Rapid receptive field (RF) reorganization of somatosensory neurons in the cat dorsal column nuclei (DCN) was studied using electrophysiological and histological methods. Soon after denervation of the peripheral RF by lidocaine injection, every DCN neuron tested exhibited a reorganized RF.

<p>This dissertation explores motivation in Japanese American learners of their heritage language. This area of study is significant because existing research primarily looks at heritage language learners as “balanced bilinguals” and limits their learning purpose to professional motivations. Also, research on “passive” or “receptive” bilinguals and the impact of history and ethnicity on motivation builds new knowledge in the field from which other scholars can construct their own studies. Through my interview-based case studies and autoethnography, I found that historical, social, and ethnic identity factors contribute considerably to the motivation to maintain or reject the heritage language. My findings reveal that the traumatic events of WWII such as the forced incarceration of over 110,000 people of Japanese descent led to the loss of the heritage language and a denial of the heritage culture. I also discovered that third generation Japanese Americans are motivated to learn Japanese for professional reasons whereas fourth generation Japanese Americans study Japanese to gain a stronger sense of ethnic identity.</p><p><br></p>

This study was a replication and an extension of the 2021 research performed by Spurgin and Borquez on the correspondence between receptive and expressive behavior. Spurgin examined the role of the echoic in a hear-say procedure with adult learners, while Borquez examined the role of the echoic in both hear-say and see-say procedures. Both studies found that receptive and expressive correspondence did not occur consistently across participants. The present study asked if the fading steps used during training contributed to the results of the previous researchers. In the present study, the fading steps were changed to minimize the chance that the participant developed a position bias. The conditions were also counterbalanced to analyze the effects of hear-say vs. see-say, easy vs. difficult words, and the order in which the words were trained on the acquisition of receptive labels and the emergence of expressive labels. The study consisted of five phases: pre-training, hear-say teaching, see-say teaching, receptive testing, and expressive testing. Results indicated that although that acquisition of receptive labels improved, the change in fading steps did not make a significant difference in the correspondence of receptive and expressive language. Results showed similar correspondence in the hear-say and see-say procedures. Easy words and words taught more recently were correlated with increased receptive-expressive correspondence.

The association between receptive language skills and reading comprehension has been established in the research literature. Even when the importance of receptive skills for reading comprehension has been strongly supported, in practice lower levels of skills tend to go unnoticed in typically developing children. A potentially more visible modality of language, expressive skills using speech samples, has been rarely examined despite the longitudinal links between speech and later reading development, and the connections between language and reading impairments. Even fewer reading studies have examined expressive skills using a subgroup of speech samples – narrative samples – which are closer to the kind of language practitioners can observe in their classrooms, and are also a rich source of linguistic and discourse-level data in school-aged children. This thesis presents a study examining the relationship between expressive language skills in narrative samples and reading comprehension after the first two years of formal reading instruction, with considerable attention given to methodological and developmental issues. In order to address the main methodological issues surrounding the identification of the optimal linguistic indices in terms of reliability and the existence of developmental patterns, two studies of language development in oral narratives were carried out. The first of the narrative language studies drew data from an existing corpus, while the other analysed primary data, collected specifically for this purpose. Having identified the optimal narrative indices in two different samples, the main study examined the relationships between these expressive narrative measures along with receptive standardised measures, and reading comprehension in a monolingual sample of eighty 7- and 8-year-old children attending Year 3 in the UK. Both receptive and expressive oral language skills were assessed at three different levels: vocabulary, grammar and discourse. Regression analyses indicated that, when considering expressive narrative variables on their own, expressive grammar and vocabulary, in that order, contributed to explain over a fifth of reading comprehension variance in typically developing children. When controlling for receptive language however, expressive skills were not able to account for significant unique variance in the outcome measure. Nonetheless, mediation analyses revealed that receptive vocabulary and grammar played a mediating role in the relationship between expressive skills from narratives and reading comprehension. Results and further research directions are discussed in the context of this study’s methodological considerations.

A fundamental question on visual system in neuroscience is how the visual stimuli are functionally related to neural responses. This relationship is often explained by the notion of receptive fields, an approximated linear or quasi-linear filter that encodes the high dimensional visual stimuli into neural spikes. Traditional methods for estimating the filter do not efficiently exploit prior information about the structure of neural receptive fields. Here, we propose several approaches to design the prior distribution over the filter, considering the neurophysiological fact that receptive fields tend to be localized both in space-time and spatio-temporal frequency domain. To automatically regularize the estimation of neural receptive fields, we use the evidence optimization technique, a MAP (maximum a posteriori) estimation under a prior distribution whose parameters are set by maximizing the marginal likelihood. Simulation results show that the proposed methods can estimate the receptive field using datasets that are tens to hundreds of times smaller than those required by traditional methods. / text

The abundance of microtubules in receptive dendrites suggests they may function in sensory transduction. Responses of frog muscle spindle receptors and joint receptors is inhibited within 25 minutes by 50 mM colchicine, a microtubuledisrupting agent. The inhibition is reversible upon removal of colchicine, and the time course of recovery is comparable to that of inhibition. Frog olfactory responses are briefly inhibited by washing the olfactory mucosa with perfusion fluid. Colchicine accentuates the inhibition and substantially retards the rate of recovery in a dose-dependent fashion. Colchicine does not affect axonal conduction, nor the oxygen uptake of isolated crab or frog leg nerves. The inhibitory action of colchicine is therefore an effect on the electrical excitability of the receptive dendrites or soma, and not an effect on axonal conduction.

