Background: Traditionally, attention was thought to be directed by either top-down goals or bottom-up salience. Recent studies have shown that reward history of a stimulus feature can also act as a powerful attentional cue. This is of particular relevance in schizophrenia, where both motivational and attentional deficits are common. Methods: Forty-eight people with schizophrenia (PSZ) and 34 healthy controls (HC) participated in a visual target discrimination task where they had to detect if a small gap was at the top or bottom of a circle. People were initially pretrained to associate one of two colors with reward receipt. In the experimental task, 2 circles were presented. In 2 blocks, targets were equally likely to appear on the left or right. In 4 blocks, the target was 75% likely on one side. Results: Patients had slower overall RT than controls. Both groups showed statistically robust effects of spatial probability and reward history with faster RTs on rewarded color cue trials as well as more likely location trials. There were no significant 2-or 3-way interaction effects. More severe positive and negative symptoms correlated with RT slowing, but there was no selective symptom reward history effect correlations. Conclusion: Patients demonstrate RT slowing but fully normal RT facilitation on the basis of reward history and spatial probability. These results are conceptually similar to prior findings by Heerey et al (2008) showing intact reward bias effects on the discrimination task of D. Pizzagali suggesting that implicit (but not explicit) reward processing may be surprisingly intact in PSZ. Background: Emerging research highlights the potential cognitive benefits of physical fitness programs for schizophrenia. Physical exercise (PE) is a safe, nonstigmatizing, and side effect-free intervention that has the potential to mitigate neurocognitive dysfunction in psychosis. To date, only two recent studies have explored the possibility of combining PE and cognitive training therapy (CT). While both studies found a signal showing that combining PE and CT may improve cognition more than CT alone, the conclusions were limited by lack of randomization, no examination of biological factors, no study arm with PE only, low power due to small sample size (N < 22), or significant attrition during the physical exercise intervention (i.e., only 75% completed the PE regimen). Methods: In our randomized pilot with 82 outpatients, we examined the individual and synergistic effects of PE and/or CT using treatments designed to improve motivation for treatment and retain patients for the entire PE (and CT) intervention. This 3-arm study employed a self-determined PE regimen intended to improve motivation for exercising and neurofeedback-aided CT that monitored a biophysiologic gauge of motivation to maximize cognitive gains. Participants were allocated to 18 hours of either: (A) PE regimen where patients chose from a menu of activities for 12 weeks with each activity designed so participants would reach volitional exhaustion-...

In the present work a study of the situation that is presented in Brazil with regard to the sexually transmitted diseases is made, indicating those groups of people for which the most common certain diseases. It introduces a system of differential equations that simulates the process of transmission of different diseases, if different cases are studied that derive from the general system; the system is simplified according to the case, a qualitative study of the system of equations is presented and conclusions are drawn regarding the future situation in relation to the number of infested patients.

In the present work a study of the situation that is presented in Brazil with regard to the sexually transmitted diseases is made, indicating those groups of people for which the most common certain diseases. It introduces a system of differential equations that simulates the process of transmission of different diseases, if different cases are studied that derive from the general system; the system is simplified according to the case, a qualitative study of the system of equations is presented and conclusions are drawn regarding the future situation in relation to the number of infested patients.

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