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Conduct problems affect between five and ten percent of children in New Zealand and are associated with a wide-range of adverse outcomes in later life. There is a clear need for the verification of evidence-based interventions for the New Zealand population including Maori. A pilot study of Functional Family Therapy (FFT) found significant (p < 0.01) pre to follow-up reductions in two of five conduct problem measures and medium effect sizes for four of five measures. Outcomes for Maori and non-Maori were similar. Variations in Therapist treatment fidelity and competence did not significantly influence outcomes. Parent satisfaction with FFT was high and Maori parents' satisfaction with cultural aspects of FFT very high. These findings provide initial evidence that FFT is effective in the New Zealand context. Keywords: Functional family therapy, conduct problems, treatment effectiveness, transportability, outcomes for Maori, Conduct problems including Conduct Disorder and Oppositional Defiant Disorder affect approximately 5% to 10% of New Zealand young people, with males and Maori being at greatest risk. There is substantial [...]

Reading and visual exploration impairments in unilateral homonymous visual field disorders are frequent and disabling consequences of acquired brain injury. Compensatory therapies have been developed, which allow patients to regain sufficient reading and visual exploration performance through systematic oculomotor training. However, it is still unclear whether the reading and visual exploration impairments require specific compensatory training for their improvement. We present the first cross-over rehabilitation study to determine whether the training-related performance improvements are task-specific, or whether there is a transfer of training-related improvements between reading and visual exploration. We compared the therapeutic effects of compensatory oculomotor reading and visual exploration training in 36 patients with unilateral homonymous visual field loss in a cross-over design. In addition, we explored whether the training sequence determines the overall treatment outcome. Our findings demonstrate that the training-related improvements in reading and visual exploration are highly specific and task-dependent, and there was no effect of training sequence.

Unilateral homonymous visual field disorders after brain damage are frequently associated with a severe impairment of reading, called hemianopic dyslexia. A specific treatment method has been developed which allows patients to regain sufficient reading performance by re-learning eye-movement control in reading through systematic oculomotor practice. However, it is still unclear whether the treatment effect associated with this training procedure critically depends on using text material. We therefore evaluated the effectiveness of systematic oculomotor training with non-text material (Arabic digits) in comparison with conventional oculomotor training using text material (words) in 40 patients with unilateral homonymous visual field disorders and hemianopic dyslexia. Non-text training was found to be as effective as conventional text training in improving reading performance and associated eye-movements in these patients. Our results suggest that using words is not critical to the treatment effect of this training procedure. Thus, lexical-semantic processes seem not to be necessary for re-learning eye-movement control in hemianopic dyslexia.

The relative efficacy with which appearance of a new object orients visual attention was investigated. At issue is whether the visual system treats onset as being of particular importance or only 1 of a number of stimulus events equally likely to summon attention. Using the 1-shot change detection paradigm, the authors compared detectability of new objects with changes occurring at already present objects--luminance change, color change, and object offset. Results showed that appearance of a new object was less susceptible to change blindness than changes that old objects could undergo. The authors also investigated whether it is onset per se that leads to enhanced detectability or onset of an object representation. Results showed that the onset advantage was eliminated for onsets that did not correspond with the appearance of a new object. These findings suggest that the visual system is particularly sensitive to the onset of a new object.

Patients with visual associative agnosia have a particular difficulty in identifying visually presented living things (plants and animals) as opposed to nonliving things. It has been claimed that this effect cannot be explained by differences in the inherent visual discriminability of living and nonliving things. To test this claim further, we performed two experiments with normal subjects. In Experiment 1 normal human observers were asked to identify objects in tachistoscopically presented line drawings. They made more errors with living things than with nonliving things. In Experiment 2 normal monkeys learned to discriminate among the same line drawings for food reward. They made many more errors in discriminating among living things than nonliving things. Agnostic patients' responses to the same line drawings were made available to us for correlative analysis with the subjects' responses to these drawings in Experiments 1 and 2. We conclude that a category-specific visual agnosia for living things can arise as a consequence of a modality-specific but not category-specific impairment in visual representation, since living things are more similar to each other visually than nonliving things are.

What is the long‐term trajectory of semantic memory deficits in patients who have suffered structural brain damage? Memory is, per definition, a changing faculty. The traditional view is that after an initial recovery period, the mature human brain has little capacity to repair or reorganize. More recently, it has been suggested that the central nervous system may be more plastic with the ability to change in neural structure, connectivity, and function. The latter observations are, however, largely based on normal learning in healthy subjects. Here, we report a patient who suffered bilateral ventro‐medial damage after presumed herpes encephalitis in 1971. He was seen regularly in the eighties, and we recently had the opportunity to re‐assess his semantic memory deficits. On semantic category fluency, he showed a very clear category‐specific deficit performing better that control data on non‐living categories and significantly worse on living items. Recent testing showed that his impairments have remained unchanged for more than 40 years. We suggest cautiousness when extrapolating the concept of brain plasticity, as observed during normal learning, to plasticity in the context of structural brain damage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]