Spatial working memory (SWM) is fundamental to cognition by caching behaviorally relevant cues on a timescale of seconds and by tapping into several executive processes including encoding, maintenance and retrieval of information for adaptive behavioral response. The striatum plays a critical role in gating WM representations, but the specific contribution of the striatal indirect pathway to WM...

Serotonin (5-HT) receptors of types 1A and 2A are strongly expressed in prefrontal cortex (PFC) neurons, an area associated with cognitive function. Hence, 5-HT could be effective in modulating prefrontal-dependent cognitive functions, such as spatial working memory (SWM). However, a direct association between 5-HT and SWM has proved elusive in psycho-pharmacological studies. Recently, a comput...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effect of Star Wars music (SWM) compared with endoscopist-selected popular music (PM) on quality outcomes in colonoscopy. DESIGN AND SETTING A single-centre, prospective, randomised controlled trial conducted in an endoscopy suite within a quaternary-centre gastroenterology unit, Melbourne, Australia. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES The primary outcome measures were procedur...

Objectives: Sensory neuropathy is the major cause of ulceration in diabetic patients. Periodical sensory examination is an appropriate method to detect neuropathy and decrease the risk of diabetic foot ulcer. Semmes–Weinstein Monofilaments (SWM) and tuning fork on/off test are widely used to assess pressure and vibration sensitivity. The present study evaluated the inter- and intra-rater reliab...

It has been proposed recently that a deficit in keeping track of spatial locations may contribute to the severity of unilateral neglect in some right hemisphere stroke patients. However, performance on traditional spatial working memory (SWM) tasks (e.g. Corsi blocks) might be confounded by failure to encode leftward locations, rather than a true deficit of maintaining locations in SWM. Here we...

Past research has emphasized the association between stress and the manifestation of psychotic symptoms in schizophrenia, yet relatively little is known about how environmental stressors affect cognitive processes in the illness. The present study sought to determine the effects of a loud noise stressor on a range of cognitive tasks, including spatial working memory (SWM), short-term visual mem...

OBJECTIVE Diabetic peripheral neuropathy (DPN) has been thought to be progressive and irreversible. Recently, symptomatic reversal of DPN was reported after treatments with a near-infrared medical device, the Anodyne Therapy System (ATS). However, the study was not controlled nor was the investigator blinded. We initiated this study to determine whether treatments with the ATS would decrease pa...

Left neglect following right hemisphere injury is a debilitating disorder that has proven extremely difficult to rehabilitate. Traditional models of neglect have focused on impaired spatial attention as the core deficit and as such, most rehabilitation methods have tried to improve attentional processes. However, many of these techniques (e.g., visual scanning training, caloric stimulation, nec...

swm is a policy-free, user configurable window manager client for the X Window System. Besides providing basic window manager functionality, swm introduces new features not found in existing window managers. First and foremost, swm has no default look-and-feel. Like the X Window system itself, swm does not dictate policy (look-and-feel); rather, it provides the mechanism for implementing window...

BACKGROUND Using a rat model we have found that the bioflavonoid silymarin (SY) ameliorates some of the negative consequences of in utero exposure to ethanol (EtOH). In the current study our aim was to determine if spatial working memory (SWM) was impaired in offspring whose mothers were maintained on a liquid diet containing EtOH during different gestational weeks. We also determined if SWM wa...