Task Conditions Research Articles

Психологическая работа с сотрудниками органов внутренних дел Российской Федерации, выполняющими служебные обязанности в особых условиях

The problem of psychological work with employees of the internal affairs bodies of the Russian Federation at all stages of their official duties in special conditions is considered. The goal is to develop and test methodological recommendations for conducting psychological work with employees of the internal affairs bodies of the Russian Federation performing official duties in special conditions. Materials and methods. The total sample of the study consisted of 244 people aged 21 to 55 years from among psychologists of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation, the National Guard and the Ministry of Defense. Psychological conversations were conducted with psychologists from internal affairs bodies and other law enforcement agencies. A survey of psychologists from the internal affairs bodies of the Russian Federation was conducted to identify the main problems of psychological work with employees of the internal affairs bodies of the Russian Federation who performed official duties in special conditions. The methodological recommendations developed as a result of the study underwent expert evaluation. The expert group was formed from among the most experienced psychologists of the internal affairs bodies of the Russian Federation. Results and discussion. According to the survey results, it was revealed that: 96% of the psychologists surveyed have experience working with employees after they have completed official tasks in special conditions; 53% of psychologists surveyed have experience working with employees who have been injured, traumatized, disfigured and 43% with members of their families; significantly fewer psychologists have experience working with family members of employees who died in the line of duty (10%); only 5% of the surveyed psychologists have experience in providing emergency psychological assistance to employees in the process of performing operational and official tasks in special conditions. Also, based on the results of the survey, the most effective methods of psychological assistance to employees of the internal affairs bodies of the Russian Federation were determined during and after the performance of their official duties in special conditions, as well as the most effective methods of providing psychological assistance to members of their families.

Using an Automated Operant Conditioning Procedure to Test Colour Discrimination in Two Juvenile Piranhas, Pygocentrus nattereri: A Lesson on Failures and Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

Most studies on the cognitive abilities of fish have focused on model organisms adopted in behavioural neuroscience. To date, little attention has been devoted to characiformes fish and we record a lack of cognitive investigation on the piranha. In this study, we conducted a preliminary set of experiments to assess whether red-bellied piranhas (Pygocentrus nattereri) can solve an automated operant conditioning task, specifically, a reversal learning task. In Experiment 1, the fish were required to discriminate between red and green, while in Experiment 2, they had to discriminate between white and yellow. In either case, we found no evidence of learning capacities with our protocol after extensive training exceeding one thousand trials overall. In Experiment 3, we simplified the learning task by using achromatic stimuli (black and white discrimination) and always presenting the reinforced stimulus on the same side of the tank (a combination of response learning and place learning). Subjects did learn how to discriminate between the colours, although no subject was able to reach the criterion in the subsequent reversal learning task, suggesting that piranhas may be limited in their cognitive flexibility. However, our training procedure may have been inefficient in addressing this issue. We outline some potential limitations of the current methodology to help to establish a more effective approach for investigating operant conditioning in this species.

Leadership Qualities of the Future Officers as an Innovative Way of Developing Moral Resistance

In today's world, where the situation is constantly escalating and new geopolitical challenges are being created, some leaders-officers possess the quality of leadership and moral stability to perform various tasks and lead their units to victory. The author analyzes the main components of leadership that contribute to the military personnel’s effective training and determines the relationship between leadership qualities and the ability of officers to withstand moral and ethical challenges. It is especially important to pay attention to innovative methods of education that contribute to increasing the personal responsibility and moral stability of future military leaders in modern conditions. It is noted that future officers’ moral stability is a key aspect of the successful performance of tasks in conditions of danger and stress, officers must not only physical training but also a strong moral spirit that allows them to defend their principles and values, independent of complex requirements. Therefore, leadership qualities are one of the key components that contribute to the formation of moral stability of future officers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and help create a strong foundation for professional development and success in a military career. A researched type of resilience that allows officers to remain strong and determined even in the most difficult situations without compromising their principles and duties. Leadership and moral stability, which are integral aspects of successful professional training of future officers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, are characterized.

