Controlled study of haloperidol, pimozide and placebo for the treatment of Gilles de la Tourette's syndrome.

The results of this controlled study of the treatment of 57 patients with Gilles de la Tourette's syndrome suggested that both haloperidol and pimozide were more effective than placebo, but that haloperidol was slightly more effective than pimozide. Adverse effects occurred more frequently with haloperidol vs placebo than with pimozide vs placebo, but the frequency was not significantly different for haloperidol compared with pimozide. Clinically significant cardiac effects did not occur at a maximum dosage of 0.3 mg/kg or 20 mg/d for pimozide and 10 mg/d for haloperidol. However, the QTc interval was prolonged during pimozide treatment compared with that during haloperidol treatment, although the values for both medications were not in an abnormal range.

ECG changes during haloperidol and pimozide treatment of Tourette's disorder.

The ECG QTc interval was significantly prolonged by pimozide but not haloperidol or placebo in a randomized clinical trial with 40 patients with Tourette's disorder. However, no adverse cardiac effects or differences in rate, rhythm, or waveform were found.

Role of an abstract order schema in conceptual judgment.

Ss performed same-different judgments for which order information was logically irrelevant. In Experiments 1 and 2, the stimuli for the judgment task were derived from an ordered set of concepts from long-term memory (U.S. presidents ordered on the dimension of historical time); in Experiments 3 and 4 the stimuli were derived from two ordered sets of concepts. In the stimulus set for each experiment, there were several associate phrases for each concept and the task was to judge whether the phrases were paired with the same concept (Experiments 1, 2, and 3) or the same ordering (Experiment 4). The time to respond "different" decreased with the ordinal distance between the concepts even when the concepts belonged to different orderings. It is concluded that same-different judgments are based in part on amodal order information (i.e., not tied to any particular dimension). Two models of the implicated order schema are proposed and tested.

Literal and figurative interpretations are computed in equal time.

The time courses for constructing literal and figurative interpretations of simple propositions were measured with the response signal, speed-accuracy tradeoff procedure. No differences were found in comprehension speed for literal and figurative strings in a task that required judging whether a string of words was meaningful. Likewise, no differences were found in processing speed for nonsense and figurative strings in a task that required judging whether a string of words was literally true. Figurative strings were less likely to be judged meaningful than were literal strings and less likely to be rejected as literally true than were nonsense strings. The absence of time-course differences is inconsistent with approaches to figurative processing that contend that a figurative interpretation is computed after an anomalous literal interpretation. The time-course profiles suggest that literal and figurative interpretations are computed in equal time but that the meaning of the latter is less constrained than that of the former.

Words in a sentence become less accessible when an anaphor is resolved.

A noun that identifies an entity in a discourse becomes less accessible following an anaphoric reference to another entity. The phenomenon cannot be attributed to ad hoc strategies, memory decay, or context checking. It occurs for both common and proper nouns and for nouns that identify both characters and inanimate objects. It is stronger for nouns that identify important entities, as opposed to more peripheral ones.