Participants passively listened to recordings of single adjectives spoken in their own and another

person’s voice (alien) preceded by their own or another person’s (alien) face and made self/non self judgments about the source. The patients showed increased error rates comparing to controls, when listening to the distorted self spoken words, misidentifying their own speech as produced by others. Importantly, patients made significantly more errors across all the invalid cue conditions. This suggests not only the presence of pathological misattribution bias, but also an inadequate balance between top-down and bottom-up attentional www.selleckchem.com/products/LBH-589.html processes in the patients, which could be responsible for misattribution of the ambiguous sensory material. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“Delay eyeblink conditioning is established by paired presentations

of a conditioned stimulus (CS) such as a tone or light, and an unconditioned stimulus (US) that elicits the blink reflex. Conditioned stimulus information is projected from the basilar selleck compound pontine nuclei to the cerebellar interpositus nucleus and cortex. The cerebellar cortex, particularly the molecular layer, contains a high density of cannabinoid receptors (CB1R). The CB1Rs are located on the axon terminals of parallel fibers, stellate cells, and basket cells where they inhibit neurotransmitter release. The present study examined the effects of a CB1R agonist WIN55,212-2 and antagonist SR141716A on the acquisition of delay eyeblink conditioning in rats. Rats were given subcutaneous administration of 1, 2, or 3 mg/kg of WIN55,212-2

or 1, 3, or 5 mg/kg of SR141716A before each day of acquisition training (10 sessions). Dose-dependent impairments in acquisition were found for PAK5 WIN55,212-2 and SR141716A, with no effects on spontaneous or nonassociative blinking. However, the magnitude of impairment was greater for WIN55,212-2 than SR141716A. Dose-dependent impairments in conditioned blink response (CR) amplitude and timing were found with WIN55,212-2 but not with SR141716A. The findings support the hypothesis that CB1Rs in the cerebellar cortex play an important role in plasticity mechanisms underlying eyeblink conditioning.”
“To highlight relevant information in dialogues, both wh-question context and pitch accent in answers can be used, such that focused information gains more attention and is processed more elaborately. To evaluate the relative influence of context and pitch accent on the depth of semantic processing, we measured event-related potentials (ERPs) to auditorily presented wh-question-answer pairs. A semantically incongruent word in the answer occurred either in focus or in non-focus position as determined by the context, and this word was either accented or unaccented.

Semantic incongruency elicited different N400 effects in different conditions. The largest N400 effect was found when the question-marked focus was accented, while the other three conditions elicited smaller N400 effects.