Endoplasmic reticulum stress enhances endocytosis in calreticulin deficient cells.

Calreticulin an endoplasmic reticulum (ER) chaperone that is involved in the quality control process and plays an important role as a regulator of intracellular calcium homeostasis. Previously, we illustrated that loss of calreticulin (crt-/-) results in the activation of ubiquitin-proteasome pathway facilitating the increased resistance to apoptosis. Our preliminary data illustrated a significant increase in the endocytosis in the calreticulin knockout mouse embryonic fibroblast cells (crt-/-).

How Easy is it to Read the Minds of People with Autism Spectrum Disorder?

How well can neurotypical adults' interpret mental states in people with ASD? 'Targets' (ASD and neurotypical) reactions to four events were video-recorded then shown to neurotypical participants whose task was to identify which event the target had experienced. In study 1 participants were more successful for neurotypical than ASD targets. In study 2, participants rated ASD targets equally expressive as neurotypical targets for three of the events, while in study 3 participants gave different verbal descriptions of the reactions of ASD and neurotypical targets.

Using other minds as a window onto the world: guessing what happened from clues in behaviour.

It has been proposed that mentalising involves retrodicting as well as predicting behaviour, by inferring previous mental states of a target. This study investigated whether retrodiction is impaired in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Participants watched videos of real people reacting to the researcher behaving in one of four possible ways.

Can people guess what happened to others from their reactions?

Are we able to infer what happened to a person from a brief sample of his/her behaviour? It has been proposed that mentalising skills can be used to retrodict as well as predict behaviour, that is, to determine what mental states of a target have already occurred. The current study aimed to develop a paradigm to explore these processes, which takes into account the intricacies of real-life situations in which reasoning about mental states, as embodied in behaviour, may be utilised. A novel task was devised which involved observing subtle and naturalistic reactions of others in order to determine the event that had previously taken place.