The inhibitory component of selective attention has been compared in young (7–8 weeks) and older (9–10 months) female mice using the latent inhibition (LI) paradigm. LI consists of retardation in conditioning to a stimulus as a consequence of its prior non-reinforced pre-exposure. In the present work, active avoidance of an electric footshock signaled with a sound was used. Avoidances of the el...

Crude and corrected amygdaloid volumes were computed from magnetic resonance scans in ten patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), 25 patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and 27 controls. Amygdaloid atrophy was present in FTD (P , 0:005) compared to controls, and a trend for increasing atrophy from controls, through FTD to AD (P for trend ,0.00005) showed that FTD amygdaloid volumes were ...

We studied whether neon spreading can be induced within three-dimensional illusory triangles. Kanizsa triangles were induced by black pacman disks consisting of red sectors with curved sides. Viewing our stimuli monocularly produced two-dimensional illusory contours and surfaces as well as neon spreading in each ®gure. Triangles appeared concave or convex under stereoscopical viewing. Neon colo...

Joke comprehension has been decomposed into surprise registration followed by a coherence stage, involving frameshifting (retrieving a new frame from long-term memory to reinterpret information in working memory). We examined this view by recording event-related brain potentials (ERPs) from adults reading one-line jokes or non-joke controls with equally unexpected endings. Joke and non-joke ERP...

Arterial and airway chemoreceptors respond to acute hypoxia by depolarizing, thereby activating voltage-gated Ca channels and so permitting Ca entry to trigger transmitter release. Following periods of prolonged hypoxia, these cells undergo a form of remodelling which involves altered expression of ion channels. Here, we use microspectrofluorimetric recordings of voltage-gated Ca entry (activat...

In this study we investigated the effects of a pulsed radio frequency signal similar to the signal produced by global system for mobile communication telephones (900 MHz carrier, modulated at 217 Hz) on neurons of the avian brain. We found that such stimulation resulted in changes in the amount of neural activity by more than half of the brain cells. Most (76%) of the responding cells increased...

The effect of the spectral tone structure on pre-attentive and attentive pitch discrimination was investigated. The mismatch negativity (MMN) component was recorded from reading subjects to pitch changes of identical magnitude in pure tones with only one sinusoidal frequency component and in spectrally rich tones with two additional harmonic partials. In a separate condition, subjects were aske...

To examine the effect of gender on the volume and pattern of brain activation during the viewing of alternating sets of faces depicting happy or sad expressions, 24 volunteers, 12 men and 12 women, participated in this functional magnetic resonance imaging study. The experimental stimuli were 12 photographs of Japanese adults selected from Matsumoto and Ekman’s Pictures of Facial Affect. Four o...

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of laser acupuncture on cerebral activation. Using functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) cortical activations during laser acupuncture at the left foot (Bladder 67) and dummy acupuncture, were compared employing a block design in ten healthy male volunteers. All experiments were done on a 1.5 Tesla magnetic resonance scanner equipped with a circu...

We compared the effects of sodium nitroprusside (SNP), and of 8-bromo guanosine 3′,5′-cyclic monophosphate (8-BrcGMP), on the 4-aminopyridine (4-AP)-evoked Ca + -dependent release of glutamate from hippocampal nerve terminals and further investigated the role of protein kinase G (PKG) in this mechanism. SNP and 8-BrcGMP dose-dependently inhibited glutamate release, however SNP concentrations ([...