, 2009). Therefore, we hypothesized that PD patients would have difficulty switching from one saccade response to the other, with particular impairment in switching from a pro to an antisaccade. Here, we not only confirmed this prediction, but also showed that PD patients performed better than controls in switching from an anti to a prosaccade. This

suggests that task switching deficits in PD are particularly pronounced when more automatic behavior needs to be overridden with alternative behavior. We suggest that this Paclitaxel mw occurs primarily at the level of establishing the appropriate task set, which is an internalized rule that governs how to respond. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“Placebo has been shown to be a powerful analgesic with corresponding reduction in the activation

of the pain matrix in the brain. However, the response to placebo treatment is highly variable. It is unclear how anticipatory and pain-evoked potentials are affected by the treatment and how reproducible the response is. Laser stimulation was used to induce moderate pain in healthy volunteers. We induced placebo analgesia by conditioning subjects to expect see more pain reduction by applying a sham anaesthetic cream on one arm in conjunction with a reduced laser stimulus. Pain ratings were assessed before, during and after treatment. Using lectroencephalography (EEG) we measured anticipatory neural responses and pain-evoked potentials to laser heat to determine how expectation of analgesia affected the response to a placebo manipulation. This was a reproducibility study JQ-EZ-05 and as such the experimental procedure was repeated after a minimum gap of 2 weeks. Significant reductions in pain-evoked potentials were shown after treatment.

The anticipatory responses did not change after treatment for the control and sham-treatment groups in the first session but were significantly lower in the repeat session relative to the first session in the sham-treatment group only. A significant correlation was found between the reduction in state anxiety in the repeat session relative to the first and the reduction in the anticipatory response in the sham-treatment group. Receiving a placebo treatment appears to cause a lasting change in the cognitive processing of pain for at least 6 weeks. This cognitive change may be facilitated by a change in state anxiety. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the time-course of processing metaphorical and literal sentences in the brain. ERPs were measured to sentence-final (Experiment 1) and mid-sentence (Experiment 2) critical words (CWs) as participants read and made plausibility judgments about familiar nominal metaphors (“”A is a B”") as well as literal and semantically anomalous sentences of the same form.