Impact of systemic cancer treatment on quality of life and mental well-being: a comparative analysis of patients with localized and advanced cancer.

Introduction: This study investigated the impact of systemic cancer therapy on the quality of life, mental well-being, and life satisfaction of cancer patients.

Methods: This prospective study was promoted by the Spanish Society of Medical Oncology (SEOM) and enrolled patients with localized, resected, or unresectable advanced cancer from 15 Spanish medical oncology departments. Patients completed surveys on quality of life (EORTC-QoL-QLQ-C30), psychological distress (BSI-18) and life satisfaction (SWLS) before and after systemic cancer treatment.

Effects of sound location on visual task performance and electrophysiological measures of distraction.

Novel sounds embedded in a repetitive stream of auditory stimuli impair performance of the visual task at hand. Parmentier et al. suggested that this distraction effect might be because of the shifting cost of moving attention from the task-irrelevant (auditory) to the task-relevant (visual) channel, or from their shifting of spatial locations.

Reduced novelty-P3 associated with increased behavioral distractibility in schizophrenia.

Behavioral and electrophysiological brain responses were used to examine the relationship between the vulnerability to distraction and the orienting response in schizophrenia. Nineteen schizophrenics and nineteen matched healthy controls were instructed to ignore task-irrelevant auditory stimuli while they classified capital letters and digits. The auditory sequences contained repetitive standard tones occasionally replaced by complex novel sounds.

When loading working memory reduces distraction: behavioral and electrophysiological evidence from an auditory-visual distraction paradigm.

The sensitivity of involuntary attention to top-down modulation was tested using an auditory-visual distraction task and a working memory (WM) load manipulation in subjects performing a simple visual classification task while ignoring contingent auditory stimulation. The sounds were repetitive standard tones (80%) and environmental novel sounds (20%). Distraction caused by the novel sounds was compared across a 1-back WM condition and a no-memory control condition, both involving the comparison of two digits.

Individual differences in sequence learning and auditory pattern sensitivity as revealed with evoked potentials.

Research on motor sequence acquisition has shown significant differences between learners. Learners who develop explicit knowledge respond faster than non-explicit ones and they show larger amplitude in event-related brain potentials to sequence deviants. There is evidence that memory span correlates with the amount of sequence learned, but the specific mechanisms subserving such differences are still unknown.

Abnormal speech sound representation in persistent developmental stuttering.

Objectives: To determine whether adults with persistent developmental stuttering (PDS) have auditory perceptual deficits.

Methods: The authors compared the mismatch negativity (MMN) event-related brain potential elicited to simple tone (frequency and duration) and phonetic contrasts in a sample of PDS subjects with that recorded in a sample of paired fluent control subjects.

Results: Subjects with developmental stuttering had normal MMN to simple tone contrasts but a significant supratemporal left-lateralized enhancement of this electrophysiologic response to phonetic contrasts.

Auditory event-related potentials as a function of abstract change magnitude.

Event-related potentials were recorded in healthy volunteers to test the accuracy of the human brain to extract, preattentively, auditory abstract rules. The abstract rule was determined by the frequency relationship between two pure tones forming a pair. The standard pairs had identical tone frequency, whereas the deviant pairs had the second tone two, four, six or eight musical steps higher or lower in frequency than the first one.

Attention capture by auditory significant stimuli: semantic analysis follows attention switching.

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from the scalp to investigate a long-standing controversy in auditory attention research, namely when the 'breakthrough of the unattended' takes place in the human brain. Nine subjects classified visual stimuli appearing 300 ms after task-irrelevant standard tones (80%, i.e.

An electrophysiological and behavioral investigation of involuntary attention towards auditory frequency, duration and intensity changes.

We measured behavior and event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in 12 subjects performing on an audio-visual distraction paradigm to investigate the cerebral mechanisms of involuntary attention towards stimulus changes in the acoustic environment. Subjects classified odd/even numbers presented on a computer screen 300 ms after the occurrence of a task-irrelevant auditory stimulus, by pressing the corresponding response button. Auditory stimuli were standard tones (600 Hz, 200 ms, 85 dB; P=0.