The state, which earned a D-plus, was weak on socioeconomic factors that can affect the educational environment, and also in the school finance area.

The state, which earned a D-plus, has struggled with school finance issues and endured teacher strikes and battles over pay, but also earned B-plus for funding equity.

Eliminating gifted programs all together is the wrong solution to fixing racial and economic imbalances, argues James R. Delisle.

Concerns about local school systems can pose recruitment and retention hurdles for the armed services as they seek to meet the needs of military families.

Leaders in some districts say remote teaching will now be a skill they will build even more in their existing teacher corps. Others are more skeptical.

The Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now, or ConnCAN, has profiled five successful early childhood education programs in other states for ideas to help programs in Connecticut.

The state, which earned a B, is one of the nation’s wealthiest and turned in strong performances in the school finance arena and in areas such as preschool and kindergarten enrollment.

A new study says that problems surrounding child-care hurt Georgia parents economically in many ways including in turned down promotions and having to cut back on work and school hours.

In this seventh installment on the growth in dual-language learning, two experts from Delaware explore how state education leaders can build capacity to support both students and educators.

State lawmakers must create a plan to improve rural schools in response to a 2014 state Supreme Court ruling.

Resurrecting an old idea about assessing school quality could allow schools to examine a broad range of data on performance and practices and lead to improvement.

A group of Vermont high school students backed by a powerful conservative Christian legal organization is accusing the state of religious discrimination.

The state, which earned a D-plus, scored low on the Chance for Success Index, which tracks a host of socioeconomic factors that can affect the educational environment.

In this third installment on the growth in dual-language learning, one expert says broad access to programs is important, but that students need an early start to reap the benefits.

Michele Deodato
Oct 2, 2024; 44:e2308232024-e2308232024
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

Kyle E. Mathewson
Mar 4, 2009; 29:2725-2732
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

Gijs Joost Brouwer
Nov 4, 2009; 29:13992-14003
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

Kong-Fatt Wong
Jan 25, 2006; 26:1314-1328
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

Recent visual experience heavily influences our visual perception, but how neuronal activity is reshaped to alter and improve perceptual discrimination remains unknown. We recorded from populations of neurons in visual cortical area V4 while two male rhesus macaque monkeys performed a natural image change detection task under different experience conditions. We found that maximizing the recent experience with a particular image led to an improvement in the ability to detect a change in that image. This improvement was associated with decreased neural responses to the image, consistent with neuronal changes previously seen in studies of adaptation and expectation. We found that the magnitude of behavioral improvement was correlated with the magnitude of response suppression. Furthermore, this suppression of activity led to an increase in signal separation, providing evidence that a reduction in activity can improve stimulus encoding. Within populations of neurons, greater recent experience was associated with decreased trial-to-trial shared variability, indicating that a reduction in variability is a key means by which experience influences perception. Taken together, the results of our study contribute to an understanding of how recent visual experience can shape our perception and behavior through modulating activity patterns in the mid-level visual cortex.

Emerging research in nonhuman animals implicates cerebellar projections to the ventral tegmental area (VTA) in appetitive behaviors, but these circuits have not been characterized in humans. Here, we mapped cerebello-VTA white matter connectivity in a cohort of men and women using probabilistic tractography on diffusion imaging data from the Human Connectome Project. We uncovered the topographical organization of these connections by separately tracking from parcels of cerebellar lobule VI, crus I/II, vermis, paravermis, and cerebrocerebellum. Results revealed that connections between the cerebellum and VTA predominantly originate in the right cerebellar hemisphere, interposed nucleus, and paravermal cortex and terminate mostly ipsilaterally. Paravermal crus I sends the most connections to the VTA compared with other lobules. We discovered a mediolateral gradient of connectivity, such that the medial cerebellum has the highest connectivity with the VTA. Individual differences in microstructure were associated with measures of negative affect and social functioning. By splitting the tracts into quarters, we found that the socioaffective effects were driven by the third quarter of the tract, corresponding to the point at which the fibers leave the deep nuclei. Taken together, we produced detailed maps of cerebello-VTA structural connectivity for the first time in humans and established their relevance for trait differences in socioaffective regulation.

