Infants' mu suppression during the observation of real and mimicked goal-directed actions

Since their discovery in the early 1990s, mirror neurons have been proposed to be related to many social-communicative abilities, such as imitation. However, research into the early manifestations of the putative neural mirroring system and its role in early social development is still inconclusive. In the current EEG study, mu suppression, generally thought to reflect activity in neural mirroring systems was investigated in 18- to 30-month-olds during the observation of object manipulations as well as mimicked actions. EEG power data recorded from frontal, central, and parietal electrodes were analysed. As predicted, based on previous research, mu wave suppression was found over central electrodes during action observation and execution. In addition, a similar suppression was found during the observation of intransitive, mimicked hand movements. To a lesser extent, the results also showed mu suppression at parietal electrode sites, over all three conditions. Mu wave suppression during the observation of hand movements and during the execution of actions was significantly correlated with quality of imitation, but not with age or language level

Semi-supervised feature selection via multiobjective optimization

In previous work, we have shown that both unsupervised feature selection and the semi-supervised clustering problem can be usefully formulated as multiobjective optimization problems. In this paper, we discuss the logical extension of this prior work to cover the problem of semi-supervised feature selection. Our extensive experimental results provide evidence for the advantages of semi-supervised feature selection when both labelled and unlabelled data are available. Moreover, the particular effectiveness of a Pareto-based optimization approach can also be seen.</p

Neural correlates of action perception at the onset of functional grasping

Event-related potentials were recorded while infants observe congruent or incongruent grasping actions at the age when organized grasping first emerges (4-6 months of age). We demonstrate that the event-related potential component P400 encodes the congruency of power grasps at the age of 6 months (Experiment 1) and in 5-month-old infants that have developed the ability to use power grasps (Experiment 2). This effect does not extend to precision grasps, which infants cannot perform (Experiment 3). Our findings suggest that infants' encoding of the relationship between an object and a grasping hand (the action-perception link) is highly specialized to actions and manual configurations of actions that infants are able to perfor

Comparing Multi-objective and Threshold-moving ROC Curve Generation for a Prototype-based Classifier

Proceedings of: GECCO 2013: 15th International Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (Amsterdam, The Netherlands, July 06-10, 2013): a recombination of the 22nd International Conference on Genetic Algorithms (ICGA) and the 18th Annual Genetic Programming Conference (GP), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, July 06-10, 2013Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) curves represent the performance of a classifier for all possible operating con-ditions, i.e., for all preferences regarding the tradeoff be-tween false positives and false negatives. The generation of a ROC curve generally involves the training of a single classifier for a given set of operating conditions, with the subsequent use of threshold-moving to obtain a complete ROC curve. Recent work has shown that the generation of ROC curves may also be formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem in ROC space: the goals to be min-imized are the false positive and false negative rates. This technique also produces a single ROC curve, but the curve may derive from operating points for a number of different classifiers. This paper aims to provide an empirical compar-ison of the performance of both of the above approaches, for the specific case of prototype-based classifiers. Results on synthetic and real domains shows a performance advantage for the multi-objective approach.GECCO 2013 Presentation slidesThis work has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science under contract TIN2011-28336 (MOVES project)En prens

Mixtures of Regression Models for Time-Course Gene Expression Data: Evaluation of Initialization and Random Effects

Finite mixture models are routinely applied to time course microarray data. Due to the complexity and size of this type of data the choice of good starting values plays an important role. So far initialization strategies have only been investigated for data from a mixture of multivariate normal distributions. In this work several initialization procedures are evaluated for mixtures of regression models with and without random effects in an extensive simulation study on different artificial datasets. Finally these procedures are also applied to a real dataset from E. coli

Politics of Anger and Trauma Disclosure in Michelle Bowdler’s Is Rape a Crime? A Memoir, an Investigation and a Manifesto (2020)

This article focuses on the memoir manifesto as an intersection of forms and analyzes Michelle Bowdler’s Is Rape a Crime? (2020) as being representative of this subgenre in the current ‘manifesto moment.’ Bowdler as author narrates through the lens of trauma, with an emphasis on the affects the political reflection of trauma evokes. Through the personal narrative, her anger about the injustices of rape culture is explored and affective truths are disclosed without adhering to the hegemonic narrative of overcoming trauma. Instead, the book narrates an emotional arc from lonely suffering to communal activism, engaging the reader in a mode of angry witnessing