A number of maladaptive behaviors and poor health outcomes (e.g., substance abuse, obesity) correlate with impulsive choice, which describes the tendency to prefer smaller, immediate rewards in lieu of larger, delayed rewards. Working memory deficits are often reported in those diagnosed with the same maladaptive behaviors. Human studies suggest that impulsive choice is associated with working ...

The stability problem of impulsive discrete systems with multiple delays is studied. By means of the Lyapunov stability theory and discrete-time Halanay-type inequality technique, we develop sufficient conditions for the exponential stability for the impulsive discrete systems with multiple delays, which involves multiple delays not only at non-impulsive time instants but also at impulsive time...

If one end of a one-dimensional excitable medium is forced periodically via impulsive stimuli, the usual response is a periodic wavetrain of propagating pulses. When the forcing period is large, the pulses are uniformly spaced and have identical propagation speed. If the forcing period B becomes critically small, the periodic wavetrain may lose stability via a period-doubling bifurcation that o...

In this paper we evaluate the benefits of series elastic actuation in performing a balancing task on a humanoid robot. By having the possibility to replace the type of transmission at the ankles level, it was possible to repeat the very same experiment in two different conditions: (1) Using series elastic actuators (SEA); (2) Replacing the elastic elements with rigid transmissions. The experime...

Individual differences in impulsive and risky choice are key risk factors for a variety of maladaptive behaviors such as drug abuse, gambling, and obesity. In our rat model, ordered individual differences are stable across choice parameters, months of testing, and span a broad spectrum, suggesting that rats, like humans, exhibit trait-level impulsive and risky choice behaviors. In addition, imp...

With the emergence of new technologies, in particular the Internet, the opportunity for impulsive purchases have expanded enormously. In this research-in-progress, we report the current status of an fMRI-project in which we investigated differences between neural processes in the brains of impulsive and non-impulsive shoppers during the trustworthiness evaluation of online offers. Both our beha...

Suicide attempts often are impulsive, yet little is known about the characteristics of impulsive suicide. We examined impulsive suicide attempts within a population-based, case-control study of nearly lethal suicide attempts among people 13-34 years of age. Attempts were considered impulsive if the respondent reported spending less than 5 minutes between the decision to attempt suicide and the ...

In this paper, we use differential evolution (DE), with best-evolved results refined using a Nelder–Mead optimization, to solve boundary-value complex problems in orbital mechanics relevant to low Earth orbits (LEO). A class of Lambert-type problems is examined to evaluate the performance of this evolutionary method in its application to solving nonlinear boundary value problems (BVP) arising i...

This paper presents a simple and cost effective method to remove the periodic impulsive noise in power-line communications (PLC) system. In the real PLC environment, some electrical appliances will produce impulsive noise at a fixed frequency with the power spectral density (PSD) usually exceeding that of the received signals. This type of impulsive noise is the periodic impulsive noise, and it...

In the present study, remote sensing of soil moisture is carried out using the Passive and Active Land S-band airborne sensor (PALS). The data in this paper were taken from 5 days of overflights near Chickasha, Oklahoma during the 1999 Southern Great Plains (SGP) experiment. Presently, we analyze the collected data to understand the relationships between the observed signals (radiometer brightn...