Domain general learning: Infants use social and non-social cues when learning object statistics.

Previous research has shown that infants can learn from social cues. But is a social cue more effective at directing learning than a non-social cue? This study investigated whether 9-month-old infants (N = 55) could learn a visual statistical regularity in the presence of a distracting visual sequence when attention was directed by either a social cue (a person) or a non-social cue (a rectangle). The results show that both social and non-social cues can guide infants' attention to a visual shape sequence (and away from a distracting sequence). The social cue more effectively directed attention than the non-social cue during the familiarization phase, but the social cue did not result in significantly stronger learning than the non-social cue. The findings suggest that domain general attention mechanisms allow for the comparable learning seen in both conditions

Causes of brain dysfunction in acute coma: a cohort study of 1027 patients in the emergency department

BACKGROUND: Coma of unknown etiology (CUE) is a major challenge in emergency medicine. CUE is caused by a wide variety of pathologies that require immediate and targeted treatment. However, there is little empirical data guiding rational and efficient management of CUE. We present a detailed investigation on the causes of CUE in patients presenting to the ED of a university hospital. METHODS: One thousand twenty-seven consecutive ED patients with CUE were enrolled. Applying a retrospective observational study design, we analyzed all clinical, laboratory and imaging findings resulting from a standardized emergency work-up of each patient. Following a predefined protocol, we identified main and accessory coma-explaining pathologies and related these with (i.a.) GCS and in-hospital mortality. RESULTS: On admission, 854 of the 1027 patients presented with persistent CUE. Their main diagnoses were classified into acute primary brain lesions (39%), primary brain pathologies without acute lesions (25%) and pathologies that affected the brain secondarily (36%). In-hospital mortality associated with persistent CUE amounted to 25%. 33% of patients with persistent CUE presented with more than one coma-explaining pathology. In 173 of the 1027 patients, CUE had already resolved on admission. However, these patients showed a spectrum of main diagnoses similar to persistent CUE and a significant in-hospital mortality of 5%. CONCLUSION: The data from our cohort show that the spectrum of conditions underlying CUE is broad and may include a surprisingly high number of coincidences of multiple coma-explaining pathologies. This finding has not been reported so far. Thus, significant pathologies may be masked by initial findings and only appear at the end of the diagnostic work-up. Furthermore, even transient CUE showed a significant mortality, thus rendering GCS cutoffs for selection of high- and low-risk patients questionable. Taken together, our data advocate for a standardized diagnostic work-up that should be triggered by the emergency symptom CUE and not by any suspected diagnosis. This standardized routine should always be completed - even when initial coma-explaining diagnoses may seem evident

The Relationship Between Motor Planning and Freezing of Gait in Parkinson’s Disease

Objective: To examine how a cued change in motor plan influences Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients with freezing of gait (FOG) (PD FOG; n=10), compared with those without FOG (PD non-FOG; n=10) and healthy controls (n=10). Methods: Participants walked through a doorway in three experimental conditions: no cue; cue before gait initiation; and cue after gait initiation. The light cue was presented at the end of the pathway and signified that individuals must walk to the cue, turn around and return to starting position. Results: Step-to-step variability (a known precursor to FOG) revealed a significant main effect of group (F2,27=32.83, p\u3c0.001), where PD FOG walked with greater step length variability than PD non-FOG and the control group. A significant interaction (F4,54=3.035, p=0.025) demonstrated that only the PD FOG group was most variable when the cue was present before gait initiation. Conclusion: This study concludes that motor planning deficits affect gait, specifically in individuals who experience FOG. This may have important implications for the design of therapeutic interventions in PD FOG

Olanzapine Attenuates Cue-elicited Craving for Tobacco

Rationale: Recent biological conceptualizations of craving and addiction have implicated mesolimbic dopamine activity as a central feature of the process of addiction. Imaging, and pharmacological studies have supported a role for dopaminergic structures in cue-elicited craving for tobacco. Objective: If mesolimbic dopamine activity is associated with cue-elicited craving for tobacco, a dopamine antagonist should attenuate cueelicited craving for tobacco. Thus, the aim of the present study was to determine whether an atypical antipsychotic (olanzapine, 5 mg) decreased cue-elicited craving for tobacco. Method: Participants were randomly assigned to 5 days of pretreatment with olanzapine (5 mg; n=31) or were randomly assigned to 5 days of a matching placebo (n=28). Approximately 8 h after the last dose, participants were exposed to a control cue (pencil) followed by exposure to smoking cues. Participants subsequently smoked either nicotine cigarettes or de-nicotinized cigarettes. Results: Olanzapine attenuated cue-elicited craving for tobacco but did not moderate the subjective effects of smoking. Discussion: This study represents one of the first investigations of the effect of atypical antipsychotics on cue-elicited craving for tobacco. The results suggest that medications with similar profiles may reduce cue-elicited craving, which in turn, may partially explain recent observations that atypical antipsychotics may reduce substance use

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Cucurbitacin E inhibits the Yes‑associated protein signaling pathway and suppresses brain metastasis of human non‑small cell lung cancer in a murine model.