A visãao é o sentido humano mais complexo e importante para os processos de cognição e de interação de um indivíduo com o mundo. Neurofiisiologistas buscam identificar e compreender como funcionam os mecanismos celulares envolvidos neste processo. O sistema visual recebe os sinais de imagens captadas pelos olhos e, por meio de transformações e processamento diversos, integra esses sinais em representações de objetos internos perceptuais. O projeto Olho Virtual consegue reconstruir, em três dimensões, modelos de olhos utilizando córneas reais ou simuladas em computador, reproduzindo suas propriedades ópticas captando imagens de maneira satisfatória. Este trabalho introduz, no projeto Olho Virtual, um modelo computacional de retina baseado no modelo biológico, capaz de reproduzir as propriedades das células cones e bastonetes em suas distribuições radiais e também em suas funcionalidades em particular. Além dessa, é apresentado uma modelagem para reprodução dos campos receptivos das células ganglionares presentes na retina, gerando sinais de saída nos sistemas parvo e magno. Por fim são feitas simulações de experimentos psicofísicos com propósito de verificar a validade da modelagem proposta / The vision is the human sense more complex and important in cognitive processes and the interaction of an individual with the world. Neurophysiologists seek to identify and understand how the cellular mechanisms involved in this process work. The visual system receives the image signals captured by the eyes and, through several transformations and processing, integrate those signals into internal representations of perceptual objects. The project Virtual Eye can reconstruct three-dimensional models of eye corneas using real or simulated on the computer, playing their optical properties capturing images satisfactorily. This work introduces the Virtual Eye project, a computational model of retina-based biological model, able to reproduce the properties of rod and cone cells in their radial distributions and also in its functionality in particular. Besides this, a model is presented for reproduction of the receptive fields of ganglion cells present in the retina, generating output signals in the parvo and magno systems. Finally, simulations are made with psychophysical experiments in order to verify the accuracy of the proposed model

<p>The aim of this study is to examine the vocabulary and receptive collocation knowledge in English among Swedish upper secondary school students. The primary material consists of two vocabulary tests, one collocation test, and a background questionnaire.</p><p>The first research question concerns whether the students who receive a major part of their education in English have a higher level of vocabulary and receptive collocation knowledge in English than those who are taught primarily in Swedish. The second concerns if the students who started to learn English before the age of 7 have a higher level of vocabulary and receptive collocation knowledge in English than those who started after 7. The third concerns if the level of the students' vocabulary and receptive collocation knowledge correlates. The fourth addresses whether external inputs of English may have had an effect on the students' vocabulary and receptive collocation knowledge level.</p><p>The results indicate that reinforcement of English through an education mostly in English has rendered a higher level of vocabulary and receptive collocation knowledge in English. In addition, starting to learn English before age 7 also appeared to have had a positive effect on these levels. In addition, the results suggest that an early onset (before 7) of English compensates for lack of reinforcement of English. Conversely, reinforcement of English compensates for a late onset (after 7) of English. However, the results imply that the combination of an early onset (before 7) of English and reinforcement of English is the most efficient means to achieve a high level of vocabulary and receptive collocation knowledge.</p><p>Moreover, a clear correlation was found between vocabulary knowledge and receptive collocation knowledge, which also points to the importance of a large exposure to English.</p><p>For the high performance students, external influences such as English in primary and secondary school, and a high motivation to learn English may have contributed to a higher language confidence, and possibly a higher level of vocabulary and receptive collocation knowledge.</p><p> </p>

The structure of phonological processing for typically developing children has been debated over the past two decades. Recent research has indicated that phonological processing is best explained by a single underlying phonological ability (e.g., Anthony and Lonigan, 2004). The current study had two goals. The first goal was to determine the structure of phonological processing for school-age children with mild intellectual disabilities (MID). The second goal was to determine the relationship between the components of phonological processing and expressive and receptive language ability. The participants were 222 school-age children identified by their schools as having MID. Confirmatory factor analysis was utilized to determine the structure of phonological processing. The results indicated that a model with one phonological awareness factor and one naming speed factor explained the data better than competing models with a single latent factor or more than two latent factors. There was a negative significant relationship between phonological processing and naming speed. There were positive bivariate relationships between phonological processing and expressive and receptive language. There were negative bivariate relationships between naming speed and expressive and receptive language. These results are consistent with other research findings with typically developing children, indicating a similarity in the relationships between phonological process and language for children with MID. Theoretical and instructional implications are discussed.

Research has demonstrated a close relationship between verbal short-term (STM) and working memory (WM) and receptive language in children (Baddeley, Gathercole, & Papagno, 1998; Ellis & Sinclair, 1996). Few studies have examined the relationship between memory and language production, and these studies focus on STM only. Though correlations have been found between verbal STM and production, the nature of the correlations are unclear. The current study examined the possibility that receptive language mediates the relationship between memory and language production. Children between 3;0 and 5;11 were administered tests assessing receptive vocabulary, receptive grammar, expressive vocabulary, verbal STM, and verbal WM. Additionally, transcripts from free-play sessions were used to assess grammar production. A regression based analytic approach revealed STM and WM mediate the relationship between receptive language and productive language. The existence of these mediated relationships are discussed in relation to the role of working memory in the speech output buffer.