebellum of mice trained to volitionally perform periodic bouts of licking for regularly allocated water rewards. Overall, PC simple spiking modulated during task performance, mapping phasic tongue protrusions and retractions, as well as ramping prior to both lick-bout initiation and termination, two important motor events delimiting movement cycles. The ramping onset occurred earlier for the initiation of uncued exploratory licking that anticipated water availability relative to licking that was reactive to water allocation, suggesting that the cerebellum is engaged differently depending on the movement context. In a subpopulation of PCs, climbing-fiber-evoked responses also increased during lick-bout initiation, but not termination, highlighting differences in how cerebellar input pathways represent task-related information. Optogenetic perturbation of PC activity disrupted the behavior by degrading lick-bout rhythmicity in addition to initiating and terminating licking bouts confirming a causative role in movement organization. Together, these results substantiate that the cerebellum contributes to the initiation and timing of repeated motor actions.

An event-oriented approach to the transmission of ex-leaders’ entrepreneurial endeavor to employees’ entrepreneurial intention

Departing from the conventional feature-oriented approach, this study introduces event system theory to highlight the importance of salient workplace events in shaping employees’ motivation for entrepreneurship and to uncover how the spatial and temporal issues inherent in the event of ex-leaders’ entrepreneurial endeavor may combine to influence employees’ entrepreneurial intention. The results of two time-lagged studies reveal that ex-leaders’ entrepreneurial success, relational proximity, and time proximity interact to affect employees’ entrepreneurial intention such that the positive impact of ex-leaders’ entrepreneurial success on employees’ entrepreneurial intention is stronger in the presence of high relational proximity and time proximity. The results further indicate that employees’ entrepreneurial self-efficacy functions as a crucial mechanism in translating this impact of ex-leaders’ entrepreneurial endeavor. These findings highlight the value of an event-oriented approach to investigating the impact of workplace events on employee outcomes.

An explorer’s journal for machines: Exploring the case of Cyberpunk 2077

With increasing technological capabilities, video games provide ever more expansive virtual worlds for players to explore. Designers employ various mechanics and level design principles to encourage such exploration. However, what motivates people to explore in virtual environments, and which approaches are successful, is not yet clearly established. Methods for measuring player experience often take place retroactively after a play session, relying on recall, and are thus prone to missing less salient events and their motivations. Journaling events as they occur allow promises to be a suitable method of collecting data, but presents a challenge in aggregating data points due to their freeform nature. This makes it difficult to identify overarching patterns of exploration behaviour. We present an exploratory study in devising a journaling protocol for gathering information during gameplay sessions, focused on documenting moments of exploration in a manner that balances ease of data capture and data evaluation. We describe our efforts in prototyping this journaling method and how we used it to analyse Cyberpunk 2077 and several other game designs. Our results show that exploration occurs in a pattern of event → expectation → resolution. The motivation to explore depends on the expectations that a game raises through its marketing and design. At the same time, exploratory behaviour going unrewarded by the game quickly reduces the desire to explore. When recording instances of exploration, the addition of emotion words is essential in order to properly contextualize the information. This article lays the foundation for documenting exploration in games, as well as other emotional or behavioural constructs that require in-the-moment data collection.

Effects of COVID-19 lockdown in Milan urban and Rome suburban acoustic environments: Anomalous noise events and intermittency ratio.

The COVID-19 pandemic affected the acoustic environment worldwide, entailing relevant reductions of equivalent noise levels (LAeq) during this exceptional period. In the context of the LIFE+ DYNAMAP project, two wireless acoustic sensor networks were deployed in Milan and Rome. Taking advantage of the built-in identification of anomalous noise events (ANE) in the sensors, this work analyses the effects of the COVID-19 lockdown in both urban and suburban acoustic environments from January to June 2020, considering the distribution of ANEs and the intermittency ratio (IR) as an indicator of the impact of noise on population. The results show statistically significant increments of ANEs in Rome during the lockdown, mainly on weekends, and especially at night, despite the significant decrease in salient events. Differently, ANEs decrease during the lockdown in Milan, mostly at daytime, as a result of population confinement. Although the IR increases in several urban locations, most sensed locations show a relevant decrease in IR during the confinement, which represents a noteworthy reduction of the negative impact of noise in the population of both cities. During the post-lockdown period, all the scores start to return to those observed in the pre-lockdown, but still remaining higher than in 2019.

