There is a controversy about the mechanisms involved in the interspecific communicative behaviour in domestic dogs. The main question is whether this behaviour is a result of instrumental learning or higher cognitive skills are required. The present investigations were undertaken to study the effect of learning processes upon the gaze towards the human's face as a communicative response. To suc...

BACKGROUND phonological disorders. AIM to verify the occurrence of vocalic lengthening, through acoustic analysis, in a group of 16 children (8 boys and 8 girls) with evolutive phonological disorders (EPD), who did not present in their speech /R/ and /S/ medial codas; to verify the occurrence percentage of lengthening and omission strategies in the two types of coda. METHOD recordings of 16...

Cognitive impairment (CI), often examined with neuropsychological tests such as the Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test (PASAT), affects approximately 65% of multiple sclerosis (MS) patients. The P3b event-related potential (ERP), evoked when an infrequent target stimulus is presented, indexes cognitive function and is typically compared across subjects' scalp electroencephalography (EEG) data....

BACKGROUND Cognitive impairment in multiple sclerosis (MS) often involves attentional deficits. The Stroop colour word test, a measure of attention, lacks current normative data for an english-speaking North american MS population. Further some authors suggest the Stroop actually measures processing speed. OBJECTIVE To generate normative data for the Stroop colour word test that can be used f...

BACKGROUND Multiple sclerosis (MS) is characterized by demyelinating and degenerative processes within the central nervous system. Unlike conventional MRI,new advanced imaging techniques improve pathological specificity and better highlight the relationship between anatomical damage and clinical impairment. OBJECTIVE To investigate the relationship between clinical disability and both grey (G...

Objectives: (i) To expose ‘normal sleepers’ to a thirty two hour sleep deprivation protocol and evaluate the impact of this deprivation on a complex performance task i.e. The Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test (PASAT), (ii) To compare these sleep deprivation performance findings with historical data on the impact of sleepiness secondary to narcolepsy on PASAT performance measures, (iii) To inv...

Objectives: (i) To expose ‘normal sleepers’ to a 32-h sleep deprivation protocol and evaluate the impact of this deprivation on a complex performance task i.e. the paced auditory serial addition test (PASAT). (ii) To compare these sleep deprivation performance findings with historical data on the impact of sleepiness secondary to narcolepsy on PASAT performance measures. (iii) To investigate th...

OBJECTIVE There is increasing evidence that altered glutamate (Glu) homeostasis is involved in the pathophysiology of multiple sclerosis (MS). The aim of this study was to evaluate the in vivo effects of excess brain Glu on neuroaxonal integrity measured by N-acetylaspartate (NAA), brain volume, and clinical outcomes in a large, prospectively followed cohort of MS subjects. METHODS We used mu...

Rumination is a cognitive-affective thinking style that plays a key role in the onset and maintenance of depression. Recently, it was shown that clinically depressed patients who received a neurocognitive training - involving two weeks of repetitive cognitive control exercises that necessitate prefrontal engagement - are more able to control over ruminative negative thoughts than patients who o...