The silent period was longer in the patients than in the controls when a RMTh-related SI was used and did not differ between the two groups when a fixed SI was used. We concluded that the observed TMS changes could be interpreted as primary alterations of intracortical motor excitability followed by defects of cortical inhibition and should be attributed to schizophrenia, antipsychotic medication or the interaction between the two factors. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“Congenital

prosopagnosia is a condition that, present from an early age, makes it difficult for an individual to recognise someone from APR-246 molecular weight his or her face. Typically, research into prosopagnosia has employed static images that do not contain the extra information we can obtain from moving faces and, as a result, very little is known about the role of facial motion for identity processing in prosopagnosia.

Two experiments comparing the performance of four congenital prosopagnosics with that of age matched and younger controls on their ability to learn and recognise (Experiment 1) and match (Experiment 2) novel faces are reported. It was found that younger controls’ recognition memory performance increased with dynamic presentation, however only one of the four prosopagnosics selleck compound showed any improvement. Motion aided matching performance of age matched controls and all prosopagnosics. In addition, the face inversion effect, an effect that tends to be reduced in prosopagnosia, emerged when prosopagnosics matched moving faces. The results suggest during that facial motion can be used as a cue to identity, but that this may be a complex and difficult cue to retain. As prosopagnosics performance improved with the dynamic presentation of faces it would appear that prosopagnosics can use motion as a cue to recognition, and the different patterns for the face inversion effect that occurred in the prosopagnosics for static and dynamic faces suggests that the

mechanisms used for dynamic facial motion recognition are dissociable from static mechanisms. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“Endophenotypes have emerged as an important concept in the study of schizophrenia. Perceptual/attentional anomalies were examined as potential endophenotypes in a family study using a strategy for “”multiplex/simplex schizophrenia”". The sample was comprised of 797 subjects: 206 schizophrenia patients, 302 first-degree relatives and 289 controls. The Spanish versions of the Structured Interview for Assessing Perceptual/attentional Anomalies (SIAPA) and Positive and Negative Symptoms Scale (PANSS) were applied to measure the presence of perceptual/attentional anomalies, and positive and negative subscale respectively. An ANCOVA was carried out for global comparisons between groups.