Sensory evaluation of dairy supplements enriched with reduced iron, ferrous sulfate or ferrous fumarate / Evaluación sensorial de suplementos lácteos enriquecidos con hierro reducido, sulfato ferroso o fumarato ferroso

Objective. To determine the degree of liking of the Oportunidades programme dietary supplements (DS) -purees and beverages- added with different iron salts (IS): reduced iron (RI), ferrous sulphate (FS) or ferrous fumarate (FF) during 24 weeks of storage. Materials and methods. The DS were evaluated through a hedonic scale for aroma, flavour and colour attributes; at time zero and every eight weeks, each panel member evaluated three DS with same flavour and presentation but different IS. Seventy women participated as panel members. Results. The chocolate and banana DS exhibited a change in preference by colour and flavour due to storage. DS with FS or RI showed the least preference by flavour and colour in the context of the three IS considered. The chocolate and neutral DS enriched with FS changed their colour and flavour. Conclusion. DS were, in general, well-liked; nonetheless, for purees enriched with FS and for beverages enriched with RI, the less-liked attributes were colour and flavour.

Objetivo. Determinar el nivel de agrado de los suplementos alimenticios (SA) (papillas y bebidas) del Programa Oportunidades, adicionados con diferentes sales de hierro (SH): hierro reducido (HR), sulfato ferroso (SF) o fumarato ferroso (FF), durante 24 semanas de almacenamiento. Material y métodos. Se evaluaron mediante una escala hedónica los atributos olor, sabor y color; a tiempo cero y cada ocho semanas, cada juez evaluó tres suplementos, mismo sabor, presentación y diferente SH. Participaron 70 mujeres. Resultados. Los SA sabor chocolate y plátano presentaron modificación del agrado por color y sabor durante el almacenamiento. Los SA con SF o HR presentaron el menor agrado para sabor y olor por efecto de las SH. En los SA sabor chocolate y natural adicionados con SF se afectó el color y el sabor. Conclusión. Los SA en general presentaron agrado; sin embargo, en las papillas adicionadas con SF y las bebidas con HR los atributos limitantes fueron color y sabor.

Neural Substrates of Hanja (Logogram) and Hangul (Phonogram) Character Readings by Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

The two basic scripts of the Korean writing system, Hanja (the logography of the traditional Korean character) and Hangul (the more newer Korean alphabet), have been used together since the 14th century. While Hanja character has its own morphemic base, Hangul being purely phonemic without morphemic base. These two, therefore, have substantially different outcomes as a language as well as different neural responses. Based on these linguistic differences between Hanja and Hangul, we have launched two studies; first was to find differences in cortical activation when it is stimulated by Hanja and Hangul reading to support the much discussed dual-route hypothesis of logographic and phonological routes in the brain by fMRI (Experiment 1). The second objective was to evaluate how Hanja and Hangul affect comprehension, therefore, recognition memory, specifically the effects of semantic transparency and morphemic clarity on memory consolidation and then related cortical activations, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) (Experiment 2). The first fMRI experiment indicated relatively large areas of the brain are activated by Hanja reading compared to Hangul reading. The second experiment, the recognition memory study, revealed two findings, that is there is only a small difference in recognition memory for semantic transparency, while for the morphemic clarity was much larger between Hanja and Hangul. That is the morphemic clarity has significantly more effect than semantic transparency on recognition memory when studies by fMRI in correlation with behavioral study.

