Mecamylamine prevents the enhancement of retention induced by lysine vasopressin in mice

Lysine vasopressin (0.03 microgram/kg, sc) enhanced retention of a one-trial, step-through inhibitory avoidance task when injected into male Swiss mice immediately post-training, as indicated by retention performance 48 h later. A low dose of the vasopressin antagonist, AAVP (0.01 microgram/kg, sc), did not significantly affect retention, whereas a higher dose (0.03 microgram/kg, sc) impaired retention. Neither lysine vasopressin nor AAVP modified latencies to step-through of mice that had not received a footshock during training. The simultaneous injection of AAVP (0.01 microgram/kg, sc) prevented the enhancement of retention induced by lysine vasopressin. The influence of lysine vasopressin on retention was antagonized by the simultaneous administration of mecamylamine (5 mg/kg, sc) but not by hexamethonium (5 mg/kg, sc), atropine (0.5 mg/kg, sc), or methylatropine (0.5 mg/kg, sc). A modulatory role of vasopressin on the activity of central cholinergic nicotinic mechanisms which participate in memory formation is suggested.     

The effects of self-management of school attendance by problem adolescents.

Self-management of attendance by problem adolescents was shown to improve attendance in an alternative school. The use of biased measures to investigate change is discussed as well as the utility of frequent measures. The effect of improved attendance on academics is presented and future research in this area is suggested.     

Hemispheric equality in reaction times to emotional and non-emotional nouns

Twenty presentations of 6 emotional and 6 non-emotional words in mixed random orders were monaurally presented to the right or left ear. Using the left hand, subjects pushed one of two response buttons indicating type of word heard. Performance improved in later trials and emotional words were recognized more quickly regardless of ear presentation. No differences were associated with the separate ear presentations. Equivalent hemispheric performance indicates equal processing sensitivity to four-letter emotional and non-emotional nouns and substantiates the right hemisphere's verbal processing capability for simple nouns.     

Training the disturbed enuretic

Twenty-two disturbed enuretic children were treated for their bedwetting with training procedures. Eighteen of 22 (81.8%) reached the initial success criterion in an average of 57.5 days. Ten of the 18 (55.6%) met the retraining criteria of relapse, and 9 of the relapses were successfully retrained, while I stopped wetting spontaneously. As compared to non-relapsed children, relapsed children had a significantly higher number of initial symptoms checked. The results indicate that a training approach is effective for the treatment of enuresis in disturbed children, but the more disturbed have a greater likelihood of relapse.     

Increased susceptibility of aphasics to a distractor task in the recall of verbal commands

The ability of 15 control, 15 nonaphasic brain-damaged, and 15 aphasic patients to carry out three-word commands on the Token Test was studied under three conditions: no delay, 20-sec unfilled delay, and 20-sec delay filled with a counting task. Only aphasics with mild to moderate comprehension deficit participated in the experiment and their scores in the no-delay condition were not inferior to those of the other two groups. The 20-sec unfilled delay did not bring about a decrement of the performance in any group, while all of them were impaired with 20-sec filled delay. The rate of forgetting was, however, significantly greater in aphasics than in patients without language disorders, even when the scores of the no-delay condition were introduced as covariates in the analysis of the filled-delay condition. The same result was obtained when, in a second experiment, 4 sec elapsed between the end of the command and the beginning of the counting activity. The increased susceptibility of aphasics to the disruptive effect of the distractor task is viewed as following a failure in organizing verbal information, a deficit that may contribute to lowering their comprehension level.     

An automated device for measuring locomotor activity in rats

An automated plus maze is described that is capable of recording the locomotor activity of 12 rats simultaneously. The system is built around an 8008 microprocessor chip from INTEL. The base of the system is formed by 12 plus mazes in which the activity of the animals under test can be monitored.     

Matching in concurrent variable-interval avoidance schedules

After pretraining with multiple variable-interval avoidance schedules, two rats were exposed to a series of concurrent variable-interval avoidance schedules. Responses on two levers cancelled delivery of electric shocks arranged according to two independent variable-interval schedules. The ratio of responses and time spent on the two levers approximately matched the ratio of shocks avoided on each. Matching to the number of shocks received was not obtained. Concurrent variable-interval avoidance can therefore be added to the group of positive and negative reinforcement schedules that can be expressed in the quantitative framework of the matching law.     

Test expectancy and encoding of pictures and words

Undergraduates were shown pictures or corresponding labels and then were tested for recognition either in the same mode or in a cross-over mode. Significantly more items were recognized in the picture-picture condition than in the picture-word and word-picture conditions. Informing subjects in advance of the change in modality significantly improved picture-word performance.     

The influence of decision task and deliberation style on the verdict of the juries

The influence of decision task and deliberation style on the verdict of the juries. In the Kameda's Deliberation Style Model the emission of verdicts of responsibility when the deliberation style of the juries (elemental/compound) and the type of decision task (disjunctive/conjunctive) are jointly manipulated, is favoured in certain conditions. Given the consequences that these approaches could have in real judicial processes, this model is analyzed using a manslaughter crime under the Spanish judicial context conditions (nine members juries and seven or five members majorities emitting a verdict of guilty or not guilty, respectively). The obtained results indicated a better operation of the model when a conjunctive decision task was demanded.