Brazil is a large country with a population of nearly 200 million people. There are difficulties in providing public health education. To ensure its effectiveness, health education should begin during adolescence, to encourage young people to adopt healthy habits. A web-based tele-education platform was developed. Thirty students from a public high school in the rural city of Tatui took part in a pilot trial. Six teachers coordinated the student's activities. After face-to-face training, the students participated in tele-education, using a ‘cybertutor’ (an educational environment based on the website) and discussion lists. There were 15 face-to-face interactions, followed by more than 200 offline and 50 online interactions. The students learned about seven health topics. During the following year, 20 of the students used their knowledge to teach people from their local communities. We estimate that about 3000 people, including children, adults and the elderly, received public health education during events in Tatui and in their schools. The pilot trial showed that face-to-face and distance interventions in the rural city of Tatui were a feasible method of disseminating public health information.

The influence of a peripheral cue represented by a gray ring on responsivity to a subsequent target varies. When a vertical line inside a ring was a go target and a white small ring inside a ring was a no-go target, reaction time was shorter at the same location relative to a different location. However, no reaction time difference between the two locations occurred when a white cross inside the ring, instead of the white vertical line inside the ring, was the go target. We investigated whether this last finding was due to a forward masking influence of the cue, a requirement of low attention for the discrimination or a lack of attention mobilization by the cue. In Experiment 1, the intensity of the cue was reduced in an attempt to reduce forward masking. In Experiment 2, the vertical line and the cross were presented in the same block of trials so as to be dealt with a common attentional strategy. In Experiments 3 and 4, the no-go target was a 45º rotated cross inside a ring to increase the difficulty of the discrimination. No evidence was obtained that the cross was forward masked by the cue nor that it demanded less attention to be discriminated from the small ring. There was a facilitation of responsivity by the cue when the small ring was replaced by the rotated cross. The results suggest that when the discrimination to be performed is too easy the cue does not mobilize attention.