Search

Two aspects of real-world visual search are typically studied in parallel: category knowledge (e.g., searching for food) and visual patterns (e.g., predicting an upcoming street sign from prior street signs). Previous visual search studies have shown that prior category knowledge hinders search when targets and distractors are from the same category. Other studies have shown that task-irrelevant patterns of non-target objects can enhance search when targets appear in locations that previously contained these irrelevant patterns. Combining EEG (N2pc ERP component, a neural marker of target selection) and behavioral measures, the present study investigated how search efficiency is simultaneously affected by prior knowledge of real-world objects (food and toys) and irrelevant visual patterns (sequences of runic symbols) within the same paradigm. We did not observe behavioral differences between locating items in patterned versus random locations. However, the N2pc components emerged sooner when search items appeared in the patterned location, compared to the random location, with a stronger effect when search items were targets, as opposed to non-targets categorically related to the target. A multivariate pattern analysis revealed that neural responses during search trials in the same time window reflected where the visual patterns appeared. Our finding contributes to our understanding of how knowledge acquired prior to the search task (e.g., category knowledge) interacts with new content within the search task.

Sarcoplasmic proteins (SP) derived from yak meat were oxidized by malondialdehyde (MDA) at different concentrations. The effects of lipid oxidation on physicochemical properties and color stability of SP were investigated by evaluating side-chain amino acid oxidation, protein structure and color of SP and the oxidation status of myoglobin (Mb). The results showed that after MDA oxidation, the a* value, b* value, C* value, and deoxymyoglobin and oxymyoglobin contents of SP significantly decreased (P < 0.05), and the L* value, metmyoglobin content, and ferrylmyoglobin concentration significantly increased (P < 0.05), indicating that MDA oxidation lowered color stability. The contents of carbonyl groups and dimeric tyrosine, the fluorescence intensity of SP-MDA adducts, and the relative contents of β-helix and β-turn significantly increased (P < 0.05), and total sulfhydryl content, surface hydrophobicity, intrinsic fluorescence intensity, and the relative contents of α-helix and random coil significantly declined (P < 0.05). Sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE) showed blurred expansion of small molecule bands and the formation of macromolecular aggregates, suggesting that MDA promoted the oxidation and aggregation of SP. Pearson correlation analysis revealed significant correlations between MDA oxidation and physicochemical properties and color stability of SP (P < 0.05). This study reveals that MDA alters the structure of SP by directly oxidizing it or mediating Mb oxidation, causing cross-linked aggregation of SP and reducing its color stability.

The effects of adding different levels (0.01%, 0.05% and 0.10%) of banana flower extract (BFE) versus dibutylated hydroxy toluene (BHT) on protein oxidation in naturally fermented yak meat sausages were investigated. lys The carbonyl content, Schiff base content, total sulfhydryl content, active sulfhydryl content, surface hydrophobicity, dimeric tyrosine content, endogenous fluorescence intensity and solubility of myofibrillar proteins (MPs) from fermented yak meat sausage were measured at different fermentation times, and the secondary structure and composition of MPs were characterized by Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, and sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE). The results showed that compared with the blank control, the addition of BFE decreased the carbonyl group content, Schiff base content, surface hydrophobicity, dimeric tyrosine content and endogenous tryptophan fluorescence intensity of MPs, and increased the total sulfhydryl group content, active sulfhydryl group content and solubility. FTIR spectroscopy showed that the addition of BFE improved the reveal the more stability of the secondary structure of MPs. SDS-PAGE showed that BFE reduced the diffusion of myosin heavy chain and had a protective effect on myosin. This study showed that BFE inhibited protein oxidation in naturally fermented yak sausage, and this effect was positively correlated with BFE concentration, being most pronounced at 0.10% BFE concentration.