Neural mechanisms of reward processing in preadolescent irritability: Insights from the ABCD study

Elevated youth irritability is characterized by increased proneness to frustration relative to peers when rewards are blocked, and is a transdiagnostic symptom that predicts multiple forms of psychopathology and poorer socioeconomic outcomes in adulthood. Although mechanistic models propose that irritability is the result of aberrant reward-related brain function, youth irritability as it relates to multiple components of reward processes, including reward anticipation, gain, and loss, has yet to be examined in large, population-based samples. Data from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) baseline sample (N = 5923) was used to examine associations between youth irritability (measured by parent-report) and reward-related brain activation and connectivity in a large, preadolescent sample. Preadolescents (M age = 9.96 years, SD = 0.63) performed the Monetary Incentive Delay task during functional MRI acquisition. In the task, during the anticipation period, participants were informed of the upcoming trial type (win money, lose money, no money at stake) and waited to hit a target; during the feedback period, participants were informed of their success. Whole brain and region of interest (ROI) analyses evaluated task conditions in relation to irritability level. Preadolescents with higher compared to lower levels of irritability demonstrated blunted prefrontal cortex activation in the anticipation period and exaggerated striatum-prefrontal connectivity differences among reward conditions during the feedback period. These effects persisted after adjusting for co-occurring anxiety, depression, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms. These findings provide evidence for the role of reward salience in pathophysiological models of youth irritability, suggesting a mechanism that may contribute to exaggerated behavioral responses.

Effects of ketamine on frontoparietal interactions in a rule-based antisaccade task in macaque monkeys.

Cognitive control is engaged by working memory processes and high-demand situations like antisaccade, where one must suppress a prepotent response. While it is known to be supported by the frontoparietal control network, how intra- and inter-areal dynamics contribute to cognitive control processes remain unclear. N-Methyl-D-aspartate glutamate receptors (NMDARs) play a key role in prefrontal dynamics that support cognitive control, and its antagonists, such as ketamine, are known to alter task-related prefrontal activities and impair cognitive performance. However, the role of NMDAR in cognitive control-related frontoparietal dynamics remain underexplored. Here, we simultaneously recorded local field potentials and single unit activities from lateral prefrontal (lPFC) and posterior parietal cortices (PPC) in two male macaque monkeys during a rule-based antisaccade task, with both Rule-Visible (RV) and Rule-Memorized (RM) conditions. In addition to altering the E/I balance in both areas, ketamine had a negative impact on rule-coding in true oscillatory activities. It also reduced frontoparietal coherence in a frequency- and rule-dependent manner. Granger prediction analysis revealed that ketamine induced an overall reduction in bidirectional connectivity. Among antisaccade trials, a greater reduction in lPFC-PPC connectivity during the delay period preceded a greater delay in saccadic onset under the RM condition, and a greater deficit in performance under the RV condition. Lastly, ketamine compromised rule coding in lPFC neurons in both RV and RM conditions, and in PPC neurons only in the RV condition. Our findings demonstrate the utility of acute NMDA receptor antagonist in understanding the mechanisms through which frontoparietal dynamics support cognitive control processes.Significance statement A low dose of ketamine is known to induce a transient cognitive control deficit in healthy humans and animals, but it remains unclear whether this deficit is related to a frontoparietal dysconnection. In macaque monkeys performing a rule-based pro- and anti-saccade task, we found that ketamine impaired information coding in frontoparietal neuron, local oscillations and inter-areal synchrony in a rule- and frequency-dependent manner. Notably, under the antisaccade rule, the amount of impairment in task performance could be predicted by the loss in fronto-parietal connectivity in the period just before the monkeys responded. The observations support the utility of NMDA receptor antagonists like ketamine as a tool to understand the role of frontoparietal dynamics in cognitive control.

Competitive plasticity to reduce the energetic costs of learning.

