[Unilateral neglect: a review of causes, anatomical localization, theories and interventions].

Unilateral neglect is usually caused by right hemisphere damage from stroke, leading to difficulties in attending to stimuli in the left perceptual hemifield. As an example, a patient suffering from neglect may read only the right part of a word or the right part of sentences, or eat only from the right side his plate. Neglect is more common, and most often more severe, following infarcts in the right hemisphere than the left.

Prism adaptation improves visual search in hemispatial neglect.

Visuomotor prism adaptation has been found to induce a lateral bias of spatial attention in chronic hemispatial neglect patients. Here, two experiments were conducted to explore the effects of 10 degrees prism adaptation on visual search tasks and standard visual inattention tests. Baselines and intervention effects were measured on separate days for all patients.

Substance use prevention for adolescents: the Icelandic Model.

Data from the European School Survey Project on Alcohol and other Drugs have shown that adolescent substance use is a growing problem in western and particularly Eastern European countries. This paper describes the development, implementation and results of the Icelandic Model of Adolescent Substance Use Prevention. The Icelandic Model is a theoretically grounded, evidence-based approach to community adolescent substance use prevention that has grown out of collaboration between policy makers, behavioural scientists, field-based practitioners and community residents in Iceland.

Independent and additive repetition priming of motion direction and color in visual search.

Priming of visual search for Gabor patch stimuli, varying in color and local drift direction, was investigated. The task relevance of each feature varied between the different experimental conditions compared. When the target defining dimension was color, a large effect of color repetition was seen as well as a smaller effect of the repetition of motion direction.

Parental divorce and adolescent cigarette smoking and alcohol use: assessing the importance of family conflict.

Aim: To investigate how family conflict contributes to the relationship between parental divorce and adolescent cigarette smoking and alcohol use.

Design: Population-based cross-sectional survey.

Setting: School classrooms in Iceland in which an anonymous questionnaire was administered to respondents by supervising teachers.

Adolescent health behavior, contentment in school, and academic achievement.

Objectives: To examine the association between health behavior indicators, school contentment, and academic achievement.

Methods: Structural equation modeling with 5810 adolescents.

Results: Our model explained 36% of the variance in academic achievement and 24% in school contentment.

On the benefits of transient attention across the visual field.

There are well-known differences in resolution and performance across the visual field with performance generally better for the lower than the upper visual hemifield. Here we attempted to assess how transient attention summoned by a peripheral precue affects performance across the visual field. Four different attentional precueing tasks were used, varying in difficulty and attentional load.

Health behavior and academic achievement among adolescents: the relative contribution of dietary habits, physical activity, body mass index, and self-esteem.

This study tested a structural equation model to estimate the relationship between health behaviors, body mass index (BMI), and self-esteem and the academic achievement of adolescents. The authors analyzed survey data from the 2000 study of Youth in Iceland , a population-based, cross-sectional sample of 6,346 adolescents in Iceland. The model demonstrated good fit with chi-square of 2685 (n = 5,810, df = 180), p < .

Trends in prevalence of substance use among Icelandic adolescents, 1995-2006.

Background: Adolescent substance use continues to be of great global public health concern in many countries with advanced economies. Previous research has shown that substance use among 15-16 year-old-youth has increased in many European countries in recent years. The aim of this study was to examine trends in prevalence of daily smoking, alcohol intoxication, and illicit substance use among Icelandic adolescents.

Object- and feature-based priming in visual search.

Two contrasting accounts for priming in visual search have been proposed. The main difference between the two is the level of perceptual processing at which the priming effects are assumed to occur, whether priming is assumed to operate through the selective facilitation of features or at the level of selection of objects for response. The aim of the experiments here was to contrast these accounts.

Priming in visual search: separating the effects of target repetition, distractor repetition and role-reversal.

Recent studies have identified between-trial priming effects in visual search tasks, but often with constraints on the possible similarities or changes across successive trials, and usually with the main emphasis on effects of target repetition. Here we sought to obtain a more thorough characterization of between-trial priming effects in speeded visual search, where observers determined target presence or absence among a set of distractors. The results show that various separable priming effects have a major influence on visual search performance.

Pagetoid reticulosis in a 5-year-old boy.

We present a rare case of pagetoid reticulosis arising in a 5-year-old white boy. He had a history of a large chronic erythematous, scaly patch on his left buttock that had shown intermittent partial response to a topical antifungal medication. A punch biopsy specimen revealed dramatic epidermal hyperplasia, with parakeratosis and prominent exocytosis of single and clustered mononuclear cells (Pautrier's microabscesses) into the epidermis.