To explore the effect of different levels of lipid oxidation on the structural and functional properties of myofibrillar protein (MP) in yak meat, the oxidation of side-chain amino acids, structure, rheological characteristics, and emulsion stability of MP incubated in the presence of different concentrations (0, 0.1, 1, 5, 10 and 20 mmol/L) of malondialdehyde (MDA) were measured. The results showed that with an increase in MDA concentration, the contents of carbonyl group, MDA-MP adducts and dimeric tyrosine and the relative content of β-turn in MP overall increased, while total sulfhydryl content, surface hydrophobicity, endogenous fluorescence intensity, and the relative contents of α-helix and β-sheet decreased. Sodium dodecyl sulfate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE) results indicated gradual loss of myosin heavy and light chains, implying that interaction with MDA could induce MP oxidation and cross-linked aggregation and result in structural transition from an ordered to a disordered state. In addition, moderate oxidation (with MAD concentration < 10 mmol/L) increased the storage and loss moduli and improved the gel quality of MP; however, excessive oxidation (with MAD concentration ≥ 10 mmol/L) led to serious aggregation of MP and a decrease in the storage and loss moduli as well as a decrease in the emulsion stability and color deterioration. In conclusion, MDA oxidation can promote the oxidation of MP, and alter the structural and functional properties.

The effects of the addition of different amounts (0.01%, 0.05% and 0.10%) of banana flower extract (BFE) on the physicochemical quality of fermented yak meat sausage were investigated using butylated hydroxy toluene (BHT) as a positive control, and the changes in the pH, moisture content, color, water retention, texture, rheological properties, total bacterial count, volatile flavor substances and sensory quality of the sausage during fermentation and storage were evaluated. The results showed that the sausage with 0.10% BFE had stronger water retention and bacterial inhibition ability, while increasing BFE addition reduced the textural characteristics and storage modulus of the fermented sausage. A total of seven classes of volatile flavor substances, including alcohols, aldehydes, acids and esters, were detected in all samples during fermentation, and three principal components were obtained by principal component analysis, with a cumulative contribution of 75.014%. In conclusion, BFE has strong antioxidant activity and significantly improves the physicochemical properties of fermented yak meat sausage, and the most pronounced effect is obtained with 0.01% BFE addition.

In this research, the distribution and physicochemical properties of polysaccharides from the whole seed, cotyledon and hull of Cicer arietinum were analyzed and compared, and the structure characteristics of Cicer arietinum hull polysaccharide (CAHP) were characterized. It was found that polysaccharide was concentrated in the hull of chickpea according to the yield and composition of polysaccharide. CAHP was further purified by column chromatography into six fractions (Fw, F0.1, F0.2, F0.3, F0.5 and F2), and the structure of CAHP-F0.2, which showed relatively high yield and good homogeneity, was characterized. The results showed that CAHP-F0.2 was consisted of mostly homogalacturonan (HG)-type pectic polysaccharide whose main chain was linked by 1,4-GalpA, and contained a small amount of RG-I domain, with arabincan and arabinogalactan-II side chain. This study will provide a theoretical basis for future research on the structure, biological activity and resource development of chickpea polysaccharides.

The mind readily learns cue-outcome associations where an object predicts a specific outcome. Previous work suggested that when multiple objects associated with different outcomes were jointly presented , the mind made conjunctive predictions that represented the common property of the associated outcomes. Using attentional tracking measures, we provided more evidence for the weighted summation framework when the conjunctive predictions involved spatial locations (Experiment 1) or conceptual categories (Experiment 2). Then, we examined the reverse of conjunction, where participants were presented with a single object, which is a part of an object pair that was previously associated with an outcome (Experiment 3). Rather than making predictions based on mental operations such as subtraction, we found that participants’ predictions were purely based on previous associations. These results together demonstrated the robust tendency to make conjunctive predictions based on knowledge of cue-outcome associations.

