Cognitive process

Supplementary CNS safety studies are more complex procedures, investigating test substance effects on cognitive processes, electrophysiological brain activity or their potential to cause drug-dependence/abuse. The following Section is therefore divided into three sub-sections dealing with these different areas. As for the core battery studies described above, an essential 

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The approach puts students in an active role and increases their motivation for learning. Higher cognitive processes are also emphasized, because students have to make the analyses and draw the conclusions. [Teacher from School N° 4, general remarks to the approach]... 

Hindmarch I, Parrott AC and Lanza M (1979). The effects of ergot alkaloid derivative (Hydergine) on aspects of psychomotor performance, arousal, and cognitive processing ability. Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, 19, 726-732. 

Drugs that act on the H3 receptor are being developed for the treatment of obesity, sleep disturbances, epilepsy and cognitive disorders. The ability of histamine to promote arousal, suppress appetite, elevate seizure threshold and stimulate cognitive processes implies that compounds able to enhance the release of neuronal histamine should mimic these effects. Several H3 antagonists currently in development demonstrate such activity and show promise as effective and novel therapeutic agents [40, 84-86]. Because H3 agonists suppress the release of... 

Abstract For most mammals, the ability to detect odours and discriminate between them is necessary for survival. Information regarding the availability of food, the presence of predators and the sex, age and dominance status of conspecifics is odour mediated. Probably because of this extraordinary reliance upon odour cues, mice and rats have developed the ability to learn and remember information associated with olfactory cues as effectively as primates recall visually related cues. As a result, these rodents have become the model of choice to study the neural and cognitive processes involved in olfactory discrimination. In this paper, we describe some of the more ethologically based tasks used in assessing olfactory discrimination and the advantages and disadvantages of the different methodologies employed. 

The conditioned odour preference tasks for rats were developed to assess more complex cognitive processes. In general, rats appear more suitable than mice for such tasks, not because their cognitive abilities are known to be greater, but because... 

Ethologically appropriate tasks are extremely useful to study olfactory discrimination in rodents to investigate several areas of current scientific interest. They provide us with the methodology to increase our understanding of cognitive processes... 

Risk may be perceived differently across societal groups, and how consumers cope with perceived risk will depend on their risk attitude. Before a person is able to respond to risk, risk must first be perceived (Trimpop, 1994). Stone et al. (1994) modeled the identification of risks as a cognitive process of identification, storage, and retrieval. The level of risk that a food-related behavior provides depends on the consumer s risk perception (Sparks et al., 1995). 

Grammer, K. 1989. Human Courtship Biological Bases and Cognitive Processing. In The sociobiology of sexual and reproductive Strategies (Ed. by A. Rasa, C. Vogel E. Volland), pp. 147—169. London Chapman and Hall. 

Emotions are subjective mood states that interact reciprocally with cognitive processes. Personality refers to traits of emotion and behavior that are more stable over time. Normal and pathological emotional states can be measured, to some degree, with objective tests to quantify changes in mood over time (or after drug treatment). Thus, several clinical scales have been developed for anxiety, depression, and mania. These measures are particularly useful for evaluating the effectiveness of psychotherapeutic herbs. 

Chronic elevation of corticosteroids has been shown to impair cognitive processes and have neurotoxic effects (Sheline et al. 1996 de Kloet et al. 1999). The cumulative effects of elevated cortisol levels are associated with cognitive impairments in human aging (Lupien et al. 1999). Thus, the cognitive and neuroprotective effects of ginkgo may be partly mediated through its neuroendocrine effects. 

When long-term chronic cannabis users (i.e., daily use for 15-24 years) were compared to shortterm users and nonusers, they were found to have elevated absolute power of theta activity over bilateral frontal-central cortex, as well as significantly increased interhemispheric coherence of theta activity across central and posterior regions (Struve et al. 1998). Concurrent reaction time studies also showed slowed cognitive processing in that group. Other work by this group has shown that in... 

Pepeu G, Giovannini MG. 2004. Changes in acetylcholine extracellular levels during cognitive processes. Learn Mem 11(1) 21-27. 

Winograd, Terry, Language as a Cognitive Process, Volume 1, Addison-Wesley, Reading, 1983. 

The studies summarized above indicate that while nicotine has sexually dimorphic effects on cognitive processes, no generalizations can be made. The effects depend on the type of test and performance measures as well as on the route and regimen of nicotine administration. Eurthermore, the species, strain and age of animals, motivation, and mood would have substantial impact on the cognitive effects of nicotine. 

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