Developmental dyslexia (DD) is typically associated with slow and laborious reading, but there is also evidence pointing to speech-in-noise perception difficulties and a deficit in rapid stimulus processing. We looked at sentence repetition in 56 adult participants, half of whom had a diagnosis of DD, using a mixed design with one between-subjects variable (group) and three within-subjects variables (presentation, noise level, and semantic content). More specifically, we investigated whether sung targets could facilitate sentence repetition in DD compared to spoken ones, drawing on the idea that singing has a slower presentation rate. Further, in light of difficulties in repeating semantically meaningless targets in DD and the mixed results regarding speech-in-noise perception in this population, we examined the effects of varying semantic content (story-like, news-like, semantically anomalous) on performance, presenting targets in quiet and in noise. Results showed a significantly poorer performance in DD in quiet relative to controls but not in noise. Semantic content came out non-significant, and sung targets did not statistically affect performance. Considering a previously documented dyslexia-amusia comorbidity, we screened all participants for amusia, and-in line with previous research-we found that approximately 29% of the DD sample met the diagnostic criteria for amusia. However, amusia did not significantly affect performance. The study suggests that sentence repetition is impaired in DD and naturalistic singing does not seem to confer an advantage. As we did not isolate presentation rate as a variable, the results cannot establish that a reduced presentation rate itself has no positive effects.

A liquid mixture of two or more components can phase separate into two liquid phases by changing the temperature. Ordinary chemical perception would attribute this transition to a competition between the favorable enthalpy of the biphasic state and the favorable entropy of the (mixed) monophasic state, rationalizing the stability of these states, respectively, at low and high temperatures. This is indeed the case for a UCST liquid-liquid phase separation. However, in contrast, in LCST behavior, the monophasic mixed state is observed at low temperatures, whereas the biphasic state is observed at high temperatures. This perplexing behavior has triggered different hypotheses about mechanisms capable of explaining it. In this paper, we study, by molecular dynamics simulations, two ionic liquids (ILs), [Hbet]-[Tf2N] and [P4444]-[TMBS], that when mixed with water exhibit, respectively, a UCST and an LCST liquid-liquid phase separation. The computational phase diagrams of these two IL/water mixtures were shown to be in very close agreement with those obtained experimentally. Here, we investigate the effective interactions between the ions in aqueous solutions at a very large dilution. We find that for an LCST IL, an increase in temperature induces substantial strengthening of the effective cation-anion and cation-cation attractions (whereas the anion-anion interactions are not significantly altered). Conversely, a UCST IL displays marginal changes in the effective interactions between the ions with a change in temperature. Calculations of thermodynamic parameters indicate that for an LCST IL, the driving force for forming cation-anion contact pairs is predominantly entropic. This positive entropy change for association, which we also attribute to the formation of the biphasic state, does not include the mixing entropy and is ascribed to changes in the properties of surrounding water molecules. On the other hand, for a UCST IL, the driving force for cation-anion association is purely enthalpic. These findings are supplemented by demonstrating that the reorientations and translations of water molecules in the first solvation shell around the LCST ions (in particular, around the cation) are slower than those around the corresponding UCST ions. Given the anomalous behavior of strengthening effective interactions upon heating, we conclude that the transition of a mixed homogeneous state to a liquid-liquid phase-separated state upon a temperature increase (LCST behavior) is driven primarily by hydrophobic interactions.

The existence of mechanisms that operate below conscious awareness (e.g. unconscious bias, microtargeting, dark patterns) and the degree to which they may threaten our autonomy fascinate and challenge us in equal measure. Although concepts like free will and consciousness are being extensively debated in (experimental) philosophy, we know remarkably little about how everyday people perceive threats to their autonomy. Still, ethical debates and ensuing policy often assume that any manipulative attempt, conscious or otherwise, is perceived as worrisome and autonomy-threatening. The present work evaluates how these positions align with public perceptions of freedom and autonomy under conscious or unconscious manipulation. We take a novel approach by grounding experimental scenarios in situations members of the public have volunteered. Across three studies (N=1462), findings show that in realistic and relatable scenarios, people hold nuanced, pragmatic views. They are generally reluctant to conclude that choices are not free, even in cases of direct, successful, and inaccessible manipulation. When evaluating freedom of choice, people consider choice importance, victim identity (self vs. others), and the counterfactual case. Intriguingly, whether participants themselves like the outcome or not affects their evaluation of the victim's freedom, even if the victim's preferences are subverted. Overall, people judge there to be a lack of freedom only after a search across plausible causal factors fails to account for anomalous choice outcomes. We propose this as a viable rational cognitive process, contrasting with claims of public irrationality, underappreciation, or misunderstanding of core philosophical concepts.