Two aspects of real-world visual search are typically studied in parallel: category knowledge (e.g., searching for food) and visual patterns (e.g., predicting an upcoming street sign from prior street signs). Previous visual search studies have shown that prior category knowledge hinders search when targets and distractors are from the same category. Other studies have shown that task-irrelevant patterns of non-target objects can enhance search when targets appear in locations that previously contained these irrelevant patterns. Combining EEG (N2pc ERP component, a neural marker of target selection) and behavioral measures, the present study investigated how search efficiency is simultaneously affected by prior knowledge of real-world objects (food and toys) and irrelevant visual patterns (sequences of runic symbols) within the same paradigm. We did not observe behavioral differences between locating items in patterned versus random locations. However, the N2pc components emerged sooner when search items appeared in the patterned location, compared to the random location, with a stronger effect when search items were targets, as opposed to non-targets categorically related to the target. A multivariate pattern analysis revealed that neural responses during search trials in the same time window reflected where the visual patterns appeared. Our finding contributes to our understanding of how knowledge acquired prior to the search task (e.g., category knowledge) interacts with new content within the search task.

Lung cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer-related death. Most advanced lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) patients have poor survival because of drug resistance and relapse. Neglecting intratumoral heterogeneity might be one of the reasons for treatment insensitivity, while single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) technologies can provide transcriptome information at the single-cell level. Herein, we combined scRNA-seq and bulk RNA-seq data of LUAD and identified a novel cluster of malignant epithelial cells - KRT81+ malignant epithelial cells - associated with worse prognoses. Further analysis revealed that the hypoxia and EMT pathways of these cells were activated to predispose them to differentiate into metastatic lung adenocarcinoma cells. Finally, we also studied the role of these tumor cells in the immune microenvironment and their role in the classification and prognosis prediction of lung adenocarcinoma patients.

The cognitive system readily learns when multiple cuesjointly predict a specific outcome. What is less known is howthe mind generates predictions when only a single cue ispresent. In four experiments, participants were first exposedto two objects followed by a circle with a specific size or aspecific numeric value. Afterwards, participants viewed asingle object and estimated the associated size or value.Finally, participants recalled the size or value that followedthe initial two objects. We found that the estimated sizeassociated with the single object was significantly smallerthan 100% but significantly larger than 50% of the recalledsize associated with the two objects. No participants wereconsciously aware of the associations. The results reveal anew consequence of statistical learning on automaticinferences: When multiple objects were previously associatedwith an outcome, the single object is implicitly expected topredict a subadditive outcome.

The cognitive system readily detects statistical relationshipswhere the presence of an object predicts a specific outcome.What is less known is how the mind generates predictionswhen multiple objects predicting different outcomes arepresent simultaneously. Here we examine the rules with whichpredictions are made in the presence of two objects that areassociated with two distinct outcomes. In three experiments,participants first implicitly learned that an object predicted aspecific target location in a visual search task. When twoobjects predicting two different target locations were presentsimultaneously, participants were reliably faster to find thetarget when it appeared in the conjunctive location than indisjunctive locations. This was true even if participants werenot consciously aware of the association between the objectsand target locations. The results suggest that in the presence ofmultiple predictors, statistical learning generates implicitexpectations about the outcomes in a conjunctive fashion.

Motivation Single cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) technique enables the transcriptome profiling of hundreds to ten thousands of cells at the unprecedented individual level and provides new insights to study cell heterogeneity. However, its advantages are hampered by dropout events. To address this problem, we propose a Blockwise Accelerated Non-negative Matrix Factorization framework with Structural network constraints (BANMF-S) to impute those technical zeros. Results BANMF-S constructs a gene-gene similarity network to integrate prior information from the external PPI network by the Triadic Closure Principle and a cell-cell similarity network to capture the neighborhood structure and temporal information through a Minimum-Spanning Tree. By collaboratively employing these two networks as regularizations, BANMF-S encourages the coherence of similar gene and cell pairs in the latent space, enhancing the potential to recover the underlying features. Besides, BANMF-S adopts a blocklization strategy to solve the traditional NMF problem through distributed Stochastic Gradient Descent method in a parallel way to accelerate the optimization. Numerical experiments on simulations and real datasets verify that BANMF-S can improve the accuracy of downstream clustering and pseudo-trajectory inference, and its performance is superior to seven state-of-the-art algorithms. Availability All data used in this work are downloaded from publicly available data sources, and their corresponding accession numbers or source URLs are provided in Supplementary File Section 5.1 Dataset Information. The source codes are publicly available in Github repository https://github.com/jiayingzhao/BANMF-S. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The cognitive system readily extracts regularities in terms ofobject co-occurrences over space and time through statisticallearning. However, how does learning such relationshipsinfluence the memory representations of individual objects?Here we used a false memory paradigm to examine the impactof statistical learning on memory representations of individualobjects. Observers were exposed to a temporal sequence(Experiment 1) or spatial arrays (Experiment 2) of objectswhich contained object pairs (e.g., A-B). In a subsequentrecognition phase, observers viewed a sequence or an arraycontaining only one member of the original pair, and judgedwhether either the presented object or the missing object in theoriginal pair was present. We found that statistical learning notonly sharpened the detection of the presented object, but alsoinduced a false memory of the missing object. This reveals anovel consequence of statistical learning: learning ofregularities can create illusory memories.