Social correlates of cigarette smoking among Icelandic adolescents: a population-based cross-sectional study.

Background: Previous research has shown that between 80 and 90 percent of adult smokers report having started smoking before 18 years of age. Several studies have revealed that multiple social factors influence the likelihood of smoking during adolescence, the period during which the onset of smoking usually occurs. To better understand the social mechanisms that influence adolescent smoking, we analyzed the relationship and relative importance of a broad spectrum of social variables in adolescent smoking in Iceland, a Nordic country with high per-capita income.

Trends in physical activity and participation in sports clubs among Icelandic adolescents.

Background: Physical activity among adolescents and its implications for health status is of increasing concern. We examined trends in physical activity and participation in sports clubs among Icelandic adolescents.

Methods: Cross-sectional survey data were used to determine levels of vigorous physical activity and participation in sports clubs (defined as engaging in moderately intensive activity four times or more a week) for cohorts of Icelandic adolescents in 1992, 1997, 2000 and 2006.

Repetition of distractor sets improves visual search performance in hemispatial neglect.

Priming from repeated distractor sets, or search context, in conjunctive visual search was examined in four patients with hemispatial neglect. In the first experiment overall context was either changed or repeated while the target was always the same to control for any modulatory effect of target priming. Considerable priming was seen from repeated context.

"I know what you did on the last trial"--a selective review of research on priming in visual search.

One could argue that studies of how we scan our visual environment have been stuck in the eternal present, investigating the properties of a particular search situation without reference to what has occurred before. There is, however, increasing evidence that what we have previously viewed, perhaps only moments before, has a large influence on what we see, what grabs our attention and how we organize the visual scene. A large amount of evidence pertinent to the question of what has been termed priming in visual search is reviewed here, evidence from psychophysics, neurophysiology and neuropsychology.

A neutropenic child with a purple lesion on the thigh.

Zygomycosis is an aggressive infection by an angioinvasive fungus seen in patients with defects in phagocytosis. We describe a neutropenic child with primary cutaneous Rhizopus infection presenting with a bull's-eye appearance. The patient was treated with aggressive surgical debridement along with amphotericin B followed by skin grafting, with full recovery.

Readout from iconic memory and selective spatial attention involve similar neural processes.

Iconic memory and spatial attention are often considered separately, but they may have functional similarities. Here we provide functional magnetic resonance imaging evidence for some common underlying neural effects. Subjects judged three visual stimuli in one hemifield of a bilateral array comprising six stimuli.

The influence of object-relative visuomotor set on express saccades.

Express saccades are considered to have the shortest latency (70-110 ms) of all saccadic eye movements. The influence of visuomotor set, preparatory processes that spatially affect a sensorimotor response, on express saccades was examined by instructing human subjects to make a saccade to one of two simultaneously appearing spots defined by its position relative to the other. A temporal gap between fixation point disappearance and target appearance was used to facilitate the production of express saccades.

Saccade landing point selection and the competition account of pro- and antisaccade generation: the involvement of visual attention--a review.

This paper presents a review and summary of experimental findings on the role of attention in the preparation of saccadic eye movements. The focus is on experiments where performance of prosaccades (saccades towards a suddenly appearing item) and antisaccades (saccades of equal amplitude in the direction opposite to where the target moved) is compared. Evidence suggests that these two opposite responses to the same stimulus event entail competition between neural pathways that generate reflexive movements to the target and neural mechanisms involved in inhibiting the reflex and generating a voluntary gaze shift in the opposite direction to the target appearance.

Surface assignment modulates object formation for visual short-term memory.

Recent results have suggested that the operational units of visual short-term memory (VSTM) are whole objects, rather than features or the total amount of information to be remembered. Here, for the first time, the influence of surface assignment on object formation for VSTM was investigated. The observers had to memorize the features of four briefly presented (300 ms) two-part objects, followed by a mask and a cue indicating which object to report on.

Neural basis for priming of pop-out during visual search revealed with fMRI.

Maljkovic and Nakayama first showed that visual search efficiency can be influenced by priming effects. Even "pop-out" targets (defined by unique color) are judged quicker if they appear at the same location and/or in the same color as on the preceding trial, in an unpredictable sequence. Here, we studied the potential neural correlates of such priming in human visual search using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).