Comparative stability of canine and feline hemostatic proteins in freeze-thaw-cycled fresh frozen plasma.

Objective: To evaluate the stability of canine and feline hemostatic proteins in freeze-thaw-cycled (FTC) fresh frozen plasma (FFP).

Design: Prospective study.

Setting: Veterinary Teaching Hospital.

Fluid intelligence loss linked to restricted regions of damage within frontal and parietal cortex.

Tests of fluid intelligence predict success in a wide range of cognitive activities. Much uncertainty has surrounded brain lesions producing deficits in these tests, with standard group comparisons delivering no clear result. Based on findings from functional imaging, we propose that the uncertainty of lesion data may arise from the specificity and complexity of the relevant neural circuit.

Executive function and fluid intelligence after frontal lobe lesions.

Many tests of specific 'executive functions' show deficits after frontal lobe lesions. These deficits appear on a background of reduced fluid intelligence, best measured with tests of novel problem solving. For a range of specific executive tests, we ask how far frontal deficits can be explained by a general fluid intelligence loss.

Goal neglect and Spearman's g: competing parts of a complex task.

In goal neglect, a person ignores some task requirement though being able to describe it. Goal neglect is closely related to general intelligence or C. Spearman's (1904) g (J.

Within-modality and cross-modality attentional blinks in a simple discrimination task.

Following up on studies of the "attentional blink," we studied interference between successive target stimuli in visual and auditory modalities. In each experiment, stimuli were two tones and four dots, simultaneously presented for 1,800 msec. Targets were brief intensity changes in either a tone or a dot.

Frontal lobe involvement in spatial span: converging studies of normal and impaired function.

Although monkey lesion studies involving the prefrontal cortex commonly report working memory deficits, and neuroimaging studies consistently show prefrontal involvement in such tasks, patients with damage to this region commonly fail to show any working memory impairment. Such a discrepancy may be due to insensitive testing measures for patients, as well as small, yet critical differences between working memory tasks in imaging and patient studies. The current study utilised a more sensitive measure of spatial working memory spans, based either on structured or unstructured spatial arrays.