BACKGROUND It recently has been demonstrated that during atrial fibrillation, a short and variable excitable gap exists, allowing regional control of atrial fibrillation by local stimulation. In the present study, we visualized the process of excitation during regional entrainment of atrial fibrillation by rapid pacing. METHODS AND RESULTS In six open-chest dogs, the excitation of the left at...

We report on the onset of fluid entrainment when a contact line is forced to advance over a dry solid of arbitrary wettability. We show that entrainment occurs at a critical advancing speed beyond which the balance between capillary, viscous, and contact-line forces sustaining the shape of the interface is no longer satisfied. Wetting couples to the hydrodynamics by setting both the morphology ...

When sinusoidal movements were artificially imposed on the tail region of the curarized spinal dogfish during "fictive locomotion' the coordinated burst pattern recorded in the ventral roots was effectively entrained to follow movement frequencies above as well as below the resting rate. The entrainment was characterized by: (1) a broad range of effective movement frequencies and amplitudes (do...

Synchronization of neural activity is fundamental for many functions of the brain. We demonstrate that spike-timing dependent plasticity (STDP) enhances synchronization (entrainment) in a hybrid circuit composed of a spike generator, a dynamic clamp emulating an excitatory plastic synapse, and a chemically isolated neuron from the Aplysia abdominal ganglion. Fixed-phase entrainment of the Aplys...

Upper-ocean heat and mass budgets are examined from three snapshots of data acquired during and after the passage of Hurricane Gilbert in the western Gulf of Mexico. Measurements prior to storm passage indicated a warm core eddy in the region with velocities of O(1) m s21. Based upon conservation of heat and mass, the threedimensional mixed layer processes are quantified from the data. During a...

A major goal of the Cognitive Infocommunication approach is to develop applications in which human and artificial cognitive systems are made to work more effectively. A critical step in this process is improving our understanding of human-human interaction so that it may be modeled more closely. Our work addresses this task by examining the role of entrainment-the propensity of conversational p...

A major goal of the Cognitive Infocommunication approach is to develop applications in which human and artificial cognitive systems are made to work more effectively. A critical step in this process is improving our understanding of human–human interaction so that it may be modeled more closely. Our work addresses this task by examining the role of entrainment – the propensity of conversational...

Intracellular oscillators entrain to periodic signals by adjusting their phase and frequency. However, the low copy numbers of key molecular players make the dynamics of these oscillators intrinsically noisy, disrupting their oscillatory activity and entrainment response. Here, we use a combination of computational methods and experimental observations to reveal a functional distinction between...

Entrainment, aka accommodation or alignment, is the phenomenon by which conversational partners become more similar to each other in behavior. While there has been much work on some behaviors there has been little on entrainment in speech and even less on how Spoken Dialogue Systems which entrain to their users’ speech can be created. We present an architecture and algorithm for implementing ac...

Random networks of coupled phase oscillators, representing an approximation for systems of coupled limit-cycle oscillators, are considered. Entrainment of such networks by periodic external forcing applied to a subset of their elements is numerically and analytically investigated. For a large class of interaction functions, we find that the entrainment window with a tongue shape becomes exponen...