Recent Saccadic Eye Movement Research Uncovers Patterns of Cognitive Dysfunction in Schizophrenia.

The frontal cortex and the subcortical areas of the brain play a major role in the control of thought and action. Eye movements are increasingly used in neuropsychological research to explore the executive and sensorimotor functions of such neural networks. This interface links the control of action, at the fundamental levels of neurophysiological and neurochemical processes, with the high-level cognitive operations that underlie visual orienting. Patients with schizophrenia have neurocognitive impairments that can be readily investigated with novel saccadic eye movement paradigms. Animal, human lesion, and neuroimaging studies have identified the cerebral centers that underlie saccadic eye movements. The areas of the prefrontal cortex include the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the frontal eye fields, the supplementary eye fields, and the anterior cingulate gyrus. Pathology of saccadic eye movements therefore provides information on the functional status of the underlying neural circuitry in brain disorders such as schizophrenia

Mathematical methods and models for radiation carcinogenesis studies

Research on radiation carcinogenesis requires a twofold approach. Studies of primary molecular lesions and subsequent cytogenetic changes are essential, but they cannot at present provide numerical estimates of the risk of small doses of ionizing radiations. Such estimates require extrapolations from dose, time, and age dependences of tumor rates observed in animal studies and epidemiological investigations, and they necessitate the use of statistical methods that correct for competing risks. A brief survey is given of the historical roots of such methods, of the basic concepts and quantities which are required, and of the maximum likelihood estimates which can be derived for right censored and double censored data. Non-parametric and parametric models for the analysis of tumor rates and their time and dose dependences are explained

Perception of checked vowels by early and late Dutch/English bilinguals

Wetensch. publicatieFaculteit der Geesteswetenschappe

“How Do We Put Him in the System?”: Client Construction at a Sport-Based Migrant Settlement Service in Melbourne, Australia

The empirical focus of this article is a sport-based settlement service targeting newly arrived migrants in Melbourne, Australia. This five-month study examines staff members’ everyday work routines with a focus on their participation in meetings and the production of documents. Embedded in the Australian immigration policy context, this article shows how staff members aim to empower clients while simultaneously falling back into stigmatising refugee/client identification through administrative practices. The results indicate that staffs’ everyday client constructions reinforce the othering and categorisation of ethnic minorities and support a reductionist deficit model of presenting clients. This may limit the opportunities for migrants to identify with and participate in wider Australian society and thus has the opposite effect of what governments and the sector aim to accomplish