No abstract

A whole-body plethysmographic technique was developed and then used to detect experimentally induced asthma in guinea pigs and to assess pharmacological treatments of allergic and classically conditioned attacks. Inhalation of a beta adrenergic compound (isoproterenol) controlled both forms of attack. Atropine and methscopolamine, parasympathetic blocking agents, prevented conditional but not allergic attacks; diphenhydramine, an antihistamine, prevented allergic attacks; and methysergide, which blocks serotonin (which is believed to trigger human asthma), prevented neither. The guinea pig's allergic reaction is probably the result of a bronchospasm induced by histamine released in tissue of the airway by a local combination of allergen and antibody. The conditional attack is believed to be a constriction of the airway mediated by parasympathetic fibers of central origin.

No abstract

Two studies of conceptual rule-learning by 36 hospitalized psychiatric patients revealed that (a) while all were clinically diagnosed as schizophrenic, they differed widely in their ability to discover abstract rules; (b) the Whitaker Index of Schizophrenic Thinking (WIST) strongly predicted the patients' ability to learn and to apply a conceptual rule; and (c) regardless of severity of conceptual impairment, the patients were unaffected by modest levels of externally generated irrelevant information as presented through the modality of vision. Deficits in abstractive ability, when they exist, are believed to be due to a schizophrenic patient's inability to prevent task-irrelevant information that originates in long-term memory from spilling into and despoiling the operations of working memory.