The development of change blindness: children's attentional priorities whilst viewing naturalistic scenes.

Change blindness describes the surprising difficulty of detecting large changes in visual scenes when changes occur during a visual disruption. In order to study the developmental course of this phenomenon, a modified version of the flicker paradigm, based on Rensink, O'Regan & Clark (1997), was given to three groups of children aged 6-12 years and to a group of adults. This paradigm tested the ability to detect single colour, presence/absence and location changes of both high and low semantic importance in a complex scene. Semantically important changes were detected more quickly and accurately than less semantically important changes, by all age groups, indicating that children had the same attentional priorities as adults. Older children achieved more efficient and accurate detection of changes than younger children and reached almost adult level at 10-12 years old. These improvements parallel age-related developments in attention and visual perception.

Anaesthesia for bronchoscopy: examination of a standard technique.

An anaesthetic technique for bronchoscopy is described, based on increments of methohexitone given in strict relation to body weight and time, suxamethonium being used to produce relaxation. There was no awareness in the 75 patients studied, while the recovery was rapid and unrelated to the duration of bronchoscopy. The efficacy of small aliquots of lignocaine in reducing injection pain was the same whether given before, or mixed with, the initial methohexitone injection. Other sequelae relating to the anaesthetic technique were minimal.

A safety block for scavenging systems.

A safety block is described which protects the patient from expiratory obstruction when using scavenging systems, and provides the anaesthetist with a visual and auditory check on the functioning of the system.

Day case anaesthesia and memory.

Two simple anaesthetic techniques were administered to forty healthy women undergoing minor gynaecological surgery. There was a significantly shorter immediate recovery period following the use of a fentanyl and methohexitone technique. Memory function testing revealed an impairment of the ability to retain new information following anaesthesia. This returned to normal within 3 hr.

Massive lignocaine overdose during cardiopulmonary bypass. Successful treatment with cardiac pacing.

A case of accidental massive overdose of lignocaine while a patient was on cardiopulmonary bypass is described. The benefits of cardiopulmonary bypass and cardiac pacing in the management of the patient are discussed.