Gene regulation in the rat prefrontal cortex after learning with or without cholinergic insult.

The prefrontal cortex is essential for a wide variety of higher functions, including attention and memory. Cholinergic neurons are thought to be of prime importance in the modulation of these processes. Degeneration of forebrain cholinergic neurons has been linked to several neurological disorders.

Gene expression profile in rat hippocampus with and without memory deficit.

The cholinergic neuronal system, through its projections to the hippocampus, plays an important role in learning and memory. The aim of the study was to identify genes and networks in rat hippocampus with and without memory deficit. Genome-scale screening was used to analyze gene expression changes in rats submitted or not to intraparenchymal injection of 192 IgG-saporin and trained in spatial/object novelty tasks.

Graded effects of number of inserted letters in superset priming.

Three masked priming experiments investigated the effects of target word length and number of inserted letters on superset priming, where irrelevant letters are added to targets to form prime stimuli (e.g., tanble-table).

Influence of foveal distractors on saccadic eye movements: a dead zone for the global effect.

Three experiments investigated the global effect with foveal distractors displayed in the same hemifield as more eccentric saccade targets. Distractors were x-letter strings of variable length and targets corresponded to the central letter of letter strings (e.g.

Letter position information and printed word perception: the relative-position priming constraint.

Six experiments apply the masked priming paradigm to investigate how letter position information is computed during printed word perception. Primes formed by a subset of the target's letters facilitated target recognition as long as the relative position of letters was respected across prime and target (e.g.

Effects of phonological and orthographic neighbourhood density interact in visual word recognition.

The present study investigated the role of phonological and orthographic neighbourhood density in visual word recognition. Three mechanisms were identified that predict distinct facilitatory or inhibitory effects of each variable. The lexical competition account predicts overall inhibitory effects of neighbourhood density.

Masked repetition and phonological priming within and across modalities.

Lexical decision latencies to word targets presented either visually or auditorily were faster when directly preceded by a briefly presented (53-ms) pattern-masked visual prime that was the same word as the target (repetition primes), compared with different word primes. Primes that were pseudohomophones of target words did not significantly influence target processing compared with unrelated primes (Experiments 1-2) but did produce robust priming effects with slightly longer prime exposures (67 ms) in Experiment 3. Like repetition priming, these pseudohomophone priming effects did not interact with target modality.