The brain is not only constrained by energy needed to fuel computation, but it is also constrained by energy needed to form memories. Experiments have shown that learning simple conditioning tasks which might require only a few synaptic updates, already carries a significant metabolic cost. Yet, learning a task like MNIST to 95% accuracy appears to require at least 108 synaptic updates. Therefore the brain has likely evolved to be able to learn using as little energy as possible. We explored the energy required for learning in feedforward neural networks. Based on a parsimonious energy model, we propose two plasticity restricting algorithms that save energy: 1) only modify synapses with large updates, and 2) restrict plasticity to subsets of synapses that form a path through the network. In biology networks are often much larger than the task requires, yet vanilla backprop prescribes to update all synapses. In particular in this case, large savings can be achieved while only incurring a slightly worse learning time. Thus competitively restricting plasticity helps to save metabolic energy associated to synaptic plasticity. The results might lead to a better understanding of biological plasticity and a better match between artificial and biological learning. Moreover, the algorithms might benefit hardware because also electronic memory storage is energetically costly.

Idea generation and planning time in second language academic writing: An empirical investigation at Howard College Campus, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa

Idea generation is a cognitive process which underlies the production of coherent writing. However, little is known about the nature of this process and how it is affected by different preparatory conditions. The current study examines the effects of three planning time conditions: ‘planning time’ (10 minutes), ‘extended planning time’ (20 minutes) and ‘no planning time’ and two task conditions, namely ‘topic given’ and ‘topic and ideas given’, and their effect on the quality and the quantity of idea units produced in the planning notes and essays of 30 English Second Language (ESL) learners at a South African university. The study aims to replicate an earlier study by Ong, and tests four hypotheses: hypotheses 1 and 2 state that an extended planning time has a positive effect on both the quantity and the quality of ideas generated in planning notes (hypothesis 1) and essays (hypothesis 2). Hypotheses 3 and 4 state that additional ideas alongside a topic enhance the idea generation process in both planning notes (hypothesis 3) and essays (hypothesis 4). Our findings do not verify hypothesis (1) as neither in the planning notes nor the essays was the quantity of ideas affected by the planning time conditions. Hypothesis 2 was partially verified as the quality of ideas in the essays — but not in the planning notes — improved as an effect of an extended planning time. These results differ from Ong whose data fully support both hypotheses 1 and 2. Our data falsify hypotheses 3 and 4 as the topic-given condition consistently produced both a better quality and a larger quantity of ideas in the planning notes and in the essays of the participants. This finding concurs with Ong. In conclusion, the attempt at a replication of Ong only partially yielded the same results. Interestingly, the data indicate that the idea-generation process differed between the production of the planning notes and the production of the essays.

A universal hippocampal memory code across animals and environments.

How learning is affected by context is a fundamental question of neuroscience, as the ability to generalize learning to different contexts is necessary for navigating the world. An example of swift contextual generalization is observed in conditioning tasks, where performance is quickly generalized from one context to another. A key question in identifying the neural substrate underlying this ability is how the hippocampus (HPC) represents task-related stimuli across different environments, given that HPC cells exhibit place-specific activity that changes across contexts (remapping). In this study, we used calcium imaging to monitor hippocampal neuron activity as animals performed a conditioning task across multiple spatial contexts. We investigated whether hippocampal cells, which encode both spatial locations (place cells) and task-related information, could maintain their task representation even when their spatial encoding remapped in a new spatial context. To assess the consistency of task representations, we used advanced dimensionality reduction techniques combined with machine learning to develop manifold representations of population level HPC activity. The results showed that task-related neural representations remained stable even as place cell representations of spatial context changed, thus demonstrating similar embedding geometries of neural representations of the task across different spatial contexts. Notably, these patterns were not only consistent within the same animal across different contexts but also significantly similar across different animals, suggesting a standardized neural encoding or 'neural syntax' in the hippocampus. These findings bridge a critical gap between memory and navigation research, revealing how the hippocampus maintains cognitive consistency across different spatial environments. These findings also suggest that hippocampal function is governed by a neural framework shared between animals, an observation that may have broad implications for understanding memory, learning, and related cognitive processes. Looking ahead, this work opens new avenues for exploring the fundamental principles underlying hippocampal encoding strategies.

