Gender differences in unilateral spatial neglect within 24 hours of ischemic stroke

Hemispatial neglect is a common and disabling consequence of stroke. Previous reports examining the relationship between gender and the incidence of unilateral spatial neglect (USN) have included either a large numbers of patients with few neglect tests or small numbers of patients with multiple tests. To determine if USN was more common and/or severe in men or women, we examined a large group of patients (312 right-handed) within 24 hours of acute right hemisphere ischemic stroke. Multiple spatial neglect tasks were used to increase the sensitivity of neglect detection. No differences based upon gender were observed for the prevalence, severity, or a combined task measure of USN.     

Attention to low- and high-spatial frequencies in categorizing facial identities, emotions and gender in children with autism

This study was aimed at investigating face categorization strategies in children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD). Performance of 17 children with ASD was compared to that of 17 control children in a face-matching task, including hybrid faces (composed of two overlapping faces of different spatial bandwidths) and either low- or high-pass filtered faces. Participants were asked to match faces on the basis of identity, emotion or gender. Results revealed that children with ASD used the same strategies as controls when matching faces by gender. By contrast, in the identity and the emotion conditions, children with ASD showed a high-pass bias (i.e., preference for local information), contrary to controls. Consistent with previous studies on autism, these findings suggest that children with ASD do use atypical (local-oriented) strategies to process faces.     

傣医学因果联系观初探

傣医学的哲学基础多源于佛教哲学,其因果联系观就是基于佛教的缘起论观点建立起来的。傣医将此观点广泛用于对人体生命的认识,用以解释生命的产生,解释生理、病理,用于病因学及指导诊断、用药,还用于指导养生,是傣医学重要组成部分。     

Emergence of an egocentric cue guiding and allocentric inferring strategy that mirrors hippocampal brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) expression in the Morris water maze

From insects to humans, successful navigation relies on retained representations of spatial relations. These representations are thought to depend on the hippocampal formation, particularly those that are independent of the navigator (allocentric representations). The Morris water maze is a simple and popular task often used to assess spatial navigation. But how animals navigate toward and retain information regarding the location of the goal in this task remains unclear. We provide a comprehensive account of how the water maze is accomplished behaviourally. Our findings suggest that animals solve the task using distal cues via an initial view-matching strategy that is supported by egocentric guidance. Through increased training, however, an emergence of an egocentric-guiding strategy combined with the animal’s greater ability to infer the hidden platform’s location (via allocentric extrapolation) emerges. We also demonstrate that behavioural changes, towards a more allocentric strategy, are reflected in increases in hippocampal brain-derived neurotrophic factor.     

Sex differences in object location memory and spatial navigation in Long-Evans rats

In both humans and rodents, males typically excel on a number of tasks requiring spatial ability. However, human females exhibit advantages in memory for the spatial location of objects. This study investigated whether rats would exhibit similar sex differences on a task of object location memory (OLM) and on the watermaze (WM). We predicted that females should outperform males on the OLM task and that males should outperform females on the WM. To control for possible effects of housing environment, rats were housed in either complex environments or in standard shoebox housing. Eighty Long-Evans rats (40 males and 40 females) were housed in either complex (Complex rats) or standard shoebox housing (Control rats). Results indicated that males had superior performance on the WM, whereas females outperformed males on the OLM task, regardless of housing environment. As these sex differences cannot be easily attributed to differences in cognitive style related to linguistic processing of environmental features or to selection pressures related to the hunting gathering evolutionary prehistory of humans, these data suggest that sex differences in spatial ability may be related to traits selected for by polygynous mating strategies.     

Spatial reorientation in large and small enclosures: comparative and developmental perspectives

Several vertebrate species, including humans, following passive spatial disorientation appear to be able to reorient themselves by making use of the geometric shape of the environment (i.e., metric properties of surfaces and directional sense). In some circumstances, reliance on such purely geometric information can overcome the use of local featural cues (landmarks). The relative use of geometric and non-geometric information seems to depend upon, among other factors, the size of the experimental space. Evidence in non-human animals and in human infants for primacy in encoding either geometric or landmark information depending on the size of the environment is reviewed, together with possible theoretical accounts of this phenomenon.     

仿真场景下类别空间关系判断中的注意分配

研究采用“提示-目标”的范式,并结合单、双任务的方法探讨仿真场景下类别空间关系判断中的空间注意分配。结果发现：提示影响类别空间关系判断效率,不同类型提示对类别空间关系判断的影响不同;类别空间关系判断还受到任务类型和判断类型的影响。由此得出以下结论：提示有助于注意资源的集中,提示越有效注意资源分配效率越高;注意分配受到第二任务要求的影响;决定注意分配策略的认知判断过程可能是持续存在的     

Location representation in enclosed spaces: What types of information afford young children an advantage?

It has been suggested that young children can only reorient, locating a target object, when the geometry of an enclosed space provides distinctive shape information [e.g., Hermer, L., & Spelke, E. (1994). A geometric process for spatial reorientation in young children. Nature, 370, 57-59]. Recently, however, young children were shown to specify location in a square-shaped space, where geometry is uninformative, so long as scale-like information was available on the walls of the space [Huttenlocher, J., & Lourenco, S. F. (2007a). Coding location in enclosed spaces: Is geometry the principle? Developmental Science, 10, 741-746]. Here we build on this work by examining more closely what types of cues afford 18- to 24-month-olds an advantage in locating a target object following disorientation. Their performance was assessed when linear scale-like information was presented either in isolation or in composite form. It was found that, even in isolation, young children searched at the appropriate locations, with added benefit when presented as a composite. We suggest that linear scale-like dimensions, especially when available in composite form, play a critical role in supporting location representation in young children.     

Weakly higher order cylindric algebras and finite axiomatization of the representables

We show that the variety of n-dimensional weakly higher order cylindric algebras, introduced in Németi [9], [8], is finitely axiomatizable when n > 2. Our result implies that in certain non-well-founded set theories the finitization problem of algebraic logic admits a positive solution; and it shows that this variety is a good candidate for being the cylindric algebra theoretic counterpart of Tarski’s quasi-projective relation algebras. Supported by the Hungarian National Foundation for Scientific Research grant T73601.