Neural correlates of tactile simultaneity judgement: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study.

Simultaneity judgement (SJ) is a temporal discrimination task in which the targets span an ultimately short time range (zero or not). Psychophysical studies suggest that SJ is adequate to probe the perceptual components of human time processing in pure form. Thus far, time-relevant neural correlates for tactile SJ are unclear. We performed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural correlates of tactile SJ using tactile number judgement as a time-irrelevant control task. As our main result, we demonstrated that the right inferior parietal lobule (IPL) is an SJ-specific region. The right IPL was detected by both parametric and non-parametric statistical analyses, and its activation intensity fulfilled a strict statistical criterion. In addition, we observed that some left-dominant regions (e.g., the striatum) were specifically activated by successive stimuli during SJ. Meanwhile, no region was specifically activated by simultaneous stimuli during SJ. Accordingly, we infer that the neural process for tactile SJ is as follows: the striatum estimates the time interval between tactile stimuli; based on this interval, the right IPL discriminates the successiveness or simultaneity of the stimuli. Moreover, taking detailed behavioural results into account, we further discuss possible concurrent or alternative mechanisms that can explain the fMRI results.

Spectrofluorometric determination of kynurenic acid with horseradish peroxidase in the presence of hydrogen peroxide.

The catalytic activity of horseradish peroxidase (HRP) in the presence of hydrogen peroxide has been investigated for the fluorescent derivatization of kynurenic acid under conditions with no exposure to light. Non-fluorescent kynurenic acid was converted into a fluorescent compound (Ex: 367 nm, Em: 470 nm) with HRP in the presence of hydrogen peroxide, and the optimum conditions of this fluorescent derivatization were investigated. Moreover, this fluorescent derivatization was developed for a spectrofluorometric determination of trace amounts of kynurenic acid by measuring the fluorescence intensity of the fluorescent compound. The calibration curve obtained was linear from 1.0 to 10.0 nmol of kynurenic acid in a 1.0 mL sample solution. The relative standard deviation at 5.0 nmol of kynurenic acid was 5.71% (n=5). By adjusting the bandwidths for both the excitation and emission to 15 nm, the calibration curve was also linear in the range between 0.1 to 1.0 nmol of kynurenic acid in a 1.0 mL sample solution. This method was applied to the fluorometric determination of trace amounts of kynurenic acid in the control sera.