Heritability of Stroop and flanker performance in 12-year old children

Background  

There is great interest in appropriate phenotypes that serve as indicator of genetically transmitted frontal (dys)function, such as ADHD. Here we investigate the ability to deal with response conflict, and we ask to what extent performance variation on response interference tasks is caused by genetic variation. We tested a large sample of 12-year old monozygotic and dizygotic twins on two well-known and closely related response interference tasks; the color Stroop task and the Eriksen flanker task. Using structural equation modelling we assessed the heritability of several performance indices derived from those tasks.     

The contribution of high frequencies to human brain activity underlying horizontal localization of natural spatial sounds

Background  

In the field of auditory neuroscience, much research has focused on the neural processes underlying human sound localization. A recent magnetoencephalography (MEG) study investigated localization-related brain activity by measuring the N1m event-related response originating in the auditory cortex. It was found that the dynamic range of the right-hemispheric N1m response, defined as the mean difference in response magnitude between contralateral and ipsilateral stimulation, reflects cortical activity related to the discrimination of horizontal sound direction. Interestingly, the results also suggested that the presence of realistic spectral information within horizontally located spatial sounds resulted in a larger right-hemispheric N1m dynamic range. Spectral cues being predominant at high frequencies, the present study further investigated the issue by removing frequencies from the spatial stimuli with low-pass filtering. This resulted in a stepwise elimination of direction-specific spectral information. Interaural time and level differences were kept constant. The original, unfiltered stimuli were broadband noise signals presented from five frontal horizontal directions and binaurally recorded for eight human subjects with miniature microphones placed in each subject's ear canals. Stimuli were presented to the subjects during MEG registration and in a behavioral listening experiment.     

Buckling delamination in compressed multilayers on curved substrates with accompanying ridge cracks

Residually compressed films and coatings are susceptible to buckle delamination. The buckles often have linear or telephone cord morphology. When the films are brittle, such buckles are susceptible to the formation of ridge cracks that extend along their length, terminating close to the propagating front. The ridge-cracked buckles are invariably straight-sided (not telephone cord) and differ in width. Buckle delaminations of this type occur on flat and curved substrates: having greatest technological relevance in the latter. They occur not only in single layer films but also in multilayers, such as thermal barrier systems. Establishing the mechanics of ridge-cracked buckle delaminations for multilayers on curved substrates serves two purposes. (a) It allows the prediction of buckle delamination and spalling for technologically important systems. (b) It provides a test protocol for measuring properties such as the delamination toughness of the interface and the stresses in the layers. Both objectives are addressed in the article: the latter by devising an inverse algorithm. Implementation of the algorithm is demonstrated for diamond-like carbon films on planar glass substrates and a thermal barrier multilayer on a curved superalloy substrate.     

Optical spectroscopy of Dysprosium Aluminum Garnet (DAG)

The absorption spectrum of antiferromagnetic dysprosium aluminium garnet (DAG) (T _N =2.50 °K) has been investigated at low temperatures. The groundstate splitting due to all interactions in the antiferromagnetic state is (5.27±0.10) cm^?1 extrapolated to 0 °K. The temperature dependence of the lineshift of the absorption lines is measured. Zeeman effect studies give theg-tensor of the groundstate asg _z =18.4±0.5,g _x =g _y =0.5±0.2. The studies also allow the determination of the critical fields asH _c ^[100] =(5.0±0.1) koe,H _c ^[111] =(3.9±0.2) koe andH _c ^[110] =(4.9±0.6) koe. In addition an investigation of a number of satellite lines is performed. Some of them can be interpreted as spin wave sidebands (Stokes and anti-Stokes); others obviously come from dysprosium ions which have impurity ions on regular lattice sites as neighbours.