GLTScene: Global‐to‐Local Transformers for Indoor Scene Synthesis with General Room Boundaries

AbstractWe present GLTScene, a novel data‐driven method for high‐quality furniture layout synthesis with general room boundaries as conditions. This task is challenging since the existing indoor scene datasets do not cover the variety of general room boundaries. We incorporate the interior design principles with learning techniques and adopt a global‐to‐local strategy for this task. Globally, we learn the placement of furniture objects from the datasets without considering their alignment. Locally, we learn the alignment of furniture objects relative to their nearest walls, according to the alignment principle in interior design. The global placement and local alignment of furniture objects are achieved by two transformers respectively. We compare our method with several baselines in the task of furniture layout synthesis with general room boundaries as conditions. Our method outperforms these baselines both quantitatively and qualitatively. We also demonstrate that our method can achieve other conditional layout synthesis tasks, including object‐level conditional generation and attribute‐level conditional generation. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/WWalter-Lee/GLTScene.

Optimizing rehabilitation strategies in Parkinson’s disease: a comparison of dual cognitive-walking treadmill training and single treadmill training

Dual cognitive-walking treadmill training (DTT), designed to replicate real-life walking conditions, has shown promise effect in individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD). This study aims to compare the effects of DTT versus single treadmill training (STT) on cognitive and walking performance under both single and dual task conditions, as well as on fall, patients’ subjective feeling, and quality of life. Sixteen individuals with PD were randomly assigned to DTT or STT group and underwent 8 weeks of training. The DTT group received treadmill training with cognitive loads, while the STT group received treadmill training without cognitive load. Outcome measures included gait parameters (speed, step length) and cognitive performance (reaction time, accuracy, composite score) under both single and dual task conditions. Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale-part III (UPDRS-III), Falls Efficacy Scale (FES), Patient Global Impression of Change (PGIC), and Parkinson’s Disease Questionnaire (PDQ-39) were also measured. Both DTT and STT groups showed increased comfortable walking speed and step length. Only the DTT group demonstrated significant improvements in cognitive composite score under both single and dual task conditions, as well as UPDRS-III, FES, and PDQ-39(p < 0.05). DTT can enhance cognitive function without compromising walking ability and also have real-world transferability.

Outcome devaluation as a method for identifying goal-directed behaviors in rats.

Goal-directed behaviors allow animals to act to satisfy needs and desires. The outcome devaluation task is an effective method for identifying goal-directed behaviors and distinguishing these from other types of behavior. Rats can be trained to lever-press for one or multiple distinct food rewards. During testing, the previously earned food-or a control food for comparison-is devalued by allowing the animal to freely feed on it until they are sated before testing lever-press performance under extinction conditions (no rewards are delivered). Behavior that adapts to reflect the new value of the outcome is considered goal-directed, whereas behavior that continues as in previous training despite the change in outcome value, is not. As more research groups have used this task, variability in the procedures used has increased. Here, we provide a reliable procedure for conducting the outcome devaluation task with appropriate controls. We describe the most common variants of the task and control conditions and discuss troubleshooting measures such as outcome pre-exposure, habituation to pre-feeding chambers and attention to animals' hunger levels. The method outlined can be executed in ~2 weeks including training (~8 d) and testing (1-4 d) by researchers who are familiar with performing behavioral tasks in laboratory rodents, although longer training may be considered for those who are interested in observing habitual control of behavior. This protocol should facilitate the comparison of results from different studies and laboratories, while allowing flexibility in the application of the outcome devaluation task to different research questions.

Consistent activation differences versus differences in consistent activation: Evaluating meta-analytic contrasts

