Resident-Led Palliative Care Education Project.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Despite the growth of palliative medicine, 39% of hospitals do not have palliative care teams for consultation or to provide resident education. We examined the impact of resident-led education in palliative care principles on attitudes toward and comfort with palliative medicine and end-of-life care among internal medicine residents. METHODS: An educational module designed by the authors was presented to other internal medicine residents in the program. Pre- and post-intervention survey data measuring residents' agreement with various statements regarding palliative medicine and end-of-life care were analyzed. Residents' agreement with various statements regarding palliative medicine and end-of-life care on a 5-point Likert scale was analyzed. RESULTS: Following the intervention, participants reported improved comfort with general knowledge of palliative medicine (p < 0.01), specific resources available to patients (p < 0.001), and explaining the difference between palliative care and end-of-life care (p < 0.001). In each of the seven specific domains of palliative medicine covered in the educational session, residents reported a statistically significant increase in comfort in all of the areas addressed (p < 0.05). CONCLUSION: This study demonstrates that a resident-led curriculum in palliative medicine can improve resident comfort within this still-under-represented area of medicine.

Sheep don't forget a face.

The human brain has evolved specialized neural mechanisms for visual recognition of faces, which afford us a remarkable ability to discriminate between, remember and think about many hundreds of different individuals. Sheep also recognize and are attracted to individual sheep and humans by their faces, as they possess similar specialized neural systems in the temporal and frontal lobes for assisting in this important social task, including a greater involvement of the right brain hemisphere. Here we show that individual sheep can remember 50 other different sheep faces for over 2 years, and that the specialized neural circuits involved maintain selective encoding of individual sheep and human faces even after long periods of separation.

Human face recognition in sheep: lack of configurational coding and right hemisphere advantage.

Face recognition in sheep is qualitatively similar to that in humans in terms of its left visual field bias, and the effects of expertise and configural coding. The current study was designed to determine whether such effects are species specific by investigating the case of sheep recognising humans. It was found that the sheep could identify human faces and while they showed a small inversion-induced decline in discriminatory performance, this was significantly less than seen with sheep faces. In other aspects, there were qualitative differences with human face recognition compared with conspecific recognition. In contrast with sheep faces there was no left visual field advantage in the recognition of human faces and the internal features were not used at all as visual cues. The data suggest that these sheep, whilst being extensively exposed to interactions with humans, were unable to identify them with all the same 'expert' methods as were used to discriminate other sheep. This suggests that different neural systems may, to some extent, be used for recognition of sheep as opposed to human faces. The relative contribution to differential neural processing of the faces of the different species and the role of expertise are discussed.

Configurational coding, familiarity and the right hemisphere advantage for face recognition in sheep.

This study examined characteristics of visual recognition of familiar and unfamiliar faces in sheep using a 2-way discrimination task. Of particular interest were effects of lateralisation and the differential use of internal (configurational) vs external features of the stimuli. Animals were trained in a Y-maze to identify target faces from pairs, both of which were familiar (same flock as the subjects) or both of which were unfamiliar (different flock). Having been trained to identify the rewarded face a series of stimuli were presented to the sheep, designed to test for the use of each visual hemifield in the discriminations and the use of internal and external facial cues. The first experiment showed that there was a left visual hemifield (LVF) advantage in the identification of 'hemifaces', and 'mirrored hemifaces' and 'chimeric' faces and that this effect was strongest with familiar faces. This represents the first evidence for visual field bias outside the primate literature. Results from the second experiment showed that, whilst both familiar and unfamiliar faces could be identified by the external features alone, only the familiar faces could be recognised by the internal features alone. Overall the results suggest separate recognition methods for socially familiar and unfamiliar faces, with the former being coded more by internal, configurational cues and showing a lateral bias to the left visual field.