Giotto's applications of embodied perception: Lateral and vertical dimensions of space.

Giotto's Arena Chapel frescoes, dating from the early fourteenth century, provide salient illustrations of two types of embodied perceptions. One is universal, a consequence of biology and the physical laws of nature, linked to the vertical dimension of space, and impacting on affect and moral judgement. The other is culturally determined, acquired from the direction of reading script and affecting perceptions of directions of movement, time and causality.

Latent inhibition in ADHD adults on and off medication: a preliminary study.

Objective: To determine the effects of stimulant medication on performance of ADHD adults on a selective attention task that assesses the processing of irrelevant stimuli.

Method: ADHD patients and matched controls were given two sessions of a two-stage visual search-latent inhibition (LI) task. In stage-1, they detected the location of a unique shape presented with homogeneous distractors.

Positive and negative affect produce opposing task-irrelevant stimulus preexposure effects.

In three experiments, groups were exposed to either positive or negative affect video clips, after which they were presented with a series of task-irrelevant stimuli. In the subsequent test task, subjects were required to learn an association between the previously irrelevant stimulus and a consequence, and between a new stimulus and a consequence. Induced positive affect produced a latent inhibition effect (poorer evidence of learning with the previously irrelevant stimulus than with the novel stimulus).

Ignoring irrelevant stimuli in latent inhibition and Stroop paradigms: the effects of schizotypy and gender.

Latent inhibition (LI), poor evidence of learning following preexposure to a task-irrelevant stimulus, reflects the ability to ignore inconsequential events. Stroop interference represents a failure to inhibit processing of a task-irrelevant word when it is incongruent with the required naming of the word's print color. The apparent commonality between the two effects is in contradiction to the literature, which indicates that LI is affected by schizotypy and schizophrenia, and perhaps gender, while Stroop interference generated by the trial-to-trial procedure is unaltered by those variables.

Classical eyeblink conditioning and schizophrenia: a short review.

There is considerable evidence for the involvement of cerebellar structures and circuits in classical conditioning of eyeblink responses (EBC) and in the pathophyiology of schizophrenia, leading to the expectation that schizophrenia patients should exhibit impaired EBC. A review of the literature indicates that such a position is not supported. Of the nine published studies, three reported poorer EBS in patients compared to controls, three reported better EBC, and three reported no significant EBC differences between the groups.