Both Manuka and Non-Manuka Honey Types Inhibit Antibiotic Resistant Wound-Infecting Bacteria.

Postoperative infections are a major concern in United States hospitals, accounting for roughly 20% of all hospital-acquired infections yearly. Wound-infecting bacteria, in particular, have a high rate of drug resistance (up to 65%), creating life-threatening complications. Manuka honey, native to New Zealand, has been FDA-approved for wound treatment in the United States after studies demonstrated its ability to inhibit a variety of bacterial species and facilitate wound healing.

The structure of illusory conjunctions reveals hierarchical binding of multipart objects.

The world around us is filled with complex objects, full of color, motion, shape, and texture, and these features seem to be represented separately in the early visual system. Anne Treisman pointed out that binding these separate features together into coherent conscious percepts is a serious challenge, and she argued that selective attention plays a critical role in this process. Treisman also showed that, consistent with this view, outside the focus of attention we suffer from illusory conjunctions: misperceived pairings of features into objects.

Substance use consequences, mental health problems, and readiness to change among Veterans seeking substance use treatment.

Individuals seeking substance use treatment who have one or more co-occurring mental health problems tend to have lower treatment engagement, higher rates of attrition, and poorer treatment outcomes. Readiness to change (RTC) is an integral construct in the recovery process, with higher RTC associated with improved treatment outcomes. However, the impact of psychiatric symptoms on RTC is not fully understood, especially among specialty subpopulations, such as military Veterans.

Comparing different kinds of words and word-word relations to test an habituation model of priming.

Huber and O'Reilly (2003) proposed that neural habituation exists to solve a temporal parsing problem, minimizing blending between one word and the next when words are visually presented in rapid succession. They developed a neural dynamics habituation model, explaining the finding that short duration primes produce positive priming whereas long duration primes produce negative repetition priming. The model contains three layers of processing, including a visual input layer, an orthographic layer, and a lexical-semantic layer.

Observed, Executed, and Imagined Action Representations can be Decoded From Ventral and Dorsal Areas.

Previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research on action observation has emphasized the role of putative mirror neuron areas such as Broca's area, ventral premotor cortex, and the inferior parietal lobule. However, recent evidence suggests action observation involves many distributed cortical regions, including dorsal premotor and superior parietal cortex. How these different regions relate to traditional mirror neuron areas, and whether traditional mirror neuron areas play a special role in action representation, is unclear.

Implicit learning of spatiotemporal contingencies in spatial cueing.

We investigated the role of implicit spatiotemporal learning in the Posner spatial cueing of attention task. During initial training, the proportion of different trial types was altered to produce a complex pattern of spatiotemporal contingencies between cues and targets. For example, in the short invalid and long valid condition, targets reliably appeared either at an uncued location after a short stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA; 100 ms) or at a cued location after a long SOA (350 ms).

A dynamic causal modeling analysis of the effective connectivities underlying top-down letter processing.

The present study employed dynamic causal modeling to investigate the effective functional connectivity between regions of the neural network involved in top-down letter processing. We used an illusory letter detection paradigm in which participants detected letters while viewing pure noise images. When participants detected letters, the response of the right middle occipital gyrus (MOG) in the visual cortex was enhanced by increased feed-backward connectivity from the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG).

Faces in the mist: illusory face and letter detection.

We report three behavioral experiments on the spatial characteristics evoking illusory face and letter detection. False detections made to pure noise images were analyzed using a modified reverse correlation method in which hundreds of observers rated a modest number of noise images (480) during a single session. This method was originally developed for brain imaging research, and has been used in a number of fMRI publications, but this is the first report of the behavioral classification images.

The role of sleep and practice in implicit and explicit motor learning.

Sleep is hypothesized to play a functional role in the consolidation of memory, with more robust findings for implicit, than explicit memory. Previous studies have observed improvements on an explicit motor task after a sleep period. We examined the role of massed practice and sleep on implicit and explicit learning within a motor task.

Priming and habituation for faces: Individual differences and inversion effects.

Immediate repetition priming for faces was examined across a range of prime durations in a threshold identification task. Similar to word repetition priming results, short duration face primes produced positive priming whereas long duration face primes eliminated or reversed this effect. A habituation model of such priming effects predicted that the speed of identification should relate to the prime duration needed to achieve negative priming.

Effective connectivities of cortical regions for top-down face processing: a dynamic causal modeling study.

To study top-down face processing, the present study used an experimental paradigm in which participants detected non-existent faces in pure noise images. Conventional BOLD signal analysis identified three regions involved in this illusory face detection. These regions included the left orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) in addition to the right fusiform face area (FFA) and right occipital face area (OFA), both of which were previously known to be involved in both top-down and bottom-up processing of faces.

Neural correlates of top-down letter processing.

This fMRI study investigated top-down letter processing with an illusory letter detection task. Participants responded whether one of a number of different possible letters was present in a very noisy image. After initial training that became increasingly difficult, they continued to detect letters even though the images consisted of pure noise, which eliminated contamination from strong bottom-up input.

An interference account of cue-independent forgetting in the no-think paradigm.

