Saint Anselm College

About: Saint Anselm College is a education organization based out in Manchester, New Hampshire, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Nurse education & Extinction (psychology). The organization has 255 authors who have published 522 publications receiving 7222 citations.

Spontaneous recovery during, but not following, extinction of the discriminative stimulus effects of nicotine in rats: Reinstatement of stimulus control

Abstract: Extinction of the discriminative stimulus effects of drugs has received little research attention. Using a one-lever food-reinforcement (VI-1 min) operant procedure with rats (N = 16), the studies reported here assessed extinction, spontaneous recovery, and reinstatement of responding to the discriminative stimulus effects of nicotine. Experiment 1 found evidence for retention of differential responding to IP administrations of nicotine after a 3-month (87 days) delay following acquisition. Experiment 2 compared spontaneous recovery of discriminative control 2 and 4 weeks following extinction. Additionally, the impact of noncontingent reinforcement on discriminative control was evaluated (reinstatement). During extinction training, nicotine (.4 mg/kg) or saline was administered 15 min prior to each 15-min session, as they were during training, but responding was not reinforced under either stimulus condition. Spontaneous recovery (SR) of responding under the SD condition occurred during a session (11th) preceded by two consecutive SΔ sessions. Matched by response rate, 8 rats were randomly assigned to either a 2-week delay group or a 4-week delay group. There was no evidence for SR of discriminated responding to the drugs 2 or 4 weeks following the final extinction session. Between-group comparisons further revealed that SR did not vary as a function of delay following extinction. Reinstatement of stimulus control was observed following 2 brief sessions of noncontingent food delivery (levers retracted and conducted in the absence of the drug cues). These results suggest that the maintenance and extinction of the discriminative stimulus effects of nicotine are temporally stable. Theoretical ideas regarding drug self-administration, craving, and therapy are entertained.

Employment and breastfeeding outcomes in a sample of black women in the United States.

Abstract: Black women have lower rates of breastfeeding initiation and duration than other racial groups have, but the effects of employment on breastfeeding, specifically for Black women, have not been studied extensively. The purpose of this research was to determine the influence of work or maternity leave on breastfeeding duration in a sample of Black women. Participants were recruited in the first postpartum week, and then followed monthly for six months or until complete weaning. The timing of returning to work significantly influenced the risk of weaning. Women who returned to work prior to 12 weeks were more likely to wean their babies than both those who returned to work after 12 weeks as well as those who remained at home. Policies that allow for at least 12 weeks' maternity leave would be likely to increase breastfeeding duration for employed Black women. Interdisciplinary research is needed to address health and economic issues of maternity leave and to eliminate racial disparities.

Automata, Living and Non-Living: Descartes' Mechanical Biology and His Criteria for Life

Abstract: Despite holding to the essential distinction between mind and body, Descartes did not adopt a life-body dualism Though humans are the only creatures which can reason, as they are the only creatures whose body is in an intimate union with a soul, they are not the only finite beings who are alive In the present note, I attempt to determine Descartes' criteria for something to be 'living' Though certain passages associate such a principle with the presence of a properly functioning heart, I show that there are important reasons for also understanding life in terms of a degree of complexity of design

Not multi-, but many-core: designing integral parallel architectures for embedded computation

Abstract: Recent embedded systems have switched to fully programmable parallel architectures. To make sure all corner cases usually present in real applications are supported and efficiently implemented in this switch of implementation, new solutions must be found. We introduce the integral parallel architecture (IPA) as a solution supporting intensive data computation in System-on-a-chip (Soc) implementations, fitting in a small area, and requiring low power. An IPA supports naturally all three possible styles of parallelism: data, time, and speculative.As an illustrative example, we present the BA1024 chip, a fully programmable SoC designed by BrightScale, Inc. for HDTV codecs. Its main performance figures include 60 GOPS/Watt and 2 GOPS/mm2, representing an efficient IPA approach for embedded computation.