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Little is known about how price evaluation processes unfold. In the current study we explored if reaction times (RTs) can be used to study price evaluations. Additionally, we explored to what extent drift diffusion models (DDMs) are suitable to decompose the different aspects that underlay this decision processes. In a behavioral experiment, participants were asked to evaluate prices as fast as possible as ‘cheap’ or ‘expensive’. We expected that the time needed to evaluate prices would vary in accordance with a price manipulation that was used, and that RTs therefore could be interpreted a proxy of decision difficulty. Analysis of the behavioral data provided evidence for this hypothesis: very cheap and very expensive prices were evaluated faster compared to ambiguous prices. Then, drift diffusion models (DDMs) were used to decompose the different aspect of this decision process, with the goal to obtain a more fine-grained understanding of how the effect in RT data emerged. Results showed that the drift rate of the model was modulated by the price manipulation. Whereas there was no significant effect of the price manipulation on the non-decision time and the starting point parameter. We then contrasted the findings of the RT analysis with the results of the DDMs and outlined what the added value of DDMs is within this context.

Item does not contain fulltext Consensus engineering, which is replacing amino acids by the most frequently occurring one at their positions in a multiple sequence alignment (MSA), is a known strategy to increase the stability of a protein. The application of this concept to the entire sequence of an enzyme, however, has been tried only a few times mainly because of the problems determining the consensus in highly variable regions. We show that this problem can be solved by replacing such problematic regions by the corresponding sequence of the natural homologue closest to the consensus. When one or a few sub-families are overrepresented in the MSA the consensus sequence is a biased representation of the sequence space. We examine the influence of this bias by constructing three consensus sequences using different MSAs of sucrose phosphorylase (SP). Each consensus enzyme contained about 70 mutations compared to its closest natural homologue and folded correctly and displayed activity on sucrose. Correlation analysis revealed that the family's co-evolution network was kept intact, which is one of the main advantages of full-length consensus design. The consensus enzymes displayed an "average" thermostability, that is, one that is higher than some but not all known representatives. We cautiously present practical rules for the design of consensus sequences, but warn that the measure of success depends on which natural enzyme is used as point of comparison. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 2013;110: 2563-2572. (c) 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

This chapter contains sections titled:Industrial Production of Caffeic Acid-α-D-O-GlucosideEnzymatic Synthesis of 5-Methyluridine by Transglycosylation of Guanosine and ThyminePreparation and Use of Sucrose Phosphorylase as Cross-Linked Enzyme Aggregate (CLEA)Enzymatic Synthesis of Phosphorylated Carbohydrates and AlcoholsBiocatalyzed Synthesis of Chiral O-Phosphorylated Derivative of 2-Hydroxy-2phenylethanephosphonateHigh Activity β-Galactosidase Preparation for Diastereoselective Synthesis of (R)-(1-Phenylethyl)-β-D-Galactopyranoside by Reverse HydrolysisStereospecific Synthesis of Aszonalenins by Using Two Recombinant PrenyltransferasesEnzymatic Friedel-Crafts Alkylation Catalyzed by S-Adenosyl- L-methionine Dependent Methyl Transferase

Schiepers [Schiepers (1980). Response latency and accuracy in visual word recognition. Perception & Psychophysics, 27, 71–81] proposed that in text reading, the currently fixated word and the next word are processed in parallel but with a time delay of 90 ms per degree of eccentricity. In his model, the benefit of seeing the upcoming word is due to the fact that the parafoveal information from fixation n is combined with the foveal information from fixation n + 1 to boost word recognition, at least when the fixation on word n is of an optimal duration (between 210 and 270 ms). We tested this assumption by adding an extra blank space between the foveal and the parafoveal word. According to the model, this should result in a 30 ms longer processing time for the foveal word. However, reading time was shorter for a word followed by a double space than for a word followed by a single space. An effect of parafoveal word length was also observed with a longer word in the parafovea leading to shorter fixation times on the foveal word. Implications of these low-level parafoveal-on-foveal effects are discussed.