Individual sensorimotor adaptation characteristics are independent across orofacial speech movements and limb reaching movements.

Sensorimotor adaptation is critical for human motor control but shows considerable interindividual variability. Efforts are underway to identify factors accounting for individual differences in specific adaptation tasks. However, a fundamental question has remained unaddressed: Is an individual's capability for adaptation effector system specific or does it reflect a generalized adaptation ability? We therefore tested the same participants in analogous adaptation paradigms focusing on distinct sensorimotor systems: speaking with perturbed auditory feedback and reaching with perturbed visual feedback. Each task was completed once with the perturbation introduced gradually (ramped up over 60 trials) and, on a different day, once with the perturbation introduced suddenly. Consistent with studies of each system separately, visuomotor reach adaptation was more complete than auditory-motor speech adaptation (80% vs. 29% of the perturbation). Adaptation was not significantly correlated between the speech and reach tasks. Moreover, considered within tasks, 1) adaptation extent was correlated between the gradual and sudden conditions for reaching but not for speaking, 2) adaptation extent was correlated with additional measures of performance (e.g., trial duration, within-trial corrections) only for reaching and not for speaking, and 3) fitting individual participant adaptation profiles with exponential rather than linear functions offered a larger benefit [lower root mean square error (RMSE)] for the reach task than for the speech task. Combined, results suggest that the ability for sensorimotor adaptation relies on neural plasticity mechanisms that are effector system specific rather than generalized. This finding has important implications for ongoing efforts seeking to identify cognitive, behavioral, and neurochemical predictors of individual sensorimotor adaptation.NEW & NOTEWORTHY This study provides the first detailed demonstration that individual sensorimotor adaptation characteristics are independent across articulatory speech movements and limb reaching movements. Thus, individual sensorimotor learning abilities are effector system specific rather than generalized. Findings regarding one effector system do not necessarily apply to other systems, different underlying mechanisms may be involved, and implications for clinical rehabilitation or performance training also cannot be generalized.

Prior acupuncture experience among elderly participants enrolled in a clinical trial of acupuncture for chronic low back pain: Implications for future trials.

Background: The effectiveness of acupuncture for chronic low back pain (cLBP) has not been studied specifically in the 65-and-older population. To inform the validity and generalizability of future acupuncture studies among older adults, we characterized elderly participants' prior experience with and views toward acupuncture and tested for clinical and sociodemographic differences between acupuncture-naïve and non-naïve participants. Methods: Data for this study were collected during the baseline telephone interview from the participants enrolled in the Kaiser Permanente Northern California site of an NIH-funded, multicenter clinical trial of acupuncture for cLBP in older adults. Results: Nearly two-thirds (65.6 %) of participants surveyed reported they had previously received acupuncture treatment with the vast majority seeking acupuncture treatment for pain-related issues (84.8 %). The majority of these participants reported relatively modest levels of exposure to acupuncture with most participants (63.1 %) reporting fewer than 10 treatment sessions over their lifetimes. There were no significant differences in age, sex, race, ethnicity, disability scores, income levels, or pain levels between the acupuncture-naïve and non-naïve groups. Conclusion: Contextual consideration for prior acupuncture utilization rates is warranted and may be higher than expected or previously reported. We found few differences in baseline characteristics between participants who were acupuncture-naïve and those with prior acupuncture experience; thus, future pragmatic clinical trials might relax previous acupuncture-use considerations in their recruitment criteria. For trials focused on acupuncture-naive patients, it may be more feasible to expand the definition of "acupuncture-naive" based on lifetime acupuncture visits or time since last treatment. Trial registration: The protocol was registered at clinicaltrials.gov (#NCT04982315).

Multiracial Patient Experiences With Racial Microaggressions in Health Care Settings.

PURPOSE: Illuminating patients' experiences of microaggressions in health care settings can help practitioners develop care that is more culturally responsive. While much of the literature on health care disparities focuses on minority groups generally, we sought to identify and to describe the ways in which racial microaggressions manifest for multiracial individuals and families specifically. METHODS: Using a combination of interviews and focus groups, we conducted 15 interviews and 3 focus groups. Eligible participants self-identified as more than one race and/or they self-identified as part of an interracial family, and they and/or someone they considered to be part of their family received health care in the past 12 months. We performed a content analysis to describe the dominant ways racial microaggressions presented in health care interactions. RESULTS: A total of 31 participants shared their experiences in health care settings, including their experiences with racism, racial bias, and microaggressions. Based on their experiences, we describe 6 prevalent microaggressions: mistaken identity, mistaken relationships, fixed forms, entitled examiner, pervasive stereotypes, and intersectionality. Many acknowledged their experiences with racial microaggressions in health care were similar to those they experienced in everyday settings; however, the power dynamics differed in health care. CONCLUSIONS: Understanding patient perspectives about racial microaggressions suggests opportunities to improve patient-provider communication. For multiracial individuals and families, racial microaggressions may have implications for patient engagement in health care. Findings of this study highlight implications for theory and research as well as opportunities to facilitate systematic improvements in the provision of culturally responsive health care services.

Towards Automatic Generation of Portions of Scientific Papers for Large Multi-Institutional Collaborations Based on Semantic Metadata.

Scientific collaborations involving multiple institutions are increasingly commonplace. It is not unusual for publications to have dozens or hundreds of authors, in some cases even a few thousands. Gathering the information for such papers may be very time consuming, since the author list must include authors who made different kinds of contributions and whose affiliations are hard to track. Similarly, when datasets are contributed by multiple institutions, the collection and processing details may also be hard to assemble due to the many individuals involved. We present our work to date on automatically generating author lists and other portions of scientific papers for multi-institutional collaborations based on the metadata created to represent the people, data, and activities involved. Our initial focus is ENIGMA, a large international collaboration for neuroimaging genetics.