Objective: Epidemiological data increasingly supports sleep as a determinant of cardiovascular disease risk. Fewer studies have investigated the mechanisms underlying this relationship or employed objective sleep assessment approaches to discern the CVD impact of specific sleep characteristics. The aim of this study was to examine associations between objectively assessed sleep duration and efficiency and daily blood pressure as a potential atherogenic pathway. Methods: A diverse community sample of 300 men and women ages 21-70, enrolled in the North Texas Heart Study participated in the study. Actigraphy assessed sleep was monitored over 2 consecutive nights with ambulatory blood pressure sampled randomly within 45-min blocks on the first and second day and second night. Results: Complete data was available for 216 participants. As predicted, individuals with lower mean sleep efficiency had higher daytime (systolic: B=-0.241, SE=0.100, p<.017, adjusted R2 =0.412; diastolic: B=-0.121, SE=0.06, p<.045, adjusted R2 =0.356) and nighttime BP (systolic: B= -0.696, SE=0.174, p<.001, adjusted R2 = .243; diastolic: B= -0.410, SE= 0.093, p<.001, adjusted R2 = .230). Moreover, lower sleep efficiency on one night was associated with higher systolic (B= -0.386, SE= 0.111, p<.001, adjusted R2 =0.325) but not diastolic BP (B= -0.126, SE= 0.067, p=.062, adjusted R2 = .223) the following day. Overall, sleep duration was associated with systolic BP only, with the exception of nighttime BP. Conclusions: Objectively assessed sleep efficiency and duration are associated with both concurrent nighttime BP and subsequent day BP and may serve as pathways linking sleep to CVD.

The hippocampus plays a critical role in binding together information into an integrated memory, and memory for these arbitrary associations is important when learning new words. Recent studies have investigated a learning mechanism called fast mapping (FM), showing that rapid acquisition of novel arbitrary associations can be learned independent of the hippocampus. In the current study we examine word-learning across two conditions more and less likely to require information integration via the hippocampus in typically developing children and individuals with hippocampal dysfunction (e.g., Down syndrome). Individuals with Down syndrome (DS) manifest hippocampal dysfunction and display memory and learning difficulties, hence could potentially benefit from alternative learning strategies. The current study found no benefit of the FM condition in either group. Both groups performed similarly and above chance level across the two conditions and over a week's delay, but a delay by group interaction suggested that the typically developing children showed improvement across all conditions after 1 week whereas performance in DS stayed consistent. Given evidence for sleep deficits in DS we examined how sleep disturbance related to delayed word retention. Sleep efficiency did not appear to be driving maintenance in either group. Future studies investigating when an individual with DS sleeps after learning, could provide a better understanding of how sleep can influence the word learning process. Additionally, future studies in an older group of children can also provide information on when the hippocampus and sleep dependent learning may develop in childhood.

This study investigated the relationship between synchronous neural activity and conscious visual perception by directly measuring neural synchrony in human EEG data collected during a perceptual task that controlled for the influence of attention. Improving a recently developed experimental paradigm and synchrony detection method (Rodriguez et al., 1999), participants viewed upright and scrambled Mooney face stimuli (fragmented black and white shapes that are perceived as faces upon visual closure) over 1000 ms exposures while performing a secondary attention task. During both presentation conditions, gamma-band synchrony increased to a maximum and then decreased to an above-baseline stationary level. Synchrony for the upright condition was significantly greater than synchrony for the scrambled condition during early and late portions of the exposure period. This result supports the hypothesis that neural synchrony mediates conscious visual organization and feature binding, although the possibility for a role in perception-related attention processes cannot be excluded.

The MMPI answer sheets of 30 psychiatric and 30 non-psychiatric patients at a Veterans Administration Hospital were scored for the standard MMPI and the scales of kincannon's 71-item Mini-Mult. Correlational data demonstrated good correspondence between the MMPI and the Mini-Mult for groups. Correlations ranged from .62 to .85 for the psychiatric group and from .20 to .81 for the non-psychiatric group. The psychiatric group was somewhat superior to the non-psychiatric group in terms of correspondence, which was expected. Individual profile pairs were also compared. An analysis of the validity scales, high points, and gerneral elevation indicated that the individual Mini-Mult profile was, in many cases, a poor predictor of its corresponding MMPi profile. Though the utility of the Mini-Mult in clinical practice is minimal, it could be usefully empolyed forresearch in group comparison.

Rule governance is critical to human society. However, could rule governance be found in non-human animals? A six year old, female, African white-necked raven (Covrus albicollis) named Shade correctly followed informal verbal commands to retrieve specified objects in the past. This ability was tested using two different methods. Both methods involved the researcher verbally asking the bird to retrieve one object out of two either from the same room or an adjacent room. While initial results were not significantly different than chance, review of trial recordings revealed that it is possible to predict when the bird will retrieve an incorrect object based solely on specific behaviors, termed inattentive or uninterested. Trials marked as inattentive by observers were significantly more likely to be incorrect than correct. This indicates that the bird was capable of retrieving the correct object, but that she also occasionally, intentionally retrieved the incorrect object.