Carrying groceries: More items in early trips than in later trips or the reverse? Implications for pre-crastination.

Returning home from the grocery store with a car full of groceries requires decisions about how many bags to carry when. If the decisions exemplify procrastination, people should carry more bags per trip in late trips than in early trips (putting the hard work off until later), but if the decisions exemplify the recently discovered phenomenon of pre-crastination (Rosenbaum et al. in Psychol Sci 25: 1487-1496, 2014), people should carry more bags per trip in early trips than in late trips (doing the hard work early).

Visuomotor priming of action preparation and motor programming is similar in visually guided and memory-guided actions.

The present study examined whether the planning and execution of a reach-to-grasp movement is susceptible to visuomotor priming, and whether the strength of the priming effect depends on the availability of visual feedback. Participants grasped a target object as quickly as possible with either a whole-hand grip or a precision grip upon hearing an auditory stimulus. Prior to the auditory cue, a prime stimulus was presented.

Generation of somatic electromechanical force by outer hair cells may be influenced by prestin-CASK interaction at the basal junction with the Deiter's cell.

The motor protein, prestin, situated in the basolateral plasma membrane of cochlear outer hair cells (OHCs), underlies the generation of somatic, voltage-driven mechanical force, the basis for the exquisite sensitivity, frequency selectivity and dynamic range of mammalian hearing. The molecular and structural basis of the ontogenetic development of this electromechanical force has remained elusive. The present study demonstrates that this force is significantly reduced when the immature subcellular distribution of prestin found along the entire plasma membrane persists into maturity, as has been described in previous studies under hypothyroidism.

AMP-activated protein kinase in BK-channel regulation and protection against hearing loss following acoustic overstimulation.

The energy-sensing AMP-activated serine/threonine protein kinase (AMPK) confers cell survival in part by stimulation of cellular energy production and limitation of cellular energy utilization. AMPK-sensitive functions further include activities of epithelial Na+ channel ENaC and voltage-gated K+ channel KCNE1/KCNQ1. AMPK is activated by an increased cytosolic Ca2+ concentration.