The ability to detect and learn contingencies between fearful stimuli and their predictive cues is an important capacity to cope with the environment. Contingency awareness refers to the ability to verbalize the relationships between conditioned and unconditioned stimuli. Although there is a heated debate about the influence of contingency awareness on conditioned fear responses, neural correla...

The role of contingency awareness in classical conditioning experiments using human subjects is currently under debate. This study took a novel approach to manipulating contingency awareness in a differential Pavlovian conditioning paradigm. Complex sine wave gratings were used as visual conditional stimuli (CS). By manipulating the fundamental spatial frequency of the displays, we were able to...

Objectives: The thesis seeks to provide an analysis of surgical work and decision making, to identify the basis of the widely observed variation in surgical practice and to indicate what surgeons see as the source(s) of that variation. Against this background, it examines the strengths and limitations of the approach promoted by the evidence-based medicine movement to surgical work. Methods: A ...

Unified power flow controller (UPFC) is one of the most effective flexible AC transmission systems (FACTS) devices for enhancing power system security. However, to what extent the performance of UPFC can be brought out, it highly depends upon the location and parameter setting of this device in the system. This paper presents a new approach based on computational intelligence (CI) techniques to...

Contingency is a ubiquitous component of project cost estimating. This paper provides a review of the literature pertaining to the estimating of project cost contingency. It describes the flaws of the tradition percentage method for estimating project cost contingency and sets out more robust estimation methods regression analysis, Monte Carlo simulation and artificial neutral networks. In part...

The present study captures the dynamics of neural processing across positively contingent, negatively contingent, and noncontingent relations. In the setting of a hypothetical chat room conversation, participants rated the contingency of emotional response between two individuals. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were time-locked to the onset of each emotional event. Although each event alone wa...

In this paper, the challenging multi-contingency transient stability constrained optimal power flow problem is partitioned into two sub-problems, namely optimal power flow (OPF) and transient stability control, solved in turn with conventional well trusted power system analysis tools instead of tackling it directly using a complicated integrated approach. Preventive multi-contingency transient ...