Humans, as social beings, are capable of employing variousbehavioral cues, such as gaze, speech, manual action, and bodyposture, in everyday communication. However, to extract fine-grained interaction patterns in social contexts has beenpresented with methodological challenges. Cross-RecurrencePlot Quantification Analysis (CRQA) is an analysis methodinvented in theoretical physics and recently applied tocognitive science to study interpersonal coordination. In thispaper, we extend this approach to analyzing joint activities inchild-parent interaction. We define a new representation asCross Recurrence Block based on CRQA. With thisrepresentation, we are able to capture interpersonal dynamicsfrom more than two behavioral streams in one CrossRecurrence Plot and derive a suite of measures to quantifydetailed characteristics of coordination. Using a datasetcollected from a child-parent interaction study, we show thatthese quantitative measures of joint activities revealdevelopmental changes in coordinative behavioral patternsbetween children and parents.

Human interaction involves the organization of a collection ofsensorimotor systems across space and time. The study ofhow coordination develops in child-parent interaction hasprimarily focused on understanding the development ofspecific coordination patterns from individual modalities.However, less work has taken a systems view andinvestigated the development of coordination among multipleinterdependent behaviors. In the present work, we usedGranger causality as a mathematical model to constructdyadic causal networks of multimodal data collected from alongitudinal study of child-parent interaction. At a group-level, we observed increases in the number of causal links andin the strength of such links in dyadic interaction from 9-months to 12-months. At an individual-level, we observedhigh variability in the types of causal links that emergedacross developmental ages. We discuss these results in termsof a multicausality hypothesis for the development of humancoordination.

Sustained visual attention is crucial to many developmentaloutcomes. We demonstrate that, consistent with thedevelopmental systems view, sustained visual attentionemerges from and is tightly tied to sensory motor coordination.We examined whether changes in manual behavior altertoddlers’ eye gaze by giving one group of children heavy toysthat were hard to pick up, while giving another group ofchildren perceptually identical toys that were lighter, easy topick up and hold. We found a tight temporal coupling betweenthe dynamics of visual attention and the dynamics of manualactivities on objects, a relation that cannot be explained byinterest alone. In the Heavy condition, toddlers looked atobjects just as much as did toddlers in the Light condition butdid so through many brief glances, whereas in Light conditionlooks to the objects were longer and sustained. We discuss theimplication of hand-eye coordination in the development ofvisual attention.

A fundamental question of biology is what determines organ size. Despite demonstrations that factors within organs determine their sizes, intrinsic size control mechanisms remain elusive. Here we show that Drosophila wing size is regulated by JNK signaling during development. JNK is active in a stripe along the center of developing wings, and modulating JNK signaling within this stripe changes organ size. This JNK stripe influences proliferation in a non-canonical, Jun-independent manner by inhibiting the Hippo pathway. Localized JNK activity is established by Hedgehog signaling, where Ci elevates dTRAF1 expression. As the dTRAF1 homolog, TRAF4, is amplified in numerous cancers, these findings provide a new mechanism for how the Hedgehog pathway could contribute to tumorigenesis, and, more importantly, provides a new strategy for cancer therapies. Finally, modulation of JNK signaling centers in developing antennae and legs changes their sizes, suggesting a more generalizable role for JNK signaling in developmental organ size control.

The involvement of host factors is critical to our understanding of underlying mechanisms of transposition and the applications of transposon-based technologies. Modified piggyBac (PB) is one of the most potent transposon systems in mammals. However, varying transposition efficiencies of PB among different cell lines have restricted its application. We discovered that the DNA-PK complex facilitates PB transposition by binding to PB transposase (PBase) and promoting paired-end complex formation. Mass spectrometry analysis and coimmunoprecipitation revealed physical interaction between PBase and the DNA-PK components Ku70, Ku80, and DNA-PKcs Overexpression or knockdown of DNA-PK components enhances or suppresses PB transposition in tissue culture cells, respectively. Furthermore, germ-line transposition efficiency of PB is significantly reduced in Ku80 heterozygous mutant mice, confirming the role of DNA-PK in facilitating PB transposition in vivo. Fused dimer PBase can efficiently promote transposition. FRET experiments with tagged dimer PBase molecules indicated that DNA-PK promotes the paired-end complex formation of the PB transposon. These data provide a mechanistic explanation for the role of DNA-PK in facilitating PB transposition and suggest a transposition-promoting manipulation by enhancing the interaction of the PB ends. Consistent with this, deletions shortening the distance between the two PB ends, such as PB vectors with closer ends (PB-CE vectors), have a profound effect on transposition efficiency. Taken together, our study indicates that in addition to regulating DNA repair fidelity during transposition, DNA-PK also affects transposition efficiency by promoting paired-end complex formation. The approach of CE vectors provides a simple practical solution for designing efficient transposon vectors.

