Attentional performance animal studies

Since the subject of wall stress evaluation has been discussed in detail in the review articles by Mirsky, 1974, 1979 Huisman et /, 1980 and Yin, 1981, this article will focus on several models which may be applied in the assessment of myocardial function. Particular attention will be given to those models which assess diastolic function since there is growing evidence from both clinical (Bonow et al, 1981 Soufer et al, 1983) and animal studies (Mirsky et al, 1983) that diastolic abnormalities in myocardial function precede abnormalities in systolic pump performance. 

Animal studies suggest that it is important to pay more attention to the nature of the task underlying test performance. That is, that test results in terms of an outcome score may be less important than knowing how the child does the task. Support for this comes from the observation that generally, in the more focused tests, false responses, trials to criterion, and error scores have proved more sensitive than scores based simply on the number of correct responses. Whether differences in the way children perform tests are important, and whether they explain differences in the results of psychometric test scores such as IQ tests, is another question. 

In general, the evidence from animal studies suggests that more attention should be paid to the nature of the task the child is required to do in a test situation, and that as well as recording an outcome score in terms of correct responses, other measures of performance such as incorrect responses, false positives, speed of response, and trials to criterion should be recorded. For... 

Other issues in veterinary bioequivalence which merit attention include policies to be followed when a product is to be used by more than one animal species. Is it sufficient to perform a bioequivalence study in only one species, or should studies be carried out in most or all the species for which the drug is recommended [46] There may be reason to believe that bioequivalence problems exist in some veterinary products [47,48]. 

Studies of animals with central cholinergic lesions produced by either pharmacological inhibition of choline uptake or direct excitotoxic lesions of basal forebrain cholinergic neurons have shown highly specific attentional deficits (Muir et al. 1992 Robbins et al. 1989). These animals showed deficits that might be predicted from studies of humans with AD that is, they showed increased response latency and increased responsiveness to irrelevant sensory stimuli. Studies by Vidal (1994b) have shown that administration of a nicotinic antagonist into rat prefrontal cortex impairs performance on spatial... 

The pharmacology of scopolamine also received due attention.39-49 Amongst other effects, the effect of scopolamine hydrobromide on the electrical activity of rat cerebellum was analysed.39 An increase in the electrical resistance of the skin of white rats was observed following injection with scopolamine.40 Scopolamine is only marginally effective in eliminating behavioural depression,41 and it was found to impair the performance of animals in a spatial maze.48 A comparative study on jV-butylscopolaminium bromide as an alternative to atropine has been undertaken.49... 

---