D-serine and D-aspartate are important regulators of mammalian physiology. D-aspartate is found in nervous and endocrine tissue, specifically in hypothalamic supraoptic and paraventricular nuclei, pituitary, and adrenal medullary cells. Endogenous D-aspartate is selectively degraded by D-aspartate oxidase. We previously reported that adult male mice lacking the gene for D-aspartate oxidase (Ddo...

d-amino acid oxidase (DAO, DAAO) is an enzyme that degrades d-serine, the primary endogenous co-agonist of the synaptic N-methyl-d-aspartate receptor. Convergent evidence implicates DAO in the pathophysiology and potential treatment of schizophrenia. To better understand the functional role of DAO, we characterized the behaviour of the first genetically engineered Dao knockout (Dao(-/-) ) mouse...

Sleep restriction (SR) impairs short term memory (STM) that might be related to different processes. Neuropeptide S (NPS), an endogenous neuropeptide that improves short term memory, activates arousal and decreases anxiety is likely to counteract the SR-induced impairment of STM. The objective of the present study was to find common cerebral pathways in sleep restriction and NPS action in order...

For a hands-free speech interface, it is important to detect commands in spontaneous utterances. To discriminate commands from human-human conversations by acoustic features, it is efficient to consider the head and the tail of an utterance. The different characteristics of system requests and spontaneous utterances appear on these parts of an utterance. Experiment shows that by separating the ...

Between 15 and 18 days of age, rat pups develop an alternation strategy in a spatial non-match-to-sample task. Adapting the rat pups to the apparatus by housing them in it overnight, the difference in behavioral patterns can readily be observed in a single laboratory session. The opportunity of the pups to "nipple attach" to an anesthetized dam serves as the reinforcer. Discussion questions are...

The lexically accented words in Goshogawara Japanese can be realized in either of the two surface pitch patterns. The pitch pattern is said to alternate regularly, depending on the phrasing structure of an utterance. The organization of prosodic phrasing of this dialect, however, has been little investigated and thus it remains unclear what prosodic phrase functions as the domain for the altern...

This paper proposes an LMT analysis for valence alternations in German of the form NP V NP [P NP ] NP V NP [P NP ], where the indices denote referential identity. These alternations involve direct internal arguments (i.e., objects) and indirect prepositional complements, and characterize among others the behaviour of verbal predicates which participate in the so-called Locative Alternation phen...