Claims of veridical perception often accompany out-of-body experiences (OBEs), but systematic evaluation under controlled conditions remains difficult. We examined whether descriptions produced after attempted OBEs corresponded to concealed visual targets beyond chance using computational semantic similarity. Twenty-one individuals affiliated with an institute specializing in OBE training attempted to perceive a randomly selected target displayed in a separate, inaccessible room. Targets were drawn from a standardized database and remained unknown to participants and researchers. Ten participants reported an OBE, and 13 provided target descriptions for analysis. Participant descriptions and target captions were converted into high-dimensional vector embeddings using a pretrained language model. For each trial, cosine similarity between the participant's description and each of 100 candidate targets was computed; the correct target was evaluated against the within-trial decoy distribution using a rank-based metric (our primary analysis) and standardized z-scores (a secondary, descriptive analysis). Control analyses confirmed that the pipeline identified correct targets when semantic correspondence was present, though these controls do not establish sensitivity to naturalistic human language. No individual trial showed statistically significant above-chance correspondence, and a combined rank-based test across all 13 trials likewise showed no evidence of above-chance performance. Two participants spontaneously reported accurate details about experimenters' locations and activities in an adjacent room. Although the target-identification results did not support anomalous cognition, the spontaneous environmental reports may have methodological value and warrant systematic investigation.

Extrasensory perception (ESP) research has used neuroimaging and neurophysiological methods to examine whether anomalous information-transfer tasks are associated with measurable brain activity. In light of recent critical work on this literature, the present article was reframed as a PRISMA-informed descriptive synthesis rather than as evidence for a unified neural signature of ESP. The review focuses on ESP-related paradigms, including telepathy, clairvoyance or hidden-target perception, remote viewing or anomalous cognition, precognition or presentiment, and selected distant-stimulation or receiver-response studies when explicitly framed as ESP, psi, or anomalous information transfer. The revised search used PubMed and ScienceDirect as reproducible database sources and supplemented these searches with an author-held topic-specific archive, citation searching, manual reference-list screening, and cross-checking against Acunzo et al. (2026). Studies were eligible when they reported empirical human data, used a neuroimaging or neurophysiological method, and included an explicit ESP-related or anomalous information-transfer task. Psychokinesis, distant healing, mediumship, survival-related research, ordinary hyperscanning, and altered-state studies without an ESP task were excluded from the primary synthesis. The final qualitative synthesis included 92 reports/studies. The review summarizes study paradigms, modalities, reported brain regions or electrode-level findings, behavioral or task-outcome context, and methodological limitations. Most studies used EEG/ERP, with fewer fMRI, fNIRS, SPECT, PET, and optical-topography reports. Findings involved posterior scalp or occipital activity, frontal, parietal, temporal, medial temporal, limbic, inter-brain, and receiver-response measures. Null, weak, and non-specific findings were retained and explicitly summarized. Overall, the literature is heterogeneous in design, modality, statistical approach, behavioral reporting, anatomical specificity, and methodological quality. Therefore, the findings are interpreted as descriptive patterns of reported results rather than as evidence for a single neural correlate of ESP. No formal meta-analysis was conducted because the studies did not provide sufficiently comparable paradigms, neural endpoints, or effect-size structures. Quantum, non-local, and filter/transmission interpretations are treated only as speculative frameworks for future empirical testing.

Reconstruction-based methods have achieved excellent performance in anomaly detection. Diffusion models are considered highly suitable for anomaly detection tasks due to their strong ability in reconstruction. Nevertheless, diffusion-based models require the reconstruction of noise features, which may lack the capacity for fine-grained feature reconstruction and fail to provide adequate semantic information for reconstruction guidance. To solve the aforementioned problems, this paper proposes a Fine-Grained Enhancement Convolutional Diffusion Transformer Anomaly Detection (FECDTAD) framework for multi-class anomaly detection. The core model of the proposed framework is the Fine-Grained Enhancement Convolutional Denoising Transformer (FECDT), which employs the diffusion transformer paradigm. To enhance fine-grained reconstruction in the diffusion process, the FECDTAD adopts a series of feature information fusion strategies. Specifically, to enhance both fine-grained perception and global understanding, the FECDT model employs a simple feature fusion module to integrate shallow-level and deep-level features extracted from a pre-trained vision transformer. To enhance the capacity for fine-grained feature reconstruction, the FECDT integrates local and global information via a CNN-Transformer architecture. Moreover, to provide guidance for the reconstruction of anomalous areas, semantic information is propagated into the FECDT through a Cross-Attention module. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective and can surpass the state-of-the-art methods.