It is well established that holding information in working memory (WM) elicits sustained stimulus-specific patterns of neural activity. Nevertheless, here we provide evidence for a distinct class of neural activity that tracks the number of individuated items in working memory, independent of the type of visual features stored. We present two EEG studies of young adults of both sexes that provide robust evidence for a signal tracking the number of individuated representations in working memory, regardless of the specific feature values stored. In Study 1, subjects maintained either colors or orientations across separate blocks in a single session. We found near-perfect generalization of the load signal between these two conditions, despite being able to simultaneously decode which feature had been voluntarily stored. In Study 2, participants attended to two features with very distinct cortical representations: color and motion coherence. We again found evidence for a neural load signal that robustly generalized across these distinct visual features, even though cortically disparate regions process color and motion coherence. Moreover, representational similarity analysis provided converging evidence for a content-independent load signal, while simultaneously showing that unique variance in EEG activity tracked the specific features that were stored. We posit that this load signal reflects a content-independent "pointer" operation that binds objects to the current context while parallel but distinct neural signals represent the features that are stored for each item in memory.

Key event-related potentials (ERPs) of perceptual decision-making such as centroparietal positivity (CPP) elucidate how evidence is accumulated toward a given choice. Furthermore, this accumulation can be impacted by visual target selection signals such as the N2 contralateral (N2c). How these underlying neural mechanisms of perceptual decision-making are influenced by the spatial congruence of distractors relative to target stimuli remains unclear. Here, we used electroencephalography (EEG) in humans of both sexes to investigate the effect of distractor spatial congruency (same vs different hemifield relative to targets) on perceptual decision-making. We confirmed that responses for perceptual decisions were slower for spatially incongruent versus congruent distractors of high salience. Similarly, markers of target selection (N2c peak amplitude) and evidence accumulation (CPP slope) were found to be lower when distractors were spatially incongruent versus congruent. To evaluate the effects of congruency further, we applied drift diffusion modeling to participant responses, which showed that larger amplitudes of both ERPs were correlated with shorter nondecision times when considering the effect of congruency. The modeling also suggested that congruency's effect on behavior occurred prior to and during evidence accumulation when considering the effects of the N2c peak and CPP slope. These findings point to spatially incongruent distractors, relative to congruent distractors, influencing decisions as early as the initial sensory processing phase and then continuing to exert an effect as evidence is accumulated throughout the decision-making process. Overall, our findings highlight how key electrophysiological signals of perceptual decision-making are influenced by the spatial congruence of target and distractor.

Different people listening to the same story may converge upon a largely shared interpretation while still developing idiosyncratic experiences atop that shared foundation. What linguistic properties support this individualized experience of natural language? Here, we investigate how the "concrete–abstract" axis—the extent to which a word is grounded in sensory experience—relates to within- and across-subject variability in the neural representations of language. Leveraging a dataset of human participants of both sexes who each listened to four auditory stories while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging, we demonstrate that neural representations of "concreteness" are both reliable across stories and relatively unique to individuals, while neural representations of "abstractness" are variable both within individuals and across the population. Using natural language processing tools, we show that concrete words exhibit similar neural representations despite spanning larger distances within a high-dimensional semantic space, which potentially reflects an underlying representational signature of sensory experience—namely, imageability—shared by concrete words but absent from abstract words. Our findings situate the concrete–abstract axis as a core dimension that supports both shared and individualized representations of natural language.

It’s official! As of Monday, 6 July, FAO is opening its doors online and offering virtual group visits. While guided tours at FAO headquarters are suspended as a measure amidst [...]

On 5 November 2020, from 12.30 to 14.30hrs, FAO Director-General, Dr QU Dongyu, will host a virtual High-Level event launching the Food Coalition. This dialogue will call for international cooperation [...]

