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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences

Road Ecology: Shifting Gears Toward Evolutionary Perspectives, Steven P. Brady, Jonathan L. Richardson Feb 2017

Road Ecology: Shifting Gears Toward Evolutionary Perspectives, Steven P. Brady, Jonathan L. Richardson

Dartmouth Scholarship

Recent advances in understanding the often rapid pace of evolution are reshaping our view of organisms and their capacity to cope with environmental change. Though evolutionary perspectives have gained traction in many fields of conservation, road ecology is not among them. This is surprising because roads are pervasive landscape features that generate intense natural selection. The biological outcomes from these selection pressures – whether adaptive or maladaptive – can have profound consequences for population persistence. We argue that studying evolutionary responses is critical to accurately understand the impacts of roads. Toward that end, we describe the basic tenets and relevance …


A Computational Psychiatry Approach Identifies How Alpha-2a Noradrenergic Agonist Guanfacine Affects Feature-Based Reinforcement Learning In The Macaque, S. A. Hassani, M. Oemisch, M. Balcarras, S. Westendorff, S Ardid, M. A. Van Der Meer, P. Tiesinga, T. Womelsdorf Jan 2017

A Computational Psychiatry Approach Identifies How Alpha-2a Noradrenergic Agonist Guanfacine Affects Feature-Based Reinforcement Learning In The Macaque, S. A. Hassani, M. Oemisch, M. Balcarras, S. Westendorff, S Ardid, M. A. Van Der Meer, P. Tiesinga, T. Womelsdorf

Dartmouth Scholarship

Noradrenaline is believed to support cognitive flexibility through the alpha 2A noradrenergic receptor (a2A-NAR) acting in prefrontal cortex. Enhanced flexibility has been inferred from improved working memory with the a2A-NA agonist Guanfacine. But it has been unclear whether Guanfacine improves specific attention and learning mechanisms beyond working memory, and whether the drug effects can be formalized computationally to allow single subject predictions. We tested and confirmed these suggestions in a case study with a healthy nonhuman primate performing a feature-based reversal learning task evaluating performance using Bayesian and Reinforcement learning models. In an initial dose-testing phase we found a Guanfacine …


Variations In Crowding, Saccadic Precision, And Spatial Localization Reveal The Shared Topology Of Spatial Vision, John A. Greenwood, Martin Szinte, Bilge Sayim, Patrick Cavanagh Jan 2017

Variations In Crowding, Saccadic Precision, And Spatial Localization Reveal The Shared Topology Of Spatial Vision, John A. Greenwood, Martin Szinte, Bilge Sayim, Patrick Cavanagh

Dartmouth Scholarship

Visual sensitivity varies across the visual field in several characteristic ways. For example, sensitivity declines sharply in peripheral (vs. foveal) vision and is typically worse in the upper (vs. lower) visual field. These variations can affect processes ranging from acuity and crowding (the deleterious effect of clutter on object recognition) to the precision of saccadic eye movements. Here we examine whether these variations can be attributed to a common source within the visual system. We first compared the size of crowding zones with the precision of saccades using an oriented clock target and two adjacent flanker elements. We report that …