燃气流量低频脉动下的火焰结构特征

针对一种可降低天然气高温燃烧过程中NOx生成量的脉动供燃料燃烧技术,研究了一个采用燃气流量脉动燃烧方式的射流扩散火焰。采用纹影和直接摄像手段观察了在燃气流量低频率(10Hz以下)脉动工况下的火焰特征及其变化,分析了火焰长度脉动特征和火焰内部结构的周期发展过程。研究发现:火焰内部结构的周期发展过程包括高速(波峰流量)燃气脉冲冲出、增长、燃气惯性冲出、回吸、低速(波谷流量)和高速燃气脉冲的分离、低速脉冲的增长等阶段。其中低速和高速燃气脉冲的分离是单火焰燃烧不稳定的原因。     

声悬浮条件下扇谐振荡液滴的内部流动规律

采用激光片光源照明和高速摄影技术,并使用聚苯乙烯微球作为示踪颗粒,研究了声悬浮条件下二阶和三阶扇谐振荡液滴的内部流场.耦合Level Set方法和标记网格法数值求解了不可压两相流的Navier-Stokes方程,模拟了液滴的扇谐振荡过程中的形态演化及其内部流动状态.数值计算的流场与实验结果吻合很好.对液滴扇谐振荡过程中的内部流速分布进行定量分析,发现流速在液滴中心区域几乎为零并沿液滴自由表面方向逐渐增大.二阶和三阶扇谐振荡的内部流速沿径向分别呈线性和二次函数分布并与理论预测结果相一致.     

记忆编码和提取中的神经激活模式再现?

情景记忆使得人们可以在头脑中生动地经历已经发生过的事件,然而支持这一过程的神经机制还没有得到很好地理解.本文针对近年来基于神经激活模式分析的研究对"神经激活模式再现"的假说进行了整合分析,提供了重要的支持性证据.这些研究发现,成功地提取伴随着编码时神经激活模式的再现,且再现的发生先于行为判断出现;除此以外,神经激活重现可以在重复学习过程中发生,或者由相似的学习材料引发,且这种再现程度与随后的记忆效果相关;此外,神经激活模式再现还可以在睡眠和休息条件下自发地产生,促进随后的记忆成绩.在此基础之上,本研究还进一步考察了神经激活模式的本质特征,探讨了内侧颞叶和额顶皮层等重要脑区在再现过程中的作用,并对神经激活模式再现的研究方向进行了展望.     

Gender difference in the effect of daytime sleep on declarative memory for pictures

Objective: To investigate gender difference in the effects of daytime sleep on item and source memories, which are dissociable elements of declarative memory, and the effects of sleep on recollection and familiarity, which are two processes underlying recognition. Methods: Participants saw a series of pictures with either blue or red background, and were then given a pretest for item and source memories. Then males and females respectively were randomly assigned either to a wake or a sleep condition. In the wake condition, participants remained awake until the posttest; in the sleep condition, participants slept for 1 h until awakened and asked to remain awake until the posttest. Results: Daytime sleep contributed to retention of source memory rather than item memory in females, whereas males undergoing daytime sleep had a trend towards increased familiarity. For females, however, neither recollection nor familiarity appeared to be influenced by daytime sleep. Conclusion: The mechanism underlying gender difference may be linked with different memory traces resulting from different encoding strategies, as well as with different electrophysiological changes during daytime sleep.     

Spontaneous muscle twitches during sleep guide spinal self-organization

During development, information about the three-dimensional shape and mechanical properties of the body is laid down in the synaptic connectivity of sensorimotor systems through unknown adaptive mechanisms. In spinal reflex systems, this enables the fast transformation of complex sensory information into adequate correction of movements. Here we use a computer simulation to show that an unsupervised correlation-based learning mechanism, using spontaneous muscle twitches, can account for the functional adaptation of the withdrawal reflex system. We also show that tactile feedback resulting from spontaneous muscle twitches during sleep does indeed modify sensorimotor transformation in young rats in a predictable manner. The results indicate that these twitches, corresponding to human fetal movements, are important in spinal self-organization.     

