[Discrimination thresholds for recognizing facial emotions: mostly higher among the elderly].

Elderly people have lower ability for recognizing facial emotions than younger people. Previous studies showed that older adults had difficulty in recognizing anger, sadness and fear, but there were no consistent results for happiness, surprise and disgust. Most of these studies used a small number of stimuli, and tabulated the number of correct responses for facial expressions.

The pathophysiology of prospective memory failure after diffuse axonal injury--lesion-symptom analysis using diffusion tensor imaging.

Background: Prospective memory (PM) is one of the most important cognitive domains in everyday life. The neuronal basis of PM has been examined by a large number of neuroimaging and neuropsychological studies, and it has been suggested that several cerebral domains contribute to PM. For these activation studies, a constellation of experimental PM trials was developed and adopted to healthy subjects.

Familiarity effect on retrieval: a neuropsychological case study.

NM, who suffered traumatic brain injury (TBI) to the prefrontal cortex (PFC), was compared with a diffuse axonal injury (DAI) patient on tasks of free recall, cued recall and recognition memory. We manipulated the familiarity of items to explore the effects of item strength on retrieval. On free recall, NM performed best during the high-familiarity picture condition.

In planta functions of the Arabidopsis cytokinin receptor family.

Since their discovery as cell-division factors in plant tissue culture about five decades ago, cytokinins have been hypothesized to play a central role in the regulation of cell division and differentiation in plants. To test this hypothesis in planta, we isolated Arabidopsis plants lacking one, two, or three of the genes encoding a subfamily of histidine kinases (CRE1, AHK2, and AHK3) that function as cytokinin receptors. Seeds were obtained for homozygous plants containing mutations in all seven genotypes, namely single, double, and triple mutants, and the responses of germinated seedlings in various cytokinin assays were compared.