Pragmatic deficits in patients with schizophrenia and right hemisphere damage: A pilot study.

Background: While pragmatic deficits are well documented in patients with schizophrenia (SCZ) and right hemisphere damage (RHD), there is a paucity of research comparing the pragmatic deficits of these two groups. Do they experience similar cognitive dysfunction or is there a dissociation between the two patient groups?

Aims: To investigate the nature of pragmatic deficits in these two groups and to gain an understanding of the underlying cognitive mechanisms that might be associated with these deficits to further future investigations.

Methods & Procedures: A total of 60 participants (15 patients with SCZ; 15 with RHD; 30 (15 + 15) healthy controls (HC) were administered the Bengali Audio-Visual Test-Battery for Assessment of Pragmatic Skills.

The evolution of religious belief in humans: a brief review with a focus on cognition.

Religion has been a widely present feature of human beings. This review explores developments in the evolutionary cognitive psychology of religion and provides critical evaluation of the different theoretical positions. Generally scholars have either believed religion is adaptive, a by-product of adaptive psychological features or maladaptive and varying amounts of empirical evidence supports each position.

Results of late surgical intervention in children with early-onset bilateral cataracts.

Background: Cataracts are a major cause of childhood blindness globally. Although surgically treatable, it is unclear whether children would benefit from such interventions beyond the first few years of life, which are believed to constitute 'critical' periods for visual development.

Aims: To study visual acuity outcomes after late treatment of early-onset cataracts and also to determine whether there are longitudinal changes in postoperative acuity.

Development of pattern vision following early and extended blindness.

Visual plasticity peaks during early critical periods of normal visual development. Studies in animals and humans provide converging evidence that gains in visual function are minimal and deficits are most severe when visual deprivation persists beyond the critical period. Here we demonstrate visual development in a unique sample of patients who experienced extended early-onset blindness (beginning before 1 y of age and lasting 8-17 y) before removal of bilateral cataracts.

Restoring vision through "Project Prakash": the opportunities for merging science and service.

By treating curably blind children in India, “Project Prakash” brings sight to children of different ages, offering insights into how their brains adapt to enable them to see. The project's experience highlights the benefits of merging basic research with societal service.

Normal facial age and gender perception in developmental prosopagnosia.

Developmental prosopagnosia is characterized by a severe deficit in face-identity recognition. Most developmental prosopagnosics do not report deficits of facial age or gender perception. We developed tasks for evaluating facial age and gender processing and used them in the largest group of developmental prosopagnosics (N = 18) tested on facial age and gender perception.

Capturing specific abilities as a window into human individuality: the example of face recognition.

Proper characterization of each individual's unique pattern of strengths and weaknesses requires good measures of diverse abilities. Here, we advocate combining our growing understanding of neural and cognitive mechanisms with modern psychometric methods in a renewed effort to capture human individuality through a consideration of specific abilities. We articulate five criteria for the isolation and measurement of specific abilities, then apply these criteria to face recognition.

Is the Web as good as the lab? Comparable performance from Web and lab in cognitive/perceptual experiments.

With the increasing sophistication and ubiquity of the Internet, behavioral research is on the cusp of a revolution that will do for population sampling what the computer did for stimulus control and measurement. It remains a common assumption, however, that data from self-selected Web samples must involve a trade-off between participant numbers and data quality. Concerns about data quality are heightened for performance-based cognitive and perceptual measures, particularly those that are timed or that involve complex stimuli.

Developmental prosopagnosia and super-recognition: no special role for surface reflectance processing.

Face recognition by normal subjects depends in roughly equal proportions on shape and surface reflectance cues, while object recognition depends predominantly on shape cues. It is possible that developmental prosopagnosics are deficient not in their ability to recognize faces per se, but rather in their ability to use reflectance cues. Similarly, super-recognizers' exceptional ability with face recognition may be a result of superior surface reflectance perception and memory.

Phantom flashes caused by interactions across visual space.

Studies regarding the effects of context on the perception of a visual target's temporal properties have generally addressed the cross-modal integration of auditory context, within a functional or ecological (e.g., Bayesian) framework.

Human face recognition ability is specific and highly heritable.

Compared with notable successes in the genetics of basic sensory transduction, progress on the genetics of higher level perception and cognition has been limited. We propose that investigating specific cognitive abilities with well-defined neural substrates, such as face recognition, may yield additional insights. In a twin study of face recognition, we found that the correlation of scores between monozygotic twins (0.

Arsenic groundwater contamination and its health effects in the state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) in upper and middle Ganga plain, India: a severe danger.

This communication presents results of our 2-year survey on groundwater arsenic contamination in three districts Ballia, Varanasi and Gazipur of Uttar Pradesh (UP) in the upper and middle Ganga plain, India. Analyses of 4,780 tubewell water samples revealed that arsenic concentrations in 46.5% exceeded 10 microg/L, in 26.

Chronic-stress induced modulation of different states of anxiety-like behavior in female rats.

Stress facilitates emotionality and consolidation of aversive memories in male rodents. In addition, considerable sexual dimorphism has been observed in animal and clinical literature, both in response to stress and predisposition to anxiety disorders thought to be exacerbated by stress. In view of this, we investigated effects of chronic immobilization stress and chronic unpredictable stress on anxiety-like behavior exhibited by female Wistar rats, using the elevated plus-maze.