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While evidence shows that dental erosion (DE) is often caused by gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), the relationship of DE severity to a patient's symptoms and receipt of appropriate medical treatment for GERD is not clearly understood. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the association between DE and GERD. Eighty participants underwent a Basic Erosive Wear Examination for DE and completed the Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) survey on symptoms of gastrointestinal reflux (PROMIS Scale v1.0, Gastrointestinal Gastroesophageal Reflux 13a) in English. Patients with observed erosive patterns were referred for gastroenterologic evaluation. The association between DE and GERD was assessed using multiple regression. The results showed that the extent of DE was positively associated with GERD symptoms (B = 0.585; 95% CI, 0.21-0.96), as measured by the PROMIS survey, in participants without a current diagnosis of GERD. Of the 80 patients in the study, 28 with more severe DE were evaluated in the gastroenterology department. A diagnosis of GERD was established for 27 of the 28, 9 of whom denied a past history of the disease. Twenty patients with GERD underwent upper endoscopy, and esophageal lesions were found in 6 patients (erosive esophagitis in 5 and Barrett esophagus in 1). Patients with clinically identified DE may benefit from medical evaluation and, if necessary, management of GERD. For a subset of patients, DE may be the only clinical indication of untreated or undertreated GERD, which could lead to serious esophageal changes. Dentists should consider referring patients with DE to primary care providers or gastrointestinal specialists to ensure that systemic conditions are identified and managed appropriately., Competing Interests: The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official views or policy of the Uniformed Services University, US Department of Defense, or its components. The authors do not have any financial interest in any companies discussed in this manuscript.

Few studies have investigated the perception of vestibular stimuli when they occur in sequences. Here, three experiments (n total = 33) are presented that focus on intravestibular motion sequences and the underlying perceptual decision-making process. Natural vestibular stimulation (yaw rotation or translation) was used to investigate the discrimination process of the direction of a subsequent spatially congruent or incongruent translation or rotation. The few existing studies focusing on unimodal motion sequences have uncovered self-motion aftereffects, similar to the visual motion aftereffect, possibly due to altered processing of sensory stimuli. An alternative hypothesis predicts a shift of spatial attention due to the cue motion influencing perception of the subsequent motion stimulus. The results show that participants systematically misjudged the direction of motion stimuli well above the detection threshold if the direction of the preceding cue motion stimulus was congruent with the direction of the target (a motion aftereffect). Hierarchical drift diffusion models were used to analyze the data. The results suggest that altered perceptual decision-making and the resulting misperceptions are likely to originate in altered processing of sensory vestibular information.

Vestibular cognition is a growing field of interest and relatively little is known about the underlying mechanisms. We tested the effect of prior beliefs about the relative probability (50:50 vs. 80:20) of motion direction (yaw rotation) using a direction discrimination task. We analyzed choices individually with a logistic regression model and together with response times using a cognitive process model. The results show that self-motion perception is altered by prior belief, leading to a shift of the psychometric function, without a loss of sensitivity. Hierarchical drift diffusion analysis showed that at the group level, prior belief manifests itself as an offset to the drift criterion. However, individual model fits revealed that participants vary in how they use cognitive information in perceptual decision making. At the individual level, the response bias induced by a prior belief resulted either in a change in starting point (prior to evidence accumulation) or drift rate (during evidence accumulation). Participants incorporate prior belief in a self-motion discrimination task, albeit in different ways.

