BACKGROUND There is now ample evidence that schizophrenia is due to an interaction between genetic and (early) environmental factors which disturbs normal development of the central nervous system and ultimately leads to the development of clinical symptoms. Recently, we showed that a single 24-hour period of maternal deprivation of rat pups at postnatal day 9 leads to a disturbance in prepulse...

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The cerebellum in transgenic mice expressing pseudorabies virus immediate-early protein IE180 (TgIE96) was substantially diminished in size, and its histoarchitecture was severely disorganized, resulting in severe ataxia. TgIE96 mice can therefore be used as an experimental model to study the involvement of cerebellar circuits in different learning tasks. The performance of three-month-old TgIE...

Measures of acoustic startle such as prepulse inhibition (PPI) and startle latency have been found to be impaired in schizophrenia, and are commonly thought to be related to cognitive deficits in this disease. However, findings about the relationship between startle variables and cognitive performance have been equivocal. In this study, we examined correlations between startle measures (baselin...

Startle eyeblink modification was measured during a degraded stimulus continuous performance test following both smoking and overnight abstinence among student smokers to measure the effects of smoking on both early and late attentional processes. A group of nonsmokers was tested twice without nicotine manipulation. A startling noise was presented either 240 or 1200 ms following target and nont...

Dopaminergic mechanisms have been theorized to influence hypnotizability and sensorimotor gating. In this study, the authors investigated an association between sensorimotor gating, as measured by prepulse inhibition (PPI), and hypnotizability, as assessed by the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale, Form C (SHSS:C). They found an inverse correlation between the SSHS:C and PPI. This finding, ...

Prepulse inhibition (PPI) is an acoustic startle paradigm that has been used as an operational measure of sensorimotor gating. Many patients with schizophrenia have impaired PPI, and several lines of evidence suggest that PPI may represent a heritable endophenotype in this disease. We examined startle magnitude and latencies in 40 schizophrenia patients, 58 first-degree relatives of these patie...

Gap-induced prepulse inhibition of acoustic startle (GPIAS) has been used in rats and mice to study the problem of tinnitus. The current study demonstrates that similar methods can be used to study the temporal development of tinnitus over time in middle-aged mice. Six-month-old mice on a mixed C57Bl6 × 129 background were anesthetized with isoflurane and exposed to unilateral noise (n = 15), o...

The effects of selective and nonselective attentional processes on prepulse inhibition (PPI) of the acoustic startle response were examined by assessing PPI under intermixed task and no-task conditions. Results for the task condition revealed that greater PPI was produced by an attended than an ignored prepulse at a lead interval of 120 ms (marginally significant in the early trial block and si...