The continuum of strategic philanthropy: Rationalizing the context for philanthropy in business and society

AbstractIn order to further enhance our understanding of strategic philanthropy within business and society, our paper proceeds as follows. First, we discuss the process driving evolutionary change in philanthropy. Next, we discuss the actual development of strategic philanthropy. This includes a brief US history of salient events in corporate giving, with attention paid to the regulatory, business, and social contexts related to corporate giving. Finally, in the discussion section, we present a modified continuum of corporate giving, based on previous research and our analysis, extending from a focus on bettering society, on the one hand ‐ to that of advancing the firm's interests, on the other.

Host Adaptation in Legionellales Is 1.9 Ga, Coincident with Eukaryogenesis.

Bacteria adapting to living in a host cell caused the most salient events in the evolution of eukaryotes, namely the seminal fusion with an archaeon, and the emergence of both mitochondrion and chloroplast. A bacterial clade that may hold the key to understanding these events is the deep-branching gammaproteobacterial order Legionellales—containing among others Coxiella and Legionella—of which all known members grow inside eukaryotic cells. Here, by analyzing 35 novel Legionellales genomes mainly acquired through metagenomics, we show that this group is much more diverse than previously thought, and that key host-adaptation events took place very early in its evolution. Crucial virulence factors like the Type IVB secretion (Dot/Icm) system and two shared effector proteins were gained in the last Legionellales common ancestor (LLCA). Many metabolic gene families were lost in LLCA and its immediate descendants, including functions directly and indirectly related to molybdenum metabolism. On the other hand, genome sizes increased in the ancestors of the Legionella genus. We estimate that LLCA lived approximately 1.89 Ga, probably predating the last eukaryotic common ancestor by approximately 0.4–1.0 Gy. These elements strongly indicate that host adaptation arose only once in Legionellales, and that these bacteria were using advanced molecular machinery to exploit and manipulate host cells early in eukaryogenesis.

The time-varying correlation between cryptocurrency policy uncertainty and cryptocurrency returns

PurposeThis study aims to analyze the time-varying correlation between the cryptocurrency policy uncertainty (UCRY Policy) and cryptocurrency returns. More specifically, it analyzes whether these correlations vary according to the uncertainty attributable to salient events such as China banning ICOs, cryptocurrency exchanges attacks, Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic crisis and the United States (U.S.) Security and Exchange Commission’s (SEC’s) announcement about Ripple.Design/methodology/approachTo measure the dynamic relationship, it uses the dynamic conditional correlation (DCC) model of Engle (2002) to consider time variation in UCRY Policy and cryptocurrency returns. The data set encompasses the weekly frequency data of the UCRY Policy and Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), Ripple (XRP), Stellar (XLM), Dash (DASH), Monero (XMR) from 4 September 2016, to 21 February 2021.FindingsEmpirical findings indicate that the correlations between the UCRY Policy and the BTC, ETH, LTC, XRP, XLM, DASH and XMR returns are consistently negative. Thus, an increase in the volatility of the UCRY Policy can lead to a decrease in volatility for BTC, ETH, LTC, XRP, XLM, DASH and XMR returns. Besides, these findings indicate that the estimated DCC is not only time-varying but also substantially responsive to salient events, such as China banning ICOs, cryptocurrency exchanges attacks, the Covid-19 pandemic crisis and SEC’s announcement about Ripple. Besides, empirical findings show that cryptocurrency returns are adversely impacted by UCRY Policy during the salient events (China bans ICOs, the hack of cryptocurrency exchanges, Covid-19 crisis), suggesting their failure to act as a hedge or safe-haven asset.Originality/valueTo the best of the author’s knowledge, this study investigates the time-varying correlation between UCRY Policy and cryptocurrency returns. Besides, this study may be useful for new studies and fill a gap in the finance literature, due to the limited number of studies on the UCRY Policy in the finance literature.

Attention Control and Audiomotor Processes Underlying Anticipation of Musical Themes while Listening to Familiar Sonata-Form Pieces.

When listening to music, people are excited by the musical cues immediately before rewarding passages. More generally, listeners attend to the antecedent cues of a salient musical event irrespective of its emotional valence. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the behavioral and cognitive mechanisms underlying the cued anticipation of the main theme’s recurrence in sonata form. Half of the main themes in the musical stimuli were of a joyful character, half a tragic character. Activity in the premotor cortex suggests that around the main theme’s recurrence, the participants tended to covertly hum along with music. The anterior thalamus, pre-supplementary motor area (preSMA), posterior cerebellum, inferior frontal junction (IFJ), and auditory cortex showed increased activity for the antecedent cues of the themes, relative to the middle-last part of the themes. Increased activity in the anterior thalamus may reflect its role in guiding attention towards stimuli that reliably predict important outcomes. The preSMA and posterior cerebellum may support sequence processing, fine-grained auditory imagery, and fine adjustments to humming according to auditory inputs. The IFJ might orchestrate the attention allocation to motor simulation and goal-driven attention. These findings highlight the attention control and audiomotor components of musical anticipation.