Facial emotion recognition deficits in relatives of children with autism are not associated with 5HTTLPR / Prejuízos no reconhecimento de emoções faciais em parentes de primeiro grau de portadores de autismo não são associados com o polimorfismo 5HTTLPR

OBJECTIVE: A large body of evidence suggests that several aspects of face processing are impaired in autism and that this impairment might be hereditary. This study was aimed at assessing facial emotion recognition in parents of children with autism and its associations with a functional polymorphism of the serotonin transporter (5HTTLPR). METHOD: We evaluated 40 parents of children with autism and 41 healthy controls. All participants were administered the Penn Emotion Recognition Test (ER40) and were genotyped for 5HTTLPR. RESULTS: Our study showed that parents of children with autism performed worse in the facial emotion recognition test than controls. Analyses of error patterns showed that parents of children with autism over-attributed neutral to emotional faces. We found evidence that 5HTTLPR polymorphism did not influence the performance in the Penn Emotion Recognition Test, but that it may determine different error patterns. CONCLUSION: Facial emotion recognition deficits are more common in first-degree relatives of autistic patients than in the general population, suggesting that facial emotion recognition is a candidate endophenotype for autism.

OBJETIVO: Diversos estudos sugerem que o processamento de emoções faciais está prejudicado em portadores de autismo e que tal prejuízo possa ser hereditário. Nós estudamos o reconhecimento de emoções faciais em parentes de primeiro grau de portadores de autismo e suas associações com o polimorfismo funcional de transportador de serotonina (5HTTLPR). MÉTODO: Foram avaliados 40 parentes de primeiro grau de portadores de autismo e 41 controles saudáveis. Todos os participantes foram submetidos ao Teste de Reconhecimento de Emoções (ER40) da Bateria Neuropsicológica Computadorizada da Universidade da Pensilvânia (PENNCNP) e genotipados para o 5HTTLPR. RESULTADOS: Os parentes de primeiro grau de portadores de autismo apresentaram pior reconhecimento de emoções faciais comparados aos controles. A análise do padrão de erros mostrou que eles tendiam a reconhecer faces demonstrando emoções como neutras. O genótipo para o 5HTTLPR não influenciou a acurácia no Teste de Reconhecimento de Emoções, mas os homozigotos para o alelo L apresentaram padrão de erros diferente. Nossos resultados sugerem que prejuízos no reconhecimento de emoções faciais possam ser encontrados em maiores taxas em parentes de primeiro grau de autistas do que na população em geral. CONCLUSÃO: Nossos resultados sugerem que o reconhecimento de emoções faciais seja um candidato a endofenótipo no estudo do autismo.

Validación de la prueba de memoria episódica de repetición de la Universidad del Sur de California (USC-REMT) / Validation of the University of Southern California Repeatable Episodic Memory Test

Background: Memory is affected differently with the passage of time; specifically, episodic memory presents a clear decline. There is a relationship of this memory impairment and degenerative and psychiatric diseases. Aim: To determine the reliability and validity of the University of Southern California Repeatable Episodic Memory Test (USC-REMT) in a sample of Chilean adults. Material and Methods: The instrument was administered to 178 subjects living in the Metropolitan Region of Santiago. The sessions were individual, during the morning, lasting approximately 15 minutes. Results: The ANOVA indicates that subjects over 61 years old had lower scores in the test than their younger counterparts. There was an inverse correlation between age and success in "Free recall" (r =- 0.570), "Recognition indicating yes-no" (r = -0.412) and "forced-choice recognition" (r =- 0.371). Regression analysis showed that age explained 32.1 percent "free recall" variance. The three components were grouped into a single factor. Conclusions: The USC-REMT meets the criteria for validity and reliability to be applied for clinical and research purposes.

Long-term social recognition memory in adult male rats: factor analysis of the social and non-social behaviors