The Asian wood-boring beetle Anoplophora chinensis (Forster) (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae) is an important pest of hardwood trees in its native range, and has serious potential to invade other areas of the world through worldwide commerce in woody plants and wood products. This species already has been intercepted in North America, and is the subject of ongoing eradication efforts in several countries in Europe. Attractants such as pheromones would be immediately useful as baits in traps for its detection. Because long-range pheromones are frequently conserved among closely related species of cerambycids, we evaluated two components of the volatile pheromone produced by males of the congener A. glabripennis (Motschulsky), 4-(n-heptyloxy)butan-1-ol and 4-(n-heptyloxy)butanal, as potential pheromones of A. chinensis. Both compounds subsequently were detected in headspace volatiles from male A. chinensis, but not in volatiles from females. Only 4-(n-heptyloxy)butanol elicited responses from beetle antennae in coupled gas chromatography-electroantennogram analyses, and this compound attracted adult A. chinensis of both sexes in field bioassays. These data suggest that 4-(n-heptyloxy)butan-1-ol is an important component of the male-produced attractant pheromone of A. chinensis, which should find immediate use in quarantine monitoring for this pest.

The longhorned beetle Aromia bungii (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae) is a major pest of stone fruit trees in the genus Prunus, including cherries, apricots, and peaches. Its native range includes China, Korea, Mongolia, and eastern Russia, but it has recently invaded and become established in several countries in Europe, and Japan, and it has been intercepted in shipments coming into North America and Australia. Here, we report the identification of its male-produced aggregation pheromone as the novel compound (E)-2-cis-6,7-epoxynonenal. In field trials in its native range in China, and in recently invaded areas of Japan, the pheromone attracted both sexes of the beetle. Thus, the pheromone should find immediate use in worldwide quarantine surveillance efforts to detect the beetle in incoming shipments. The pheromone will also be a crucial tool in ongoing efforts to eradicate the beetle from regions of the world that it has already invaded.

Young children's visual environments are dynamic, changing moment-by-moment as children physically and visually explore spaces and objects and interact with people around them. Head-mounted eye tracking offers a unique opportunity to capture children's dynamic egocentric views and how they allocate visual attention within those views. This protocol provides guiding principles and practical recommendations for researchers using head-mounted eye trackers in both laboratory and more naturalistic settings. Head-mounted eye tracking complements other experimental methods by enhancing opportunities for data collection in more ecologically valid contexts through increased portability and freedom of head and body movements compared to screen-based eye tracking. This protocol can also be integrated with other technologies, such as motion tracking and heart-rate monitoring, to provide a high-density multimodal dataset for examining natural behavior, learning, and development than previously possible. This paper illustrates the types of data generated from head-mounted eye tracking in a study designed to investigate visual attention in one natural context for toddlers: free-flowing toy play with a parent. Successful use of this protocol will allow researchers to collect data that can be used to answer questions not only about visual attention, but also about a broad range of other perceptual, cognitive, and social skills and their development.

The ability to rapidly recognize words and link them to referents in context is central to children's early language development. This ability, often called word recognition in the developmental literature, is typically studied in the looking-while-listening paradigm, which measures infants' fixation on a target object (vs. a distractor) after hearing a target label. We present a large-scale, open database of infant and toddler eye-tracking data from looking-while-listening tasks. The goal of this effort is to address theoretical and methodological challenges in measuring vocabulary development. We present two analyses of the current database (N=1,320): (1) capturing age-related changes in infants' word recognition while generalizing across item-level variability and (2) assessing how a central methodological decision -- selecting the time window of analysis -- impacts the reliability of measurement. Future efforts will expand the scope of the current database to advance our understanding of participant-level and item-level variation in children's vocabulary development.