History-dependent dopamine release increases cAMP levels in most basal amygdala glutamatergic neurons to control learning.

Dopaminergic inputs to basal amygdala (BA) instruct learning of motivational salience. This learning depends on intracellular plasticity signals such as cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP), which is regulated by activation of dopamine receptors. We examine the dynamics of dopamine release and downstream signaling during multiple salient events occurring within tens of seconds. We perform real-time tracking and manipulation of cAMP in BA neurons invitro and invivo. Optogenetically evoked release of dopamine drives proportional increases in cAMP in almost all BA glutamatergic neurons, suggesting widespread actions of dopamine across neurons preferring positive or negative valence. This cAMP response decreases across trials with short intertrial intervals owing to depression of dopamine release. No such depression is evident when photostimulating cAMP production directly. cAMP and protein kinase A responses to repeated appetitive or aversive stimuli also exhibit pronounced depression. Thus, history-dependent dynamics of dopamine and cAMP may regulate learning of temporally clustered, salient stimuli.

On the semantics and discourse functions of the aorist and the pluperfect in Modern Serbian: A study of Milorad Pavić’s novel The Inner Side of the Wind

The article deals with the semantics and discourse functions of the aorist and the pluperfect in the modern Serbian language. It considers the functioning of the aorist and the pluperfect in the system with the extended perfect. For the aorist, a bunch of meanings is proposed that includes both typologically trivial aoristic meaning and some less predictable meanings (new and / or unexpected event; event that has an actual result). For the pluperfect, the meaning of actual result in the past is claimed to be the most essential one. Among the discourse functions of the aorist and the pluperfect a so-called focusing function is claimed to be the crucial one — i.e., the function of marking the most salient events in the narrative.

The Impact of Life Trajectories on Retirement: Socioeconomic Differences in Social Support Networks

In general, the literature about social support networks (SSNs) has been divided into two different statements: On the one hand, social support is a safety net that helps the ego confront disadvantages in life. On the other hand, studies have shown how SSNs could act as sources of constraints for ego, especially in poverty. In this study, we looked into the SSNs of older people over time and found how those two paths co‐exist and depend on the socioeconomic status of ego. Then, this article aims to discover how cumulative social inequalities intersect with social networks in facilitating or hampering social support over time, impacting retirement experience. Specifically, we want to observe if and how the life trajectories of older people from different socioeconomic statuses affect how people build their SSNs in terms of structure and composition. This article presents a mixed‐method project that collected qualitative life history interviews from 30 older women and men in Santiago, Chile. The results show that socioeconomic status plays a role in shaping individual experiences of retirement but that these experiences are shaped through SSNs structural and compositional characteristics. People identify salient life events and the relevant networks and conjointly discuss supportive and/or exploitative aspects of their networks. The amount of support they give to others or that they receive from their alters accumulates over time, resulting in a progressive social inclusion or exclusion mechanism. This article concludes that SSNs during retirement are shaped by the ego’s socioeconomic status and life history.

Collateral Damage: The Relationship Between High-Salience Events and Variation in Racial Discrimination

To what extent are individual or organizational biases affected by racially salient events? We propose that acts of discrimination and the individual biases that undergird them are sensitive to high-salience events and will oscillate with the salience of the focal attribute. In short, that the propensity to discriminate reflects both individual and environmental differences, and therefore a given person may become more prone to discriminate in the aftermath of a high-salience event. We test our hypothesis in three online experiments that examine how varying the salience of race affects the evaluation of in-group or out-group founders. We find that respondents evaluate their in-group members more favorably, and out-group members less favorably, when exposed to a high-salience event, which translates into a significant disadvantage for the minority (African American) group. We complement these studies with an assessment of how police shootings affect fundraising outcomes on Kickstarter to confirm the external validity of our findings. Together, these studies indicate that racially salient events depress the quality evaluations and success odds of African American entrepreneurs relative to others. Hence, discrimination levels can be affected by salient yet unrelated events, and such events are consequential for the economic fortunes of individuals belonging to minority and disadvantaged groups. History: This paper has been accepted for the Organization Science Special Issue on Experiments in Organizational Theory. Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2021.1527 .