Memory suppression is investigated with the no-think paradigm, which produces forgetting following repeated practice of not thinking about a memory [Anderson MC, Green C (2001) Nature 410:366-369]. Because the forgotten item is not retrieved even when tested with an independent, semantically related cue, it has been assumed that this forgetting is due to an inhibition process. However, this conclusion is based on a single stage to recall, whereas global memory models, which produce forgetting through a process of interference, include both a sampling and a recovery stage to recall.

A distributed neural system for top-down face processing.

Evidence suggests that the neural system associated with face processing is a distributed cortical network containing both bottom-up and top-down mechanisms. While bottom-up face processing has been the focus of many studies, the neural areas involved in the top-down face processing have not been extensively investigated due to difficulty in isolating top-down influences from the bottom-up response engendered by presentation of a face. In the present study, we used a novel experimental method to induce illusory face-detection.

Sleep does not enhance motor sequence learning.

Improvements in motor sequence performance have been observed after a delay involving sleep. This finding has been taken as evidence for an active sleep consolidation process that enhances subsequent performance. In a review of this literature, however, the authors observed 4 aspects of data analyses and experimental design that could lead to improved performance on the test in the absence of any sleep consolidation: (a) masking of learning effects in the averaged data, (b) masking of reactive inhibition effects in the averaged training data, (c) time-of-day and time-since-sleep confounds, and (d) a gradual buildup of fatigue over the course of massed (i.

Detecting faces in pure noise images: a functional MRI study on top-down perception.

To assess the nature of top-down perceptual processes without contamination from bottom-up input, this functional MRI study investigated face detection in pure noise images. Greater activation was revealed for face versus nonface responses in the fusiform face area, but not in the occipital face area. Across participants, positive correlations were found for the degree of greater face-detection activation between the fusiform face area and bilateral inferior frontal gyri, suggesting a top-down pathway generating perceptual expectations.

Long-term remission after intensive chemotherapy in advanced myelodysplastic syndromes is generally associated with restoration of polyclonal haemopoiesis.

The clonality of peripheral blood cells was assessed in eight female patients with myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) by means of the human androgen receptor gene-based assay (HUMARA). The patients were in complete remission for a median follow-up time of 83 months after intensive chemotherapy. X-chromosome inactivation patterns (XCIPs) indicated polyclonal haemopoiesis in five patients.

Factors influencing G-CSF-mediated mobilization of hematopoietic progenitor cells during steady-state hematopoiesis in patients with malignant lymphoma and multiple myeloma.

We retrospectively analyzed factors influencing PBPC mobilization during steady-state hematopoiesis in 52 patients with malignant lymphoma (n=35) or multiple myeloma (n=17) who received 77 cycles of G-CSF (12.5-50 microg G-CSF/kg/day). For 15 of these patients, the first mobilization cycle (12.

Granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (G-CSF) mediated mobilization of leukemic cells in Philadelphia chromosome positive acute lymphoblastic leukemia expressing myeloid antigens (my+Ph+ALL).

The therapeutic benefit of G-CSF in the treatment of acute lymphoblastic leukemia has been well established. G-CSF has been used to shorten neutropenia induced by conventional dose cytotoxic chemotherapy and allogeneic bone marrow transplantation. Recently autologous peripheral blood progenitor cell transplantation has been explored to treat high-risk ALL.

Idarubicin, melphalan and cyclophosphamide: an intensified high-dose regimen for the treatment of myeloma patients.

Following conventional chemotherapy, eight myeloma patients presenting with advanced tumor stages were treated with an intensified high-dose regimen and autologous peripheral blood stem cell transplantation. High-dose chemotherapy consisted of idarubicin 20 mg/m2 on days -13, -12 and -11, melphalan 100 mg/m2 on days -5 and -4 and cyclophosphamide 60 mg/kg (plus mesna 60 mg/kg) on days -3 and -2 (IMC). Seven patients achieved a complete remission or a very good partial remission (reduction of M-component > or =90%).

Preattentive information processing in schizophrenia.

Preattentive and attentive information processing was investigated in 24 schizophrenic patients and 24 control subjects using a texture discrimination task based on Julesz's texton theory. Texton theory essentially defines a certain limited number of texture elements that can be detected readily and simultaneously without attentional effort irrespective of the size and information content of the rest of the visual field. During the first task, subjects had to detect texton elements (one 'L' among 35 '+'), which were presented on slides for 40 ms and were followed by a mask after different stimulus onset asynchronies (SOA: 200-800 ms).

Texture segmentation and 'pop-out' in infants and children: the effect of test field size.

The ability of infants and children to segment textures based on differences in line orientation and blob size was investigated, using a forced-choice preferential looking method. In the first experiment, a stimulus pair (a homogeneous texture and a texture containing either a group of sixteen elements or a single element of an orthogonal orientation or a larger blob size) was presented on two separate test fields. Preference for the figure defined by differences in blob size was seen already in 2-month-old infants.

Texture segregation in infants and children.

Segregation of textures based on differences in line orientation and blob size was tested in adults, infants and children, with a forced-choice preferential looking technique. Preference for a figure defined by differences in blob size already occurs in 2-month-old infants. In contrast, preference for a figure differing from the background by the orientation of its elements emerges at the end of the first year of life and becomes adult-like by school age.