Dopamine (DA) signaling at synapses is tightly coordinated through opposing mechanisms of vesicular fusion-mediated DA release and transporter-mediated DA clearance. Altered brain DA signaling is suspected to underlie multiple brain disorders, including schizophrenia, Parkinson's disease, bipolar disorder, and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). We identified a pedigree containing ...

The entorhinal cortex (EC) is a significant component of the systems that underlie certain forms of memory formation and recall. Evidence has been emerging that the dopaminergic system in the EC facilitates these and other functions of the EC. The effects of dopamine (DA) on membrane properties and excitability of EC neurons, however, are not known. We used in vitro whole-cell patch-clamp recor...

Decision making under uncertainty is central to reasoning by practical intelligent systems, and attracts great controversy. The most widely accepted approach is to represent uncertainty in terms of prior and conditional probabilities of events and the utilities of consequences of actions, and to apply standard decision theory to calculate degrees of belief and expected utilities of actions. Unf...

Partially observed actions are observations of action executions in which we are uncertain about the identity of objects, agents, or locations involved in the actions (e.g., we know that actionmove(?o, ?x, ?y) occurred, but do not know ?o, ?y). Observed-Action Reasoning is the problem of reasoning about the world state after a sequence of partial observations of actions and states. In this pape...

dynamic assessment (da) which is rooted in vygotsky’s (1978) sociocultural theory involves the integration of instruction and assessment in a dialectical way to achieve two main purposes: enhancing learners' development and understanding about their learning potential. however, the feasibility and appropriateness of mediation are two main concerns of da. the former is concerned with the applica...

Derived from the emerging paradigm shift in English language teaching and assessment, there has been a renewal of interest in dynamic assessment (DA) to be used as an alternative to the traditional static testing in language classrooms. However, to date, DA practice has been mostly limited to clinical treatments of children with learning disabilities, and it has not been widely incorporated int...