Abstract Background Asthma education, a key component of long-term asthma management, is challenging in resource-limited settings with shortages clinical staff. Task-shifting educational roles to lay (non-clinical) staff potential solution. We conducted randomised controlled trial an enhanced care intervention for children Malawi, which included reallocation education tasks lay-educators. In th...

Our ability to flexibly shift between tasks or task sets declines in older age. As this decline may have adverse effects on everyday life of elderly people, it is of interest to study whether set shifting ability can be trained, and if training effects generalize to other cognitive tasks. Here, we report a randomized controlled trial where healthy older adults trained set shifting with three di...

Impairments of set shifting have been associated with damage to both the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and to the basal ganglia. The purpose of these experiments was to determine whether damage to the PFC was associated with shifting impairments per se or whether any switching deficits could be attributed to a reduction of working memory capacity. In contrast, shifting impairments were expected for P...

In recognition memory experiments participants must discriminate between old and new items, a judgment influenced by response bias. Research has shown substantial individual differences in the extent to which people will strategically adjust their response bias to diagnostic cues such as the prior probability of an old item. Despite this significant between subject variability, shifts in bias h...

9 Chapter 1 General Introduction 10 Early Behavioural Tasks: Abstraction, Concepts and Sorting 14 Early Behavioural Tasks: Discriminations, Reversals and Shifts 18 Issues of Terminology 26 The Contemporary Primate Attentional Set-Shifting Task 29 Attentional Set-Shifting In Rats 31 The Psychopharmacologist’s Tool 34 Chapter 2 General Methods 36