BACKGROUND Curriculum planners and medical teachers attempt to enhance medical students' empathy and patient-centeredness. Despite educational efforts, there is stability in medical students' empathy and patient-centered medicine during the preclinical stage and a decline in both of them throughout the clinical years. Student-tutor relationship plays a key role in students' learning. This study...

Core psychopathological symptoms in patients with schizophrenia suggest that their sense of self may be disturbed. A disturbance in predictive motor mechanisms may be the cause of such symptoms. Ten patients with schizophrenia and ten healthy right-handed control subjects opened and closed their hand. This movement was filmed with an MRI compatible video camera and projected online onto a monit...

To test for retrospective effects of sucrose ingestion in the anticipatory contrast procedure, 4 experiments examined intake of an initial 0.15% saccharin solution as a function of the unsignaled interspersing of days in which the 2nd solution was 32% sucrose or 0.15% saccharin. In Experiment 1, rats that received alternating saccharin-saccharin days and saccharin-sucrose days drank less saccha...

It has been suggested that certain theoretically important anomalous results in the area of verbal short-term memory could be attributable to differences in strategy. However there are relatively few studies that investigate strategy directly. We describe four experiments, each involving the immediate serial recall of word sequences under baseline control conditions, or preceded by instruction ...

Methods for choosing an appropriate sample size in animal experiments have received much attention in the statistical and biological literature. Due to ethical constraints the number of animals used is always reduced where possible. However, as the number of animals decreases so the risk of obtaining inconclusive results increases. By using a more efficient experimental design we can, for a giv...

In two eye-tracking experiments, the effects of salience in accent training and speech accentedness on spoken-word recognition were investigated. Salience was expected to increase a stimulus' prominence and therefore promote learning. A training-test paradigm was used on native German participants utilizing an artificial German accent. Salience was elicited by two different criteria: production...