Northampton Community College

About: Northampton Community College is a education organization based out in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 3410 authors who have published 4582 publications receiving 130398 citations. The organization is also known as: Northampton County Area Community College.

The case for the development and use of “ecologically valid” measures of executive function in experimental and clinical neuropsychology

Abstract: This article considers the scientific process whereby new and better clinical tests of executive function might be developed, and what form they might take. We argue that many of the traditional tests of executive function most commonly in use (e.g., the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test; Stroop) are adaptations of procedures that emerged almost coincidentally from conceptual and experimental frameworks far removed from those currently in favour, and that the prolongation of their use has been encouraged by a sustained period of concentration on “construct-driven” experimentation in neuropsychology. This resulted from the special theoretical demands made by the field of executive function, but was not a necessary consequence, and may not even have been a useful one. Whilst useful, these tests may not therefore be optimal for their purpose. We consider as an alternative approach a function-led development programme which in principle could yield tasks better suited to the concerns of the clinician because of the transparency afforded by increased “representativeness” and “generalisability.” We further argue that the requirement of such a programme to represent the interaction between the individual and situational context might also provide useful constraints for purely experimental investigations. We provide an example of such a programme with reference to the Multiple Errands and Six Element tests. (JINS, 2006, 12, 194–209.)

Characterization of an ocular photopigment capable of driving pupillary constriction in mice

Abstract: This work demonstrates that transgenic mice lacking both rod and cone photoreceptors (rd/rd cl) retain a pupillary light reflex (PLR) that does not rely on local iris photoreceptors These data, combined with previous reports that rodless and coneless mice show circadian and pineal responses to light, suggest that multiple non-image-forming light responses use non-rod, non-cone ocular photoreceptors in mice An action spectrum for the PLR in rd/rd cl mice demonstrates that over the range 420-625 nm, this response is driven by a single opsin/vitamin A-based photopigment with peak sensitivity around 479 nm (opsin photopigment/OP479) These data represent the first functional characterization of a non-rod, non-cone photoreceptive system in the mammalian CNS

Spectromorphology: explaining sound-shapes

Abstract: The art of music is no longer limited to the sounding models of instruments and voices. Electoacoustic music opens access to all sounds, a bewildering sonic array ranging from the real to the surreal and beyond. For listeners the traditional links with physical sound-making are frequently ruptured: electroacoustic sound-shapes and qualities frequently do not indicate known sources and causes. Gone are the familiar articulations of instruments and vocal utterance: gone is the stability of note and interval: gone too is the reference of beat and metre. Composers also have problems: how to cut an aesthetic path and discover a stability in a wide-open sound world, how to develop appropriate sound-making methods, how to select technologies and software.