Impairments of event-related magnetic fields in schizophrenia patients with predominant negative symptoms.

Recently there is a growing understanding that patients suffering from negative symptoms of schizophrenia represent a distinct patient population. However, despite the abundance of EEG studies characterizing schizophrenia patients in general, only a handful of studies have focused on the electrophysiological correlates of negative symptoms. The current study examined whether the impairments in event-related magnetic fields (ERFs) commonly reported in heterogeneous groups of patients with mixed positive and negative symptoms also occur in patients with predominantly negative symptoms, and investigated their correlation to clinical symptoms and cognitive deficits.

Different signal transduction cascades are activated simultaneously in the rat insular cortex and hippocampus following novel taste learning.

Novel taste learning is a robust one-trial incidental learning process, dependent on functional activity of the insular (taste) cortex. In contrast to that of the cortex, the role of the hippocampus in taste learning is controversial. We set out to identify the time courses of the activation of mitogen-associated protein kinase (MAPK), transcription factor cAMP-response element-binding protein (CREB) and Akt/PKB (protein kinase B) in the insular cortex and hippocampus of rats subsequent to novel taste learning.