Human theta oscillations exhibit task dependence during virtual maze navigation.

Theta oscillations (electroencephalographic activity with a frequency of 4-8 Hz) have long been implicated in spatial navigation in rodents; however, the role of theta oscillators in human spatial navigation has not been explored. Here we describe subdural recordings from epileptic patients learning to navigate computer-generated mazes. Visual inspection of the raw intracranial signal revealed striking episodes of high-amplitude slow-wave oscillations at a number of areas of the cortex, including temporal cortex. Spectral analysis showed that these oscillations were in the theta band. These episodes of theta activity, which typically last several cycles, are dependent on task characteristics. Theta oscillations occur more frequently in more complex mazes; they are also more frequent during recall trials than during learning trials.     

Consolidation during sleep of perceptual learning of spoken language

Memory consolidation resulting from sleep has been seen broadly: in verbal list learning, spatial learning, and skill acquisition in visual and motor tasks. These tasks do not generalize across spatial locations or motor sequences, or to different stimuli in the same location. Although episodic rote learning constitutes a large part of any organism's learning, generalization is a hallmark of adaptive behaviour. In speech, the same phoneme often has different acoustic patterns depending on context. Training on a small set of words improves performance on novel words using the same phonemes but with different acoustic patterns, demonstrating perceptual generalization. Here we show a role of sleep in the consolidation of a naturalistic spoken-language learning task that produces generalization of phonological categories across different acoustic patterns. Recognition performance immediately after training showed a significant improvement that subsequently degraded over the span of a day's retention interval, but completely recovered following sleep. Thus, sleep facilitates the recovery and subsequent retention of material learned opportunistically at any time throughout the day. Performance recovery indicates that representations and mappings associated with generalization are refined and stabilized during sleep.     

Micro-mechanism of metal magnetic memory signal variation during fatigue

Tensile fatigue tests were designed to study the relation between the tangential magnetic memory signal and dislocations. According to experimental results, in the early stage of fatigue, the magnetic signal and the dislocation density rapidly increase; while in the middle stage, the magnetic signal gradually increases, the dislocation density remains steady, and only the dislocation structure develops. On the other hand, in the later stage, the magnetic signal once again increases rapidly, the dislocation structure continues to develop, and microscopic cracks are formed. Analysis reveals that the dislocations block the movement of the domain wall, and the area of dislocation accumulation thus becomes an internal magnetic source and scatters a field outward. In addition, the magnetic memory field strengthens with increasing dislocation density and complexity of the dislocation structure. Accordingly, the dislocation pinning factor related with the dislocation density and the dislocation structure has been proposed to characterize the effect of dislocations on the magnetic memory signal. The magnetic signal strengthens with an increase in the dislocation pinning factor.     

在记忆过程中额叶与信息粒度的交互作用

采用事件相关的功能磁共振技术(fMRI)研究了记忆与信息粒度的相互关系.实验使用相同的记忆任务-Boolean规则,依据Ebbinghaus范式,要求被试在完全掌握规则后的第1天(短期记忆)和学习训练后的第7天(长期记忆)完成fMRI测试.结果表明,短期记忆任务和长期记忆任务均激活了左侧额下回和额中回,但短期记忆任务相对长期记忆任务激活更多的左侧中央前回和额下小叶、右侧的额上回和额中回,而长期记忆比短期记忆激活了更多的右侧的额下回,这可能与规则中的各个元素之间的聚合程度和记忆的精度有关.因此,额叶对不同信息粒度的规则提取有重要影响.高粒度相对于低粒度的Boolean规则提取需要更短的时间,但是记忆信息提取的正确率不会因高低粒度的不同而表现出差异.虽然信息粒度对长、短期记忆任务的提取的正确率不起决定性作用,但信息粒度作为记忆巩固与否的一种度量标准会对提取时间产生影响;这可能使得规则提取的策略不同,因此,额叶对不同粒度的信息提取起到了至关重要的作用.