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, through the Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) Programme, will organise the International Symposium on Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems and Family Farming from [...]

This newly-released report highlights the progress made since FAO’s Strategy for Private Sector Engagement 2021-2025 was approved during the 165th session of the Council in December 2020. It discusses important [...]

This newly-released annual report charts progress in FAO's work with the private sector in 2022. It highlights developments across FAO's portfolio of private sector engagements, documents major achievements and lessons learned [...]

Rome – The newly released Annual Report for 2020, 2021 and 2022 raises the visibility of the Organization's Resource Partners, including FAO Members, international financial institutions (IFIs), United Nations entities, [...]

This annual report charts progress in FAO's work with the private sector in 2022. It highlights developments across FAO's portfolio of private sector engagements, documents major achievements and lessons [...]

The Black Death of 1348 was a devastating event, wiping out half the population of Britain. And in churches like this one, drawings on the wall provide a haunting visual record of the scale of the tragedy.

This video from the Illustris project simulates 13 billion years of the universe in just two minutes

After reviewing more than 30,000 photos, the editors of Smithsonian magazine are proud to announce the winning submissions. Learn more about the finalists and winners of 2024 here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/see-winners-21st-annual-smithsonian-magazine-photo-contest-180984001/. --- For more videos from Smithsonian Magazine: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/videos/ Digital Editorial Director: Brian Wolly Supervising Producer & Scriptwriter: Michelle Mehrtens Video Editor: Sierra Theobald

After reviewing more than 30,000 photos, the editors of Smithsonian Magazine are proud to announce the Grand Prize Winner. #shorts

The annual award ceremony featured costumes, songs and paper airplanes as scientists recognized comedic research across ten disciplines

A new exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History combines satellite observations and historical data to offer a "larger-than-life look" at our planet's climate today

Two comb jellies can merge their digestive and nervous systems and even sync their bodily functions, according to new research. The discovery could have implications for human medicine

Travis Gienger, who nicknamed his prize-winning pumpkin "Rudy," has been growing gourds for nearly 30 years

See the finalists of our 2014 photo contest and vote for the Readers' Choice winner

The tongues of bird-like dinosaurs and pterosaurs, however, may have been more mobile

In insects, oocyte resorption (oosorption) or follicular atresia is one of the key physiological processes and evolutionary strategies used to optimize reproductive fitness. Mosquitoes are ideal model organisms for studying egg maturation in arthropods, as their follicle development is initiated only following the ingestion of a blood meal, followed by a carefully orchestrated series of hormonally regulated events leading to egg maturation. A cohort of approximately 100 follicles per mosquito ovary begin developing synchronously. However, a significant fraction of follicles ultimately undergo apoptosis and oosorption, especially when available resources from the blood meal are limited. Therefore, simple, rapid, and reliable techniques to accurately evaluate follicular atresia are necessary to understand mechanisms underlying follicle development in insects. This protocol describes how to detect apoptotic follicle cells within the Aedes aegypti mosquito ovaries using a commercially available fluorescent-labeled inhibitor of caspases (FLICA). Caspases are key players in animal apoptosis. In this assay, the FLICA reagent enters the intracellular compartment of follicles in dissected mosquito ovaries and covalently binds to active caspases. The bound reagent remains within the cell and its fluorescent signal can be observed by confocal microscopy. Although this method was specifically developed for visualizing apoptotic ovarian follicles during Ae. aegypti mosquito egg development, it should be applicable to other mosquito tissues that undergo caspase-mediated program cell death in a time-dependent manner.

Three weeks after the death of another beluga whale at Marineland, the Ontario government is speaking publicly about its ongoing investigation of the park, saying water troubles are under control after a recent investment.

Malloree Enoch alleges she was sexually coerced by former Whitecaps coach Hubert Busby Jr., who was recently reinstated as head coach of the Jamaican women's national team.