Verbal short-term memory (STM) is a crucial cognitive function central to language learning, comprehension and reasoning, yet the processes that underlie this capacity are not fully understood. In particular, although STM primarily draws on a phonological code, interactions between long-term phonological and semantic representations might help to stabilise the phonological trace for words ("semantic binding hypothesis"). This idea was first proposed to explain the frequent phoneme recombination errors made by patients with semantic dementia when recalling words that are no longer fully understood. However, converging evidence in support of semantic binding is scant: it is unusual for studies of healthy participants to examine serial recall at the phoneme level and also it is difficult to separate the contribution of phonological-lexical knowledge from effects of word meaning. We used a new method to disentangle these influences in healthy individuals by training new 'words' with or without associated semantic information. We examined phonological coherence in immediate serial recall (ISR), both immediately and the day after training. Trained items were more likely to be recalled than novel nonwords, confirming the importance of phonological-lexical knowledge, and items with semantic associations were also produced more accurately than those with no meaning, at both time points. For semantically-trained items, there were fewer phoneme ordering and identity errors, and consequently more complete target items were produced in both correct and incorrect list positions. These data show that lexical-semantic knowledge improves the robustness of verbal STM at the sub-item level, even when the effect of phonological familiarity is taken into account., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Recent studies have shown that vestibular stimulation can influence affective processes. In the present study, we examined whether emotional information can also modulate vestibular perception. Participants performed a vestibular discrimination task on a motion platform while viewing emotional pictures. Six different picture categories were taken from the International Affective Picture System: mutilation, threat, snakes, neutral objects, sports, and erotic pictures. Using a Bayesian hierarchical approach, we were able to show that vestibular discrimination improved when participants viewed emotionally negative pictures (mutilation, threat, snake) when compared to neutral/positive objects. We conclude that some of the mechanisms involved in the processing of vestibular information are also sensitive to emotional content. Emotional information signals importance and mobilizes the body for action. In case of danger, a successful motor response requires precise vestibular processing. Therefore, negative emotional information improves processing of vestibular information., ((c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).)

Reading familiar words differs from reading unfamiliar non-words in two ways. First, word reading is faster and more accurate than reading of unfamiliar non-words. Second, effects of letter length are reduced for words, particularly when they are presented in the right visual field in familiar formats. Two experiments are reported in which right-handed participants read aloud non-words presented briefly in their left and right visual fields before and after training on those items. The non-words were interleaved with familiar words in the naming tests. Before training, naming was slow and error prone, with marked effects of length in both visual fields. After training, fewer errors were made, naming was faster, and the effect of length was much reduced in the right visual field compared with the left. We propose that word learning creates orthographic word forms in the mid-fusiform gyrus of the left cerebral hemisphere. Those word forms allow words to access their phonological and semantic representations on a lexical basis. But orthographic word forms also interact with more posterior letter recognition systems in the middle/inferior occipital gyri, inducing more parallel processing of right visual field words than is possible for any left visual field stimulus, or for unfamiliar non-words presented in the right visual field.

In the age-of-acquisition (AoA) effect, an advantage for recognition and production is found for items learned early in life, as compared with items learned later. In this laboratory analogue, participants learned to categorize novel random checkerboard stimuli. Some stimuli were presented from the onset of training; others were introduced later. At test, when early and late stimuli had equal cumulative frequency, early stimuli were classified significantly more quickly. Because stimuli were randomly assigned to be introduced either early or late, we can conclude that early stimuli were categorized more quickly because of their order of acquisition. This finding suggests that age- or order-of-acquisition effects are a general property of any learning system.

Italian is a language with a transparent orthography in which printed words can be translated into the correct sequence of phonemes using a limited set of rules. The rules of letter-sound conversion are, however, simpler for some letters than for others: The pronunciations of sequences involving the letters c and g are determined by complex (i.e., context-sensitive) rules that depend on the letters that follow them. In this article, we report two experiments in which Italian participants read aloud words containing simple or complex letter-sound conversion rules. In Experiment 1, we found that words containing complex rules were read more slowly than words containing simple, noncontextual rules. In Experiment 2, we found that the effect of rule complexity on naming speed held for low-frequency words but not high-frequency words. The results are interpreted in terms of a dual-route model in which rule complexity effects arise from sublexical procedures that are more involved in reading low-frequency words than high-frequency words. The experimental material used in this study may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.

The patterns of activation invoked in the two cerebral hemispheres by written words may be different. Two lexical decision experiments investigated several aspects of such activation patterns. Experiment 1 tested phonological and orthographic priming in the hemispheres, manipulating two levels of phonological and two levels of orthographic similarity. Orthographic priming in the left visual field (LVF) was significantly larger than in the right visual field (RVF). In Experiment 2, primes were phonologically identical to the targets (homophones) but differed in their orthographic similarity. For LVF targets, only orthographic priming was significant, whereas for RVF targets, the phonological primes were effective regardless of their orthographic similarity. The results imply that orthographic activation, though maintained by both hemispheres, is more characteristic of right hemisphere word recognition processes, whereas phonological priming is more characteristic of left hemisphere processes.