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.     

Mean field approximation versus exact treatment of collisions in few-body systems

A variational principle for calculating matrix elements of the full resolvent operator for a many-body system is studied. Its mean field approximation results in nonlinear equations of Hartree (-Fock) type, with initial and final channel wave functions as driving terms. The mean field equations will in general have many solutions whereas the exact problem being linear, has a unique solution. In a schematic model with separable forces the mean field equations are analytically soluble, and for the exact problem the resulting integral equations are solved numerically. Comparing exact and mean field results over a wide range of system parameters, the mean field approach proves to be a very reliable approximation, which is not plagued by the notorious problem of defining asymptotic channels in the time-dependent mean field method.     

Multi-Component Ginzburg-Landau Theory: Microscopic Derivation and Examples

This paper consists of three parts. In part I, we microscopically derive Ginzburg–Landau (GL) theory from BCS theory for translation-invariant systems in which multiple types of superconductivity may coexist. Our motivation are unconventional superconductors. We allow the ground state of the effective gap operator \({K_{T_c}+V}\) to be n-fold degenerate and the resulting GL theory then couples n order parameters. In part II, we study examples of multi-component GL theories which arise from an isotropic BCS theory. We study the cases of (a) pure d-wave order parameters and (b) mixed (s + d)-wave order parameters, in two and three-dimensions. In part III, we present explicit choices of spherically symmetric interactions V which produce the examples in part II. In fact, we find interactions V which produce ground state sectors of \({K_{T_c}+V}\) of arbitrary angular momentum, for open sets of of parameter values. This is in stark contrast with Schrödinger operators \({-\nabla^2+V}\), for which the ground state is always non-degenerate. Along the way, we prove the following fact about Bessel functions: At its first maximum, a half-integer Bessel function is strictly larger than all other half-integer Bessel functions.