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.     

Raising the Coefficient of Turbulent Diffusion in the Reaction Zone as Means To Improve Technical and Economical Parameters of Polymer Production

Use of a new type of apparatus, high-output small-size tubular turbulent reactors of mainly dif- fuser-confuser design, in very fast processes, including polymerization, is considered. The turbulent diffusion coefficient D _t and its distribution over the apparatus volume were calculated as functions of the confuser divergence angle . The calculations were confirmed by experimental data. New reactor designs for a number of processes of large-tonnage polymer production were proposed and put into practice.     

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.     

Simple Interpretation of Kinetics of Fast Solid-State Reactions

A simple model of fast solid-state reaction of two substances on the phase boundary is proposed. It is assumed that the reaction is controlled by the formation of new surface. The dependence of a change in the surface on the value of shear deformation is calculated. Thus, the relation between the product yield and shear deformation independently of time is explained.