NEVHI is a comprehensive assessment tool, helpful to identify the presence of visual hallucinations and to quantify cognitions, emotions and behaviours associated with hallucinations.

BackgroundMalaria parasites of the genus Plasmodium possess large hyper-variable families of antigen-encoding genes. These are often variantly-expressed and are major virulence factors for immune evasion and the maintenance of chronic infections. Recombination and diversification of these gene families occurs readily, and may be promoted by G-quadruplex (G4) DNA motifs within and close to the variant genes. G4s have been shown to cause replication fork stalling, DNA breakage and recombination in model systems, but these motifs remain largely unstudied in Plasmodium.ResultsWe examined the nature and distribution of putative G4-forming sequences in multiple Plasmodium genomes, finding that their co-distribution with variant gene families is conserved across different Plasmodium species that have different types of variant gene families. In P. falciparum, where a large set of recombination events that occurred over time in cultured parasites has been mapped, we found a strong spatial association between these recombination events and putative G4-forming sequences. Finally, we searched Plasmodium genomes for the three classes of helicase that can unwind G4s: Plasmodium spp. have no identifiable homologue of the highly efficient G4 helicase PIF1, but they do encode two putative RecQ helicases and one homologue of the RAD3-family helicase FANCJ.ConclusionsOur analyses, conducted at the whole-genome level in multiple species of Plasmodium, support the concept that G4s are likely to be involved in recombination and diversification of antigen-encoding gene families in this important protozoan pathogen.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12864-016-3183-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Social stimuli are known to both attract and direct our attention, but most research on social attention has been conducted in highly controlled laboratory settings lacking in social context. This study examined the role of social context on viewing behaviour of participants whilst they watched a dynamic social scene, under three different conditions. In two social groups, participants believed they were watching a live webcam of other participants. The socially-engaged group believed they would later complete a group task with the people in the video, whilst the non-engaged group believed they would not meet the people in the scene. In a third condition, participants simply free-viewed the same video with the knowledge that it was pre-recorded, with no suggestion of a later interaction. Results demonstrated that the social context in which the stimulus was viewed significantly influenced viewing behaviour. Specifically, participants in the social conditions allocated less visual attention towards the heads of the actors in the scene and followed their gaze less than those in the free-viewing group. These findings suggest that by underestimating the impact of social context in social attention, researchers risk coming to inaccurate conclusions about how we attend to others in the real world.

The results suggest that, consistent with the PAD model, complex visual hallucinations in people with acquired eye disease are associated with visual attention impairment.

Although closed-circuit television (CCTV) footage is used in both crime prevention and police investigations to prosecute criminals, relatively little is known about the strategies that observers use when monitoring and interpreting (criminal) events observed in such footage. Howard, Troscianko, Gilchrist, Behera, and Hogg (2009) stated that measuring eye movements during CCTV monitoring might produce innovative data to determine the strategies people use when attending to footage. Stainer, Scott-Brown, and Tatler (2013) examined the eye movements of two trained CCTV operators monitoring multiple display screens on a wall, compared to a single-spot monitor (the operator could select only one of multiple screens to inspect in more detail). They found that more attention was allocated to the single-screen-spot monitor than the multiplex display, with the more (cf. less) experienced operator utilising the spot monitor more often. Stainer et al. (2013) identified that their observers selectively allocated attention based on expected informativeness. This replicated Howard, Troscianko, and Gilchrist's (2010) finding that participants with more experience watching football matches shifted their eyes to more informative areas of the footage earlier than did non-experienced observers. Following on from this work, we investigated whether event type and instructions affected fixation behaviour during CCTV observation and whether fixation behaviour predicted observers' detection of critical changes in the footage.