Operating under limited resources poses significant demandson the cognitive system. Here we demonstrate that peopleunder time scarcity failed to detect time-saving cues as theyoccur in the environment (Experiment 1a). These time-savingcues, if noticed, would have saved time for the time-poorparticipants. Moreover, the visuospatial proximity of thetime-saving cues to the focal task determined successfuldetection, suggesting that scarcity altered the spatial scope ofattention (Experiment 1b & 1c). People under time scarcitywere also more likely to forget previous instructions toexecute future actions (Experiment 2). These instructions, ifremembered and followed, would have saved time for thetime-poor participants. Failures of online detection andprospective memory are problematic because they causeneglect and forgetting of beneficial information, perpetuatingthe condition of scarcity. The current study provides a newcognitive account for the counterproductive behaviors in thepoor, and relevant implications for interventions.

Binary information is prevalent in the environment. In thisstudy, we examined how people process repetition andalternation in binary sequences. Across four paradigmsinvolving estimation, working memory, change detection, andvisual search, we found that the number of alternations isunder-estimated compared to repetitions (Experiment 1).Moreover, recall for binary sequences deteriorates as thesequence alternates more (Experiment 2). Changes in bits arealso harder to detect as the sequence alternates more(Experiment 3). Finally, visual targets superimposed on bitsof a binary sequence take longer to process as alternationincreases (Experiment 4). Overall, our results indicate thatcompared to repetition, alternation in a binary sequence isless salient in the sense of requiring more attention forsuccessful encoding. The current study thus reveals thecognitive constraints in the representation of alternation andprovides a new explanation for the over-alternation bias inrandomness perception.

Studies on attentional selection typically use unpredictable and meaningless stimuli, such as simple shapes and oriented lines. The assumption is that using these stimuli minimizes effects due to learning or prior knowledge, such that the task performance indexes a "pure" measure of the underlying cognitive ability. However, prior knowledge of the test stimuli and related stimuli acquired before or during the task impacts performance in meaningful ways. This mini review focuses on prior knowledge of object associations, because it is an important, yet often ignored, aspect of attentional selection. We first briefly review recent studies demonstrating that how objects are selected during visual search depends on the participant's prior experience with other objects associated with the target. These effects appear with both task-relevant and task-irrelevant knowledge. We then review how existing object associations may influence subsequent learning of new information, which is both a driver and a consequence of selection processes. These insights highlight the importance of one aspect of prior knowledge for attentional selection and information acquisition. We briefly discuss how this work with young adults may inform other age groups throughout the lifespan, as learners gradually increase their prior knowledge. Importantly, these insights have implications for developing more accurate measurements of cognitive abilities.

