1,721,026 research outputs found
Tough Decisions in Unclear Situations. Dealing with Epistemic and Ethical Uncertainty in Disorders of Consciousness
No full textDisorders of consciousness (DoC) are characterized by impaired or complete loss of self-awareness and awareness of the environment. It is not easy to assess the level of consciousness of people with DoCs; there may be cases of covert awareness, that is, people who manifest complete behavioural unresponsiveness but preserve some degree of consciousness. This makes the search for neuronal markers of consciousness in subjects with DoC quite urgent, and the improvement and dissemination of innovative neuroimaging technologies a moral imperative. Neuroethics, considered here as a special branch of clinical ethics, should deal with the ethical implications of these neurotechnologies and the intrinsic uncertainty of diagnosis and prognosis about disorders of consciousness, with a focus on how these issues affect clinical decision-making. First, I will present some epistemic and methodological issues that characterise the disorders of consciousness: diagnostic error, prognostic uncertainty, communication with family and caregivers, and the performative value of clinical language. The epistemic uncertainty emerging from these problems is deeply intertwined with ethical uncertainty, especially when dealing with clinical decisions that may lead to the death of persons whose states of consciousness (and wishes) are not entirely clear. I will suggest the need for epistemic and ethical prudence, through the formulation of a balance between the two principles of inductive risk as proposed by L. Syd M Johnson. Consequently, recognition of intrinsic uncertainty in the field of disorders of consciousness could improve clinical and ethical attitudes, avoiding hasty end-of-life decisions and cases of misinterpretation and manipulation in physician-family communication
From pre-stimulus activity to the contents of consciousness - A spatiotemporal view: Reply to comments on "Beyond task response-Pre-stimulus activity modulates contents of consciousness"
No full textWhat are the exact neuronal mechanisms of pre-post-stimulus interaction and how can that account for the intrinsically subjective nature of the contents of consciousness? This is the key question lurking behind the various excellent and very thoughtful commentaries to our target article which we group along four main topics and questions. (i) What is the role of neural features like alpha power, phase dynamics, trial-to-trial variability and fractal scale-free dynamics in yielding pre-post-stimulus interaction and its conscious contents. (ii) What do we mean by 'content' of consciousness? This concerns its meaning, its characterization as internal or external, and its relation to the basic subjectivity of consciousness. (iii) How does our approach stand to other theories of consciousness like the Dendritic Integration Theory (DIT), GNWT and IIT? This concerns the convergence among the different theories that highlight distinct aspects. (iv) How can we detail the spatiotemporal shaping of the contents of consciousness including their intrinsically subjective nature through pre-post-stimulus interaction? This concerns the details of how the non-additive pre-post-stimulus interaction shapes the subjective nature of our experience of conscious contents, that is, how the neuronal activity connects to the phenomenal features of consciousness. Together, we conclude that the contents of consciousness are shaped primarily in a temporal-dynamic and spatial-topographic way through the non-additive pre-post-stimulus interaction. Such spatiotemporal shaping of the contents in our consciousness constitutes their intrinsically subjective nature which must be distinguished from their (more objective) modulation by cognitive, sensory, affective, and motor functions
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Correlation between Neurophysiological Measures of Consciousness and BCI Performance in a Locked-in Patient
No full textThis exploratory study searched for systematic correlations between measures of consciousness in resting-state EEG and the performances reached in subsequently performed P300-based BCI tasks. We opted for measures of consciousness (LZC & power-law exponent) which are reflective for two different properties of brain dynamics, i.e., the complexity and criticality of neural signals. To unravel systematic relationships, we performed correlation analyses on a small, clinical dataset from a locked-in ALS-patient and on the publicly accessible dataset from Won et al. [1] containing data from 55 healthy participants. We detected opposing correlation patterns for the two samples. Whereas increased brain criticality and complexity seemed to be related to higher performance in the healthy participants, strong correlations between both our measures of consciousness and BCI performance in the ALSpatient indicate that decreased brain criticality and decreased brain complexity seemed to be advantageous to reach higher BCI performance in ALS-patients. We interpret this pattern regarding the known increases in functional connectivity in ALS-patients and put up for discussion if the increased functional connectivity with simultaneously decreasing structural connectivity in ALS-patients induces a brain dynamic of higher or even super-criticality, which is disadvantageous for information processing. In this case the brain criticality must be reduced to reenter a range of criticality in brain dynamics to facilitate the performance of tasks in need of a high amount of information processing – a pattern which we observed here
Impatto sul tempo door/to/balloon dell'implementazione di un sistema Hub&Spoke dell-infarto miocardico ST sopraslivellato (STEMI) in Trentino.
No full textVariations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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