Another look at category effects on colour perception and their left hemispheric lateralisation: no evidence from a colour identification task

The present study aimed to replicate category effects on colour perception and their lateralisation to the left cerebral hemisphere (LH). Previous evidence for lateralisation of colour category effects has been obtained with tasks where a differently coloured target was searched within a display and participants reported the lateral location of the target. However, a left/right spatial judgment may yield LH-laterality effects per se. Thus, we employed an identification task that does not require a spatial judgment and used the same colour set that previously revealed LH-lateralised category effects. The identification task was better performed with between-category colours than with within-category task both in terms of accuracy and latency, but such category effects were bilateral or RH-lateralised, and no evidence was found for LH-laterality effects. The accuracy scores, moreover, indicated that the category effects derived from low sensitivities for within-blue colours and did not reflect the effects of categorical structures on colour perception. Furthermore, the classic "category effects" were observed in participants\u27 response biases, instead of sensitivities. The present results argue against both the LH-lateralised category effects on colour perception and the existence of colour category effects per se

The brief history of laryngoscope: from lyric theater to operating theater

Tracheal intubation is one of the most widely used manoeuvres and laryngoscope is one of the most used devices in medicine. The first mentioned laryngoscopy is attributed to the Roman physician Aulus Cornelius Celsus. In the following centuries the contributions of Andreas van Wesel, known also with his Italian name Vesalio, of the English scientists Robert Hooke and Benjamin Guy Babington and the efforts of the German-Italian physician Philipp Bozzini and, particularly, of the Spanish singing teacher Manuel Patricio Rodríguez García were important. The ancestor of the laryngoscope used today was built by Alfred Kirstein, while the straight blades were designed by Robert Arden Miller and the curve blades by Robert Reynold Macintosh, respectively in 1941 in United States and in 1943 in United Kingdom. Only with Henry Harrington Janeway the laryngoscope lost its diagnostic function and became the essential device for tracheal intubation. Nowadays, the “digital revolution” of 21th century has brought newer technology to the science of tracheal intubation, and the GlideScope, a laryngoscope incorporating a video camera connected to a high resolution LCD monitor designed by the surgeon John Allen Pacey, is one of the most recent devices