Abstract: A new cyclopentenone, 5-hydroxycyclopeni cillone (1), was isolated together with three known compounds, ar-turmerone (2), citreoisocoumarin (3), and 6-O-methyl-citreoisocoumarin (4), from a culture of the sponge-derived fungus Trichoderma sp. HPQJ-34. The structures of 1-4 were characterized using comprehensive spectroscopic analyses. The absolute configuration of 1 was determined by comparison of electronic circular dichroism (ECD) spectra with literature values used for the reported analogue, cyclopenicillone (5), which was not isolated in this research. Compound 1 was shown to scavenge 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl free radicals, and decrease β-amyloid (Aβ) fibrillization in vitro. Moreover, 1 significantly reduced H₂O₂-induced neurotoxicity in SH-SY5Y cells. These findings suggested that compound 1, a newly discovered cyclopentenone, has moderate anti-oxidative, anti-Aβ fibrillization properties and neuroprotective effects, and might be a good free radical scavenger.

A remarkable ability of the cognitive system is the creation ofnew knowledge based on prior experiences. What cognitivemechanisms support such knowledge creation? We proposethat statistical learning not only extracts existing relationshipsbetween objects, but also generates new associations betweenobjects that have never been directly associated. Participantsviewed a continuous color sequence consisting of base pairs(e.g., A-B, B-C), and learned these pairs. Importantly, they alsosuccessfully learned a novel pair (A-C) that could only beassociated through transitive relations between the base pairs(Exp1). This learning, however, was not successful with threebase pairs (e.g., learning A-D from A-B, B-C, C-D), revealinga limit in this transitive process (Exp2). Beyond temporalassociations, novel transitive associations can also be formedacross categorical hierarchies (Exp3), but with limits(Exp4&5). The current findings suggest that statistical learningprovides an efficient scaffold through which new objectassociations are transitively created.

Resource scarcity poses challenging demands on the humancognitive system. Budgeting with limited resources induces anattentional focus on the problem at hand. This focus enhancesprocessing of relevant information, but it also comes with acost. Specifically, scarcity may cause a failure to noticebeneficial information that helps alleviate the condition ofscarcity. In three experiments, participants were randomlyassigned with a small budget (“the poor”) or a large budget(“the rich”) to order a meal from a restaurant menu. The poorparticipants looked longer at the prices of the items andrecalled the prices more accurately, compared to the richparticipants. Importantly, the poor neglected a useful discountthat would save them money. This neglect may arise as a resultof attentional narrowing, and help explain a range of counter-productive behaviors of low-income individuals. The currentfindings have important implications for public policy andservices for low-income individuals.

An adaptive function of the visual system is that it flexibly updates existing representations of objects upon changes.Such updating can also alter the representations of associated objects that are not directly observable. What mechanism supportsthis process? We propose that statistical learning provides a channel through which changes in one object are automaticallytransferred to related objects. Observers viewed a temporal sequence of paired circles. One circle in each pair then changed insize, and observers recalled the size of the other circle. When the first circle enlarged (or shrank), the second circle was judgedto be larger (or smaller), suggesting that the change was automatically transferred to the predicted object (Experiment 1). Thesame, however, was not true if the second circle changed in size (Experiment 2). No observer was explicitly aware of the circlepairs. Thus, statistical learning enables the implicit updating of representations through predictive associations.

The exotic pet trade poses a major threat to biodiversity conservation. To combat biodiversity loss, it is essential to reduce demand for exotic pets and engage people in civic actions for wildlife conservation. Although messaging has been extensively used in conservation practice, little is known about how it can influence attitudes and various types of actions pertaining to the exotic pet trade. This study examined the impact of conservation messaging in the context of exotic pet ownership and wildlife entertainment visitation as common practices of the exotic pet trade. We randomly assigned participants in the United States to one of five messaging conditions: biodiversity loss and animal abuse (M1), zoonotic disease risks (M2), illegality (M3), social disapproval (M4), and neutral biological information as a control condition (M5). We found that all conservation messages (M1–M4) significantly decreased people's favorable attitudes toward the exotic pet trade and their desire to visit wildlife entertainment. However, conservation messaging did not influence the desire for exotic pet ownership or intentions to take civic actions. Our findings highlight the potential of conservation messaging for attitude change and demand reduction for wildlife entertainment, but different approaches are necessary for promoting more effortful actions such as exotic pet ownership and civic actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]