Abstract Meta-analytic contrasts are a promising aspect of coordinate-based meta-analyses in neuroimaging research as they facilitate the statistical comparison of two meta-analytic results. They have been used for a multitude of comparisons, such as task conditions, cognitive processes, and groups. However, it remains to be tested how the results of meta-analytic contrasts relate to those of classic meta-analyses and vice versa. Here we present a comprehensive empirical investigation of this issue using four datasets from three different cognitive domains: working memory, working memory load, cognitive interference processing, and emotional face processing. For all four datasets, we compared the results of a standard meta-analysis across prototypical contrasts (condition A &amp;gt; condition B) reported in individual experiments with those of a contrast between two individual meta-analyses of the same conditions (meta-analysis condition A &amp;gt; meta-analysis condition B). In the meta-analytic contrasts similar brain regions as in the standard meta-analysis were found but with relatively distinct spatial activation patterns. Additionally, fewer regions were revealed in the meta-analytic contrasts, especially in areas where the conditions spatially overlapped. This can be ascribed to the loss of information on the strength of activations in meta-analytic contrasts, across which standard meta-analysis summarize. In one dataset, additional regions were found in the meta-analytic contrast, potentially due to task effects. Our results demonstrate that meta-analytic contrasts can yield similar results to standard meta-analyses but are sparser. This confirms the overall validity, but also limited ability to capture all regions found in standard meta-analyses. Notable differences observed in some cases indicate that such contrasts cannot be taken as an easy substitute for classic meta-analyses of experiment-level contrasts, warranting further research into the boundary conditions for agreement.

Dominant Strategies for Solving Sensorimotor Tasks in Students with Different Cognitive Resource Experience

The article introduces a new method for diagnosing the preferable cognitive resource strategy in university students. One’s personal experience of using cognitive resources defines the dominant strategies for solving sensorimotor tasks. Cognitive resource patterns can be described by using particular psychological indicators in order to select the optimal analysis method. The new method made it possible to model the situation of solving sensorimotor tasks and develop criteria for determining the strategies employed by university students to solve cognitive tasks in experimental conditions. The research involved 127 first-year students (18 y.o.) of Psychology, Tomsk State University. The strategies used by the students to solve sensorimotor tasks ranged from scarcity and heterogeneity to positive experience in cognitive resource application. Sensorimotor tasks proved to be an effective diagnostic marker of the cognitive development level during university education. The method also proved applicable as a cognitive simulator to develop optimal strategies in solving sensorimotor tasks of various levels of difficulty, as well as to reduce the existing deficiency in cognitive experience.

Cognitive dual-task does not annihilate the negative effects of gender stereotype threat on girls' motor learning

Stereotype threat, a key concept in social psychology, occurs when individuals fear they may confirm negative stereotypes about their social group (Steele, 1997). This phenomenon can significantly impair motor learning, particularly in children. Given the robust nature of stereotype threat, research it is now focused on mitigating these negative effects. According to the explicit monitoring hypothesis, it is suggested that distracting individual’s attention can lead to an annihilation of stereotype threat effects, however, to date, this hypothesis has not been examined in children. The present study examined the effect of stereotype threat in a dual task condition on children’s motor learning. One hundred and fifty girls (mean age = 10.96 ± .80 years) were randomly assigned into 3 groups; 1- explicit gender stereotype threat; 2- explicit gender stereotype threat + dual task; 3- control. The task consisted of a soccer-kicking task in which the participants had to score the most points by kicking the soccer ball towards the goals on the wall. This study included three phases; 1- pretest (10 trials); 2- practice phase (5 blocks of 10 trials); 3- retention test (10 trials). During the practice phase, the results indicated that participants in the control condition performed better (M = 1.46, SD = .19) than participants in the gender stereotype threat condition (M = 1.25, SD = .16, p < .001), and, than participants in the gender stereotype threat + dual task paradigm condition (M = .92, SD = .19, p < .001). However, participants in the gender stereotypes + dual task paradigm condition performed worse than participants in the gender stereotype threat condition (p < .001). In addition, the results of the retention test showed that participants in the control condition performed better (M = 1.51, SD = .34) than participants in the gender stereotype threat condition (M = 1.24, SD = .35, p = .001), and participants in the gender stereotype threat + dual task paradigm condition (M = 1.15, SD = .49, p < .001). In conclusion, these results do not support the potential neutralizing effect of a cognitive dual task in a stereotype threat condition in children.