Schizophrenia Patients Show Largely Similar Salience Signaling Compared to Healthy Controls in an Observational Task Environment.

Recent evidence suggests that the aberrant signaling of salience is associated with psychotic illness. Salience, however, can take many forms in task environments. For example, salience may refer to any of the following: (1) the valence of an outcome, (2) outcomes that are unexpected, called reward prediction errors (PEs), or (3) cues associated with uncertain outcomes. Here, we measure brain responses to different forms of salience in the context of a passive PE-signaling task, testing whether patients with schizophrenia (SZ) showed aberrant signaling of particular types of salience. We acquired event-related MRI data from 29 SZ patients and 23 controls during the performance of a passive outcome prediction task. Across groups, we found that the anterior insula and posterior parietal cortices were activated to multiple different types of salience, including PE magnitude and heightened levels of uncertainty. However, BOLD activation to salient events was not significantly different between patients and controls in many regions, including the insula, posterior parietal cortices, and default mode network nodes. Such results suggest that deficiencies in salience processing in SZ may not result from an impaired ability to signal salience per se, but instead the ability to use such signals to guide future actions. Notably, no between-group differences were observed in BOLD signal changes associated with PE-signaling in the striatum. However, positive symptom severity was found to significantly correlate with the magnitudes of salience contrasts in default mode network nodes. Our results suggest that, in an observational environment, SZ patients may show an intact ability to activate striatal and cortical regions to rewarding and non-rewarding salient events. Furthermore, reduced deactivation of a hypothesized default mode network node for SZ participants with high levels of positive symptoms, following salient events, point to abnormalities in interactions of the salience network with other brain networks, and their potential importance to positive symptoms.

Neural tracking to go: auditory attention decoding and saliency detection with mobile EEG

Objective. Neuro-steered assistive technologies have been suggested to offer a major advancement in future devices like neuro-steered hearing aids. Auditory attention decoding (AAD) methods would in that case allow for identification of an attended speaker within complex auditory environments, exclusively from neural data. Decoding the attended speaker using neural information has so far only been done in controlled laboratory settings. Yet, it is known that ever-present factors like distraction and movement are reflected in the neural signal parameters related to attention. Approach. Thus, in the current study we applied a two-competing speaker paradigm to investigate performance of a commonly applied electroencephalography-based AAD model outside of the laboratory during leisure walking and distraction. Unique environmental sounds were added to the auditory scene and served as distractor events. Main results. The current study shows, for the first time, that the attended speaker can be accurately decoded during natural movement. At a temporal resolution of as short as 5 s and without artifact attenuation, decoding was found to be significantly above chance level. Further, as hypothesized, we found a decrease in attention to the to-be-attended and the to-be-ignored speech stream after the occurrence of a salient event. Additionally, we demonstrate that it is possible to predict neural correlates of distraction with a computational model of auditory saliency based on acoustic features. Significance. Taken together, our study shows that auditory attention tracking outside of the laboratory in ecologically valid conditions is feasible and a step towards the development of future neural-steered hearing aids.

Polling India via regression and post-stratification of non-probability online samples.

Recent technological advances have facilitated the collection of large-scale administrative data and the online surveying of the Indian population. Building on these we propose a strategy for more robust, frequent and transparent projections of the Indian vote during the campaign. We execute a modified MrP model of Indian vote preferences that proposes innovations to each of its three core components: stratification frame, training data, and a learner. For the post-stratification frame we propose a novel Data Integration approach that allows the simultaneous estimation of counts from multiple complementary sources, such as census tables and auxiliary surveys. For the training data we assemble panels of respondents from two unorthodox online populations: Amazon Mechanical Turks workers and Facebook users. And as a modeling tool, we replace the Bayesian multilevel regression learner with Random Forests. Our 2019 pre-election forecasts for the two largest Lok Sahba coalitions were very close to actual outcomes: we predicted 41.8% for the NDA, against an observed value of 45.0% and 30.8% for the UPA against an observed vote share of just under 31.3%. Our uniform-swing seat projection outperforms other pollsters-we had the lowest absolute error of 89 seats (along with a poll from 'Jan Ki Baat'); the lowest error on the NDA-UPA lead (a mere 8 seats), and we are the only pollster that can capture real-time preference shifts due to salient campaign events.