Schizophrenia has been associated with disturbances in perceiving affordances, i.e. action possibilities offered by the environment. However, empirical research has largely relied on static laboratory tasks that poorly capture the dynamic perception-action loops of everyday environments. In this exploratory study, we used immersive virtual reality (VR) to examine environmental exploration and interaction in patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls (n = 19 each). Participants completed baseline questionnaires including self-report measures of anomalous world experience and were exposed to natural and urban 360° video environments and an interactive VR game. Their field of view was recorded and manually coded using a predefined coding scheme. Subjective affect, stress, and presence were assessed before and after VR exposure. Patients with schizophrenia showed reduced visual exploration of the environments, reflected by fewer gaze shifts per minute compared with controls, particularly in urban scenes. In the interactive VR game, overall object interaction patterns were comparable, although patients showed a tendency toward longer latencies before initiating social interaction with a virtual non-player character. Reduced fixation of the character's face was strongly associated with domains of anomalous world experience related to other persons, language, and atmosphere. Qualitative observations further suggested that immersive environments could interact with the sense-making of psychotic experiences in a few participants. Although preliminary given the limited sample size, these findings indicate subtle alterations in how patients with schizophrenia explore their surroundings, while basic object interaction remains preserved. Immersive VR paradigms may provide a promising experimental platform to investigate altered subject-world relations in psychosis.

Notch filters can alter color contrasts by selectively filtering different spectral bands of the stimulus and have been developed to enhance reddish-greenish contrasts for color-deficient observers with anomalous trichromacy. We examined the effects of such filters on color salience for normal trichromats, using a visual search paradigm where the task was to locate a color target superimposed on a variegated chromatic background, similar to foraging for fruits among foliage. Background colors varied along a bluish-yellowish or purplish to yellow-green (short-wave cone isolating) axis, roughly spanning the range of dominant color variations in arid or lush environments. Target colors sampled a wide range of hue angles and contrasts. Testing was conducted on a computer monitor, with the filter effects simulated by calculating corresponding chromaticities with or without the filter for naturalistic (Munsell) reflectances. The filter evaluated (Enchroma SuperX® glasses) was designed to increase color contrast along a reddish-cyan (long- vs medium-wave cone) axis. Consistent with this, search times for targets on the blue-yellow background were significantly faster for the filter condition, because the filter increased the target-background color difference. Alternatively, overall differences in search times were not observed for the S-cone background. The differences on the two backgrounds could be qualitatively accounted for by the relative salience of the stimuli predicted by a perceptual color space (CIELAB). Our results demonstrate the efficacy of the filters for enhancing visual performance for normal trichromats and naturalistic tasks, and illustrate how these effects depend on the potential color characteristics of the environment.

Facial anomalies, such as scars, are often linked to an "anomalous-is-bad" stereotype, in which people with visible differences are seen as less warm or less moral. We developed the "Normalizing Anomalies with Mobile Exposure" (NAME) intervention based on the idea that repeated exposure and narratives can shift automatic evaluations of others. In a between-subjects design, one group of participants was repeatedly exposed to faces with visible anomalies paired with narratives describing morally praiseworthy actions, while a second group viewed phenotypically typical faces of people of color paired with the same type of narratives. Each group completed two daily sessions for five consecutive days via a mobile application. Across both versions of the intervention, implicit evaluations of the targeted faces became more positive over time, with the anomalous faces version showing the clearest target-specific improvement. Explicit attitudes did not change. These findings suggest that exposure-based storytelling can alter automatic evaluations of individuals with facial anomalies and may offer a promising, scalable approach to reducing stigma associated with visible differences, although further research is needed to test durability and generalizability to other groups.