Human non‑small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is associated with an extremely poor prognosis especially for the 40% of patients who develop brain metastasis, and few treatment strategies exist. Cucurbitacin E (CuE), an oxygenated tetracyclic triterpenoid isolated from plants particularly of the family Cucurbitaceae, has shown anti‑tumorigenic properties in several types of cancer, yet the mechanism remains unclear. Yes‑associated protein (YAP), a main mediator of the Hippo signaling pathway, promotes tumorigenesis, drug resistance and metastasis in human NSCLC. The present study was designed to ascertain whether CuE inhibits YAP and its downstream gene expression in the human NSCLC cell lines H2030‑BrM3 (K‑rasG12C mutation) and PC9‑BrM3 (EGFRΔexon19 mutation), which have high potential for brain metastasis. The efficacy of CuE in suppressing brain metastasis of H2030‑BrM3 cells in a murine model was also investigated. It was found that after CuE treatment in H2030‑BrM3 and PC9‑BrM3 cells, YAP protein expression was decreased, and YAP signaling GTIIC reporter activity and expression of the downstream genes CTGF and CYR61 were significantly (P<0.01) decreased. CuE treatment also reduced the migration and invasion abilities of the H2030‑BrM3 and PC9‑BrM3 cells. Finally, our in vivo study showed that CuE treatment (0.2 mg/kg) suppressed H2030‑BrM3 cell brain metastasis and that mice treated with CuE survived longer than the control mice treated with 10% DMSO (P=0.02). The present study is the first to demonstrate that CuE treatment inhibits YAP and the signaling downstream gene expression in human NSCLC in vitro, and suppresses brain metastasis of NSCLC in a murine model. More studies to verify the promising efficacy of CuE in inhibiting brain metastasis of NSCLC and various other cancers may be warranted

A configural dominant account of contextual cueing : configural cues are stronger than colour cues

Previous work has shown that reaction times to find a target in displays that have been repeated are faster than those for displays that have never been seen before. This learning effect, termed “contextual cueing” (CC), has been shown using contexts such as the configuration of the distractors in the display and the background colour. However, it is not clear how these two contexts interact to facilitate search. We investigated this here by comparing the strengths of these two cues when they appeared together. In Experiment 1, participants searched for a target that was cued by both colour and distractor configural cues, compared with when the target was only predicted by configural information. The results showed that the addition of a colour cue did not increase contextual cueing. In Experiment 2, participants searched for a target that was cued by both colour and distractor configuration compared with when the target was only cued by colour. The results showed that adding a predictive configural cue led to a stronger CC benefit. Experiments 3 and 4 tested the disruptive effects of removing either a learned colour cue or a learned configural cue and whether there was cue competition when colour and configural cues were presented together. Removing the configural cue was more disruptive to CC than removing colour, and configural learning was shown to overshadow the learning of colour cues. The data support a configural dominant account of CC, where configural cues act as the stronger cue in comparison to colour when they are presented together

A Comparison of the Ovulation Method With the CUE Ovulation Predictor in Determining the Fertile Period

The purpose of this study was to compare the CUE Ovulation Predictor with the ovulation method in determining the fertile period. Eleven regularly ovulating women measured their salivary and vaginal electrical resistance (ER) with the CUE, observed their cervical-vaginal mucus, and measured their urine for a luteinizing hormone (LH) surge on a daily basis. Data from 21 menstrual cycles showed no statistical difference (T= 0.33, p= 0.63) between the CUE fertile period, which ranged from 5 to 10 days (mean = 6.7 days, SD = 1.6), and the fertile period of the ovulation method, which ranged from 4 to 9 days (mean = 6.5 days, SD = 2.0). The CUE has potential as an adjunctive device in the learning and use of natural family planning methods

Drug Predictive Cues Activate Aversion-Sensitive Striatal Neurons That Encode Drug Seeking

Drug-associated cues have profound effects on an addict’s emotional state and drug-seeking behavior. Although this influence must involve the motivational neural system that initiates and encodes the drug-seeking act, surprisingly little is known about the nature of such physiological events and their motivational consequences. Three experiments investigated the effect of a cocaine-predictive stimulus on dopamine signaling, neuronal activity, and reinstatement of cocaine seeking. In all experiments, rats were divided into two groups (paired and unpaired), and trained to self-administer cocaine in the presence of a tone that signaled the immediate availability of the drug. For rats in the paired group, self-administration sessions were preceded by a taste cue that signaled delayed drug availability. Assessments of hedonic responses indicated that this delay cue became aversive during training. Both the self-administration behavior and the immediate cue were subsequently extinguished in the absence of cocaine. After extinction of self-administration behavior, the presentation of the aversive delay cue reinstated drug seeking. In vivo electrophysiology and voltammetry recordings in the nucleus accumbens measured the neural responses to both the delay and immediate drug cues after extinction. Interestingly, the presentation of the delay cue simultaneously decreased dopamine signaling and increased excitatory encoding of the immediate cue. Most importantly, the delay cue selectively enhanced the baseline activity of neurons that would later encode drug seeking. Together these observations reveal how cocaine cues can modulate not only affective state, but also the neurochemical and downstream neurophysiological environment of striatal circuits in a manner that promotes drug seeking