Exacerbation of paranoia-like thoughts following exposure to common misophonia trigger sounds

Paranoia-like thoughts refer to heightened suspicions and unfounded beliefs about being watched or persecuted by others. Recent research has found a significant correlation between misophonia symptoms, a form of decreased sound tolerance, and paranoia-like thoughts, both of which are linked to heightened negative emotions in clinical and non-clinical populations. Notably, it has been observed that misophonia may also be associated with the tendency to attribute hostile intent to those producing triggering sounds, a feature consistent with paranoid ideation (i.e., perceptions of intentional harm). However, existing research is based on correlational data, limiting causal inference. Therefore, an online study involving a non-clinical sample (N = 487) employed an experimental approach to examine the relationship between misophonia symptoms, negative emotional response, and paranoia-like thoughts. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four task conditions, each related to exposure to different stimulus types: orofacial human-produced sounds, non-human sounds, sounds without visual context, or visuals devoid of sound. The results of mixed model ANOVA and mediation analysis revealed that exposure to common misophonia trigger sounds with a human-related visual context raised, but not significantly, the levels of paranoia-like thoughts. However, it did lead to a significant increase in negative emotions, which, in turn, proved to be a significant mediator of an increase in paranoia-like thoughts. Conversely, exposure to non-human sounds or to only audio/visual stimuli either decreased both negative emotions and paranoia-like thoughts or showed no significant change. This emphasized the role of context and the involvement of negative emotional response to human-made sounds in amplifying paranoia-like thoughts. Importantly, this effect was observed in individuals who do not meet the provisional diagnostic criteria for misophonia, suggesting that symptoms of misophonia may extend beyond clinical diagnoses, with milder manifestations potentially being present within the general population.

The Infralimbic, but not the Prelimbic Cortex is needed for a Complex Olfactory Memory Task.

The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) plays a key role in memory and behavioral flexibility, and a growing body of evidence suggests that the prelimbic (PL) and infralimbic (IL) subregions contribute differently to these processes. Studies of fear conditioning and goal-directed learning suggest that the PL promotes behavioral responses and memory retrieval, while the IL inhibits them. Other studies have shown that the mPFC is engaged under conditions of high interference. This raises the possibility that the PL and IL play differing roles in resolving interference. To examine this, we first used chemogenetics (DREADDs) to suppress mPFC neuronal activity and tested subjects on a conditional discrimination task known to be sensitive to muscimol inactivation. After confirming the effectiveness of the DREADD procedures, we conducted a second experiment to examine the PL and IL roles in a high interference memory task. We trained rats on two consecutive sets of conflicting odor discrimination problems, A and B, followed by test sessions involving a mid-session switch between the problem sets. Controls repeatedly performed worse on Set A, suggesting that learning Set B inhibited the rats' ability to retrieve Set A memories (i.e. retroactive interference). PL inactivation rats performed similarly to controls. However, IL inactivation rats did not show this effect, suggesting that the IL plays a critical role in suppressing the retrieval of previously acquired memories that may interfere with retrieval of more recent memories. These results suggest that the IL plays a critical role in memory control processes needed for resolving interference.

Differential reconfiguration of brain networks in children in response to standard versus rewarded go/no-go task demands.

Response inhibition and sustained attention are critical for higher-order cognition and rely upon specific patterns of functional brain network organization. This study investigated how functional brain networks reconfigure to execute these cognitive processes during a go/no-go task with and without the presence of rewards in 26 children between the ages of 8 and 12 years. First, we compared task performance between standard and rewarded versions of a go/no-go task. We found that the presence of rewards reduced commission error rate, a measure considered to indicate improved response inhibition. Tau, thought to index sustained attention, did not change across task conditions. Next, changes in functional brain network organization were assessed between the resting state, the standard go/no-go task, and the rewarded go/no-go task. Relative to the resting state, integration decreased and segregation increased during the standard go/no-go task. A further decrease in integration and increase in segregation was observed when rewards were introduced. These patterns of reconfiguration were present globally and across several key brain networks of interest, as well as in individual regions implicated in the processes of response inhibition, attention, and reward processing. These findings align with patterns of brain network organization found to support the cognitive strategy of sustained attention, rather than response inhibition, during go/no-go task performance and suggest that rewards enhance this organization. Overall, this study used large-scale brain network organization and a within-subjects multi-task design to examine different cognitive strategies and the influence of rewards on response inhibition and sustained attention in late childhood.

