Patterns of benzodiazepine prescribing by neuropsychiatrists and general practitioners for elderly patients in Germany in 2014 .

Background: The patterns of benzodiazepine prescriptions in older adults are of general and scientific interest as they are not yet well understood. The aim of this study was to compare the prescription patterns of benzodiazepines in elderly people in Germany to determine the share or proportion treated by general practitioners (GP) and neuropsychiatrists (NP).

Methods: This study included 31,268 and 6,603 patients between the ages of 65 and 100 with at least one benzodiazepine prescription in 2014 from GP and NP, respectively.

Interactions between task difficulty and hemispheric distribution of attended locations: implications for the splitting attention debate.

Whether attention can be split between multiple regions in space simultaneously is an ongoing controversy in attention research. We argue that the debate could be resolved if the distribution of target locations over hemifields and task difficulty are both considered. This premise was tested in five experiments in which 48 subjects compared the identity of two out of four stimuli.

Differential effects of target probability on saccade latencies in gap and warning tasks.

Saccade latencies are significantly reduced by extinguishing a foveal fixation stimulus before the appearance of a saccade target. It has been shown recently that this "fixation offset effect" (FOE) can be modulated by varying target probability. Cortico-collicular top-down effects have been assumed to mediate this strategic FOE modulation.

Saccades to spatially extended targets: the role of eccentricity.

Size and eccentricity of visual targets are known to modulate saccade parameters. Here we asked for a possible interaction between these target properties. We investigated latency and amplitude of saccades to targets of varying diameter presented at various eccentricities in the visual field.

Target size modulates saccadic eye movements in humans.

The authors investigated mechanisms involved in transformation of spatially extended targets into saccadic eye-movement vectors. Human subjects performed horizontal saccades to targets of varying diameter, which contained no conspicuous elements within the target shape. With increasing target size, express saccades and saccades with fast regular latencies decreased in frequency, whereas frequency of saccades with slow regular latencies increased.

Oculomotor effects of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol in humans: implications for the functional neuroanatomy of the brain cannabinoid system.

The significance of cannabinoid signaling for human cognition and motor control is still poorly understood. Here, we have investigated acute behavioral effects of oral delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) with oculomotor paradigms in 12 healthy human subjects. Compared to baseline testing: (i) THC increased latencies of reflexive visually guided saccades, while their accuracy was not affected; (ii) latencies of memory-guided saccades were unaffected, but THC modulated accuracy of these eye movements by increasing average gain and gain variability; (iii) frequency of anticipated memory-guided saccades and antisaccade errors was increased; (iv) the saccade amplitude/peak velocity relationships were not affected.