Consciousness is a subjective experience. During both sleep and anesthesia, consciousness is common, evidenced by dreaming. A defining feature of dreaming is that, while conscious, we do not experience our environment; we are disconnected. Besides inducing behavioral unresponsiveness, a key goal of anesthesia is to prevent the experience of surgery ...

With the widespread adoption of electrical lighting during the 20th century, human and nonhuman animals became exposed to high levels of light at night for the first time in evolutionary history. This divergence from the natural environment may have significant implications for certain ecological niches because of the important influence ...

Current illusory contour models do not predict the disappearance of the Kanizsa illusion due to specific spatial luminance distributions within the inducers. We suggest that these stimulus conditions are characterized by an insufficient amount of induced brightness. Our model's core assumption is that contour edge detection of the Kanizsa illusion ...

The ability to elicit visual percepts through electrical stimulation of the retina has prompted numerous investigations examining the feasibility of restoring sight to the blind with retinal implants. The therapeutic efficacy of these devices will be strongly influenced by their ability to elicit neural responses that approximate those of normal ...

Recent theories suggest that error is detected based on the process generating an appropriate response from the presented stimulus, including stimulus processing (e.g. encoding and evaluation) and activation of the appropriate response. This study examines the effects of stimulus processing (related to stimulus deviance) and activation of the appropriate response ...

The relationship between the latencies of saccadic eye movements and the number of response alternatives is complex. Previously, we have found a decrease in exogenous saccade latencies with an increase in the number of response alternatives (i.e., an anti-Hick's effect). In the present study, we examined the effect of bottom ...

Several studies have linked increases in the N2 and P3 components to response conflict, evoked when multiple incompatible responses are simultaneously activated. However, these studies confound a change of response with a change of stimulus identity, and often a change in stimulus probability also. In two experiments, additional trial types ...

Crayfish showed avoidance reactions when mechanical stimulation was applied to their tailfan. The response pattern of the avoidance reaction was dependent on crayfish size. Small crayfish showed an escape-like dart response while larger crayfish displayed a defensive-like turn response. We show that the response pattern to the same sensory stimulus ...

BACKGROUND: Extremely rapid movements are frequently executed in response to novel, potentially threatening stimuli. The mechanism by which these sophisticated responses are generated is a topic of debate. The current study investigates: 1) the importance of stimulus-response congruence in rapid responses and 2) the relationship between the autonomic nervous system ...

Tlauka and McKenna ( 2000 ) reported a reversal of the traditional stimulus-response compatibility (SRC) effect (faster responding to a stimulus presented on the same side than to one on the opposite side) when the stimulus appearing on one side of a display is a member of a superordinate unit ...

When a single brief flash is accompanied by two auditory beeps, participants often report perceiving two flashes. The present experiment examined whether the perception of illusory redundant flashes can result in faster responses as compared to the perception of a single flash, because previous research has shown such a redundancy ...

Background and Aims Karrikinolide (KAR(1)) is a smoke-derived chemical that can trigger seeds to germinate. A potential application for KAR(1) is for synchronizing the germination of weed seeds, thereby enhancing the efficiency of weed control efforts. Yet not all species germinate readily with KAR(1), and it is not known whether ...

Responses to innocuous stimuli often habituate with repeated stimulation, but the mechanisms involved in dishabituation are less well studied. Chan et al. (2010b) found that hermit crabs were quicker to perform an anti-predator withdrawal response in the presence of a short-duration white noise relative to a longer noise stimulus. In ...

Classical conditioning of a motor response such as eyeblink is associated with the development of a pause in cerebellar Purkinje cell firing that is an important driver of the overt response. This conditioned Purkinje cell response is adaptively timed and has a specific temporal profile that probably explains the time ...

Cite this as: R. J. Mullins and C. A. Camargo Jr, Clinical & Experimental Allergy, 2011 (41) 766-768.

The aims of this study were to compare test-retest variability and accuracy measures between (1) manual palpation and a novel palpometer and (2) different force levels. Sixteen clinicians were instructed to target 0.5, 1.0, and 2.0 kg on a force meter using manual palpation and the new palpometer (adjustable spring-coil ...

: Evidence suggests a link between decreased dorsiflexion range of motion (DROM) and injury risk during landings. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of weight-bearing DROM on ankle mechanics during drop landings. : Forty-eight men (mean ± SD = 22.5 ± 4.7 yr) were measured for ...