A modified version of the intruder-resident paradigm was used to investigate if social recognition memory lasts at least 24 h. One hundred and forty-six adult male Wistar rats were used. Independent groups of rats were exposed to an intruder for 0.083, 0.5, 2, 24, or 168 h and tested 24 h after the first encounter with the familiar or a different conspecific. Factor analysis was employed to identify associations between behaviors and treatments. Resident rats exhibited a 24-h social recognition memory, as indicated by a 3- to 5-fold decrease in social behaviors in the second encounter with the same conspecific compared to those observed for a different conspecific, when the duration of the first encounter was 2 h or longer. It was possible to distinguish between two different categories of social behaviors and their expression depended on the duration of the first encounter. Sniffing the anogenital area (49.9 percent of the social behaviors), sniffing the body (17.9 percent), sniffing the head (3 percent), and following the conspecific (3.1 percent), exhibited mostly by resident rats, characterized social investigation and revealed long-term social recognition memory. However, dominance (23.8 percent) and mild aggression (2.3 percent), exhibited by both resident and intruders, characterized social agonistic behaviors and were not affected by memory. Differently, sniffing the environment (76.8 percent of the non-social behaviors) and rearing (14.3 percent), both exhibited mostly by adult intruder rats, characterized non-social behaviors. Together, these results show that social recognition memory in rats may last at least 24 h after a 2-h or longer exposure to the conspecific.

Correlations of recognition memory performance with expression and methylation of brain-derived neurotrophic factor in rats

Object recognition memory allows discrimination between novel and familiar objects. This kind of memory consists of two components: recollection, which depends on the hippocampus, and familiarity, which depends on the perirhinal cortex (Pcx). The importance of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) for recognition memory has already been recognized. Recent evidence suggests that DNA methylation regulates the expression of BDNF and memory. Behavioral and molecular approaches were used to understand the potential contribution of DNA methylation to recognition memory. To that end, rats were tested for their ability to distinguish novel from familiar objects by using a spontaneous object recognition task. Furthermore, the level of DNA methylation was estimated after trials with a methyl-sensitive PCR. We found a signifcant correlation between performance on the novel object task and the expression of BDNF, negatively in hippocampal slices and positively in perirhinal cortical slices. By contrast, methylation of DNA in CpG island 1 in the promoter of exon 1 in BDNF only correlated in hippocampal slices, but not in the Pxc cortical slices from trained animals. These results suggest that DNA methylation may be involved in the regulation of the BDNF gene during recognition memory, at least in the hippocampus.

Effect of the time-of-day of training on explicit memory

Studies have shown a time-of-day of training effect on long-term explicit memory with a greater effect being shown in the afternoon than in the morning. However, these studies did not control the chronotype variable. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to assess if the time-of-day effect on explicit memory would continue if this variable were controlled, in addition to identifying the occurrence of a possible synchronic effect. A total of 68 undergraduates were classified as morning, intermediate, or afternoon types. The subjects listened to a list of 10 words during the training phase and immediately performed a recognition task, a procedure which they repeated twice. One week later, they underwent an unannounced recognition test. The target list and the distractor words were the same in all series. The subjects were allocated to two groups according to acquisition time: a morning group (N = 32), and an afternoon group (N = 36). One week later, some of the subjects in each of these groups were subjected to a test in the morning (N = 35) or in the afternoon (N = 33). The groups had similar chronotypes. Long-term explicit memory performance was not affected by test time-of-day or by chronotype. However, there was a training time-of-day effect [F (1,56) = 53.667; P = 0.009] with better performance for those who trained in the afternoon. Our data indicated that the advantage of training in the afternoon for long-term memory performance does not depend on chronotype and also that this performance is not affected by the synchronic effect.

Serotonergic modulation of face-emotion recognition: [review]

Facial expressions of basic emotions have been widely used to investigate the neural substrates of emotion processing, but little is known about the exact meaning of subjective changes provoked by perceiving facial expressions. Our assumption was that fearful faces would be related to the processing of potential threats, whereas angry faces would be related to the processing of proximal threats. Experimental studies have suggested that serotonin modulates the brain processes underlying defensive responses to environmental threats, facilitating risk assessment behavior elicited by potential threats and inhibiting fight or flight responses to proximal threats. In order to test these predictions about the relationship between fearful and angry faces and defensive behaviors, we carried out a review of the literature about the effects of pharmacological probes that affect 5-HT-mediated neurotransmission on the perception of emotional faces. The hypothesis that angry faces would be processed as a proximal threat and that, as a consequence, their recognition would be impaired by an increase in 5-HT function was not supported by the results reviewed. In contrast, most of the studies that evaluated the behavioral effects of serotonin challenges showed that increased 5-HT neurotransmission facilitates the recognition of fearful faces, whereas its decrease impairs the same performance. These results agree with the hypothesis that fearful faces are processed as potential threats and that 5-HT enhances this brain processing.

