AIM To quantify Toxoplasma gondii DNA using a specially constructed artificial template as competitor in a nested polymerase chain reaction (PCR). METHODS The diagnostic assay was a nested PCR employing four primers that amplify part of the single copy gene for the P30 major surface antigen in T gondii. An artificial competitor containing the four primer binding sites was made first by creati...

The Competitor Rule Suppression (CRS) effect is the performance impairment observed in task switching when the currently relevant task rule is the same rule that had generated a response conflict in the preceding trial. This effect could reflect (a) episodic tagging, in which a competitor rule is retrieved with relative difficulty in subsequent trials or (b) residual active inhibition of the co...

I investigated mechanisms of parasitoid coexistence in a spatially structured host–multiparasitoid community (harlequin bugs [Murgantia histrionica] and two specialist parasitoids [Trissolcus murgantiae and Ooencyrtus johnsonii ]). I tested both local and metapopulation hypotheses. The local hypothesis, intraguild predation, predicts coexistence if the inferior larval competitor is superior at ...

Two German eye-tracking experiments tested whether top-down expectations interact with acoustically-driven word-recognition processes. Competitor objects with two synonymous names were paired with target objects whose names shared word onsets with either the dominant or the non-dominant name of the competitor. Non-dominant names of competitor objects were either introduced before the test sessi...