Investigate lower extremity kinematics in runners with patellofemoral pain (PFP) syndrome during a prolonged run. For this study, 20 runners with PFP and 20 uninjured controls performed a prolonged run on a treadmill at a self-selected pace. The run ended based on HR, perceived exertion, or level of knee pain. ...

Invasive methods are more reproducible and accurate than non-invasive ones when it comes to recording knee kinematics, but they are usually less accessible and less safe, mainly due to risk of infection. For this reason, non-invasive methods with passive markers are widely used. With these methods, varying marker sets based ...

Brain-computer interface (BCI) systems use brain activity as an input signal and enable communication without movement. This study is a successor of our previous study (BCI demographics I) and examines correlations among BCI performance, personal preferences, and different subject factors such as age or gender for two sets of SSVEP ...

Head turns performed while rotating about another axis result in a cross-coupled stimulus (CCS) to the vestibular system. The CCS causes a tumbling sensation, and the magnitude of the tumbling sensation is dependent on the type of head turn (HT) that is performed. Asymmetric CCS responses to different rotational directions ...

PURPOSE: This study examined the influence of presentation level and mild-to-moderate hearing loss on the identification of a set of vowel tokens systematically varying in the frequency locations of their second and third formants. METHOD: Five normally-hearing (NH) and five hearing-impaired (HI) listeners identified synthesized vowels that represented both highly-identifiable ...

Dynamic finger joint motion is difficult to measure using optical motion analysis techniques due to the limited surface area allowed for adequate marker placement. This work describes an extension of a previously validated kinematic measurement technique using a reduced surface marker set and outlines the required calculations based on a ...

During binocular rivalry, the percept alternates between dissimilar images presented dichoptically. A central question in studies on binocular rivalry is whether its dynamics are affected by attention. Here we approach this question by studying how set size affects the number of alternations reported from a rivalry-inducing display. The results show ...

Pain secondary to instability in total knee arthroplasty (TKA) has been shown to be major cause of early failure. In this study, we focused on the effect of instability in TKA on the proximal tibio-fibular joint (PTFJ). We used a robotics model to compare the biomechanics of the PTFJ in ...

We aimed to investigate scaphoid and lunate movement in radial deviation and in slight and moderate ulnar deviation ranges in vivo. We obtained computed tomography scans of the right wrists from 20° radial deviation to 40° ulnar deviation in 20° increments in 6 volunteers. The 3-dimensional bony structures of the ...

To investigate the effects of uniquely processed titanium-permeated garments (Aquatitan) on the performance of and recovery from a high-intensity intermittent exercise. In a crossover, 14 nationally and regionally competing male soccer/hockey players performed two 5-d trials composed of a Loughborough Intermittent Shuttle Test on day 1, followed by 4 d ...

Neural systems that control movement maintain accuracy by adaptively altering motor commands in response to errors. It is often assumed that the error signal that drives adaptation is equivalent to the sensory error observed at the conclusion of a movement; for saccades, this is typically the visual (retinal) error. However, ...

Subject-specific three-dimensional finite element models of the knee joint were created and used to study the effect of the frontal plane tibiofemoral angle on the stress and strain distribution in the knee cartilage during the stance phase of the gait cycle. Knee models of three subjects with different tibiofemoral angle ...

Ankle sprain injury is very common in sports and the use of ankle support is crucial. This research investigated the effect of an ankle brace in reducing the ankle angular displacement and angular velocity during sudden supination. In the experiment, 11 healthy males were tested. The bracing condition, semi-rigid ankle ...

The most recent non-invasive methods for the recording of scapular motion are based on an acromion marker (AM) set and a single calibration (SC) of the scapula in a resting position. However, this method fails to accurately measure scapular kinematics above 90° of arm elevation, due to soft tissue artifacts ...

The accuracy of estimating the relative pose between knee replacement components, in terms of clinical motion, is important in the study of knee joint kinematics. The objective of this study was to determine the accuracy of the single-plane fluoroscopy method in calculating the relative pose between the femoral component and ...

A road traffic accident of an unusual nature is presented. The driver of a pickup cab sustained fatal injuries by a large piece of concrete (missile) set in motion consequent to a car crashing onto the centre island of a highway.

Colored target words were presented with distractor nonwords in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task. In Experiment 1, the attentional blink (AB) effect on T2 accuracy was larger when T1 was a difficult (low-frequency) word than when it was a high-frequency word. In Experiment 2 the effect of T1 ...