Scan: perfil de desempenho em crianças de sete e oito anos / Scan: performance profile of children with seven to eight years

TEMA: avaliar o processamento auditivo é um procedimento muito útil para detectarmos alguma alteração no processo não apenas de recepção, mas também análise e organização da mensagem sonora, e também para trazer um norteador para o processo terapêutico fonoaudiológico que visa à maximização da efetividade da comunicação. OBJETIVO: caracterizar o padrão de normalidade da pontuação em teste de triagem de processamento auditivo, aplicado em quarenta crianças de sete e oito anos e comparar os achados do presente estudo com a literatura nacional. MÉTODO: foram avaliadas quarenta crianças portadoras de audição normal, sem indicativos de distúrbio do processamento auditivo e pertencentes à rede regular de ensino de Bauru-SP. RESULTADOS: a pontuação média obtida na idade de sete anos nos sub-testes fala filtrada, fala no ruído e palavras competitivas foi de 33,35; 32,5 e 71,8 respectivamente, e nas crianças de oito anos foi de 33,5; 34,5 e 79,9. CONCLUSÃO: as diferenças estatisticamente significantes encontradas entre os estudos analisados mostram a necessidade de um trabalho que avalie um maior número de crianças de regiões geográficas e sociais diferentes.

BACKGROUND: the assessment of the auditory processing is a useful procedure to detect deficits not only related to sound reception but also to the analysis and organization of sound information, which in turn leads to a therapeutic process that aims at the maximization of communication. AIM: to characterize normal score patterns in a auditory processing screening test, applied in 40 children with ages varying from seven to eight years and to compare the results of the present study to those in the national literature. METHOD: 40 normal hearing children, students of regular schools of Bauru-SP, who presented no signs of auditory processing disorder, were evaluated. RESULTS: the average scores obtained for children with seven years of age in the subtests of filtered speech, speech in noise and competing words were of 33.35, 32.5, and 71.8 respectively, and for children with eight years of age the scores were of 33.5, 34.5 and 79.9. CONCLUSION: the significant statistical differences found between the analyzed studies indicate the need of studies involving a larger number of children of different geographic and social areas.

Mental rotation of anthropoid hands: a chronometric study

It has been shown that mental rotation of objects and human body parts is processed differently in the human brain. But what about body parts belonging to other primates? Does our brain process this information like any other object or does it instead maximize the structural similarities with our homologous body parts? We tried to answer this question by measuring the manual reaction time (MRT) of human participants discriminating the handedness of drawings representing the hands of four anthropoid primates (orangutan, chimpanzee, gorilla, and human). Twenty-four right-handed volunteers (13 males and 11 females) were instructed to judge the handedness of a hand drawing in palm view by pressing a left/right key. The orientation of hand drawings varied from 0° (fingers upwards) to 90° lateral (fingers pointing away from the midline), 180° (fingers downwards) and 90° medial (finger towards the midline). The results showed an effect of rotation angle (F(3, 69) = 19.57, P < 0.001), but not of hand identity, on MRTs. Moreover, for all hand drawings, a medial rotation elicited shorter MRTs than a lateral rotation (960 and 1169 ms, respectively, P < 0.05). This result has been previously observed for drawings of the human hand and related to biomechanical constraints of movement performance. Our findings indicate that anthropoid hands are essentially equivalent stimuli for handedness recognition. Since the task involves mentally simulating the posture and rotation of the hands, we wondered if "mirror neurons" could be involved in establishing the motor equivalence between the stimuli and the participants' own hands.

