The differing impact of multisensory and unisensory integration on behavior.

Pooling and synthesizing signals across different senses often enhances responses to the event from which they are derived. Here, we examine whether multisensory response enhancements are attributable to a redundant target effect (two stimuli rather than one) or if there is some special quality inherent in the combination of cues from different senses. To test these possibilities, the performance of animals in localizing and detecting spatiotemporally concordant visual and auditory stimuli was examined when these stimuli were presented individually (visual or auditory) or in cross-modal (visual-auditory) and within-modal (visual-visual, auditory-auditory) combinations.

Haphazard neural connections underlie the visual deficits of cats with strabismic or deprivation amblyopia.

Identification of the neural basis of the visual deficits experienced by humans with amblyopia, particularly when associated with strabismus (strabismic amblyopia), has proved to be difficult in part because of the inability to observe directly the neural changes at various levels of the human visual pathway. Much of our knowledge has necessarily been obtained on the basis of sophisticated psychophysical studies as well as from electrophysiological explorations on the visual pathways in animal models of amblyopia. This study combines these two approaches to the problem by employing similar psychophysical probes of performance on animal models of two forms of amblyopia (deprivation and strabismic) to those employed earlier on human amblyopes (Hess & Field, 1994, Vis.

Isotope dilution-mass spectrometry determination of blood cyanide by headspace gas chromatography.

A direct and sensitive method for the determination of blood cyanide by isotope dilution was developed. The blood is placed in a headspace vial, and K13C15N is added as internal standard. Addition of phosphoric acid liberates the cyanide as HCN.

The spatial localization deficit in visually deprived kittens.

We measured the spatial localization abilities (alignment accuracy) of visually deprived kittens by use of similar spatially bandpass stimuli (Gaussian blobs) to those employed for the assessment of human amblyopes. The tests of vision were conducted on kittens reared with either strabismus or following different periods of monocular deprivation. As with amblyopic humans, the deficits in alignment accuracy were scaled in proportion to blob size and were not only considerably larger than those of grating acuity but also were not correlated with either the acuity or contrast sensitivity losses.

Cancer risk associated with household exposure to chloroform.

Chloroform (CHCl3) the trihalomethane most prevalent in drinking water, is a proven animal carcinogen and a suspected human carcinogen. Consequently, standards have been issued by health authorities to limit its concentration in drinking water. These limits are based solely on ingestion, without taking into account inhalation and skin contact.