Current diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia overlook the patient's subjective experience, offering a simplified view. To describe the subjective anomalies in the personal experience of the "lived world" in patients diagnosed with schizophrenia via the EAWE interview (Examination of Anomalous World Experience). A qualitative study was conducted between January and May 2024. Semistructured interviews were conducted with patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, using the thematic axes of the EAWE as a framework. Also, the interviews were recorded and transcribed for analysis using ATLAS.ti.v24 software. We interviewed five patients, three men and two women, aged between 18 and 46. The main narrative focused on religious and sexual delusions involving God, the Virgin Mary, or the Holy Spirit, within the context of "Existential Orientation." Sexual experiences were identified as an emerging category in the interview content. In the "Space and Objects" domain, participants reported hallucinations and blurred vision. The "time and events" domain showed a perception of slowness. The "Other Persons" domain included hypoattunement and paranoia. The "Language" domain revealed disorganized thinking. The "Atmosphere" domain covered déjà vu and emotional emptiness. Conclusions: Individuals may experience their place in the world and their intimate relationships in ways that significantly differ from usual.

We present the design and demonstration of silicon nitride side-coupled Fabry-Pérot resonators employing both uniform and apodised distributed Bragg reflectors, for broadband dispersion engineering. By implementing air-gap Bragg gratings, we achieve a broad stopband exceeding 70 nm. Apodised gratings enable enhanced dispersion control, allowing transitions from normal to anomalous integrated dispersion. Furthermore, high-Q resonant modes and enhanced peak reflectivity are demonstrated through co-optimisation of cavity length and waveguide-to-cavity gap. The compact footprint, the enhanced mode selectivity and the spectral bandwidth control, make side-coupled Fabry-Pérot resonators a promising platform for resonant mirrors in hybrid on-chip lasers, as well as for sensing and non-linear photonic systems.

To address fragmented multimodal perception, high energy consumption in hardware deployment, and delayed responses in anomalous driving scenarios, this work proposes a coupled gradient-evolutionary learning framework deployed on sparse memristive neuromorphic networks for robust edge intelligence. The framework fuses physiological, visual, and auditory modalities and is validated across multimodal benchmarks on image, audio, and EEG tasks for real-time driving-safety monitoring, forming a closed-loop perception-analysis-decision pipeline that improves the reliability of safety-critical decisions. At the hardware level, neuromorphic processing units are constructed using two-dimensional material-based memristors. Leveraging in-memory computing and parallel processing capabilities of the memristive architecture, the proposed framework achieves energy-efficient classification of multimodal signals. At the algorithm level, a cross-species-inspired gradient-evolutionary architecture integrates local visual-cortex-inspired CNN learning for traffic-scene parsing with global Darwinian population evolution. Memristor write noise is utilized as a functional perturbation to drive the evolutionary training, which improves classification accuracy under quantization noise and enhances robustness against hardware non-idealities. With the synergy between evolutionary training and memristor-aware low-bit quantization, the framework exhibits enhanced natural sparsity and achieves tens-of-milliseconds inference latency, tens of milliwatts power consumption, and an energy cost of hundreds of microjoules per inference, resulting in about 5.8 × energy savings compared to conventional von Neumann edge computing architectures. Overall, this work provides a low-carbon, robust, and scalable edge intelligence solution for road safety decision-making in human-vehicle-environment systems, demonstrating the potential of neuromorphic computing for supporting carbon neutrality in transportation.

Research efforts spanning more than seven decades have used functional neuroimaging to investigate whether putative extra‑sensory perception (ESP/receptive psi) has identifiable neural correlates. However, the field lacks a coherent and critical synthesis of its methodological approaches and reported effects. We conducted a systematic review consolidating 143 reports and qualitatively evaluated the methods of 129 individual studies. We organized studies by paradigm using two broad categories: (1) explicit psi paradigms (including forced-choice and free-response design subcategories), in which psi is assessed via overt responses; and (2) implicit psi paradigms (including distant stimulation, distant intentionality, and predictive anticipatory activity subcategories), in which psi is assessed solely via neurophysiology. Most work relied on EEG (91%), followed by fMRI (5%). We identified recurrent methodological limitations, in particular, small sample sizes, inadequate multiple‑comparison control, and analytical flexibility. Explicit paradigms rarely showed above‑chance behavior, yet investigators frequently proceeded to neural analyses, implying unacknowledged shifts in the operational definition of psi. Implicit paradigms often reported psi‑consistent effects, but findings were heterogeneous and seldom replicated. Overall, definitive conclusions about the neural correlates of ESP remain premature. Nevertheless, we identify potential leads-such as alpha‑band power in forced-choice designs, and a target‑related negative slow wave in event‑related designs-as testable candidates for future research. We provide a set of 13 methodological recommendations to promote cumulative progress, as well as 6 recommendations for future research directions.