Comparison of Brazilian and American norms for the International Affective Picture System (IAPS)

OBJETIVO: O presente artigo compara as normas obtidas no Brasil e nos EUA para o "International Affective Picture System" (IAPS), um conjunto de fotografias emocionais amplamente utilizado na investigacão experimental. MÉTODOS: Os sujeitos foram 1.062 universitários brasileiros (364 homens e 698 mulheres) que avaliaram as 707 fotografias do IAPS nas dimensões prazer, alerta e dominância, utilizando o mesmo procedimento do estudo normativo original realizado nos EUA, permitindo uma comparacão direta dos dados através de correlacões lineares de Pearson e testes t de Student. RESULTADOS: Todas as correlacões entre as populacões foram altamente significativas, sendo o maior coeficiente o da dimensão prazer, seguido da dimensão dominância e alerta. Entretanto, os brasileiros atribuíram maiores valores médios à dimensão alerta do que os norte-americanos. CONCLUSAO: Os resultados confirmam que esse conjunto de estímulos pode ser usado no Brasil como um instrumento de medidas afetivas em funcão das altas correlacões encontradas entre as duas populacões, apesar das diferencas encontradas na dimensão alerta, que serão discutidas em detalhe.

Evaluation of two experimental models of hepatic encephalopathy in rats

The serious neuropsychological repercussions of hepatic encephalopathy have led to the creation of several experimental models in order to better understand the pathogenesis of the disease. In the present investigation, two possible causes of hepatic encephalopathy, cholestasis and portal hypertension, were chosen to study the behavioral impairments caused by the disease using an object recognition task. This working memory test is based on a paradigm of spontaneous delayed non-matching to sample and was performed 60 days after surgery. Male Wistar rats (225-250 g) were divided into three groups: two experimental groups, microsurgical cholestasis (N = 20) and extrahepatic portal hypertension (N = 20), and a control group (N = 20). A mild alteration of the recognition memory occurred in rats with cholestasis compared to control rats and portal hypertensive rats. The latter group showed the poorest performance on the basis of the behavioral indexes tested. In particular, only the control group spent significantly more time exploring novel objects compared to familiar ones (P < 0.001). In addition, the portal hypertension group spent the shortest time exploring both the novel and familiar objects (P < 0.001). These results suggest that the existence of portosystemic collateral circulation per se may be responsible for subclinical encephalopathy.

Brazilian standardised norms for a set of pictures are comparable with those obtained internationally

Snodgrass & Vanderwart (1980) standardized a set of 260 pictures in the USA for use in studies of cognitive processes that employ pictured objects as laboratory analogues of object themselves. Since then similar norms for this set were obtained in Britain, Spain, Japan and Iceland and a larger set of 400 pictures (including the original 260: Cycowicz et al., 1997) was studied in France and Brazil. The present article provides a comparison of the norms obtained in Brazil and internationally. The pattern of correlations among the Brazilian and other standardizations were equivalent to that previously observed: despite pictures being judged to be of similar familiarity and visual complexity (high positive correlations), name agreement was less correlated, possibly due to differences in the languages spoken in each country and/or in the sample size used in each study. Results confirm the adequacy of the Brazilian norms

A set of 400 pictures standardised for Portuguese: norms for name agreement, familiarity and visual complexity for children and adults

The present article provides normative measures for 400 pictured objects (Cycowicz et al., 1997) viewed by Portuguese speaking Brazilian University students and 5-7 year-old children. Name agreement, familiarity and visual complexity ratings were obtained. These variables have been shown to be important for the selection of adequate stimuli for cognitive studies. Children's name agreement was lower than that of adults. The children also failed to provide adequate modal names for 103 concepts, rated drawings as less familiar and less complex, and chose shorter names for pictures. The differences in ratings between adults and children were higher than those observed in the literature employing smaller picture sets. The pattern of correlations among measures observed in the present study was consistent with previous reports, supporting the usefulness of the 400 picture set as a tool for cognitive research in different cultures and ages