The health, environmental, and economic dimensions of future dietary transitions in Argentina.

Diets link human health with environmental sustainability, offering promising pressure points to enhance the sustainability of food systems. We investigated the health, environmental, and economic dimensions of the current diet in Argentina and the possible effects of six dietary change scenarios on nutrient adequacy, dietary quality, food expenditure, and six environmental impact categories (i.e., GHG emissions, total land occupation, cropland use, fossil energy use, freshwater consumption, and the emission of eutrophying pollutants). Current dietary patterns are unhealthy, unsustainable, and relatively expensive, and all things being equal, an increase in income levels would not alter the health dimension, but increase environmental impacts by 33-38%, and costs by 38%. Compared to the prevailing diet, the six healthier diet alternatives could improve health with an expenditure between + 27% (National Dietary Guidelines) to -5% (vegan diet) of the current diet. These dietary changes could result in trade-offs between different environmental impacts. Plant-based diets showed the lowest overall environmental impact, with GHG emissions and land occupation reduced by up to 79% and 88%, respectively, without significant changes in cropland demand. However, fossil energy use and freshwater consumption could increase by up to 101% and 220%, respectively. The emission of eutrophying pollutants could increase by up to 54% for all healthy diet scenarios, except for the vegan one (18% decrease). We conclude that the health and environmental crisis that Argentina (and other developing countries) currently face could be mitigated by adopting healthy diets (particularly plant-based), bringing in the process benefits to both people and nature. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11625-021-01087-7.

Optimum Integration Procedure for Connectionist and Dynamic Field Equations.

Connectionist and dynamic field models consist of a set of coupled first-order differential equations describing the evolution in time of different units. We compare three numerical methods for the integration of these equations: the Euler method, and two methods we have developed and present here: a modified version of the fourth-order Runge Kutta method, and one semi-analytical method. We apply them to solve a well-known nonlinear connectionist model of retrieval in single-digit multiplication, and show that, in many regimes, the semi-analytical and modified Runge Kutta methods outperform the Euler method, in some regimes by more than three orders of magnitude. Given the outstanding difference in execution time of the methods, and that the EM is widely used, we conclude that the researchers in the field can greatly benefit from our analysis and developed methods.

A massive experiment on choice blindness in political decisions: Confidence, confabulation, and unconscious detection of self-deception.

We implemented a Choice Blindness Paradigm containing political statements in Argentina to reveal the existence of categorical ranges of introspective reports, identified by confidence and agreement levels, separating easy from very hard to manipulate decisions. CBP was implemented in both live and web-based forms. Importantly, and contrary to what was observed in Sweden, we did not observe changes in voting intentions. Also, confidence levels in the manipulated replies where significantly lower than in non-manipulated cases even in undetected manipulations. We name this phenomenon unconscious detection of self-deception. Results also show that females are more difficult to manipulate than men.

Arithmetic on Your Phone: A Large Scale Investigation of Simple Additions and Multiplications.

We present the results of a gamified mobile device arithmetic application which allowed us to collect vast amount of data in simple arithmetic operations. Our results confirm and replicate, on a large sample, six of the main principles derived in a long tradition of investigation: size effect, tie effect, size-tie interaction effect, five-effect, RTs and error rates correlation effect, and most common error effect. Our dataset allowed us to perform a robust analysis of order effects for each individual problem, for which there is controversy both in experimental findings and in the predictions of theoretical models. For addition problems, the order effect was dominated by a max-then-min structure (i.e 7+4 is easier than 4+7). This result is predicted by models in which additions are performed as a translation starting from the first addend, with a distance given by the second addend. In multiplication, we observed a dominance of two effects: (1) a max-then-min pattern that can be accounted by the fact that it is easier to perform fewer additions of the largest number (i.e. 8x3 is easier to compute as 8+8+8 than as 3+3+…+3) and (2) a phonological effect by which problems for which there is a rhyme (i.e. "seis por cuatro es veinticuatro") are performed faster. Above and beyond these results, our study bares an important practical conclusion, as proof of concept, that participants can be motivated to perform substantial arithmetic training simply by presenting it in a gamified format.

Time to Tango: expertise and contextual anticipation during action observation.

Predictive theories of action observation propose that we use our own motor system as a guide for anticipating and understanding other people's actions through the generation of context-based expectations. According to this view, people should be better in predicting and interpreting those actions that are present in their own motor repertoire compared to those that are not. We recorded high-density event-related potentials (ERPs: P300, N400 and Slow Wave, SW) and source estimation in 80 subjects separated by their level of expertise (experts, beginners and naïves) as they observed realistic videos of Tango steps with different degrees of execution correctness. We also performed path analysis to infer causal relationships between ongoing anticipatory brain activity, evoked semantic responses, expertise measures and behavioral performance. We found that anticipatory activity, with sources in a fronto-parieto-occipital network, early discriminated between groups according to their level of expertise. Furthermore, this early activity significantly predicted subsequent semantic integration indexed by semantic responses (N400 and SW, sourced in temporal and motor regions) which also predicted motor expertise. In addition, motor expertise was a good predictor of behavioral performance. Our results show that neural and temporal dynamics underlying contextual action anticipation and comprehension can be interpreted in terms of successive levels of contextual prediction that are significantly modulated by subject's prior experience.

Choosing in freedom or forced to choose? Introspective blindness to psychological forcing in stage-magic.

We investigated an individual ability to identify whether choices were made freely or forced by external parameters. We capitalized on magical setups where the notion of psychological forcing constitutes a well trodden path. In live stage magic, a magician guessed cards from spectators while inquiring how freely they thought they had made the choice. Our data showed a marked blindness in the introspection of free choice. Spectators assigned comparable ratings when choosing the card that the magician deliberately forced them compared to any other card, even in classical forcing, where the magician literally handles a card to the participant This observation was paralleled by a laboratory experiment where we observed modest changes in subjective reports by factors with drastic effect in choice. Pupil dilatation, which is known to tag slow cognitive events related to memory and attention, constitutes an efficient fingerprint to index subjective and objective aspects of choice.

Black-box model for the complete characterization of the spectral gain and noise in semiconductor optical amplifiers.

A Black Box Model for the quick complete characterization of the optical gain and amplified spontaneous emission noise in Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers is presented and verified experimentally. This model provides good accuracy, even neglecting third order terms in the spectral gain shift, and can provide cost reduction in SOA characterization and design as well as provide simple algorithms for hybrid integration in-package control.

Spontaneous decay rates in active waveguides.

We present a new method of measuring the guided, radiated, and total decay rates in uniform waveguides. It is also shown theoretically that large modifications of the total decay rate can be achieved in realistic erbium-doped fiber amplifiers and erbium-doped waveguide amplifiers with effective mode area radii smaller than approximately 1 microm.