Effects of Head-Up Display Information Layout Design on Driver Performance: Driving Simulator Studies

Head-up displays (HUDs) enable drivers to receive additional information while maintaining a forward view of the road. However, due to human cognitive resource limitations, improper HUD interface design can pose safety risks, especially when multiple pieces of information are presented simultaneously. This study involved 45 participants and conducted two driving simulation experiments. Study 1 explored the impact of different HUD interface positions on driver cognitive performance in single cognitive task conditions. Study 2 validated the findings of Study 1 under multiple cognitive task conditions and further compared drivers’ cognitive performance, workload, driving operation, and eye movement between grouped and disordered information layouts on the HUD. The results indicated that the central area of the HUD interface provided the best cognitive performance, followed by the left side, with the right side performing the poorest. Grouped information layouts on the HUD proved superior to disordered layouts in terms of cognitive performance, workload, driving operation, and eye movement. An XGBoost regression model was proposed to predict the drivers’ comprehensive cognitive responses. This study could provide empirical evidence and practical recommendations for HUD interface design.

Aperiodic neural activity reflects metacontrol in task-switching

“Metacontrol” refers to the ability to find the right balance between more persistent and more flexible cognitive control styles, depending on task demands. Recent research on tasks involving response conflict regulation indicates a consistent link between aperiodic EEG activity and task conditions that demand a more or less persistent control style. In this study, we explored whether this connection between metacontrol and aperiodic activity also applies to cognitive flexibility. We examined EEG and behavioral data from two separate samples engaged in a task-switching paradigm, allowing for an internal replication of our findings. Both studies revealed that aperiodic activity significantly decreased during task switching compared to task repetition. Our results support the predictions of metacontrol theory but contradict those of traditional control theories which would have predicted the opposite pattern of results. We propose that aperiodic activity observed in EEG signals serves as a valid indicator of dynamic neuroplasticity in metacontrol, suggesting that truly adaptive metacontrol does not necessarily bias processing towards persistence in response to every control challenge, but chooses between persistence and flexibility biases depending on the nature of the challenge.

A multi-source domain feature-decision dual fusion adversarial transfer network for cross-domain anti-noise mechanical fault diagnosis in sustainable city

Rotating machinery forms the critical backbone of infrastructure in a sustainable city, with bearings playing a pivotal role as key mechanical transmission components. Therefore, the health status of these bearings directly influences the safe operation of the infrastructure. Accurate and reliable diagnosis of defects in these components minimizes downtime, reduces maintenance costs, and prevents major accidents, ultimately providing insights in the construction and management of a sustainable city. Typically, in actual industrial scenarios, varying working conditions and various types of machines can result in significant discrepancies in the distribution of sample data. Moreover, the non-negligible noise may degrade the diagnostic performance. Therefore, realizing an accurate and reliable bearing diagnosis considering the cross-domain and noise environment remains a challenge. Leveraging the merits of information fusion and multi-source domain transfer learning, this article proposes a multi-source domain feature-decision dual fusion adversarial transfer network (DFATN) to break through the aforesaid limitations. Initially, an adversarial transfer framework is developed, incorporating novel feature matching evaluation and joint distribution difference losses. This framework is designed to facilitate the learning of feature invariants across domains and to enhance the sharing of domain-specific knowledge, even in noise. Relying on channel-spatial interactive feature fusion, a multi-scale feature extractor (MFE) is constructed to share the interaction and enhance the modeling of complex features in multiple dimensions. Additionally, a fault state-related decision fusion mechanism (SDF) is also implemented to integrate diagnostic information, significantly enhancing the generalization performance and robustness of the proposed network. By employing both public Paderborn University (PU) and laboratory-collected (Lab) datasets, the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed DFATN on bearing fault diagnosis are validated. For cross-working condition tasks, the proposed method realizes impressive performance, with average accuracies of 96.52% and 98.76% for Paderborn University (PU) and laboratory-collected (Lab) datasets, respectively. For cross-machine tasks, the average accuracy is 83.36%, outperforming other latest cross-domain fault diagnosis techniques.