The purpose of the current study was to assess kinematic coupling within the foot in individuals across a range of arch heights. Seventeen subjects participated in this study. Weight-bearing lateral radiographs were used to measure the arch height, defined as angle between the 1st metatarsal and the calcaneus. A kinematic ...

Existing approaches to nonrigid structure from motion assume that the instantaneous 3D shape of a deforming object is a linear combination of basis shapes. These basis are object dependent and therefore have to be estimated anew for each video sequence. In contrast, we propose a dual approach to describe the ...

The purpose of our study was to 3-dimensionally assess cam engagement in male patients with symptomatic femoroacetabular impingement during motion. A total of 13 hips with cam-type impingement were investigated. Patient anatomy and clinical range of motion were determined. After 3-dimensional segmentation and reconstruction, the dynamic behavior of the cam ...

In this study, we investigate how two persons (dyads) coordinate their movements when performing cyclical motion patterns on a rocking board. In keeping with the Leading Joint Hypothesis (Dounskaia, 2005), the movement dynamics of the collaborating participants were expected to display features of a prime mover with low movement variability. ...

Standard gait analysis reports knee joint rotations in the three anatomical planes without addressing their different levels of reliability. Most clinical studies also restrict analysis to knee flexion-extension, because knee abduction-adduction and axial rotation are small with respect to the corresponding amount of measurement artefact. This study analyses a set ...

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a single joint mobilization treatment on dorsiflexion range of motion (DF ROM), posterior talar glide, and dynamic and static postural control in individuals with self-reported chronic ankle instability (CAI). In this randomized cross-over study, subjects received a Maitland Grade ...

Treatment of medial compartment knee osteoarthritis with high tibial osteotomy can produce an unintended change in the slope of the tibial plateau in the sagittal plane. The effect of changing posterior tibial slope (PTS) on cruciate ligament forces has not been quantified for knee loading in activities of daily living. ...

Trunk lean over the stance limb during gait has been linked to a reduction in the knee adduction moment, which is associated with joint loading. We examined differences in knee adduction moments and frontal plane trunk lean during gait between subjects with knee osteoarthritis and a control group of healthy ...

The effects of tuning the AFO footwear combination (AFOFC) for an adult with post-stroke hemiplegia were investigated. Gait analysis and tuning were carried out using a Vicon 3D motion analysis system and two force plates. Tuning of the AFOFC was accomplished by gradually modifying its design over a number of ...

Past studies have hypothesized that aspects of hominin upper limb morphology are linked to the ability to produce stone tools. However, we lack the data on upper limb motions needed to evaluate the biomechanical context of stone tool production. This study seeks to better understand the biomechanics of stone tool-making ...

Idiopathic osteoarthritis (OA) of the thumb carpometacarpal (CMC) joint is a common disabling disease that often causes pain and motion loss. The aims of this study were to characterize the multidimensional motion capability of the thumb CMC joint in a group with severe CMC OA and to compare it with ...

Controlled laboratory study using a cross-sectional design. To evaluate knee joint dynamics in elite volleyball players with and without a history of patellar tendinopathy, focusing on mechanical energy absorption and generation. We hypothesized that tendinopathy would be associated withreduced net joint work and net joint power. Patellar tendinopathy is a ...

The pivot shift test reproduces a complex instability of the knee joint following rupture of the anterior cruciate ligament. The grade of the pivot shift test has been shown to correlate to subjective criteria of knee joint function, return to physical activity and long-term outcome. This severity is represented by ...

This study was conducted to compare the effects of three ankle-foot orthosis (AFO) designs on walking after stroke and determine whether an ankle plantar flexion contracture impacts response to the AFOs. A total of 30 individuals, ranging from 6-215 months post-stroke, were tested in four conditions: shoes only (SH), dorsi-assist/dorsi-stop ...

In this study, the standard-sequence properties of a joint coordinate system were implemented for the glenohumeral joint by the use of a set of instantaneous geometrical planes. These are: a plane that is bound by the humeral long axis and an orthogonal axis that is the cross product of the ...

During surgery, all joints of the upper limbs, including shoulder, elbow, wrist, and finger, coordinate to complete a task. Hence, analysis of these joint movements during surgical manipulations is useful for the design of optimal hand-instrument interface. This study compared two types of surgical handheld manipulators with 6 degrees of ...