CONTEXT Few studies have shown that diagnostic palpation is reliable. No studies have shown that the reliability of diagnostic palpatory skills can be maintained and improved over time. OBJECTIVE To investigate whether the reliability of selected palpatory tests used to identify lumbar somatic dysfunction was maintained during a 4-month period as part of a clinical observational study. METH...

High-variability phonetic training is effective in the acquisition of foreign language sounds. Previous studies have largely focused on small sets of contrasts, and have not controlled for the quantity of prior or simultaneous exposure to new sounds. The current study examined the effectiveness of phonetic training in full-inventory foreign language consonant acquisition by listeners with no pr...

Nicotine functions as a negative feature in a Pavlovian discriminated goal-tracking task. Whether withholding of responding to the conditional stimulus (CS) reflects nicotine functioning as a conditioned inhibitor is unknown. Accordingly, the present research sought to determine whether nicotine trained as a negative feature passed the retardation-of-acquisition and summation tests, thus charac...

To examine experience-dependent plasticity of striatal neurons during habit learning in awake, freely moving animals, single neurons in the dorsolateral striatum (54 neurons related specifically to vertical head movement and 14 unresponsive neurons, i.e. not related to any body movement) were recorded and tracked off-line to assess changes in firing rate over sessions as performance of instrume...

the main aim of the present study was to examine the effect of field-independent and field-dependent cognitive styles on learning an aiming task in closed and open environments based on fuzzy and classic logics. 60 male students with an age range of 16-17 were assigned to four groups (each group 15 subjects): field-independent with classic approach, field-dependent with classic approach, field-...

The effectiveness of a fixed-ratio (FR) escalation procedure, developed by Pinkston and Branch (2004) and based on interresponse times (IRTs), was assessed during lever-press acquisition. Forty-nine experimentally naïve adult male Long Evans rats were deprived of food for 24 hr prior to an extended acquisition session. Before the start of the session, three food pellets were placed in the magaz...

2008 iv Delay discounting—a behavioral measure of impulsivity defined as a tendency to prefer a small, immediate reward over a larger reward delayed in time—has been extensively linked with tobacco smoking. However, the causal direction of this relationship remains unclear. One possibility is that delay discounting may be a marker for an underlying vulnerability to nicotine reinforcement—a poss...